Sleep Competition vs Phillies' Farm Hand Taylor Lehman

For the past two weeks I have been competing against Taylor Lehman (Phillies LHP) for who could get the BEST sleep, not the most. I'll explain what that means in a little bit. So in order to partake in this we both had to have similar sleep patterns. So we set the same sleep goals and tried to fall asleep and wake up around the same time the other person would. Obviously we weren't always able to do that just because of our different schedules.

There are two major components in what make up your "sleep score". REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and Deep Sleep. I spoke to Kyle Wagner once about this at the Florida Baseball Ranch. REM sleep is when your body mentally recovers and when most of our dreams occur. REM is characterized by the rapid increase of your heart rate and breaths. You generally want your REM cycle to be about 15%-25% of your total sleep.

Deep sleep is considered the most important stage of your time asleep. This is where your body recovers. If you ever wake up and feel groggy/bad it's most likely either you were woken up in the middle of your deep sleep cycle or you just didn't have enough deep sleep. Deep sleep should also take up about 15%-25% of your total sleep. Combined, REM and Deep sleep should equal close to 50% of your sleep.

The picture to the right is Taylor's sleep score and statistics for one night. He was asleep for almost 8 hours. You can see that he almost immediately goes into Deep sleep. That's essential for an athlete like himself. He's able to do this because he takes the proper steps before he goes to bed to ensure he gets the best sleep he can. Taylor wears blue light glasses after dinner to when he goes to bed. Why? Because blue light kills your melatonin production. As you probably know, melatonin is what makes us fall asleep. So the longer you stay up and look at your phone or play video games a night, the longer it'll take you to fall asleep and go into deep sleep. If you wear blue light glasses however, you can do all of that and still have melatonin being produced.

The picture to your left is an example of one of my sleep scores. Notice how unlike Taylor, I go straight to light sleep. That's due to me looking at a screen before I go to bed. My body isn't ready to go to deep sleep. I ordered a pair of blue light glasses and I'm excited to see how my score will change when I use them. My score for this night was 89. REM and deep sleep took up 49% of my time asleep. Which is pretty good. I was able to make up for the fact I didn't go to deep sleep right away because I slept a little longer than Taylor did. In simple terms, Taylor slept more efficiently than me.

Me and Taylor are still competing against each other, but so far he has beaten me every night. I'm hoping I can turn the tables with the addition of my blue light glasses, magnesium pills, and melatonin that I have on the way. Thanks for reading my first article! I really appreciate all of the support I am getting for this website. Stay tuned for more content!