5 Must-Hit Sleep Tactics for Zombie Pharmacists
Here’s what a zombie looks like: a decade ago, my wife and I brought home our first baby. Not the baby, us. Two zombies. In the lack of sleep trance new parents find themselves in, we realized we forgot something at the hospital. Again, not the baby, but it meant I had to run to the pharmacy.
On the way out my wife actually said this to me, “Before you buy, ask the Pharmacist if it’s the right kind.”
I had to explain that I was a pharmacist and remind her that so was she. Pharmacists are bad at taking their own advice. We counsel on sleep. We counsel on sleep hygiene. Then we go home and flush it. We doom scroll our phone, grab a snack because we skipped food while busy at work and might even pour a drink. Then we sleep poorly and expect ourselves to run an optimal dispensary the next day.
While this specific evening’s activities are both highly enjoyable and warranted, making sleep a priority is an investment into tomorrow. The products we create tomorrow correlate very closely with our quality of sleep the night before.
Taking a page out of our pharmacist counselling notes, here are the top five sleep-promoting tips for pharmacists:
1. Have a routine wake-up and bedtime.
Our bodies and minds depend on a circadian rhythm to balance regular hormones that regulate us. Keeping to a consistent schedule within 30–60 minutes for each morning and bedtime promotes quality sleep.
2. Keep caffeine to morning.
With a half-life of five hours, that 3pm coffee is only half gone at 8pm. That’s equivalent to stopping at the coffee shop for a half cup of coffee on your way home after closing the pharmacy.
3. Reduce blue light before bed.
This is not beer. This is a wavelength of the light spectrum that enter the eye, hitting the retina and turning off the melatonin production needed to induce sleep.
4. Eat lightly or not at all before bed.
A full meal, fatty or carbohydrate-rich foods in the 2–3 hours before bed not only promotes GERD, but raises body temperature in the night when the body is trying to stay cool for deep sleep.
5. Avoid alcohol.
Contrary to old stories, a night cap is not good practice. Alcohol may help us GET to sleep, but it is sedative, not sleep-promoting. It shuts off the frontal cortex, bypassing the deeper, restorative stages of sleep such as REM.
If you are tired and not bringing a baby home, there are things you can do in your day to help or hurt your sleep tonight. Checking off as many of these five boxes will raise the chances of great sleep and serves as the antidote for zombie pharmacists.
