O’Sullivan, (Belake) Blake. 4 Weeks to Sleep Mastery: A Proven System to Maximise Your Recovery and Energy in Just 30 Days. 2026.
Reason read: as a member of LibraryThing’s Early Review program I often chose (and win) interesting books. This time I chose a book that could potentially help me with my situational insomnia.
Straight away O’Sullivan does not want you to think he is a licensed medical professional. He was an athlete looking to improve his performance and had an ah-ha moment about sleep. His advice is mostly common sense: stay away from caffeine and your phone before bed; expose yourself to light as soon as you wake up; take cold showers in the mornings and warm showers in the evening; remove all light sources from your bedroom and so on. O’Sullivan uses a lot of analogies to get his point across. He also repeats himself. There was a lot of redundancy surrounding the checklists for each week.
I have always heard the advice about how to get a good night’s sleep, but thanks to $ Weeks to Sleep Mastery, I have a better handle on the science behind the advice. I also appreciated O’Sullivan’s breakdown of information into two categories: simplified and advanced.
4 Weeks to Sleep Mastery is short. O’Sullivan could have added more depth to his book by including advice for the outliers. What about the people who are at work before the sun makes its appearance? What about seasonal changes when the sun doesn’t always rise before you do? I have a friend who gets up at 2am in order to get to work at 4am. How is he supposed to get early morning sunshine to signal his brain to wake up? He also works in the belly of a ship for eight to ten hours a day. He doesn’t even have enough time on a lunchbreak to see the sun, let alone the sunset anchor.
As an aside, why not call the heart the drum? Why violins? Are drums too cliche? As another side, O’Sullivan can be a little didactic (he told me what attenuated meant). As yet another aside, I am not downloading another app that is free but utilizes third party ad services which use cookies to target personalization. No thank you.
I would have liked to see more information regarding diet and special circumstances, like traveling or having a chaotic life event (new baby, job loss, foster puppies) that keep you up at night.
Author fact: Belake is twenty years old at the time of publication. My burning question is why point that out to readers? Why draw attention to your age and create doubt about your knowledge base? Stand firm with the knowledge and you should not have to make excuses. Because of that one disclosure about age my immediate thought was you are a life coach? Have you been alive and on the planet long enough to be a coach?
~*LunaSea*~ 