The Erling Haaland Sleep & Recovery Routine (2026): What He Does vs. What Works

In August 2023, Erling Haaland sat down on Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast and did something most footballers don't: he talked less about training than about going to bed.

"I think sleep is the most important thing in the world. To sleep good, simple kind of things — blue-blocking glasses, shutting out all the signals in the bedroom, I think is really important." That's the sentence the headlines came from. The one that explains him better is quieter: "Doing a lot of things is not good but doing small things every single day for a longer period really pays off."

That second line is a philosophy of habit, not a gadget list. But the gadget list is real too, and he owns all of it on the record: the glasses, the tape on his mouth at night, the water filter, the near-daily sauna. Some of it the evidence supports. Some of it the evidence flatly doesn't. He tells you what he does; nobody checks which is which. That's this page's job.

One honesty note on sourcing: the podcast episode and the Viaplay documentary his diet quotes come from are the primary records, and we could not watch either in full — the documentary is paywalled. Every quote here is cross-checked across outlets we did read in full: Planet Sport's report of the episode (Rob Fleming, 31 August 2023) and Goal.com's separate reports of the episode and the documentary. Where their wording of an exchange differs — the mouth-tape banter is rendered slightly differently by different outlets — we quote only the words they agree on.

The habit, precisely

1. A long, protected sleep window. Around ten hours, treated as part of the job. He talks about sleep the way other athletes talk about lifting.
2. Blue-light-blocking glasses in the evening, plus "shutting out all the signals in the bedroom" — his phrase, from the same answer.
3. Tape over his mouth at night to force nose breathing. On the podcast he confirmed he sleeps with it; the exact banter around it varies by outlet, but "I sleep with it" appears in every rendering.
4. Recovery extras: a sauna or steam room most days, ice baths, and — from the Viaplay documentary Haaland: The Big Decision (October 2022), translated from Norwegian — "I have also started to filtrate my water a bit. I think it can have great benefits for my body." His words, and note they claim a belief, not a result.

What the science says, habit by habit

The sleep window is the part with real evidence. A consensus panel of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society concluded adults should regularly get seven or more hours (Watson et al., SLEEP, 2015). That's a floor, not a target — ten is his schedule, not a prescription. Haaland's headline habit is also his best-supported one.

Mouth taping is the part the evidence doesn't back — and this needs saying plainly. A 2025 systematic review (Rhee et al., PLOS ONE) found 10 studies totalling 213 patients, every one rated poor quality, and only two — both in mild sleep apnea, both excluding people with blocked noses — showing a significant improvement. The same review warns that sealing the mouth "could pose a serious risk of asphyxiation in the presence of nasal obstruction." So: if you have sleep apnea, suspect you might, or can't breathe freely through your nose, taping your mouth shut is the wrong move, full stop. Haaland doing it is not evidence it works. It's evidence a heavily-monitored 6'4" professional athlete with a medical team can afford experiments you shouldn't run unscreened. Loud persistent snoring or waking up exhausted is a conversation with a doctor, not a roll of tape.

The glasses have been tested, and they mostly failed. A 2023 Cochrane review of 17 randomized trials found blue-light-filtering lenses probably make no difference to sleep (Singh et al., 2023). What does hold up is the plain version of what he's doing: less light and less stimulation in the last hours of the day. The glasses are one expensive way there; a dim lamp is a free one.

Ice baths feel great and the muscle-building evidence cuts the other way. Regular post-workout cold immersion blunted strength and muscle gains over 12 weeks in 21 men (Roberts et al., J Physiol, 2015), and a 2024 meta-analysis of cold immersion and hypertrophy found a small negative effect whose credible interval crosses zero (Piñero et al., 2024) — small, from a small literature. And cold water has a real hazard: the cold shock response (Datta & Tipton, 2006). Never plunge alone, and check with a doctor if you have a heart condition.

The water filter has no study behind it at all. He frames it as belief — "I think it can have great benefits" — and that's exactly the weight it deserves. If your tap water is safe, there's no evidence filtering it does anything for recovery. It's the clearest case on this page of a habit that costs money and buys a feeling.

Why the routine works anyway

Strip out the gadgets and what's left is the actual mechanism: he picked recovery as a priority, made it boring and daily, and never skips. "Small things every single day for a longer period" is a better one-line summary of the habit-formation literature than most books manage. In the study everyone cites, new behaviours took a median of 66 days to feel automatic — self-report, range 18 to 254, over the 39 of 96 enrolled volunteers whose curves the model fitted (Lally et al., 2010) — and missing a single day didn't derail the process. The tape and the filter are almost certainly doing less than the ten dark hours they decorate. But they may be doing one indirect thing: a man who tapes his mouth for sleep does not then stay up scrolling. Rituals guard the window.

The honest part: Haaland is a genetic outlier with a club medical staff, a chef, no commute and a job that pays him to recover. The window is arranged for him. You can't copy his circumstances — you can copy the decision to put sleep first and the dailiness.

How to run it yourself, starting tonight

• Set the window before the gadgets. Pick your real wake time, count back 7.5 to 8 hours, and put lights-out in your calendar tonight as a recurring event with an alarm — an alarm to go to bed, not to get up.
• Do his "signals" line for free. Phone charging outside the bedroom, screens off 60–90 minutes before lights-out. That's the evidence-backed core of what the glasses gesture at.
• Skip the tape. 213 patients across 10 poor-quality studies and an asphyxiation warning is not a bet worth making without a doctor. If you snore hard or wake up wrecked, book the appointment instead.
• If you want the cold, keep it out of the way of your training goals — the 12-week data says regular post-lift plunges work against muscle gains — and never alone.
• Write down what you actually got. Across 122 studies, self-monitoring was one of the strongest components of behaviour change (Michie et al., 2009). One line a night beats a drawer of gadgets.

The mistakes that kill this habit

Copying the accessories and skipping the sleep. The tape, filter and glasses are the copyable-looking parts and the least-supported parts. The ten protected hours are the habit.

Taping an unscreened airway. Worth repeating because it's the viral bit: with a blocked nose or undiagnosed sleep apnea, mouth taping carries a documented asphyxiation warning.

Chasing ten hours and losing seven. Aim at his number, miss, and give up on the floor you could have held.

Buying your way in. Every purchase on this page has a free version: darkness, a phone in another room, a consistent wake time.

Judging it in a week. Median 66 days to automatic. Give it a season; missing one night doesn't reset it.

Where HealthBrew fits

Haaland's real edge here is that he treats recovery as a thing you do daily and check, not a thing you feel. HealthBrew's nightly close is sixty seconds of exactly that: what you did, how the day went, so after a few weeks you can see which evenings come before your better days. Your first 30 closes are free, no credit card.

For the light half of his routine — morning sun, dark room, the full method — we've covered it separately: Ten Hours and a Dark Room.

Educational content, not medical advice. Haaland's quotes are from his August 2023 Impaulsive appearance and the October 2022 Viaplay documentary Haaland: The Big Decision, read via Planet Sport's and Goal.com's full reports rather than the paywalled originals. We picked him because he wins; thousands of people protect their sleep just as carefully and nobody writes about them. Persistent snoring, gasping or daytime exhaustion deserves a doctor.