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Do you think you got enough sleep in the past week? When was the last time you woke up without an alarm clock feeling refreshed and not needing caffeine? If you’re the average person, the chances are these are not things you want to think about as you’ve probably not been giving yourself the recommended eight hours of sleep we humans need.
In today’s world with our long working hours and on-demand entertainment, people ruthlessly cash in sleep for extra time doing conscious activities. Some even wear their trimmed down sleep schedules as a badge of honour, touting the importance of their alternative pursuits. Besides, you can sleep when you’re dead, right? Wrong. As Matthew Walker unpacks in his eye-opening book ‘Why We Sleep’, living by this motto might give you your wish sooner than you bargained for.
The effects of sleep
To lay it out plainly, here is what sleep deprivation can lead to:
- A weakened immune system
- Increased risk of cancer
- Major swings in blood sugar levels
- Psychiatric conditions including depression and anxiety
- Even Alzheimer’s disease (Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan were outspoken about their 4-hour sleep schedules. Both developed it)
These all can occur much sooner than you would expect. Even consistently losing a couple of hours a night can send you down the path towards these troubling health and mental conditions.
On the flip side, some eye-opening benefits of getting adequate sleep, other than avoiding the above, are that it helps you to lose weight (you can simply sleep your way to a summer body!), improves memory, creativity, emotional regulation, empathy, the list goes on!
We know sleep is important. But how does it work and what can we do to get a good night’s rest? Read on.
How sleep works
Circadian rhythm
A high-level overview of how sleep works is as follows.
You have your circadian rhythm that is a sort of internal body clock, controlling the rhythm of everything. It determines when you should be asleep and awake, your timed preferences for eating and drinking, your core body temperature, metabolism, and much more.
Crucially, the circadian rhythm influences your sleep-wake cycles and how awake you feel at certain times during the day. It sticks to its schedule regardless of what plans you have for sleep and will initiate the wind-down sequence, such as lowering your core body temperature, at the pre-programmed time every evening.
Adenosine
The other internal sleep guardian is Adenosine, a neurotransmitter creating ‘sleep pressure’ in the body. This builds up while you’re awake and creates the urge to sleep, being filtered away in the night while you conduct the act. If you ever feel the urge to have a mid-morning nap without the prop-up of caffeine then it is very likely that you haven’t slept enough or the quality of your sleep is poor and your levels of adenosine are higher than they should be.
This is also why naps later in the day will hurt your ability to sleep at night as they lower your adenosine levels, reducing the pressure to drift off.
One of the most surprising findings for me was the knowledge that sleep cannot be ‘caught up’. This is a sad revelation as many of us lie in on weekends in the hopes to make up for lost sleep and while it might make us feel slightly better, unfortunately internally, the damage is done.
Types of sleep
There are two main types of sleep – rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep.
NREM sleep is for filtering out unnecessary neural connections and cementing our memories while REM sleep develops our emotional and creative states and also facilitates dreaming.
We cycle between REM and NREM sleep throughout the night but the proportion of each changes between cycles. This means that in the first half of the night we predominantly get NREM sleep and in the second half of the night we predominantly get REM sleep.
The implication being, if you ever cut into your eight hours of sleep by sleeping late or waking up early, while the loss you sustain may seem like only a small portion of your overall sleep time it actually turns out to be a very large chunk of either your REM or NREM sleep. If you sleep late and wake up early then, well, you’re in trouble.
Top tips for better sleep
Now we’ve covered the basics, below are some tips on how to give yourself a better chance of getting in your life-sustaining 8-hours of shut-eye.
Stick to a schedule
Nothing will beat getting to bed at the same time and rising at the same time as it’ll help your body sync up to a routine. To help make the habit stick first read my post on building habits and then set an alarm for when it’s time to sleep. Yes, I said sleep. Intention is everything here. Only with true intention will you be able to stick to a schedule and change your habits and by setting an alarm you won’t ‘over-wake’.
While not always possible to sleep on time I’ve found a good method to ensure you get a full nights rest is to get up early as a default, giving yourself plenty of contingency to sleep in if you happen to get to bed later due to life commitments.
For example, I used to sleep at 9.30 pm and be up by 5.45 am, get in some exercise, do some meditation and then head off to work (although I must confess I’ve let that slip since being stuck at home). If I ever got home late, I had all the way up till 7.15 am before I needed to get up and dash to avoid being late. This ensured that I always got my 8 hours.
The reality is that most people don’t do anything that useful between 9 pm and when they sleep so they might as well hit the sack. Try it out and see if it works for you.
Avoid caffeine and nicotine
Coffee, colas, certain teas, and chocolate all contain caffeine. The schools of thought on whether coffee is good keep flitting, and while it may have health benefits from a sleep perspective it’s a big no-no. A late afternoon coffee can cause problems falling asleep in the night.
The way caffeine works is that is it blocks the receptors of adenosine which, as we know, makes us feel sleepy. Caffeine also stays in our system for a very long time, with a half-life of around 6 hours, meaning that 6 hours after consumption half of it will still be present. And while it’s in our system sleep will not come easily nor will it be sound.
Note: If you’re the type of person who can’t function in the morning without your hit of caffeine it is very likely that you’re not sleeping enough. While you probably aren’t feeling the effects too much right now, as discussed above, being chronically and consistently underslept can cause major problems in your golden years, maybe sooner. If the lack of sleep is unavoidable, I would urge you to conduct a lifestyle review.
Nicotine, while an equally, if not harder habit to kick (but not impossible), leads to only light sleep and generally being forced awake earlier in the morning due to withdrawals.
Exercise
Exercise is beneficial for overall health and conducive for sleep but can hamper your ability to sleep if you do it too close to bedtime. As exercise raises your core body temperature, this combats your circadian rhythm’s attempt to cool you down in preparation for sleep. It is recommended to leave at least a couple of hours between exercising and going to bed.
Personally, I would recommend exercising in the morning if you can. It’s the perfect energy booster, helping to avoid the need for a coffee, and is an excellent emotional regulator before you start your day. But as everyone’s lifestyles are unique, play around with different times and see what works for you!
Unwind before bed
Don’t work relentlessly or keep busy right up until the moment you want to fall asleep as your mind will still be swimming with thoughts and you’ll find it harder to relax. Spend some downtime doing some reading, with your family, meditating or anything else to help calm your thoughts and prep yourself for a good night’s rest.
Some extra tips
- Avoid big meals and beverages in the late evening as it’ll cause indigestion and waking up to use the loo. Both will interfere with sleep.
- Sleep in a dark and cool room. The darkness promotes the generation of melatonin, which tells your body it’s time to sleep, and a cool room will lower your body temperature to help you fall asleep. A room temperature of 18.3°C (55° Fahrenheit) is ideal for most people according to Mathew Walker.
- Finally, needless to say, it is worth investing in good quality mattresses and pillows. These can get expensive but considering how important sleep is and how much of your life you’ll spend doing it, it’s worth it. I would highly recommend an Emma Mattress, which won the T3 mattress of the year and is one of the highest-scoring mattresses on Which?.
These recommendations are based on page 20 of this source. Check it out for further tips.
Get the book
We’ve barely scratched the surface of the over 20 years of research Matthew Walker has conducted on sleep. I would highly recommend getting a copy of his book Why We Sleep which includes further information on the genetics of chronotypes (being a morning or night person), the science of dreams, alcohol and sleep, the sleep disaster that is early school timings and so much more. This book is simply brilliant and if this post hasn’t changed your opinion on the importance of sleep then the book certainly will.
That’s it! I hope this has given some insight into the importance of sleep. As I said, the book has so much more detail and is packed full of science so check it out. It certainly opened my eyes. Happy sleeping!
The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep
E. Joseph Cossman
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