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Recepies For A Good Night's Sleep?
pavelc asks: "I was wondering recently if there are any ways to improve the efficiency of sleeping and awakening. You have all probably noticed that sometimes it is significantly easier to wake up after partying the whole night and a 3-hour-long sleep for work than it is to wake up after being in the bed for 12+ hours. It also makes a lot of difference how you wake/get up - do you use the XMMS Alarm plugin or a conventional alarm clock? What do you do after that? A long shower works for me much better than caffeine for example. Any suggestions on how to improve the quality of sleep, and just as importantly, how you start the day."
This falls into the "duh" category. If you're overstressed, take steps to change your environment by whatever means necessary. Chronic stress will do things far worse than messing up your sleep patterns.
If I have one too many blankets, it takes me a long time to fall asleep. This is something that's difficult to notice. If you find yourself tossing and turning, chuck a blanket and see if that helps.
I have asthma. I rarely have full-blown attacks, but breathing will often become more difficult than usual. This is another thing that's difficult to notice, that will keep me tossing and turning for hours. Make sure you can breathe freely. Install air filters if you're having trouble - they'll save you a lot of grief during the day, too. If you have serious trouble breathing, fairly often, see a doctor. You may have asthma or another breathing disorder (or be allergic to a solvent in your carpet, or what-have-you).
This is another "duh" point, but if you have to go to the bathroom, you're going to be waking up every couple of hours until you drag yourself out of bed and go. That'll wreck your night's sleep pretty effectively.
YMMV.
Light regulates sleeping and waking cycles. People who have trouble sleeping or waking up are often more strongly affected by light than others. Don't sleep in the basement. Make sure you've got a room with lots of windows, or a big window, or a window that gets sunlight as soon as the sun rises (or all three!). Go to bed when it gets dark, wake up when it gets light out.
If you have problems sleeping, you may have to abandon any hopes of sleeping less. If you don't sleep well now, and your asking to be able to fall asleep instantly and wake up refreshed, and only get 4 or 6 hours sleep, your probably won't get what you want. If you've got bad sleeping habits the best thing you can do is establish good ones.
Between the ages of 9 and 25 I had horrible sleeping habits. It really affected my life. It took me 2 hours to fall asleep every night and I woke up every 45 minutes (no it was apnia). I woke up in a very foul mood and usually stayed in bed for an hour or so before getting up. My life suffered greatly. Then moved into a place where my bedroom was facing the sunlight in the morning. WOW! Things were very different. I woke up early and felt great.
Also try Melatonin. It's a substance produced by your brain when there is no light and induces sleeping behavior. The brain destroys melatonin when you see bright sunlight. It really has a profound effect on regulating sleeping and waking cycles. I've used it on and off for years now and when my sleeping habits begin to slide it really helps to get back on track. Or when I NEED a full nights sleep without interuption it helps too.
I've found that one key in all of the above is consistency. Our bodies are designed to do everything in cycles. Breaking the cycle or just having erratic behavior to begin with is very hard on your body. But once you get into a regular routine of eating, exercising and sleeping, you'll be amazed at the difference in how you feel. You won't need caffeine because you'll have plenty of energy to go all day.
This is, of course, based solely on my own observations on how my body has reacted to various behavior patterns over the years. I assume it applies more or less to other people but YMMV! ;-)
Say hello to zMac.
Hence, if you need three hour cycles, 3,6,9 or 12 hours will leave you refreshed but 8 won't - hence the curious effect of 3 hours seeming better than 8.
In the same way, if you need four hour cycles, 4, 8 or 12 hours works but say six or ten turn out to be next to useless.
As I said, it's just a theory but it does explain why differing lengths of sleep work differently.
It's funny you should ask that question. If you haven't noticed, in the past few months, there has been a push among sleep researchers to alert the public to the importance of sleep.
The bottom line is, Americans need more sleep. The whole "less sleep is better" or "rise and shine" attitude seems to be an antiquated leftover from the 19th century when we didn't have electricity and getting up with dawn conserved time.
Anyway, from what I've been able to read:
(1) Figure out when you naturally would go to bed and naturally would wake up. "Naturally" means on vacation when you're not up 'til 4:30 at a LAN party or whatever.
(2) Try to aim for going to bed and waking up with your natural schedule. Consistency helps; getting few hours one night will throw off your sleep the next few days.
(3) Watch how much you sleep. If it's substantially different from 7-9 hours of sleep, there might be a problem, whether it be physical, psychological, or both. I've now learned, for example, that when I sleep much more than 8 hours, It's a pretty reliable sign I'm getting sick.
(4) Don't take substances close to before when you go to sleep (alcohol, caffeine, etc.). The key is to not mess up REM sleep. Dreams are your way for your brain to learn and assimilate what's happened during the day. When it can't do that, you have problems.
(5) After you get little sleep, there is sometimes a feeling that you have extra energy or some such thing. This is somewhat of an illusion: attention and cognitive performance actually inevitably degrade with lack of sleep, the feeling of extra energy is fleeting anyway.
Sweet dreams!
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