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."

Comments

Three things

[Van Halen]

I've found through my own experience that you need three things in order to be full of energy during the day and sleep well at night:

• Eat right. The very recent ask slashdot is an excellent starting point.
• Exercise at least 5 times a week. Again see above for some good comments. When you exercise regularly, your body just works more efficiently and this includes sleeping.
• Stay on a regular sleep schedule, and get enough sleep. What that schedule is or how much you get daily is up to you to discover, as we all have different needs.

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! ;-)

sleep campaign

[kriemar]

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!