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Recepies For A Good Night's Sleep?

Posted by Cliff on from the for-those-of-you-over-worked-and-over-stressed dept.

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."

1 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. sleep campaign by kriemar · · Score: 5

    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!