Sleep

A Good Night’s Sleep

A good night’s sleep is essential for restoring energy to your body and brain. While you sleep, the also brain sifts through your memories removing the unimportant ones and moving the useful ones for storage. Most adults require about 7 to 8 hours of good quality sleep for good health and to promote positive mood and performance.

Benefits

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Strategies

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Benefits of a Good Night's Sleep

By getting a good nights sleep, you will:

Improve your mood, positivity and energy
Increase self-control, creativity and innovation
Reduce your risk of developing mental health issues such as depression and anxiety
Improve your decision-making and problem-solving skills
Improve your natural immunity
Reduce your risk of developing diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
Avoid weight gain as a lack of sleep increases hunger, appetite and reduces physical activity.

More About Sleep

For a good night’s sleep:

Set a consistent 7 to 8 hours sleep per night as a goal.
Make sleep a priority, go to bed at the same time each night.
A regular sleep cycle will make your sleep patterns and rhythms stronger.
Don’t think you can make up for lack of sleep during the week on the weekend — this leads to a jet-lag effect.

Before going to bed:

Don’t work right up until you go to bed, plan some downtime to relax your mind.
Avoid large, heavy meals in the evening that make you feel uncomfortable.
Stay away from caffeine and nicotine and avoid excessive quantities of alcohol. Whilst alcohol may help you to get to sleep it reduces the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Disruption of REM sleep causes daytime sleepiness, poor concentration and ability to focus.
Avoid stressful activities — take a warm bath, read a book to relax.
Allow 2-3 hours between exercise and going to bed to allow body temperature to return to normal.
Once it is evening, use low-level lighting (lamps rather than intensely bright overhead lights) to help stimulate the production of melatonin.

Turn your bedroom into a sleep-inducing environment:

Creating a cool, dark and quiet environment
Limiting your bedroom activities to sleep and sex only — keep your electronic devices away (laptop, iPad, mobile phones).
Make sure your pillow and mattress are comfortable (remember a mattress is designed to last about 10 years)

Having trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep?

Keep a sleep diary for a week, record your day including diet and physical activity and look for triggers to a good or bad night’s sleep.
Practice breathing, relaxation and/or mindfulness exercises
Keep a notepad by your bed to write down any problems or thoughts crowding your mind and then put them aside.
Try to get some bright sunshine during the day as this can help with melatonin regulation. This will help avoid the mid-afternoon slump, particularly for early morning risers. But once it is evening, if possible, use low-level lighting (lamps rather than â€˜operating theatre’ bright overhead lights) to help stimulate the production of melatonin.
Focus on replaying a repetitive activity in your head (visualise swimming up and down in a pool counting laps or your favourite walking/running/cycling route).

What about a daytime nap?

A 20-minute nap during the day helps to improve cognitive processing, reduce errors and concentration ability.
The trick for an effective daytime nap is to keep it short and not so long that you sink into a deep sleep. This is usually about 10 to 20 minutes, napping longer than this will leave you feeling groggy rather than refreshed.
Limit daytime naps to before 5pm so that you can still sleep well at night.

Sleep Debt:

Most of us require 7 hours of sleep each night for optimal functioning. If we get less than that, we start to go into sleep debt.
Sleep debt, like a bank debt, is cumulative. So if you miss an hour of sleep each night, by the end of 5 working days you will have accrued a 5-hour sleep debt.
And like a bank debt, it will keep building until you pay it off. So, if you do need to miss out on some sleep, make sure you have a catch-up night of â€˜repayment’ sleep as soon as you can.
As sleep debt is known to impair judgement, most people are unaware of the impact of their sleep debt until it is extreme. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Caffeine might make you temporarily more alert in times of sleep debt but it doesn’t improve judgement.

Impacts on:

Strategies to Improve Sleep

1. How much sleep are you really getting?

Keep a sleep diary, or perhaps you have a smartwatch that monitors your sleep patterns. Although not a perfect measure, tracking devices can be useful to help you recognise patterns in your sleep habits.

Try Dr Michael Mosley’s Sleep Onset Latency Test or Spoon Test to find out how quickly you fall asleep during the day. This is a good measure of accumulated “Sleep Debt”.

2. Try a sleep app.

If you are having trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, a range of sleep apps are available to help you get a good night’s sleep. These are worth a try:

Tide is a free app that provides relaxing sleep soundtracks and calming breathing exercises.
Calm has relaxing sounds and ambiences that will help to improve your sleep.
Try listening to a Headspace bedtime story or “sleepcastâ€. Each of these are 45 to 55 minutes long and are designed to help you visualise calming experiences, like a crackling fire or walk through a garden.
Many of these including Calm and Headspace also include meditation and deep-breathing exercises.

3. Practice controlled breathing.

When we are awake we breathe at a faster rate than when we sleep. By controlling our breathing, we can decrease the heart rate and begin to mimic pre-sleep physiology.

Counting helps too, as this stops the intrusion of thoughts which provide more mental stimulation, readying the brain to catch the ‘sleep wave’ when it comes.