At some time or another, we’ve all heard someone say, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”. Heck, I’m sure I’ve been guilty of saying it myself in the past. When something as simple as getting a good night’s sleep seems completely out of reach, it’s tempting to tell yourself you don’t need it. After all, thousands of people function perfectly well on less than 7 hours of sleep, right? Wrong. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Consistently getting less sleep than you need wreaks havoc on your health, makes you more likely to get heart disease, become diabetic, struggle with weight gain, develop Alzheimer’s Disease and it lowers your libido and life expectancy. Still think postponing getting enough sleep is a good idea?
Let’s take a look at five more sleep myths that are so, so wrong.
Top 5 Myths About Sleep
Sleep Myth #1: You can teach your body to get by on less sleep
FALSE. Our bodies need a minimum of 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night. It’s okay to miss an hour or so here and there but consistently getting less than that builds a sleep debt. And sleep debt causes brain fog, irritability, and even if you don’t feel sleepy, your brain will not work as well as when you get a good night’s sleep.
Sleep Myth #2: You can make up for your sleep deficit on weekend
FALSE. A sleep deficit, or sleep debt, is the number of hours of sleep you missed. So, if you miss an hour of sleep a night, by the end of the week you will have accumulated a sleep deficit of 5 hours. And although sleeping in on the weekend does help you catch up on some of the sleep you’ve missed over the past week, most people need an average of 4 hours of recovery sleep to make up for 1 hour of sleep deficit. So if you missed an average of an hour a night for five nights you would need to sleep an additional 20 hours on the weekend to make up for it. Not likely. Plus, if you’re getting up at 6 a.m. during the workweek and sleeping until 10 a.m. on weekends, you’re going to throw off your sleep rhythms and make bedtime on Sunday night that much more challenging.
Sleep Myth #3: It doesn’t matter when you sleep as long as you sleep 6 to 8 hours
FALSE. When you sleep matters. Sleep before midnight is more restorative than sleep after midnight. You may have heard your parents or grandparents say, “An hour of sleep before midnight is worth two hours of sleep after.” They’re right. NON-REM sleep tends to dominate your sleep cycles between 8 p.m. and midnight. But as night gets closer to dawn, REM sleep kicks in. That makes a difference in your quality of sleep. NON-REM sleep is deeper and more restorative than lighter, dream-infused REM sleep. They’re both important, but while REM sleep helps you consolidate memories and make decisions, non-REM is the restorative part of the night, the healing and repair stage.
That’s bad news for shift workers and others with unconventional work hours. Shift work has been linked to obesity, heart attack, a higher rate of early death and even lower brain power.
“The idea that you can learn to work at night and sleep during the day—you just can’t do that and be at your best,” Dr. Matthew Walker, head of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, told Time . Your brain and body’s circadian rhythms, which regulate everything from your sleeping patterns to your energy and hunger levels, tell your brain what kind of slumber to crave. And no matter how hard you try to reset or reschedule your circadian rhythms when it comes to bedtime, there’s just not much wiggle room. “These cycles have been established for hundreds of thousands of years. Thirty or 40 years of professional life aren’t going to change them.”
Sleep Myth #4: Daytime naps don’t help and they’re a waste of time
FALSE. Although adults don’t need daytime naps if they’ve slept long and well enough during the night, naps are hugely helpful for catching up on lost sleep. They also reduce levels of stress and anxiety and give your immune system a boost.
The best time to have a nap is right before lunch, around 12:30 p.m. or during the post-lunch dip, around 2 p.m. Any later than that, and you’ll likely have problems falling asleep once bed time rolls around.
Also, make sure to keep your naps short – between 10 and 20 minutes long is ideal. The idea is to get your body to stage 2 sleep (when your mind disengages from outside stimuli) and wake up before Stage 3. Stage 3 helps you feel refreshed in the morning after a full night of sleep but during a nap, you’ll likely struggle to wake up from Stage 3 sleep. And when you do wake up, you’ll feel groggy and experience a delay in the positive effects of a nap, also called sleep inertia, or you might feel worse than you did before you napped.
Sleep Myth #5: Some people don’t dream
FALSE. Everybody dreams. In fact, most people have 4 to 6 dreams a night depending on how long they sleep. Most dreams happen during the REM stage of sleep which your body enters every 90 minutes. So, while you may be convinced you don’t dream, rest assured, you do. You just don’t remember them.
Reasons Why You Can’t Remember Your Dreams
How you wake up can have something to do with not remembering. According to Psychology Today, if you wake up with an alarm clock it causes your noradrenaline levels to spike, and when our noradrenaline levels are high, we forget.
Also, if you are really sleep-deprived, and you fall asleep too quickly, your brain doesn’t experience hypnagogia. Hypnagogia is that in-between state between wakefulness and sleep when you’re essentially in limbo between two states of consciousness. You experience some elements of sleep mixed with some aspects of wakefulness. It is the process your brain goes through when shutting down for sleep properly (meaning over 15-20 min). But if you’re so sleep deprived that you fall asleep as soon as your head hits your pillow, then your brain doesn’t get a chance to store these “early dreams”.
Time to Realign Your Sleep Priorities
So, if you’ve been one of many people who used to think you can retrain your body to sleep less, aren’t remembering your dreams and try to catch up on your sleep on weekends, it’s time to adjust your sleep rituals. And a good place to start is to figure out where you fall on the 7 to 9-hours-a-night sleep spectrum.
Are you a solid 8-hours-a-nighter, or think you’re one of the rare “lucky” six-hour-sleepers? Not sure? Here’s one way to figure it out. “Every night for two weeks you go to bed at the same time and see what time you wake up by yourself next morning,” says scientist Paul Martin in his book, Counting Sheep. “For the first few nights you might well be catching up on missed sleep, but after that the time you wake up gives an indication of the length of your ideal night’s sleep.”
And, if you find you need way more sleep to function than you’d hoped, don’t be disappointed or see it as a waste of time. The hours you spend sleeping allow your body and mind to function at their best during waking hours. You may end up spending a third of your life in bed, but it’ll make the other two thirds so much better.
Drop me a line and let me know how you made out. And be honest. How many hours of sleep do you actually need to function vs the number of hours you’ve been getting every night?
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