Quality not quantity. No matter how much your mother tells you that you need eight hours of sleep, if you're not tired and you can't truly relax, your sleep time will be worthless.
Robin Lloyd of Live Science reports<!-- wiki-renamed-hyperlink "reports"<http://www.livescience.com/health/060323_sleep_deprivation.html> --> that at the 2006 National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference, experts agreed, according psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego on the following recommendations for obtaining optimum sleep value:
- Do not take sleeping pills. This includes over-the-counter pills and melatonin.
- Don't go to bed until you're sleepy. If you have trouble sleeping, try going to bed later or getting up earlier.
- Get up at the same time every morning, even after a bad night's sleep. The next night, you'll be sleepy at bedtime.
- If you wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back to sleep, get out of bed and return only when you are sleepy.
- Avoid worrying, watching TV, reading scary books, and doing other things in bed besides sleeping and sex. If you worry, read thrillers or watch TV, do that in a chair that's not in the bedroom.
- Do not drink or eat anything caffeinated within six hours of bedtime.
- Avoid alcohol. It's relaxing at first but can lead to insomnia when it clears your system.
- Spend time outdoors. People exposed to daylight or bright light therapy sleep better.
A six-year study Kripke headed up of more than a million adults ages 30 to 102 showed that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep. The risk from taking sleeping pills 30 times or more a month was not much less than the risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, he says.
So what happens when you don't have time for even 6 hours of sleep? Surely you can't go without sleep? Without adequate rest, the brain's ability to function quickly deteriorates. The brain works harder to counteract sleep deprivation effects, but operates less effectively: concentration levels drop, and memory becomes impaired.
Similarly, the brain's ability to problem solve is greatly impaired. Decision-making abilities are compromised, and the brain falls into rigid thought patterns that make it difficult to generate new problem-solving ideas. Insufficient rest can also cause people to have hallucinations. Other typical effects of sleep deprivation include:
- depression
- heart disease
- hypertension
- irritability
- slower reaction times
- slurred speech
- tremors
Bеcause the amount and quality of the sleep we get affects our hormone levels, namely our levels of leptin<!-- wiki-renamed-hyperlink "leptin"<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptin> --> and ghrelin<!-- wiki-renamed-hyperlink "ghrelin"<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghrelin> -->, many physiological processes that depend on these hormone levels to function properly, including appetite, are affected by our sleep.
While leptin is a hormone that affects our feelings of fullness and satisfaction after a meal, ghrelin is the hormone that stimulates our appetites. When you suffer from sleep deprivation, your body’s levels of leptin fall while ghrelin levels increase. This means that you end up feeling hungrier without really feeling satisfied by what you eat, causing you to eat more and, consequently, gain weight.
Scientists say that a successful midday nap depends on two things: timing and (no kidding) caffeine consumption. Experiments performed at Loughborough University in the UK showed that the sleep-deprived need only a cup of coffee and 15 minutes of shut-eye to feel amazingly refreshed.
1. Right before you crash, down a cup of java. The caffeine has to travel through your gastro-intestinal tract, giving you time to nap before it kicks in.
2. Close your eyes and relax. Even if you only doze, you’ll get what’s known as effective microsleep, or momentary lapses of wakefulness.
3. Limit your nap to 15 minutes. A half hour can lead to sleep inertia, or the spinning down of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which handles functions like judgment. This gray matter can take 30 minutes to reboot.
