The Power of a Good Sleep

There’s an adage that between good grades, a social life and a full night’s sleep you can only have two. As such sleep is often the first thing to be sacrificed. However, when you’re trying to be competitive and need to perform at your best – it might not be wise to sacrifice sleep for more opportunities to work.

Sleep is one of the great evolutionary enigmas, seemingly counter-productive to survival and with a yet to be determined concrete reason for it you are left wondering if it is necessary. A few theories exist as to why it is necessary. These include the Inactivity Theory which posits that it was an advantage to not be moving during the night when we might be prone to accidents or be victims of animals that can see better than us. Additionally, the Theory of Energy Conservation considers it a remnant from when food was less available and so it made sense to rest and save energy for the time of day when there would be greater success for finding food. Neuroscience has additionally begun exploring the function with sleep with a restorative function being suggested i.e. that non-REM sleep is a period for body tissue restoration and REM sleep for brain neuronal tissue. Finally, the role in learning and brain plasticity has been recently demonstrated with sleep deprived groups performing notably worse in learning tasks than their well-rested counterparts.

But just because it is an evolutionary structure, is it necessary? The answer is looking like yes. Increasingly science is demonstrating that sleep has a myriad of benefits including anti-inflammatory functions that protect from arthritis and diabetes, athletic performance being markedly improved, learning and attention as well as significant effects on losing and maintaining a healthy weight.

As you can see it’s more important than ever to get those eight hours.

But the problem might be that you have trouble getting to sleep in the first place. In that case the concept of sleep hygiene might have the answer. Sleep hygiene, much like personal hygiene is a series of practices and tools surrounding sleep that help you to have a healthier, and thus more conducive to sleep, environment.

1. Avoid stimulants around bedtime: This includes things such as coffee, cigarettes and other chemical stimulants as well as intensive exercise. You should avoid these in the four to six hours before bed as they will leave you alert and agitated and unable to sleep.

2. Turn your bedroom into a sleep promoting environment: Experts recommend that your bedroom be used for nothing except for sex and sleep. Move your desk and other activities out to another room. This is because it is best to psychologically associate your bedroom with sleep and not with the anxieties of your work and study.

3. Establish a pre-Sleep routine: By having a soothing routine that does not agitate you, you will come to associate sleep with these habits which will help put you to sleep.

4. Only attempt to go to sleep when you are truly tired: By lying in bed merely waiting to fall asleep, you will only agitate yourself with frustration. If you find yourself unable to get to sleep after twenty minutes, go do a relaxing activity with the lights low until you feel tired.

5. Use natural light to your advantage: Allow morning light in, natural sunlight kick-starts the hormones that wake you out of sleep and so you will awake more ‘naturally’ and refreshed.

6. Develop your internal clock with a regular sleep schedule: Waking up and going to bed at the same time each day trains your body to go to sleep at the designated time and to sleep effectively during that time, giving you better quality sleep.

7. Avoid daytime sleeping: Naps might be temporarily invigorating by the mess with the hormones that help you sleep and shift your internal clock out of sync with your desired sleep schedule.

8. Exercise, and exercise early: Regular stimulates hormones that wake you up as well as making your body more receptive to sleep later in the day. What you don’t want is this hormone circulating when you are trying to get to sleep, so ensure that you don’t work out after mid-afternoon.