Sleep is an essential component of health, like diet and physical activity. But unlike diet and physical activity, where you can decide what to eat, when to exercise etc., sleep seems to resist any attempts at control. Even really good sleepers don’t have full control of their sleep – the best sleepers in the world still have the odd bad night. But we can learn to gain more control of our sleep if we understand the factors that impact on our sleep.
Before we talk about what these factors are, let me first ask you a question:
What night of the week do most people say they sleep the worst? If you ask your friends, I’m confident most of them will say Sunday night. And the reason for this gives us an important clue on how to gain better control of your sleep.
There are many factors that affect your sleep but in this blog I’m going to focus on just two:
1. Your homeostatic sleep drive – this is a fancy term for sleepiness.
2. Your circadian rhythm – this refers to your internal body clock.
These are the prime physiological drivers of your sleep, and they are factors that you can control. When one has insomnia it can feel like your body has forgotten how to sleep, but there are techniques to harness these physiological drivers to give yourself the best chance of sleeping well.
Let’s talk first about the homeostatic sleep drive. As I mentioned above this is just a fancy term for sleepiness. Sleepiness is the fuel that drives your sleep and from the moment you wake up in the morning, you start to accumulate sleepiness. So in a sense, what you are doing during the day is filling up your sleep tank with sleep fuel. When you sleep at night you use up that fuel and, when your tank is near empty you wake up and the cycle starts again.
To show how this works, lets look at a hypothetical example. Suppose you are currently sleeping 7 hours a night. That means you are awake for 17 hours of the day, or to put it another way, it takes you 17 hours to fill up your tank. If you wake at 7am and it takes 17 hours to fill the tank then your tank will reach full at midnight. Therefore, you will feel sleepy enough at midnight to fall asleep.
But if instead you only wake up at 9am, it still takes you 17 hours to fill the tank and the tank will only reach full at 2am! Now, if you go to bed at midnight you will be going to bed without a full fuel tank and one of two things will happen:
1. You will lie in bed for two hours waiting for your tank to fill up before you are able to fall asleep, or
2. You may fall asleep, but because your tank isn’t full, part way through the night you run out of fuel and wake up.
Almost everyone with insomnia has been told by someone that they should go to bed at the same time every night, but this turns out to be pointless advice. You can go to bed religiously at midnight every night, but whether you fall asleep at midnight or 2.00 or any other time is determined not by what time you went to bed, but by what time you woke up that morning!
The other factor at play is your circadian rhythm or internal body clock. This clock tells you what time of day you should be awake and what time of night you should be asleep. Your internal clock needs to be synchronised with the outside world or it may start to drift, and it does this through light. In particular, morning light sends a powerful signal to your internal clock telling it what time it is. If that first dose of morning light happens at a different time each day it is hard for your internal clock to know where it is in time. Indeed, sleeping in on weekends can cause your body clock to delay, effectively jet lagging you by a couple of time zones! But if you get that first dose of light at the same time every day it anchors your body clock and helps to keep it in synch with the outside world.
So now you know why people sleep badly on a Sunday night. Most people sleep in a bit on a Saturday morning, but as they tend to go to bed later on a Saturday night they are still able to fill the tank and sleep well. They sleep in again on a Sunday morning but then go to bed at their normal, weekday bedtime. And because they started filling their tank later, the tank is not full and their sleep suffers. Furthermore, their body clock has drifted later due to the lie-ins and so their bodies don’t yet realise it is time to sleep.
Which brings us to the one simple thing that everyone with insomnia should do to improve their sleep:
You should set an alarm to wake up and get up at the same time, every day, seven days a week, whatever time you’ve gone to bed, regardless of how you’ve slept.
Even if you are always wake up long before your rising time and haven’t used an alarm in years, you should start setting an alarm every day. What time you set your alarm for is entirely up to you, as long as it is a time you can stick to seven days a week. For most people that will be determined by the time they need to get up for work on a weekday. For example, if you get up at 7.30 Monday to Friday, you should set your alarm for 7.30 every day of the week including weekends. I should also point out that the time you set your alarm for is a latest rising time. You can get up earlier than the alarm, but never later. If you get up at 7.30 most days but have one morning where you want to get up at 6.30 that’s absolutely fine. However, if there is a morning where you only need to wake at 8.30, you still need to set the alarm for 7.30.
I realise this is not going make me popular (I said it was simple, I didn’t say it was easy), but it is really important. You might find the first few nights you do this you will sleep a bit worse as you may be anxious about getting enough sleep before the alarm goes off, but your body will gradually get into the new rhythm and you will start to reap the benefits. You will start to feel sleepy at the same time every night and this will make your sleep more regular and predictable. This is a win in itself and it also shows you that you have more control over your sleep than you realised. It is the essential first step in harnessing your body’s powerful sleep drives. And you may be the only one in your group of friends who sleeps well on a Sunday night!
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