Radio Headspace｜Struggling to sleep. Stay out of bed

Hi, I'm Dr. Eric Prather, a psychologist who helps people get more restful sleep. A sleep evangelist, if you will.

And if you've ever had insomnia, or even one sleepless night, you know it can affect everything, from your mood, to your productivity, to your overall health.

So I'm here to share the science behind sleep, how it happens, and the tools you need to help you sleep well. Because let's face it, who couldn't use more quality shut-eye? Today, I'm going to debunk the biggest sleep myths out there and show you what to try instead so you can literally sleep easier.

It's interesting to think about what the origin of the eight-hour sleep recommendation comes from. In general, if people sleep in kind of a consolidated fashion, they will sleep between seven to nine hours if they need to. And so it's thought that this might represent someone's sleep need. But historically, people haven't necessarily slept in one big chunk like that.

Several decades ago now, Robert Eckrich, who was a historian, wrote a book documenting the fact that there may have been a time in which we had polyphasic sleep, where we slept in two chunks, which has to do with the fact that before industrial lighting.

We would go to sleep when the sun went down. We would sleep for, say, three to four hours, wake up for some period of time where people would do things, have rituals, procreate, and then go back to sleep for several more hours and wake up when the sun came up.

And the thinking is that, potentially, when there was indoor lighting and changes in industrialization, workforces were put on schedules and, as a consequence, had to consolidate that time for bed.

And it turned out that, for many people, it was in this kind of eight-hour chunk that we could stitch together. Though, of course, we know that many people wake up throughout the night, and perhaps that is a reflection of this evolution of how our sleep has come to be.

So we don't have a great understanding of how we define sleep need, and we think it probably varies.

Can we catch up on sleep? In the long term, there is a cost. So a lot of people, and most of us, honestly, spend the week probably not getting the sleep that you need or the sleep that you want. And so we often try to make that up on the weekends.

And so what we're basically trying to do is kind of make up that sleep debt, that difference between how much sleep we got and how much sleep we need. And if the debt is really high, we are unlikely to be able to pay that off. I mean, we know this from laboratory sleep studies.

So if we keep people awake across the course of a whole night, so that's, you know, say eight hours of opportunity, and they don't sleep at all, and then we allow them to sleep the following night, it's not like they sleep 16 hours, because our body cannot generate that.

There's something about that difference, and it suggests that we cannot make that up, that it does have a cost in the long term. And the more that difference is, that seems to be a predictor for increased risk for other biological outcomes, things like cardiovascular disease, diabetes. These chronic conditions that we know are part of aging and certainly reduce our health span, if not our lifespan.

So another myth that I hear quite a bit is that if you have trouble sleeping, you should stay in bed. People understandably say, well, no, I want to be in bed. I want to be in the right place at the right time in case sleep is to come. That actually undermines how sleep works. It breaks that relationship between the bed and the feeling of sleepiness.

So what we have people do is like, one, if you're not sleepy, don't get in bed. You know, you get in bed and all of a sudden you can't sleep and you give yourself say 15 to 20 minutes and you still can't get to sleep.

You want to get out of bed, sit somewhere, do something quiet until you begin to feel sleepy again and then get back in bed and try again. And basically we're trying to pair the feeling of sleepiness with the bed.

And at the same time, extinguish the feeling of angstiness or anxiety or distress with the bed. And for people that have insomnia, it's some of this back and forth in the beginning with this technique. But over time, the empirical research really supports that this will help build up that relationship to allow you to sleep more reliably and more restoratively.

We treat our brains and our bodies like computers that we can just shut down when the day is done. And it actually doesn't work that way.

So carving out best you can, like a one hour to two hour wind down period where you stop work and allow yourself to relax, to make that transition, that is a really healthy way to increase the likelihood that you'll get a good night's sleep and you'll feel rested and ready to take on tomorrow.

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