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Emotional balancer. Strength giver. Happiness booster. Harnessing the benefits of eight hours’ (or less) really is within our control. Journalist Fiona McCarthy gets the experts’ take on just how powerful sleep can be.
“Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity,” asserts Dr. Matthew Walker, a world-leading sleep researcher and author of Why We Sleep. “It is Mother Nature’s best effort at immortality and the most powerful elixir of life.” Yet, with our frantic modern lives – working, caring for children and elderly parents and finding some time for ourselves – sleep is often the thing we seem to value least and compromise most.
How we sleep is vital to our wellbeing. “Approximately every 90 minutes, you go through a cycle of different stages of non-REM to REM, but what changes is the ratio of non-REM to REM within that cycle,” Dr. Walker explains. “In the first half of the night, the majority of those 90-minute cycles are comprised of lots of deep sleep and very little REM. As you push through to the second half of the night, you have much more REM sleep. But you need all stages of sleep – you can’t shortchange any of them.”
Sleep, and particularly dream sleep, provides us with essential emotional convalescence, like “a form of emotional first aid,” says Dr. Walker. “Dreaming crosslinks your memories together, so you wake up the next day with a revised mind web, capable of defining solutions to previously impenetrable problems. In a way, you go to sleep with the pieces of the jigsaw, but you wake up with the puzzle complete. I would argue that’s the difference between knowledge (remembering the individual pieces) and wisdom (knowing what it all means when you fit them together).”
“A good night’s sleep can literally change someone’s life,” says Dr. Guy Meadows, co-founder and Clinical Lead at London’s Sleep School (sleepschool.org). “Everyone has an occasional bad night, particularly when something is happening in one’s life, but we encourage people to learn to embrace the sleeplessness.”
Dr. Meadows, a pioneering practitioner of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) – an updated form of cognitive behavioral therapy – says “humans have this incredible ability to feel, and feelings are messengers. If you are feeling something at an intense level, it’s trying to tell you something.” ACT is about acknowledging your racing mind, or knotted stomach, rather than pushing those feelings away.
“Trying to free yourself fully from anxiety fuels your amygdala, the emotions-processing part of the brain that instigates fight-or-flight responses,” says Dr. Meadows. “So when we’re lying awake at night, panicking about not sleeping, it’s important to acknowledge that it is our amygdala creating these feelings. Being kind to ourselves at night is imperative. It activates our care-and-repair system – the complete opposite of fight-or-flight – and learning to say ‘I’m really struggling right now but that’s okay’ allows us to give ourselves a break and to move to a gentler place, which will hopefully allow our brains to sleep.”
Dr. Maja Schaedel is a Clinical Psychologist specializing in insomnia, sleep difficulties and trauma, and co-founded The Good Sleep Clinic (goodsleep.clinic). “Dealing with sleep issues really does need both medical and psychological support, because you have to really understand physiologically what’s going on for somebody when they don’t sleep. For example, their hormones might be affecting their sleep or they might be coming off medication which might trigger sleeplessness – but also that insomnia is often perpetuated by psychological factors, such as the fear of not sleeping actually keeping us awake,” she explains.
Lying awake at 3am is particularly problematic, Dr. Schaedel says. “The key to good sleep relies on the concept of sleep pressure or sleep drive – essentially when you wake up in the morning, your body and brain start a process which gives off a chemical: adenosine. This builds up throughout the day, so that by the evening, it has created enough sleep pressure to help you fall – and stay – asleep. The problem with waking up at three or four in the morning is that you’ve flushed away most of the previous day’s adenosine so it’s harder to get back to sleep,” she explains. “Your core body temperature goes up and your body thinks it must be daytime.”
If you then find your mind starts buzzing with all sorts of thoughts and worries, stopping you from going back to sleep, “you need to find a way to shift that thought processing to earlier in the day,” Dr. Schaedel suggests. “Put some time aside – go for a walk at lunchtime or walk some of the way home – or sit with a cup of tea earlier on in the evening, to allow yourself time to process all those concerns. Teach your body that daytime is for thinking and nighttime is for resting.”
The Sleep Scientist Dr. Sophie Bostock (thesleepscientist.com) discovered the power of sleep of her own accord after a climbing accident. “I was on crutches for five or six months which made me slow down. I had to sleep, and it broke the cycle where previously I’d been compromising sleep in favor of working longer hours, because I thought that was what a successful career was all about,” she recalls. Before she knew it, Dr. Bostock started to feel more creative and in turn, more capable of doing things, particularly physically, but also emotionally and cognitively.
With a degree in medicine, a master’s in Entrepreneurship and a PhD in Health Psychology, Dr. Bostock’s doctorate research into why happiness protects against heart disease pointed to sleep as the unsung hero of mental and physical resilience. Now working as a “sleep evangelist”, Dr. Bostock firmly believes that by making just a few subtle changes to help achieve “better-quality sleep or slightly longer sleep,” she says. “It will allow anyone exhausted and stressed to enjoy their lives more because they’ll have better emotional balance, physical strength and more energy during the day. There’s really nothing more profound than a good night’s sleep on the way we feel and function.”
She cites the insights in Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time And How To Use It, about today’s dialled-up work ethic where “we feel this pressure to always be doing more,” she says. “Time has become a commodity that we have to optimize so we compress our sleep by perhaps working longer hours or trying a bit of escapism on our phones. But when we’re short of sleep, the brain responds by dialling up the sensitivity of our stress response, so we sleep for less time and our sleep becomes lighter and less restorative.”
Dr. Bostock suggests keeping a simple pen-and-paper sleep diary for a week or so to work out how much time you are actually sleeping. She says, “I ask people to write down what time they fall asleep, wake up, and roughly how their energy was during the day, and very often they realize they’re actually getting a bit more sleep than they thought, or their sleep patterns are a bit more haphazard than they realized.”
Consistency is key. Dr. Bostock adds, “Waking up at the same time every day is the quickest win because it provides an anchoring point for our circadian rhythms. So, by getting up at the same time every day, including weekends, it gives you more energy because all your internal systems are working in sync. More energy for physical activity, but also for focus and concentration. You’ll feel hungry at mealtimes, be able to metabolize food more efficiently and your body simply works better.” Even if you’re only getting six hours’ sleep a night, for example, if you’re consistent about it, you’re at least going to a get good-quality six hours’ because that supports your body clock. Dr. Bostock also suggests adding just 15 minutes more to those six hours. “That 15 minutes over the course of a week is an hour and three quarters extra and can make a big difference.”
Fiona McCarthy is a leading international lifestyle journalist, author and contributing editor. Follow her on @thechicshopper
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