I have a quote for you. “People have come to value time so much that sleep is often regarded as an annoying interference, a wasteful state that you enter into when you do not have enough willpower to work harder and longer. It has become increasingly clear, however, that no matter how hectic our lives may be, we can no longer afford to ignore what research is telling us about the importance of sleep for our safety and mental and physical well-being.” This is a quote from sleep expert Professor David Dinges, and it highlights the stark difference between our respect for sleep, and the true importance of it. In this episode I’m going to talk about why sleep is so important, and what you can do to get better sleep.

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Sleep can sometimes feel like a nuisance, right? Often we go to bed and finally rest, only when all the important or urgent things or done. Or sometimes it’s when you’ve finally mustered up the energy to get off the couch once you’re done slothing after a long day. (I think I just made that word up, slothing, but I’m going with it). Sleep is not prioritised as an important activity, and yet it’s profoundly important for your brain and therefore your physical health and your mental wellbeing.

I feel like there are eternal complaints about how little sleep people get and how tired they are – you don’t hear working parents going around saying yeah I feel amazing, I’ve been having the best nights of sleep all week and I feel so refreshed! Of course, there are some interruptions that can’t be controlled, like kids waking up in the night, but there are also some things that we can do to make sure that we’re getting the best sleep we can given our circumstances.

I’d love to go over some of the best sleep ideas, and they are things that you might not have tried before when trying to get a better night of shut-eye.

How Much Sleep Do You Need?

First, I want to give some detail about how much sleep you actually need. Not everyone needs 8 hours. There was a paper in 2004 by Ohayon that did an analysis of all the relevant sleep literature to get a summary of the average amount of sleep that people got across the lifespan. We know from this huge body of literature that the required sleep reduces with age, so that at around age 20, people are getting on average about 7 and a half hours; at age 40 people are getting about 7 hours, and age 60 it’s 6 hours and 20 mins on average. This means that if you are getting less than 8 hours of sleep, that’s probably ok for you.

The most important question to ask yourself is whether or not you feel refreshed when you wake up. I actually had a patient once who came to see me at the hospital, and one of the things she was worried about was that she wasn’t getting enough sleep. We talked about it a little, and she said she was taking a while to get to sleep, and falling asleep around 11pm, and then waking early around 5am. This was a total of 6 hours, and this woman was in her 60s, and so I explained to her that this was probably normal. She was surprised to hear this, and it turned out that she wasn’t tired during the day, she just believed that she wasn’t getting enough, so it was something that she could be reassured about. So just check in with yourself and see how you feel during the day.

If you are getting an appropriate amount of sleep but you don’t feel refreshed, then this might be for a number of reasons, so please go and see a health care professional – I have to say that of course nothing on this podcast is medical advice, it is general advice only. The sleep tips that I will focus on later should help if you are having trouble being asleep when you are actually in bed.

Sleep is a complex topic, and there is of course different parts to sleep, this is called sleep architecture, and I’m not going to go too much into that topic, but just know that you can get higher or lower quality of sleep as well, and of course the aim is to not only get the right amount of sleep, but also good quality sleep as well.

Sleep and Cognition

Before I cover my best sleep tips, let’s look at what happens to your cognition and wellbeing when you start to lose sleep. There was a large study published in 2021 that looked at sleep duration in mid life (so ages 50 and 60 and 70), and they followed people over 30 years and found that a reduced sleep duration in mid life, so less than 6 hours a night, was associated with an increased risk of dementia in later life, even after accounting for other factors. If those people had less than 6 hours over this whole 30 year period, then the risk of dementia increased by 30%. The mechanism here (the way this works) is thought to be related to inflammation and poor clearing of proteins that actually build up and cause dementia pathology in the brain.

Now that’s a very long term look at sleep deprivation – when we look at the shorter term we also know that reduced sleep can cause difficulty with attention, where the longer you are awake the worse your attention becomes, so that you miss important details AND you have more trouble paying sustained attention to a long task. Your working memory becomes impaired, which is how much information you can hold in your mind, and this feels like you’re not catching what’s being said or you can’t think clearly. Learning is also affected, and we know that sleep deprivation affects the storing of memories by affecting the way the hippocampus works, which is the key part of the brain in making memories. So this means that your brain might not be holding onto memories that it created yesterday or the day before.

Getting little sleep can affect your emotions as well, making you feel more anxious, more irritable, and more aggressive, and it can actually make you more frightened of scary things that you otherwise would have been, so if you’re up in the night and see something like a spider you’re going to feel more fear.

Interestingly, when you are sleep deprived, you actually become less able to understand rewards properly, which means that you take more risks and become more impulsive, so you’re not as good at making sensible decisions. Less than four hours of uninterrupted sleep per night is related to more car accidents and medical errors. {And all of these research findings that I’m mentioning are listed in the show notes). So you can see that regular good-quality sleep is a vital factor in optimal brain function, affecting how you think and feel.

Now just to be clear, if the poor sleep is happening in the short term, then these brain functions improve again once you are well rested, so these are temporary effects when it’s a short term problem, but it doesn’t make for a very nice experience while it’s happening, as we all know, so let me now share with you some tips that you might like to try to help you get amazing shut-eye. Good sleep practices are referred to as sleep hygiene, and I’m going to cover my favourite and most effective sleep hygiene tips here, and they might be ones you haven’t heard before.

Your Mindset About Sleep

It’s really important for me to say that none of these tips are going to be helpful if you don’t value sleep. You have to truly understand that sleep is KEY for optimal brain function and for feeling really good during the day, and so you need to be prioritising it. Like the quote that I mentioned at the start of the episode, life can’t be about doing more and more – we just can’t function without good sleep and so you have to understand that there are real disadvantages to missing out on sleep – I’ve mentioned the effects on mood and cognition already, so try to shift your mindset to understand that good sleep is part of good health and longevity, and better efficiency and safer practices as well.

The First Tip to Get Better Sleep

Now the first is actually to wake up at the same time each day, no matter whether it’s the weekend or not, and no matter how you slept the night before. There is a lot of focus on what time you went to bed as important for sleep, like don’t stay up late, and make sure you go to bed early if you’re tired, but actually it’s your wake time that sets your circadian rhythm. It seems logical that if you are tired, you have a sleep in, so that you can get more sleep, but this sets you up for failure over the next few days or weeks.

You see, if you sleep late, then you have something called reduced sleep pressure – this means that when it comes to the evening the following night, you don’t feel as tired because you haven’t been awake for long enough and built up enough sleep pressure, and so you don’t fall asleep at a good time, and you continue to sleep in because you’re tired. You end up falling asleep later and later, and going to bed later, and end up being out of sync with the day/night cycle, so you’re awake in the night which isn’t good, or inevitably the day comes around when you have to get up early, and you feel terrible.

So, what you need to do is wake up at the same time everyday, so that your sleep pressure can start to increase over the day so that when it comes to the evening, you have enough sleep pressure to push you to fall asleep.

When you consistently do this, you set your body clock, and you have less trouble falling asleep, and you’re sleeping at the right time of day. So even though it sounds terrible, especially if it took you hours to fall asleep, make sure to wake up at the same time each day.

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The Second Tip

The next tip I have is a routine around what to do when you are having trouble falling asleep. Now, your brain is very clever, and it associates different environments (so, the spaces that you’re in) with different activities. If you are in bed and you’re not tired, you don’t want to do things like scroll on your phone, or watch TV, or worse still do work. You want to train your brain to associate bed with sleep.

To do this, get up out of bed when you’re not tired. Go into a different room, somewhere you can sit down like the lounge room, but keep the lights low so you’re not waking up your brain. Now I want you to sit and read a book – yes, and actual paper book, so that you’re not watching screens. Keep reading until you feel tired again, and then go back into bed. Give it 15 to 20 minutes, and if you are not asleep, get back up and do the same thing again. Now, this might feel a little tedious, but remember this a training program for your brain – it’s not going to magically work after one try. It might take several turns in a night, and will take an unknown number of nights. Your brain is practicing associating bed with sleep.

The Third Tip to Get Better Sleep

The next tip I have for you is to not look at the clock! There is no need for you to look at the time. Whenever anyone talks about sleep, there seems to be this obsession with knowing what time you fell asleep and what time you were awake in the night and how long for and how many times you looked at the clock and then how many minutes before your alarm you woke up. If this is you, then please consider NOT looking at a clock. There is no need to know the time.

If on most mornings you set an alarm at a time when it’s not pitch black, you’ll probably know that it’s the morning if you wake up then, so if you do wake up and it’s very dark, all you need to know is that it’s still the night time. Do not look at the clock to see how long you’ve been asleep for, and how long until the morning. Why? When we look at the clock and we’re doing mental calculations about time and then we’re frustrated because this means it’s x number of minutes until my alarm goes off, and I got even less sleep this night than the previous night and then you tell yourself that you’ll never sleep properly again, and you attach all this meaning to what’s happening.

But guess what you’re brain is doing? It’s thinking too hard and starting to process too much and you’re waking yourself up even more! Please try and get out of the habit of looking at the clock, you just don’t need to.

The Last Tip

Now, speaking of overthinking, the next tip I have is something that will help calm your mind so you can fall asleep more easily. There was a really well designed study done in 2017 by Scullin and colleagues that showed that participants fell asleep much faster after they wrote a list of things that they had to do over the next few days, for five minutes. They also asked a different group of people to write a list of things that they’d already completed over the last day or two, and this did not have the same effect. Also, when the participants wrote the to-do list, the more specific they were, the faster they were to fall asleep! This speaks to the benefit of getting future ideas out of your mind, so that they’re not on your mind any more, so that you mind is less occupied and will fall asleep faster. Anything under 30 minutes for time to fall asleep is thought to be good, and in this study, writers of the future to do list had an average time to sleep of 15 minutes, whereas the other group it was 25 minutes.

Having writing or journaling as part of your evening routine is beneficial, and this study shows specifically that it’s the things that you have going on in the immediate future that can interfere with falling asleep. This means that you should take out a paper and pen and write down all of your future tasks, just for 5 minutes, as part of the routine you have when going to bed. You’ll feel much more relieved and that will help you to fall asleep.

What Else Can You Do?

These tips I’ve mentioned are some of the less well known sleep hygiene tips, so I hope that these are things you can try to incorporate into your evening and sleep routines since you may not have tried them before, but I will also briefly mention now the other more well known sleep hygiene tips here in case you haven’t heard them before and it’s something you are just coming across.

So, make sure you limit alcohol in the evenings – it’s thought of as a sedative, but it disrupts your sleep architecture, so it leaves you with poor quality sleep and so you don’t feel rested.

Next, avoid caffeine intake after midday (I’m telling you all fun things to do aren’t I!) Caffeine not only keeps you awake longer at bedtime, but it is also known to reduce sleep duration, and results in lighter sleep and more wake periods during the night. Whilst you might want to have your morning coffee, have a think about whether a later coffee is affecting your sleep.

Don’t eat about 2 hours before bedtime, it can reduce sleep quality and also cause reflux which can affect your sleep too.

Reduce all light – yes there is a lot of talk about reducing blue light at night, blue light affects how much you wake up and your sleep architecture regardless of how bright the screen is, so try and avoid all screens 2 hours before bed, or at the very least use a blue light filter. However, it’s not enough just to reduce the blue light. A darker environment is more conducive to sleep, so completely get rid of other light as well, and this will help the body start producing a chemical known as melatonin and help you drift off.

That’s what I have for you, go and get some sleep so you can perform at your best! I’m going to end with my favourite quote it’s by Mary Oliver, “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See you next time.

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Want to really level up and learn how to harness your daily routines? Sleep is just one element of living an intentional life. If you want to take back your days and fit work, rest, and play into your week, then my time management course TIMEWISE might be for you.

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References:

Quote from Prof David Dinges came from: Worley, S. L. (2018). The extraordinary importance of sleep: the detrimental effects of inadequate sleep on health and public safety drive an explosion of sleep research. Pharmacy and Therapeutics, 43(12), 758.

Abdalla, R. N., Ansari, S. A., Hurley, M. C., Attarian, H., Fargen, K. M., Hirsch, J. A., … & Shaibani, A. (2022). Correlation of call burden and sleep deprivation with physician burnout, driving crashes, and medical errors among US neurointerventionalists. American Journal of Neuroradiology, 43(9), 1286-1291.

Baranwal, N., Phoebe, K. Y., & Siegel, N. S. (2023). Sleep physiology, pathophysiology, and sleep hygiene. Progress in cardiovascular diseases, 77, 59-69.

Krause, A. J., Simon, E. B., Mander, B. A., Greer, S. M., Saletin, J. M., Goldstein-Piekarski, A. N., & Walker, M. P. (2017). The sleep-deprived human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18(7), 404-418.

Ohayon, M. M., Carskadon, M. A., Guilleminault, C., & Vitiello, M. V. (2004). Meta-analysis of quantitative sleep parameters from childhood to old age in healthy individuals: developing normative sleep values across the human lifespan. Sleep, 27(7), 1255-1273.

Ohayon, M., Wickwire, E. M., Hirshkowitz, M., Albert, S. M., Avidan, A., Daly, F. J., … & Vitiello, M. V. (2017). National Sleep Foundation’s sleep quality recommendations: first report. Sleep health, 3(1), 6-19.

Sabia, S., Fayosse, A., Dumurgier, J., van Hees, V. T., Paquet, C., Sommerlad, A., … & Singh-Manoux, A. (2021). Association of sleep duration in middle and old age with incidence of dementia. Nature communications, 12(1), 2289.

Scullin, M. K., Krueger, M. L., Ballard, H. K., Pruett, N., & Bliwise, D. L. (2018). The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: A polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 147(1), 139.