Sleep. It’s gotten a lot more attention in recent years, but it can be an elusive thing for some people. The culture in the United States of ‘working until you make it’ or ‘sleep when I’m dead’ has made sleep’s value a low priority and even correlated it with being something that is associated with weakness of character. The reality is that sleep could not be more central to a healthy lifestyle. With the advent of newer research in the last decade we have been able to study the various states of sleep and started to understand how important a role sleep plays in mitigation of elevated blood sugar, hunger hormone and even disease states like alzeheimers in later life.
Optimal sleep is getting 8-10 hours of sleep nightly, at regular time intervals: meaning you go to bed and get up at essentially the same time. There are so many factors that influence people’s ability to get to bed and stay asleep. If you are struggling to get your 8-10 every night, there are a few things to evaluate about your habits.
Caffeine. How much coffee, tea, energy drinks or caffeinated beverages are you consuming a day? Caffeine is a classic example of a what we call a ‘positive feedback loop’ with negative consequences to your sleep. Typically people will drink caffeine to help them wake up in the morning, when being underslept. Then they drink the caffeine throughout their day to stay wakeful for their job. The resulting issue is when they get home, they have difficulty falling asleep, in part due to the amount of caffeine still in their system. In most healthy people caffeine has an elimination half life of 5 hours, which means 5 hours after you have drank your cup of coffee, you have gotten rid of only half of the chemical that is keeping you awake. With this in mind, if you wanted to go to bed at 10pm, your goal should be to have your last caffeinated beverage at noon, so that 75% of that caffeine you drank has cleared your system.
A common term in medicine is ‘sleep hygiene’ when discussing the habits of how people get to bed. There are many things to consider in respect to your habits as you go to bed:
- Do you watch TV or surf Instagram until you fall asleep?
- Do you take medication to help you sleep?
- Do you exercise before bed?
- Do you eat a large meal before bed?
- How warm and how dark is your room?
The ideal situation is a completely dark, slightly cool room at 65 degrees F. No large meals or exercise 1-2 hours prior to bed, and no screen time for an hour before bed. Computer, television, kindle and phone all count as screens. Medication for sleep also remains highly controversial as the majority of sleep aids, from unisom, ambien to marijuana and alcohol all significantly impact your ability to achieve one of the particularly important sleep state called REM sleep. Melatonin has some variable affect for people, but is one of the only sleep agents that does not alter your sleep states. (And is naturally produced in our bodies.)
Coach Sarah, FNP-BC, MSN