ANCSLEEP BLOG

Sleep Is Integral to Living a Good Life

Living with chronic sleep deprivation will make it hard to live a quality life. You’ve felt exhausted before – you may feel exhausted right now – and you know how hard it is to function well when you are feeling so tired: at best, you can “get by.” The goal of life should be more than simply getting by.

It’s certainly a strong statement to say that chronic sleep deprivation makes it “hard to live a quality life,” but it’s a true statement. Many conditions cause chronic sleep deprivation, including:

• Sleep apnea
• Insomnia
• Parasomnias
• Restless leg syndrome
• Circadian rhythm disorders

By chronic sleep deprivation, most studies tend to look at getting less than 6 hours of sleep per night on a continual basis.

Let’s look at the critical ways chronic sleep deprivation impacts the quality of your life and, in turn, how getting good sleep can positively impact your life.

Relationship Between and Age

Your age is likely the most important factor in how much sleep you need. Additionally, your sleep pattern and circadian rhythm changes as you get older as well. You likely won’t sleep the same at 10 years old as you will at 20 or even 50 years of age.

Why does this matter? Because sleep deprivation is not always caused because you aren’t sleeping enough at night. You might not be sleeping enough at night, but perhaps you are not napping enough to make up sleep that you cannot get at night because your sleep pattern has changed.

It also goes without saying that you are a unique person with unique work and life circumstances that dramatically affect when and where and how you sleep. Such life factors also need to be taken into account when evaluating whether or not you are sleeping enough.

Let’s look at how much sleep you need based on age.

Sleep and Age

Your sleep needs are largely moderated by single factor: your age. Your age dictates how much sleep you need, and it will likely also dictate your sleep cycle (circadian rhythm). These are both important points in the “how much sleep do you need” discussion, as you can lose sleep because:

• You are not sleeping long enough during the night
• You are not sleeping in sync with your circadian rhythm

Additionally, you are a unique person. Your life is unique. And so your sleep needs are unique to your life as well. Do you have kids? Do you work irregular or overnight shifts? There are life factors that also need to be taken into account when evaluating whether or not you are sleeping enough.

Let’s look at sleep for children, sleep for adults, and how sleep changes as you age.

Sleep and Wellbeing

Wellbeing is similar to the word happiness in the sense that it means something different to everyone. That being said, we might all generally agree that “happiness” for us involves having a sense of satisfaction and healthfulness with our day to day lives. You could contrast this with feeling poorly, discouraged, and melancholic every day.

Not being able to sleep is frustrating. You may have already tried the common suggestions like having a sleep routine, avoiding too much caffeine and alcohol before bed, and so on. Fortunately, there are creative ways to help you get to sleep. Here are six strange but well researched, proven ways to sleep better that may help you.

What is Binge Sleeping?

Here’s a common scenario. During the week you stay up late reading, watching TV, working, or doing things on your computer. You get up early for work, maybe only getting about five hours of sleep. After all, you can “make up” this sleep on the weekend.

Then on the weekend, you sleep in an extra couple of hours each day. That should make you sleep better right? This is probably a fairly common practice for most people. Americans average sleeping 6.8 hours per night during the week and 7.4 hours during the weekend.

The idea of sleep binging revolves around the notion of a “sleep debt”, which is an important concept when discussing sleep deprivation and sleep binging.

Sleep Trouble – Could it Be Your Nightcap?

Do you frequently wake up feeling particularly tired? Does it take your brain quite a while to dispel the fogginess of sleep? Feel like you are easily forgetting things? It might be that nightcap before bed.

The fact is: alcohol disrupts important sleep activities, like getting a full night's rest, uninterrupted sleep, and restorative sleep. This is because alcohol blocks REM sleep, and can interrupt your circadian rhythm by breaking your sleep throughout the night. Continue reading to learn about the effects of alcohol on sleep.  

Alcohol Blocks REM Sleep

REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep is the deepest phase of your sleep. It is the mentally restorative phase of sleep, keeping your brain primed for [National Institute of Health]:

• Memory retention
• Learning

Alcohol suppresses REM sleep, especially in the second half of the night. This means less restoration/stimulation on the parts of your brain needed for learning and memory retention. What this usually ends up looking like is general, decreased performance during the day at work or in school.

Are You of the One in Three Who Don’t Sleep Enough

More than a third of adults in the United States don’t get enough sleep on a regular basis [Centers for Disease Control]. Are you in the 33%?

It’s not a surprising statistic. As things like electronics make their way into normal everyday life (and our bedroom) and most of us sit all day long at work, there are more sleep disruptions now than at any other point in history.

In nearly every facet of your life there is a sleep disruptor lurking in the shadows. It could be your home, your body, your brain, your possessions, or your work – the point is that they are everywhere and you need to know what to look for.

Here are our top ten most common things that sabotage sleep.

Sleep Quality vs Quantity

What is your sleep GPA? No that is not a typo. Your sleep grade point average. This measurement matters to us for most things, but for some reason when it comes to sleep, we generally only report on how many hours we got the night before. Sleep is much more complex and nuanced than this, and it's important to take a closer look.

Sleep is essential to the body. During sleep, the body has a chance to repair, prune and strengthen neural connections, reduce inflammation, and a whole host of other important bodily functions. Without it, people wouldn’t be able to function. It occupies approximately 1/3 of a human’s life, so even just as a percentage, sleep is extremely important.

When asked how they slept, people often respond with a statement about how many hours of sleep they got. Like many things in life, quantity doesn’t capture the whole picture. Sleep is no different. Keeping tabs on how many hours of sleep per night is a great place to start when taking inventory, but it doesn’t capture some of the most important aspects of sleep.