Beating Sleep Deprivation: How to Get Better Sleep
Practical tips on how to improve your sleep.
Mexico, may 21st, 2014
It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and I just can’t sleep. Not good.
I have a serious problem with not sleeping enough. See, I have come to the point with my meditation practice where it’s almost impossible for me feel anxiety or stress (at least in big quantities). But no matter how equanimous I become, sleep has always been my kryptonite.
I don’t have a problem with pulling all-nighters every now and then. In fact, I do it quite frecuently. The problem comes the next day.
Most people who experience a bad night will feel tired in the morning, but that’s about it. Just tiredness and maybe a little bit of crankiness. Nothing more.
But, I am a little bit different.
Whenever I don’t get my eight hours of sleep, I tend to get anxious. And I don’t mean just slightly anxious. I mean real anxious; I get the strongest anxiety attacks you could possible imagine. My head starts spining and my hands get shaky. Let mu put it this way: the last time this happened, I ended up hugging the back of a chair in an attempt to hold dear life in the middle of an airport. And yes… people were watching.
And not only that but it also seems that my IQ drops 30 points. Normally, my mind feels sharp and rather focused, but during the days that I can barely keep my eyes open… Well, let’s just say that I am neither the smartest nor the most productive person in the room.
I short, become worse than useless.
In the middle of my insomnia, I decided to do some research about the topic of sleep and I found out that more than 30% of the world´s population suffers from insomnia. My reaction?
What?! That’s more than 2 billion people!
Needless to say, I was shocked.
I hate insomnia and how it affects my performance. And I am sure that you hate it too. Thus I ask you:
Are you getting enough sleep?
In today’s fast-paced society where people are juggling with work, school, social life, and family, sleep often gets tossed aside as unnecessary or even as a luxury.
People may say things like: “Sleep if for the weak”, “I can rest when I am dead” or, my favorite, “I don’t have time to sleep. Sleep is for lazy people.”
It is very easy to get pulled into the bad habit of not getting enough sleep, but are you aware of all of the dangers that come with sleep deprivation.
Health Risks Caused By Sleep Deprivation
In the middle of my insomnia (it's 3 a.m. what should I do? I know, browse the internet!), I also did some research on the health effects on deep deprivation and learned some surprising facts.
It turns out that the consequences of not getting enough sleep are worse than I thought.
Some serious health risks are:
Obesity: In a recent study published in the journal Sleep, researchers from Case Western Reserve University found that people who slept less than the recommended hours for their age ate more fattening foods and snacks. This happens mainly because of two factors:
• The Good Hormone, called Leptin, goes down when you don’t sleep right. This is the hormone that controls appetite and if it goes down, you will get hungry.
• The Bad Hormone, Ghrelin, goes up. This hormone is produced by fat cells, and a raise of it indicates you need to get more fat calories.
So it’s a vicious cycle; the more ghrelin you have, the more you want to eat. The more you eat (fat) the more ghrelin you produce.
Heart disease: People who don’t get enough sleep or have a sleep disorder have more stress hormones in their bodies, a condition that’s bad for the heart over the long run. Stress hormones can damage blood vessels. This can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension), which can lead to bigger heart diseases. If you already have high blood pressure (hypertension), sleep deprivation can make it much worse, especially if you’re male. Lack of sleep has shown to increase men’s risk for heart disease and even death.
Headaches: Headache is a symptom of sleep deprivation; not sleeping can trigger headaches in predisposed individuals. This is especially true for people who suffer from migraines.
Bad Mood: Have you ever felt cranky in the morning? Have you ever felt like a zombi? Not getting enough sleep can affect your mood heavely, which can damage your work life and your relationships with others.
And these are just the common effects of sleep deprivation. It can also cause lack of proper attention, diabetes, and even depression.
How Much Sleep Do I need?
So now you probably give more importance to sleep, and maybe you want to sleep better. But the question remains: how much sleep does humans need?
It’s affair question. See, the recommended amount of sleep is not the same for everybody.
The amount of sleep a person needs depends on many factors, like age:
• Infants require about 16 hours a day.
• Teenagers need about 9 hours on average.
• Most adults need 7 to 8 hours a night for the optimal amount of sleep.
• Women in the first 3 months of pregnancy often need several more hours of sleep than usual.
How Can I Enhance My Sleep.
But the amount of sleep is not nearly as important as the quality of sleep. To make sure you have a high quality sleep, you can follow the next recommendations. These 6 tips have worked like a charm for me, and I am sure that they will help you too.
- Get away from the computer screen at least 1hour and 30 minutes before boing to bed: the lights that your monitor produces can affect the quality of your sleep pretty heavily and the light might be so shinny than overtime it can even damage your eyes (those who have Apple products like Macs or iPads will know what I mean). If diminishing your time in front of a screen is not possible because your work requires you to be on your computer late at night, use a free program called Flux, which will automatically change the light of the screen according to the time of the day to make it less shinny. I use it and it works like a charm when I need to pull an all-nighter.
- Make sure you are exercising correctly. Sometimes you can't sleep simply because you are not tired. It is hard to fall asleep when you have a lot of unused energy remaining in your body because you don’t exercise. Try to add more physical activity to your day like lifting weights at the gym or ridding a bicycle. Just make sure you dont exercise in less than 2 hours prior bed time as this can cause your body to enter into an active state, thus ruining your sleep entirely.
- Try using guided meditations for sleep. I plan on developing guided meditations in the near future.
- Consider having relaxing music playing in the background. Do not use headphones as they can harm your ears when you fall asleep.
- Ask your doctor for sleeping pills*. Sometimes people have medical problems that require special drugs to ease up the process of falling asleep.
- Take 400mg (approx.) of Magnesium prior going to sleep*. Magnesium works like a sleep enhancer. It is very easy to find in supplement form and it is quite cheap (five dollars’ worth of magnesium can last for months). You can find magnesium in many presentations like: milk, pills, chewable tablets, and in its natural form, which looks (and tastes) a lot like a block of chalk. I personally like two take two pills (200mg each) as they are easier to swallow, less fragile than a block of chalk, and less disgusting. Why 400mg? 400mg is the suggested daily intake for adults (people over 18 years old), both men and women. As a matter of fact, most people consume less than 100mg a day, which is only 25% of the daily intake.
PS: magnesium is often times sold as an antacid for cases of sour stomach or heartburn. If you suffer from sour stomach at night, you can kill to birds with one stone following this recommendation. You can find more about magnesium and its properties here.
- Please consult your doctor before taking any drug or supplement to enhance your sleep.
UPDATE:
Ain't Twitter great?
Thanks to the recomendations of some readers, I now can share another couple of practical tips to enhance sleep. I tried them and these are the ones that definetly helped. Enjoy.
Sleep on a completly dark room.
If possible, you shoud really find a way to sleep in a completly black room. And by completly dark, I mean it: no lights at all are allowed.
I know it sound alittle bit silly or strage but this one trick makes a world of diference.
To pull this off, turn off all the lights, get some blackout curtains (the type most hotels use on their rooms), and maybe even disconect the elecronic devices that use those little red leds when they are in stand-by mode.
If you just can't pull a complelty dark room off, at the very least try to wear a sleep mask.
Trust me. Try this little change and see the results for yourself.
Control the temperature of the room.
Humans get the best sleep at cooler temperatures. This phenomenon occurs mainly because a cool room lowers our body temperature (shocking, I know), which is what naturally occurs during sleep anyway.
There is no cure-it-all temperature, but I have found that 20ºC works best for me.
Do you have more actionable sleeping tips? Reach me on twitter at @Ricardo_Fabila and share them with me. I will add the best ones I get to the list.
Peace,
Ricardo Fabila
