Tag: Reading

How many hours per night do you sleep? Do you wake up relaxed and full of energy? Or are you tired and looking for coffee to get you going? I usually sleep at least eight hours every night and wake up relaxed in the morning, but did you know that two-thirds of adults throughout developed nations fail to get the recommended eight hours of sleep per night? The effect of just one night of deficit reaches far into our everyday life: From eating more to being irritated. In his book Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker explains the complex work that our brain does – especially while we are sleeping.

Sleep and Caffeine

While our twenty-four hours circadian rhythm is one factor that dictates our time awake or asleep, sleep-pressure is the second. While we are awake, the chemical adenosine is rising in our brains. The more adenosine we have in our brain, the more our sleeping pressure increases and we want to sleep. Many of us turn to coffee to kick off the day and to get energized. Now, caffeine blocks the receptors that signal sleepiness to our brain. Caffeine makes you feel awake and alert, while your brain is actually getting the signals to go to bed. However, adenosine is still being produced without your brain noticing it. Once the caffeine wears off, many experience a “caffeine crash”. Our brain gets hit by all the adenosine signalling “I am tired” to the brain. The “problem” with adenosine is, that it gets reduced only by sleeping. So if you don’t sleep enough, you wake up with adenosine still making you tired, even after a night of sleep.

The perks of sleeping enough

The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.

Dr. Thomas Roth

Not only does enough sleep help your brain to get rid off adenosine. Sleep also helps your studying, to foster recently learned things and to prevent serious accidents. According to Walker, “more than 2 million people in the US fall asleep while driving their motor vehicle in one week”. Drowsy driving leads to about 1.2 million accidents per year, in the USA alone. Our brain needs to recover to function perfectly. The recycle rate of our brain is around sixteen hours, after this time, our brain starts to fail. Walker points out that waking up at seven in the morning, staying up all day and hanging out with friends until the night, by 2 o’clock at night, your brain is in the same state as the brain of a legally drunk driver – without you having touched alcohol at all.

Step up your game with sleep

Enough sleep does not only help you stay awake while driving and not kill someone else or get killed yourself, but it also helps you improve skills such as piano playing. Matthew Walker explains that the best thing to do after practising or learning something new is to sleep. “If you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter.” It does not only apply to learning for your history exam or practising a new piano routine. Tests have also shown how sleeping helps professional athletes who get enough and deep, good sleep perform much better than athletes who did not rest enough.

How to get enough sleep

For me, a good evening routine is important to get a good night of sleep. Here is what works for me:

• No laptop during the last hour before sleeping.
• No mobile phone in the bedroom.
• Going to bed at the same time. I usually fall asleep between 9.30 and 10.00 every night, also on the weekend.
• Getting up at the same time.
• Relaxing before I go to bed. This means no appointments scheduled too late, not reading or watching something late that might lead to over-thinking or call-to-action thoughts.
• Turning down the heat. I first didn’t want to listen to my boyfriend and always have a warm room, but sleeping with around 18.4 degrees really helps me get better sleep.
• No naps during the day. When I sleep during the day, I find it difficult to fall asleep at night. Matthew Walker also recommends to not take naps after 3 p.m.
• Cleaning for 20 minutes and listening to calming music. I rarely do it, to be honest, but when I do, I feel super relaxed and proud.

The book Why We Sleep digs much deeper into why we sleep, why we dream and why sleeping and also dreaming is very important to maintain a healthy way of living. I can only recommend reading the book as it tells you so much more about the power of sleep than just the things I mentioned above.

Do you have an evening routine to help you sleep better?

Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep. The New Science of Sleep and Dreams, ISBN 978-0-141-98376-9, 342 pages. All quotes are from the book.