Cure:Insomnia

Most insomniacs and people who have problems with daily energy levels fear that a lack of sleep will impair daytime functioning. You too are likely to be influenced by the media hype and sleep researchers telling you that everybody need eight hours of sleep to function during the day. This is not necessarily true! Yet most insomniacs and people who suffer from lack of energy during the day share a very common belief: “If I don’t sleep for eight hours or more I won’t be able to function tomorrow”. No one can tell you how much sleep you need, in fact it is very likely that you have unrealistic beliefs about how much sleep you need to function during the day.

There are many examples of people who sleep four, five or six hours per night and yet are perfectly capable of maintaining high performance levels during the day. Studies of transatlantic yacht racers, who intentionally limit their sleep to as little as possible, have shown that their performance is not impaired. In fact, studies have shown that those sailors who average just around five and a half hours of sleep perform the best.

You see, it isn’t really about how long you sleep. It’s really all about the quality of your sleep. However, over the next few chapters your will learn exactly what quality sleep really means.

The burning question,”how can I get more sleep,” should really be: “how can I raise the quality of my sleep?”

Raising the quality of your sleep is most definitely possible, because most people engage in daily activities that suppress the deep sleep stage and hence lowers the quality of your sleep. Our goal is to optimize your sleep system so the deep sleep stage is not suppressed.

Therefore, our mission is not necessarily to sleep longer; in some cases that won’t do any good. What is one to do then? Well, you want to raise the quality of your sleep. You want to optimize your sleep system and make sure that the all-important deep sleep stage that occurs during your core sleep is not suppressed, but rather optimized!

In fact, most people engage in a variety of activities that produce lighter stages of sleep throughout the night. If your activities and habits promote a lighter stage of sleep, naturally you will experience problems with daytime functioning.

In fact, your ability to function during the day is dependent on many other factors than simply how long you sleep. We will explore these in detail in the next chapter.

People who experience a high quality of sleep need far less sleep in order to rejuvenate themselves physically than those who experience a lesser quality of sleep.

Remember that most of your all-important deep sleep occurs during the first part of the night. In fact, you obtain 100% of deep sleep during roughly the first five and a half hours of sleep. Here we find a very important reason why you can perform on less sleep than you think.

Since the deep-sleep stage is responsible for your physical rejuvenation and therefore your daily energy levels, sleeping more than your core sleep will do very little—practically nothing—to help you feel rested and energetic during the day! It doesn’t really matter much whether you get six hours or 10 hours. The extra four hours contain extremely little quality sleep.

Nevertheless, it’s not that simple. If you sleep less and the quality of your sleep is reduced as a direct result of the thoughts and behaviors that we will examine, you will certainly feel tired and groggy, because your deep sleep stage was suppressed!

Furthermore, the extra hours only contribute to disturb your body temperature rhythm making it more difficult to fall asleep at night.

Sleep loss: The important realization here is that the worst thing that can happen is that insomnia affects mood – you may be slightly more irritable.

Research has shown that reduced sleep does not impair performance. In fact, studies have consistently shown that you CAN perform despite not getting the amount of sleep you thought you needed.

The term core sleep describes the minimal amount of sleep that an individual needs to perform properly during the day. This amount varies from person to person.

In a typical individual, the first 5.5 hours of sleep contain 100% of deep sleep. This stage of sleep is what is most important in terms of daytime functioning.

When you actively start to reduce the amount of time you sleep (more on this later) you will need to experiment to find your personal core sleep.

Keep in mind that even in the event that you do not obtain full deep sleep one night, your body’s natural sleep mechanism will make up for this by a prolonged period of deep sleep the next night.

Understanding the basics of sleep will be more helpful than you think. I have no way of knowing how much you already know, but if you are not familiar with the basics, this will definitely be the first step towards conquering insomnia/getting more energy in your life.

Understanding the underlying processes and mechanisms that control your sleep will give you a sense of empowerment; you can look down on your problem, rather than your problem looking down on you. The first step is to put you back in the driver’s seat so you can take control of the direction of your life.

It is not until recent years that scientists have actually possessed the technology to measure and study exactly what happens in the human mind and body during sleep.

Up until the 1950s, most people thought of sleep as a passive, dormant, and inactive state where the body and mind are turned off and had nothing to do with our daily lives.

However, we now know that our brains are in a very active dynamic state during sleep, and this greatly influences our waking hours. New technology gives sleep researchers the ability to measure the brain’s electrical activity. These activity levels are called Electroencephalographs (EEG) recordings or brain waves.

Each stage represents a different physical and mental state of the body during sleep. During some stages, the body is in a lighter sleep (faster brain waves) and can be awakened more easily, while others indicate a very deep sleep (very slow brain waves).

No one knows for sure why we sleep, but there are two basic theories:

1. Sleep has a restorative function.

2. Sleep has an adaptive function.

This theory of sleep suggests that sleep helps the body recover from all the work it did while awake. Experiments have shown that the more physical exercise we do, the more SWS (slow wave sleep) we have. If you are deprived of SWS you’ll likely experience being physically tired along with being anxious and irritable.

Sleep may have developed from our distant ancestor’s survival instincts to protect themselves during the night. Because they didn’t function well at night due to their inability to see, search for food, and defend against predators, they slept.

Sleep gives your body a rest and allows it to prepare for the next day. It’s like giving your body a mini-vacation. Sleep also gives your brain a chance to sort through things. Scientists think that sleep may be the time when the brain sorts and stores information, replaces chemicals, and solves problems.