Cure:Insomnia

Catching up on sleep is a preferred strategy among many insomniacs. In fact, trying to catch up on “lost sleep” is counterproductive, because it throws off your natural body rhythm. It creates even more of the very problems insomniacs are trying to solve. As you recall, your circadian rhythm governs your sleep. By getting up later, you delay your exposure to sunlight and postpone the physically active start of your day. By delaying these factors, you also delay the corresponding rise in body temperature. That means that you delay the needed drop in body temperature (that is conducive to sleep) by that same length of time at night. If you try to get to sleep at your usual bedtime, your body temperature may still be too elevated, and you will find it difficult or impossible to fall asleep.

This is how by sleeping in on Sundays, for instance, you are actually creating a kind of artificial jet lag. (If you fly three hours east, morning arrives three hours early. It’s three hours later on the East Coast of the US than on the West Coast.) You haven’t been on a plane, but the effects are exactly the same. You are creating a shift in your natural rhythm. Trying to catch up on sleep only disrupts your natural rhythm of your body. In effect, you will prolong this and create fertile ground for insomnia at night.

You can always catch up on quantity of sleep simply by sleeping longer hours, but what you can’t catch up on is quality sleep, which as we’ve learned is what really matters! As you remember, you get most of your quality sleep (deep sleep) during the first part of the night, during the first cycles of sleep. So if you extend your sleep time to ten hours or more you will obviously be increasing your amount of sleep (quantity), but the benefits in terms of increased energy will be limited since the extra hours of sleep contain brief, if any periods of deep sleep! You see now that trying to catch up on lost sleep is another strategy that is destined for failure!

The good news is that this is not really something that you should worry about since our sleep system has a self-restorative function; a “drive” that will compensate for the lack of deep sleep one night by increasing the percentage of deep sleep you receive the next night!