Do you wake up feeling refreshed or do you feel even more tired than before you went to bed? Many people do that.
Do you spend hours counting sheep, trying breathing techniques or simply rolling from one side of the bed to the next hoping your mind we’ll just switch off?
Sleep is something we all need and it shouldn’t be so hard to get. So why is sleep so elusive to so many?
In a survey of how much sleep do you get, nine percent said nine hours plus. 65 percent said six to eight hours a night, so that would be good. Six is okay, seven is ideal, but you really need more than six hours.
26 percent of people who responded to the survey said five hours or less. That’s pretty shocking, but it’s not altogether surprising. People having babies rarely get more than five hours of sleep. The same thing is for shift workers. They come home in the morning and it’s really quite hard to sleep more than four or five hours. These people are very sleep deprived.
The question is are we getting less sleep as a race.
There have been some researches that showed that we are getting less sleep now than we used to. At the turn of the 20th century, early nineteen hundreds, people were getting nine hours of sleep pretty regularly.
When sleep was starting to be talked about more frequently in the 50s and 60s, about eight hours of sleep was common. These days, however, seven hours is really quite normal.
One of the huge issues is that we’re not as physically tired as we used to be. A lot of people spend their entire lives just sitting down in front of computers.
We really need to spend more time outside being physical and we don’t. Many people spend most of their days sitting behind a desk, which is not good for their sleep.
How important is that we get enough sleep? It’s really important. There are so many active things that happen in sleep. Sleep is such an amazingly active and important process that if we don’t do it well, we’re not in a function as well as we could do during the day.
People wrongly think that they function well on five hours of sleep. They don’t function optimally. You need at least six hours of sleep to consolidate memory. Many people think they are getting Alzheimer’s because they can’t remember anything, but in fact it’s just that they’re not getting enough sleep.
We are very busy when we’re asleep. We’re doing things like resetting, many hormonal processes take place, neuro-cognitive things are happening and many other brain executive functions are improved during sleep. As well as physical things, such as cell repair, we produce growth hormone, enhance our immune system, etc.
Some of the best tips for people who know they’re not getting enough sleep include, getting rid of electronic media, not going to bed with your laptop or cell phone.
Go to bed at approximately the same time every night. Sleep in dark, cool room, in clean sheets because they feel great next to the skin. These antibacterial sheets are especially good.
Address your stress by getting out in front of it. If you usually go to bed around 10 o’clock, try scheduling in 30 minutes of worry time maybe at 6:30, so there’s less on your mind later when
your head hits the pillow,
Be careful of things like caffeine and alcohol. Alcohol is quite sedative, it’ll help you get to sleep but it’ll just wake you up more during the night, so it’s not a good idea.
