This weekend I had the pleasure to attend Dr. Catherine Schuman’s fascinating presentation “Integrating Sleep Management Into Clinical Practice” at the annual Massachusetts Psychological Association conference. Dr. Schuman was the Director of of Behavioral Medicine and Behavioral Medicine Training at Cambridge Health Alliance, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, and has been an expert on sleep for many years. I wanted to share with you some of the very interesting facts she talked to us about, and hope this will motivate you to stop shortchanging yourself on sleep.
So ask yourself - are you drowsy or overtired during the day? Do you have problems going to sleep or staying asleep? Do you snore or have any unusual behaviors during the night? Do you wake up gasping for breath? Do you fall asleep easily during quiet moments in the day time? If you’ve answered yes to even one question, you may have a sleep problem. I encourage you to take this seriously, talk to a professional, and make time in your schedule for sleep, just as you would for healthy diets and exercise.
- Insufficient sleep is associated with mood and cognitive disturbances, behavioral and academic problems, the onset of diabetes, lowered metabolism, high levels of cortisol, and increased hunger paired with a decreased ability to burn calories (how cruel!), among other things. (For more info you can also watch the 60 Minutes video from my previous post.)
- We go through 3 stages of sleep - the first lasts just a few seconds or minutes and is the transition to sleeping. The second is a sounder sleep. And the third stage is the “deep” sleep we all need to recuperate and heal. If are deprived of our deep sleep, as you saw in the 60 Minutes video, we can get into big big trouble.
- Until the age of 3, humans have a 50 minute sleep cycle. This means that infants and toddlers will go through a full round of sleep stages and then wake up every 50 minutes. Children 6 years old and older, as well as adults, have a sleep cycle of 90 minutes. Do the math and that means that if we wake up to soothe our infants and toddlers every time they wake up during the night, we will never reach our stage 3 sleep!! Take-away lesson? Train your infants early to self-soothe and fall asleep on their own so that you only need to get up when they need to eat or be changed. Tip: don’t train them to fall asleep in your arms! When they get drowsy and start nodding off, put them to bed.
- How much sleep do we need? Newborns need 10-19 hrs every 24 hrs. Infants need 9-10 hrs/night, plus 3-4 hrs/day in naps. Toddlers need 9.5-10.5 hrs/night plus 2-3 hrs/day in naps. Preschoolers and 6-12 year olds need 9-10 hrs/night. Adolescents need 9-9.5 hrs/night. And finally, adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per night.
- Clients tell me over and over that they have adapted to having less than 7 hrs/night of sleep, but ALL the research out there says humans cannot function on less than 7 hrs in the long term. If you try to do it for more than a couple days in a row, your body will begin to show the signs of sleep deprivation and you will begin to suffer - physically and mentally. If you don’t get your deep sleep regularly, your body will reset itself and make you sleep, and all you can do is hope it’s not while you’re driving or in a meeting with your boss.
- Some medications and substances will disrupt your sleep: alcohol, caffeine, diet pills, Ritalin, steroids, albuterol, theophylline, quinidine, and many others. Check with your doctor or pharmacist to see if your meds are the problem, and limit your alcohol and caffeine intake.
So ask yourself - are you drowsy or overtired during the day? Do you have problems going to sleep or staying asleep? Do you snore or have any unusual behaviors during the night? Do you wake up gasping for breath? Do you fall asleep easily during quiet moments in the day time? If you’ve answered yes to even one question, you may have a sleep problem. I encourage you to take this seriously, talk to a professional, and make time in your schedule for sleep, just as you would for healthy diets and exercise.
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