Kent Sport health and fitness instructor Sarah Black offers some advice about the importance of getting the all too often elusive good nights sleep.
How much sleep do we need? I am not going to let students answer this one. Adopting a typical student sleeping pattern wouldn’t necessary be the most healthy approach to solving our sleeping issues.
Instead let’s discuss why we need sleep in the first instance.
Humans use this precious time to repair their health and maintain and optimise wellbeing. The body is subjected to daily wear and tear, which damages our cells, breaks down muscle tissue and releases free radicals within the body. Free radicals are the metabolisms waste products, which if not combated through sleep and the A, C and E vitamins, may lead on to further destroy cell membranes and muscle fibres. They can harm our growth, disrupt functional metabolism, lower immunity and speed up the ageing processes.
We need sleep to repair our body’s immunity and rebuild muscles, repairing any damage caused by daily exercise and environmental factors.
Sleep offers relaxation and stress reduction through mental shutdown and switches off our overused senses. Without sleep our mental energy runs low and we become irate, tired and do not function to our best abilities. Sleep assists our immune system, giving the body a chance to focus solely on fighting illness, aiding it to combat infections through rest and recovery.
It is our body clocks way of setting and resetting itself, giving us opportunity to form routine and the nervous system a chance to signal the correct routes and pathways to function.
So how much do we need and what kind? There’s two types of sleep: REM (rapid eye movement) and non-REM. REM is deep sleep, the kind of state that if your woken up in it, you will feel groggy and disheveled. We usually have our dreams in REM sleep. Non-REM is the lighter sleep we can feel easily awoken in and it is a lighter version of our sleep state. During the night we fall in and out of the two cycles.
A lot of people suggest that after a long nights sleep they wake up feeling even more tired. Why is this? Reasons could include waking up in the wrong sleep cycle, or changing the usual length of time we have adapted to which disturbs our rhythm. So when you go to bed do some calculations and work out when the best time would be to set your alarm clock. Sleep apps are a great way to help you with this, as well as sleep monitors that work alongside your sleeps body clock.
So how do we lead busy lives with stressful jobs and still factor in a good nights sleep? Here are a few handy tips to get you started.
- Avoid caffeine up to six hours before bedtime. Switch to decaf and save yourself the racing pillow head.
- Go to bed early and wake up early. Ensure you get a successful days work by utilising all the waking moments and feeling refreshed and energised from the start.
- Eat selectively. Nourish your sleep with good nutrition. Instead of the sugary doughnut before bed, make the sensible judgement that the reason you’re feeling hungry for sugar is because you’re tired. So go to bed.
- Switch off the tech. Bright lights, loud music are all distractions and disrupt the pattern of shut down. Read a novel or listen to some classical quiet music.
Give your body and your mind the time to adapt to a peaceful setting and allow it to attain a sense of calm and quiet.
Now we have covered the basic types of sleep and the importance, including a few points on delivering the correct attitude to experiencing a good night’s rest; I will leave you by suggesting that a typical adult needs between 7-9 hours of good solid sleep to feel at their best.
Look out for the follow up article that will explain what disrupts our sleep and ways to avoid and resolve extrinsic factors from getting in the way of your precious snooze time.