Sleep Expert Matthew Walker once said, "Sleep is the most idiotic thing in terms of creation of mother nature".
He explains that during sleep, you're not eating, not finding a mate, reproducing, caring for young, and on top of that, you're vulnerable to predation. In this line of logic, why has sleep been naturally selected for?
Sleep has been so important throughout our evolution, that despite the risks it poses, sleep has heroically fought it's way through natural selection.
Sleep provides a number of complex functions, and is known to be made up of 5 stages. Stages 1 - are called NREM (Non Rapid Eye Movement), and stage 5 is the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep. REM sleep is the stage that is famous for being the one in which we dream. We cycle in and out of these stages through the night, where in the initial stage of getting to sleep, we tend to oscillate through stage 3 and 4 of NREM, and in the later part of our slumber we cycle through stage 2 and REM sleep.
Studies have shown that
REM sleep serves some emotional first aid functions.
Walker and colleagues' research has found that during REM sleep, dreaming allowed for improved recovery from depression in a population of divorced women (Walker & Van Der Helm, 2009). It was also found in another study that REM sleep helps decrease emotional reactivity towards fearful facial expressions, and enhanced emotional reactivity when seeing happy facial expressions (Gujar et al., 2011). Need more convincing of the benefits of sleep? It has also been found that sleep loss can be a double edged sword: it can amplify negative emotions that result from disruptive daytime experiences, and can blunt the positive emotions felt when experiencing a reward!
So how can sleep be enhanced? Here are a few tips, a check-list if you will, to follow. You may like to try one and take baby steps to slowly integrate these ideas into your life.
Light. The only way our body knows that it is day or night is by the light we receive into our eyes. We can use this to our advantage to be more awake in the day, and more tired at night. Try getting sunlight as soon as you can when waking, and getting a little light in the afternoon. This tells your body when it is morning and afternoon, and calibrates your body clock to sleep at night. Try keeping your environment as dark as you can at night without stubbing your toe on the coffee table, and switch off from screens (TV and phones) at least an hour before bed.
Relaxation. It is quite incompatible to feel both sleepy and stimulated at the same time. I often hear the old story of "but I'm just not tired enough to go to sleep, so I keep playing my video game", which illustrates the power that doing something exciting (and, with screen light) can awaken our body. Try having an hour of a 'wind down' routine before bed. This might be taking a hot shower, reading a calming book and switching to some soft lighting.
Bed = Sleep. Overtime we can train ourselves to associate certain stimuli with certain responses, such as automatically beginning to cross a road when the sound of a pedestrian crossing signal tells us- even if the beeping is actually for a different crossing. When we spend time in bed anxiously paying bills, or excitedly playing computer games, our brain associates it as 'a place of anxiety' or 'a place of excitement'. This is fine for us in the day, but when we get into this same bed, we can find ourselves becoming anxious, or excited, just anything but sleepy. Try keeping bed as a place for sleep and sex only, and try your best to be creative and find specific spaces in your environment for your other activities.
Substances: Different substances can impact our wakefulness, and perhaps unsurprisingly, caffeine is among them. Caffeine for example takes around 5-6 hours to completely disappear from our body, so if you're hitting the hay at 10pm, make sure your last tea or coffee is well before 4pm or 5pm. Interestingly, alcohol has been shown to disrupt the all important REM cycle, and decrease deep sleep, so again it's important to be mindful of how you use certain substances for the benefit of a rejuvenating sleep (Ebrahim, et al, 2013).
Of course, this article does not serve as a substitute for therapy for sleep, but rather a helpful basic guide to improve sleep. If you are suffering from poor sleep, insomnia, or associated sleep issues (e.g., anxiety and worry, nightmares, fatigue and low energy), please contact me to book in an appointment to see how a tailored evidence-based therapeutic treatment can be provided for you.
- Chelsea
References:
Gujar, N., McDonald, S. A., Nishida, M., & Walker, M. P. (2011). A role for REM sleep in recalibrating the sensitivity of the human brain to specific emotions. Cerebral cortex, 21(1), 115-123.
Ebrahim, I. O., Shapiro, C. M., Williams, A. J., & Fenwick, P. B. (2013). Alcohol and sleep I: effects on normal sleep. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 37(4), 539-549.
Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: The new science of sleep and dreams. Penguin UK.
Walker, M. P., & van Der Helm, E. (2009). Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Psychological bulletin, 135(5), 731.
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