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Getting the A-B-Zzzs of sleep
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November 1, 2020Getting enough sleep is one of the easiest, cheapest, most natural things you can do to improve your health. And yet, 40 percent of U.S. adults cut their sleep short.
If you’re one of them, you are putting your health at risk, and more than you know. Today, I’ll share some helpful information about sleep — this thing we all do every day, but some of us not enough.
A generation ago, it was almost unheard of for a person to sleep fewer than six hours. Today, it’s quite common, but that doesn’t mean it’s normal. For optimal function, your body and brain depend on getting enough sleep. But what’s “enough”?
The CDC recommends a minimum of seven hours of sleep a night on average for adults. Less than that and the consequences are no laughing matter. Health problems linked to insufficient sleep include weight gain, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, depression, and dementia. A very small percentage (around five percent) of adults is genetically wired to be short sleepers and can get away with four to six hours a night. But most people—90 percent of us—need approximately eight hours of sleep a night to function optimally.
Have you ever experienced jet lag from changing just one or two time zones? When you’re living in a chronically sleep-deprived state — which most of us are, to some degree — the rhythms in your brain that maintain sleep and wakefulness can become fragile to the point that you’ll have a hard time adjusting to even small changes.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in the early ‘90s demonstrated how even minor amounts of sleep loss can have major consequences. Investigators tallied all motor vehicle accidents in Canada around Daylight Savings Time and discovered a dramatic rise in accidents on the day after the spring time change, when we set our clocks forward and lose an hour of sleep. After the fall time change, there was an equally dramatic effect in the opposite direction: the day after drivers got an extra hour of sleep, accidents were way down.
If you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, before you resort to supplements or medication, the first thing to try is changing your environmental factors. Limit exercise and use of electronics in the hours before bedtime. Optimize the temperature in your bedroom. Avoid caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol too close to bedtime. (Alcohol can help one fall asleep, but it is rapidly metabolized and can cause wakefulness within a couple of hours.) Give yourself a buffer before bed with a pre-sleep ritual, like reading or a warm bath.
KATE MARTIN is director of marketing for Healthnetwork. She compiled this article from a recent lecture given by Nancy Foldvary-Schaefer, D.O., M.S., director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Cleveland Clinic.
