Good morning, Sunshine! How did you sleep last night? Did you log a solid eight and wake up on your own without an alarm, feeling well-rested with plenty of time to make your first class? If so, you are in a distinct and distinguished minority.
Benjamin Franklin acknowledged sleep as “necessary to our constitution.” Ernest Hemingway said, “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” Of course, he ended his own life with a shotgun. Edgar Allan Poe, morose as his poetry, groused “Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”
What is your standpoint on slumber? Many college students consider time in bed to be a luxury they can’t afford, unless someone else is in bed with them, in which case sleep is probably the last item on the agenda. Or they think of snooze time as a necessary nuisance that eats up valuable hours. At the same time, lots of students don’t rest well when they do sleep, and they’re not alone.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, more than half of all Americans report having some kind of sleep problem most nights.
About two-thirds of us say our sleep needs are not being met overall. The IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics reports that more than 63 million prescriptions for sedatives were filled last year in the United States, including 44 million for Ambien alone.
Sleep troubles can be caused by anything from a noisy roommate to stress to diagnosable sleep disorders such as insomnia or narcolepsy (daytime sleep attacks). Other sleep problems include restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, sleep walking and night terrors. Everyone has a nightmare from time to time, but some people have them every night.
Insomniacs have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or both. As a result, their bodies don’t go through the normal and necessary highly organized series of physical and mental states called stages of sleep. These stages are drowsiness, light sleep, deep sleep and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Cycling through all the stages of sleep takes about 90-100 minutes. Early in the night, the sleep cycles contain lots of deep sleep and short REM periods.
By the end of the night, this has reversed, and by morning REM and light sleep predominate. We spend about 25 percent of our total sleep time in REM, which is when we dream. If we lose REM sleep, we suffer. REM sleep stimulates the parts of the brain used in learning, and is vital to psychological health.
Ben Franklin was right: Sleep is vital to your health, just like food, water and air. Lack of sleep not only makes you drowsy and dangerous, it can contribute to a host of problems from memory loss to aging skin. It also squashes your sex drive and even makes you gain weight. In extreme cases, people who truly, literally cannot sleep lose their minds.
How much sleep do we need? It varies from person to person, but aiming for eight hours works for most. That’s right — a third of your life should be spent unconscious.
If shuteye doesn’t come easy to you, try the following:
Make sure your bed is right for you. If you’re not comfortable, you won’t sleep well. Keep the room temperature on the cool side.
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Keep regular sleep hours. Try to go to bed and get up at the same time every day. Do not nap during the day if you have insomnia.
Exercise during the day. Even 20-30 minutes of brisk walking helps, but don’t do it right before bed or it might keep you up.
Watch out for stimulants. If you use caffeine, stay away from it in the afternoon and evening. If you smoke, nicotine withdrawal might wake you up too early. Alcohol keeps you in the lighter stages of sleep and robs you of REM, so that even though a drink may make you drowsy and help you fall asleep, your sleep won’t be healthful sleep.
Relax before bed with a warm bath (about an hour before bed because it is the fall in body temperature that stimulates sleep), stretching or other relaxing routines. Avoid screen time close to bedtime as that kind of artificial light can interfere with your body’s natural day/night hormones.
Use the bedroom only for sleep and sex. This is training your brain.
If you aren’t sleeping, get out of bed, go to another room to relax until you get sleepy. Trying too hard to go to sleep will backfire on you. Turn your clock away so you can’t see and obsess about the time.
Eat a small starchy snack at bedtime, or drink warm milk. No big meals close to bedtime. Some think a calcium-magnesium supplement helps.
Consider pills. In my opinion, these are best used as a last resort, or for temporary insomnia such as after travel or before a big event. There are a variety of over-the-counter remedies and herbs that are effective, or you can see your health provider for a prescription.
If you want to learn more, or to get help with your own sleep, come to Student Health and Counseling’s free workshop on sleep.
The next one is on Monday from 4 to 6 p.m., and there is another one in November. Call (505) 277-4537 or go to shac.unm.edu/forms/counseling-workshops.html to register.
Finally, I can’t resist quoting Shakespeare, who has many memorable lines about sleep, from Hamlet’s famous speech contemplating suicide to this gem from the play Julius Caesar:
“Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber; Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies, Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep’st so sound.”
May your sleep be sweet and sound.
Peggy Spencer is a student-health physician. She is also the co-author of the book “50 ways to leave your 40s.” Email your questions directly to her at pspencer@unm.edu. All questions will be considered anonymous, and all questioners will remain anonymous.
