Goodnight Mind (4 page)

If you follow this recommendation consistently, this buildup will eventually translate to deeper sleep. Keep in mind that you are not limiting your sleep by following this recommendation; you are limiting your time spent awake in bed so that you can sleep more efficiently and deeply.

Are You Hesitant to Reduce the Time You Spend in Bed?

You may have mixed feelings about this new sleep habit. Although you may be convinced by the rationale we provided and may even be excited at the prospect of obtaining deeper sleep, you may feel nervous about spending less time in bed. This nervousness usually stems from worrying that if you spend less time in bed you will end up sleeping even less than you have been.

There are a few things to keep in mind. First, decreasing the time you spend in bed is not a recommendation to be followed indefinitely. We recommend that as your sleep improves you slowly spend more time in bed (see the next heading).

Second, you do not know whether you will sleep less. Test it out over the next week or two and then look back and determine whether on average your prediction came true. It is important to follow the recommendation for at least a week to test your prediction, because the amount of sleep you get varies from night to night—this is normal—and it may take a few days before your sleep becomes consistently deeper. In other words, do not worry if you do get less sleep the first few nights—this trend will likely reverse. Give it some time; do not quit before the recommendation has had a chance to work.

Third, if you stick to this reduction of your time in bed, you may notice that you are becoming sleepier as bedtime approaches and may even start having difficulty staying awake. This is a sign that your sleep drive is building. If you take it in stride rather than worry about it, you will soon experience deeper, high-quality sleep. It may take a few days for this to occur, but it will happen. However, if you become very sleepy outside of bed, you must also consider your safety and others’. If you are feeling very sleepy, observe the same cautions as you would if you were taking a sedating medication. That is, avoid driving or operating machinery.

Last, this strategy needs to be followed fairly consistently for it to work. If you are nervous about possibly losing sleep and “play it safe” by spending more time in bed on weekends, your efforts during the workweek will be undone. You will not get the benefits of having spent less time in bed on weeknights—that is, increased deep sleep—because your sleep drive will be weakened by your weekend behavior. Consider this: if you follow a diet during the week but overeat on the weekends, will you lose much weight, if any?

Following a strict schedule is the fastest road to results, but if you still do not feel ready to make such a change, you can take it more slowly and adjust your expectations for how quickly the strategy will work. Remember the basic rules for limiting your time in bed from earlier in this chapter: do not go to bed early, and do not sleep in to try to make up for lost sleep.

Extend the Time You Spend in Bed

Once your sleep has improved significantly and you are feeling very sleepy during the day, you may want to experiment with slowly extending the time you spend in bed. Here are some rules that can guide you in making this determination. A “significant sleep improvement” may be identified in several ways. One way is to ask yourself,
Am I now satisfied with the quality of my sleep?
A second way is to compare your sleep with that of someone who does not have sleep problems. Someone without sleep problems tends to fall asleep within thirty minutes of going to bed and spends less than thirty minutes awake in the middle of the night. This means that for a person without sleep problems, the percentage of time spent asleep is around 85–90 percent of the time spent in bed. If your overall average percentage is 90 percent or greater—that is, you are asleep for almost the entire time that you are in bed—extend your time in bed over the next week by fifteen minutes each night. It is your choice as to whether to set your alarm for fifteen minutes later or go to bed fifteen minutes earlier. Similarly, if it used to take you more than thirty minutes to fall asleep before you began restricting your time in bed, but now you fall asleep much more quickly (say within an average of fifteen minutes or less), give yourself fifteen more minutes.

Importantly, you should also extend your time in bed if you experience considerable sleepiness during the day and are concerned about your safety. This may happen, for example, if you based your new time in bed on an underestimation of how long you sleep, thus limiting your sleep most nights and not just your time in bed. However, do not confuse sleepiness with fatigue. You may be tired but not sleepy; that is, you are not dozing off unintentionally when inactive.

Summary

This chapter went into detail as to how you can build a stronger drive for deep sleep. It emphasized the importance of limiting your time spent in bed. It also highlighted the helpfulness of increasing your activity during the day, eliminating naps and dozing, and being careful with caffeine. Following our guidelines for limiting your time in bed can quickly increase your sleep drive to help you fall asleep within thirty minutes and spend less time awake during the night. Succumbing to the urge to go to bed early or sleep in will reduce the effectiveness of this strategy. Remember the following tips:

• Sometimes your mind is awake because your body is not yet ready for sleep.
  
• You can create a readiness for deep sleep by limiting the amount of time you spend in bed to match the amount of sleep you can currently produce.
  
• Any attempt to make up for lost sleep will backfire, because it prevents your body from making up for lost sleep naturally.
  

Chapter 3

Find and Set a Proper Sleep Schedule

I
n chapter 1, you learned that if your sleep schedule does not match your body clock, you will not have the quality of sleep you desire. If your mind is too active when you are trying to sleep, the reason could be that you are trying to sleep at a time when your body clock is promoting alertness. This chapter will teach you how to create a set sleep schedule that matches your body clock.

What Is the Body Clock, and Why Is It Important for Sleep?

As we discussed in chapter 1, you have an internal clock that determines the best timing for sleep. Throughout the morning and early part of the day, the body clock sends stronger and stronger alerting, or wakeful, signals; as the day goes on, these signals gradually fade, paving the way for sleepy signals to become dominant. If you go to bed much earlier or much later than your clock expects, you will either have difficulty sleeping or experience poor sleep quality. Because your body clock is so important in determining the quality of your sleep, the time you select for being in bed to sleep must (a) match your body clock type and (b) be regular. Let’s start with an exploration of your body clock type and then discuss why regularity leads to better sleep.

Step 1: Pick a Sleep Window That Matches Your Body Clock Type

The first step in finding and setting a sleep schedule is deceptively simple: choose a period for sleeping that matches your body clock type. People have a range of body clock types. At one extreme, there are definite morning types, and at the other end are extreme evening types; everyone else falls somewhere in between. Where are you on this spectrum? If you are unsure of your body clock type, read the descriptions below.

If you have the following tendencies, you are an extreme evening type, also called a night owl:

• You have difficulty waking up in the morning (or others have difficulty waking you up).
  
• You dislike and avoid eating early in the morning.
  
• You feel mentally cloudy for a while after waking up in the morning.
  
• You feel at your best in the evening.
  
• You become sleepy much later than most others do (for example, later than midnight).
  

If on the other hand the following are descriptive of you, you are an extreme morning type, also called an early bird, or lark:

• You become sleepy much earlier than most others do (usually earlier than 10:00 p.m.).
  
• You have difficulty staying awake in the evening.
  
• You wake up in the morning much earlier than most others do, without an alarm.
  
• You feel most mentally alert in the morning; this alertness declines throughout the afternoon and into the evening.
  

Although going to bed early and waking up early—or going to bed late and waking up late—may be in line with your body clock, it may be at odds with your partner’s. Your spouse, significant other, friend, family member, or roommate may have trouble understanding that your body clocks are different, so your ideal sleep patterns are different, and efforts to change this may in fact be counterproductive. If you are an extreme night person and your partner is an extreme morning person, it does not mean that your preferred sleep habits are wrong and your partner’s are right (or vice versa). Different people simply have different body clocks.

If your new sleep window has the potential to create relationship problems, do your best to communicate with your partner and compromise. Below are some solutions you might explore.

• Explain that your “unusual” sleep window may be biologically based and therefore not easy to change. Because body clocks have a significant genetic component, you may be able to identify at least one person in your family who can sympathize.
  
• If you are a night person: explain that, for you, waking up at 7:00 a.m. feels just as “off” as waking up at 3:00 a.m. does for most people. Just as most people would find it unappealing to eat breakfast at 3:00 a.m., you do not find it appealing to eat at 7:00 a.m.
  
• If you are a morning person: explain that, for you, staying in bed trying to sleep later in the morning is just as unpleasant and irritating as it would be for your friend or partner to try to go to sleep at 8:00 p.m.; no doubt your friend or partner would find it difficult to fall asleep so early. Just as most people would feel agitated to have to be in bed for the night when they still had energy, it makes you feel uncomfortable to remain in bed in the morning when your energy is already ramping up.
  
• Compromise on when you expect each other to do things that require energy. A morning person can reduce demands on a night person in the morning, and a night person can reduce demands on a morning person in the evening. The afternoon may be the best time to enjoy shared activities.
  
• For couples, accept your differences and agree to go to bed at different times but establish a “tuck-in” or a cuddle period so you can continue spending time together at night. For example, go to bed together and cuddle, but when the morning person is ready to sleep the night person can leave the bedroom and return to bed later when sleepy. Conversely, a night person may appreciate a cuddle in the morning upon waking up. The morning person, who has been up for a while, could return to bed to spend time with the night person. Remember that intimacy can occur independent of a sleep schedule.
  

Step 2: Maintain Your New Schedule Every Single Day

Once you determine a sleep window (that is, the regular time at which you provide yourself with an opportunity to sleep in bed) that matches your body clock type, you must use this same sleep window night after night. Do not vary your sleep window from one night to the next. Many sleep problems are caused by an irregular schedule, and an irregular schedule can cause insomnia and fatigue.

Are You Suffering from Social Jet Lag?

Jet lag is the result of a mismatch between the local time and the time your body thinks it is, as occurs when you travel significantly east or west by jet. When you are in a different time zone than usual, the clock in your body is no longer in sync with the clock on the wall. Common symptoms of jet lag are insomnia and fatigue. If you experience these symptoms without having traveled, we call this
social jet lag
. Social jet lag occurs when there are societal constraints on your sleep schedule because of work, your children, or other responsibilities such that you cannot keep a schedule consistent with your body clock type. To find out whether you are suffering from social jet lag, keep track of your sleep over the next two weeks (see chapter 1 for detailed instructions on keeping a sleep diary). Every day, as soon as you can after getting out of bed, record what time you physically got into bed and what time you physically got out of bed. These times may be different than when you intended to sleep or what time you woke up; you just need to record the time into and out of bed. For example, if you climbed into bed at nine to read a book for an hour before attempting to go to sleep, and you woke up at five thirty but tried to get another half hour of sleep before your alarm went off at six, just record 9:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. for that day. At the end of the two weeks, find the difference between the earliest time you got into bed and the latest time you got into bed. Then find the difference between the earliest time you got out of bed and the latest time you got out of bed. Is each difference an hour or greater? If so, you can expect symptoms of jet lag the same as if you had crossed a time zone. The greater the difference, the greater the possible changes in sleep, energy levels, and appetite you may have from day to day. For example, if you stay up two hours later than usual on Fridays and Saturdays and sleep in for two hours on Saturdays and Sundays, the effect on your body is much as if you lived in Chicago but traveled to Las Vegas every weekend. Perhaps, then, you can improve your energy and sleep simply by preventing social jet lag.

Pick a Standard Rise Time

For some, picking a standard time to get out of bed is an unappealing idea. Many people do not like getting up in the morning, so the idea of getting up at the same time even on mornings after a poor night’s sleep may seem unpleasant. Also, you may wonder,
How do I pick which time I should get up each day?