"If you can't sleep, get out of bed and do something else"-this is advice we hear all the time. Not for me: when I get up and turn on the light, I'm up for the night. I do much better listening to a recorded book, which lets me lie quietly in the dark but gets my mind onto someone else's story. Memoirs are the most soothing, and quiet kinds of novels, but they have to be interesting and pleasurable moment to moment, with characters I want to spend time with, nothing that leaves me hanging on, waiting for what comes next. Listening to a book lets me lie in the dark in a restful state, eyes closed, drifting in and out-and this may be have restorative effects. A series of fascinating studies done in the nineties by National Institutes of Health researcher Thomas Wehr looked at subjects dozing in the dark, and found that levels of sleep hormones melatonin and prolactin remain elevated (prolactin is a tranquility-promoting hormone that's associated with lactation and that keeps birds still as they brood their eggs).
If you're lying there listening to the sound of your wheels spinning, though, you'll get no restorative effects from that- better to get out of bed and do something else. But whether you get out of bed or stay in it, try to see it as a choice, not an affliction. If you stay in bed, tell yourself, how lucky I am not to have to get up, how lovely and restful it is to be lying in the dark, all these nice healing hormones. If you get up, think of that as a choice, too- view it as an opportunity to do yoga or meditation or music or read a few more pages of a novel. And if you end up taking a low dose of a fast-acting sleeping pill for a few more hours sleep, well, okay, that's a choice, too (just make sure you leave time for the effects of the pill to wear off by the time you have to function the next morning). Be glad we have such medications. Generations past did not such a wide range of meds to choose from.
Experts tell us we should adhere to a regular sleep schedule, get up at the same time every day to an alarm, even if we haven't slept enough. Sorry, there is no way I will sacrifice sleep to regularity. Sleep is such a shy and fleeting presence in my life, and is so essential to my mood and functioning, that, no, I won't scare it away with an alarm. So my schedule sometimes drifts way late. But I have the luxury of being able to schedule classes late in the day. If your work allows it, if you're retired or a student or self-employed, why feel you have to march to the world's time? True, you don't want to drift entirely out of synch with the world. But people in the not so distant past, as recently as the nineteenth century, slept in segments, and people in traditional cultures today drift in and out of sleep more fluidly than we do. The consolidated 8-hour block may actually be an artifact of industrialization and artificial lightning.
So I say, sleep when you can. As for napping, studies have shown that it's good for the mind, memory, and the heart. Even a few minutes can recharge the batteries.
"You probably don't need as much sleep as you think you do" -I've heard this all my life. But when you talk to people about their sleep, as I did, writing INSOMNIAC, you find out how different we all are in terms of the sleep we need and how well we bear up under sleep loss. Research that came out earlier this year suggests that our differences are inborn and genetic: there's not a lot we can do about them. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, found that those who function well on less than six hours have a certain kind of genetic mutation. Researchers at the University of Liege in Belgium and the University of Surrey found that how well people weather sleep deprivation is related to the short or long variant of a gene that governs the timing of sleep.
You and you alone are the judge of how much sleep you need. And you're the only one who can figure out how to get the sleep you need. Listen to your body. Become a careful observer of your slee. Learn how your sleep reacts to food, drink, light, medications. Figure out what times you sleep best and worst. Read around, get on the web, and find out what works for others. Then cobble together a set of practices that works.
There are no ten rules to better sleep. There is only what you can find that works.
Links to 2009 genetic research:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/46390/title/A_gene_for_a_short_night's_sleep
https://www.ucsfhealth.org/adult/health_library/news/2009/08/121644.html
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sciencenow;2009/813/2
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6795361.ece
http://sleepeducation.blogspot.com/2009/06/sleep-deprivation-your-genetic.html
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006320.html
