What are some tips for better sleeping?
To improve the quality of your sleep, you need to establish some good bedtime habits, says sleep medicine expert Dr. Carol Ash. Watch this video to learn how to get a better night's sleep.
Transcript
So the first thing that you should try and do is keep a consistent wake-up time. What that will do for you is actually
set the clock in your brain. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Most people fail to even recognize the basic principles of sleep. The range is seven to nine hours. On average, we need eight hours.
So you need the right amount. But also, just as important, is the right timing. When you open your eyes in the morning and expose yourself to light, that's
one of the strongest setters of a clock in your brain that will help you get up every morning so that you can wake up, feel really awake and refreshed,
and then be able to get to sleep at night at the right time so that you can get the amount of sleep that you need. And that clock, not only does it set the rhythms
for normal sleep and wakefulness, but it also sets many other physiologic rhythms throughout the body.
So sometimes we just think, you know, I go to sleep at night and that's really just to help me feel awake during the day. Sleep has an impact on all physiology throughout the body.
And over the past 10 years, there's been a tremendous amount of literature to show us how important sleep really is. The first thing I'll tell people to do
is to focus on one of the principles first, because most of us really don't have good sleep habits. And it's hard to change everything, so take baby steps.
So the first thing that you should try and do is keep a consistent wake-up time. What that will do for you is actually
set the clock in your brain. Now, what we tend to do is all week long try to meet demands and expectations. We cause sleep debt.
So we're literally tired going into the weekend. And what happens then is we tend to sleep in trying to make up for that lost sleep all week long.
The problem with that is that resets the clock. So if you typically are getting up at 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock in the morning to get to work and meet
demands and decide to sleep until 10:00 on a Saturday, well now you've reset the clock. And as far as the clock is concerned, your new wake up time is 10:00 AM.
And if you need seven or eight hours, well, now you don't need to get to bed at 12 midnight to get those eight hours. Your brain is shifting your time to bed to a later time.
So you can imagine, on Sunday night, you're going to struggle to get up out of bed. And what we tend to do is misread the cues.
So you might get up on Monday morning and feel like you're depressed, and oh, I've got to go back to work. And what you might not realize is what you're actually
sensing is sleep debt and the off-kilter of the circadian rhythm. So you've actually shifted the circadian rhythm
and you won't feel well. You really won't. So just simply getting up at the same time every day and on the weekend trying not to get up past one
hour past your usual wake-up time is one of the best things you can actually do.
healthy habits
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