GOOD SLEEP GUIDES FOR WORKERS, PARENTS, DREAMERS AND MORE
Genetic make-up, our environment, and our health, age and gender, as well as our overall approach to sleep hygiene, all affect our sleep. We can talk about the “average” person and their “average” sleep, but each of us is unique, facing our own sleep challenges. In this chapter, I take some of life’s occupations and preoccupations and look specifically at how, if one of them applies to you, you can either overcome the issues your situation poses for your sleep, or use your sleep to help you to improve performance and ability in your waking life.
Dancer or dreamer, frequent flyer or long-distance driver, this chapter offers specific advice for specific circumstances.
A WORKER’S GUIDE TO GOOD SLEEP
What effects do lack of sleep have on your ability to work effectively? As we already know, disturbed sleep inhibits your attention span, your complex thinking skills and your ability to make good decisions. It may damage your social interactions and exacerbate inappropriate behaviours, because lack of good-quality sleep makes you more impulsive. Furthermore, your colleagues will be able to tell from your appearance when you haven’t had enough sleep. One study randomly selected half the members of a study group to have a bad night’s sleep, asking the remainder to sleep well. The test was repeated with a new random selection on another night. On both occasions a panel of judges noticed simply by appearance which participants had had the good night and which had had the bad. You can’t hide lack of sleep!
So, if your work involves looking good, feeling sharp-witted and liaising collaboratively with others, getting a good night’s sleep and reducing daytime sleepiness are essential.
What you can do
1. Optimize your sleep time
First and foremost make sure you give yourself the opportunity to get enough sleep. Calculate backwards from the time you need to leave your home to establish what time you need to go to bed. So:
• What time do you need to leave for work? (Say, 8am.)
• Deduct the time it takes for you to have your breakfast (say 30 minutes, giving 7.30am).
• Deduct the time it takes you to wash and dress (say 40 minutes, giving 6.50am).
• Deduct the amount of sleep you need in order to wake feeling refreshed (say, 7½ hours, giving 11.20pm).
• Deduct a further ten minutes so that you wake ten minutes before you absolutely have to get up (giving 11.10pm).
• Deduct the amount of time it usually takes you to fall asleep (say, 15 minutes, giving 10.55pm).
The time you need to be in bed with the light out is 10.55pm. Begin your bedtime routine (see pp.68–70) with this time in mind.
2. Release residual stress
All jobs come with their quota of stress. Many of the people I meet carry home that stress and mull it over in the hours of darkness. To give yourself the best possible chance for a good night’s sleep, it’s really important that you release residual anxiety before you go to bed. Read Box p.71 and pages 78–81, which are specifically related to this subject, but also make sure that you have dealt with the day’s “anxiety hangover” before you go to bed. The following make good strategies for work-related stress relief; use any or all of them as relevant.
• If you use public transport to get home, amend your journey so that you can build in a 15-minute walk before you step over the threshold. This might mean walking rather than driving home from the station, or getting off the bus one stop early. The pause between work and home helps to clear your head, and the walk will give you a good burst of fresh air (and, in the summer, daylight) to help you fall asleep more easily later.
• Write a list of things you need to achieve tomorrow at work (beginning with any that didn’t get done today) and put it in your work bag or case. Close the bag; no need to think about any of them now – you can deal with them tomorrow.
• If you had a difficult meeting or conversation over the course of the day and it’s troubling you, make sure you talk it through with a partner or friend; or write a letter to yourself outlining brief details and what it is about the conversation or meeting that has upset you. Try to come up with three action points to recover or move forward the situation – which you can do tomorrow. Now, let the episode go for the day, knowing you have a plan for resolution in place. You can also use this technique if you’re worried about something you know you have to do the following day.
3. Keep your energy levels stable
An adequate breakfast not only enables you to perform more efficiently during the day, it also reduces your chances of putting on weight, and a healthy weight improves your sleep. Breakfast is exactly what it says – a break in a natural fast. For this reason your brain likes carbohydrates in the morning to give it a good energy boost. Adding low-glycaemic index foods helps to release the carbohydrates slowly so that you don’t feel hungry until lunchtime, and you don’t feel as though you need a sugar fix to give you a bit of mid-morning zing. If you balance your breakfast with protein, too, studies show that you will find multi-tasking much easier. I encourage a morning cup of caffeinated coffee – I think it improves alertness and mental performance.
Make lunch protein-rich, with only small amounts of carbohydrate, helping to keep your blood sugars stable over the course of the afternoon to attenuate mid-afternoon sleepiness. Avoid alcohol at lunchtime, too. Note that the mid-afternoon energy dip will get more pronounced as you grow older. If you aren’t overly sensitive to caffeine, a 2.30pm cup of caffeinated coffee or tea will help stave off mental fatigue and shouldn’t affect your nighttime sleep. However, avoid this if you do think it will keep you awake later.
Overall, make sure your diet contains sufficient amounts of iron (from green leafy vegetables, whole grains and cereals, as well as from red meat), as good levels of iron help to prevent daytime fatigue. Remember that vitamin-C-rich foods, such as oranges and grapefruits, help with iron absorption.
Try to ensure your day is broken up with a variety of tasks. That way, if you do get a sleepy period while you’re at work, you can switch to something new to do, which can have an instantly invigorating effect on your energy levels.
A SHIFT WORKER’S GUIDE TO GOOD SLEEP
Shift work, especially when it involves nightshifts, has become the subject of much debate within the sleep community. We define shift work as any job that falls outside a 9.30am to 5.30pm (or thereabouts) working-hours routine. For many years sleep researchers have tried to unravel the effects of working shifts on health and well-being. However, empirical studies are skewed by the fact that those doing shift work are already more physiologically and psychologically able to cope with its demands, simply by virtue of their genetic make-up. We find that those unsuited to shift work leave their professions quickly once the erratic hours begin to take their toll. Those left for us to study don’t, therefore, represent a true cross-section of the population.
Nevertheless, the major detrimental effects of shift work have over time become apparent. For women, studies reveal that shift work can increase susceptibility to breast cancer, and both sexes are more prone to gastrointestinal problems, increased blood pressure and stroke. Night workers (including nurses, doctors and factory workers) are five times more likely to have a road traffic accident on their way home at the end of their shift. What we’re not clear about yet is what exactly causes the problems. Could it be fewer hours asleep (which we know is true of shift workers)? Disruption to the 24-hour biological clock? Or simply changes to lifestyle (for example, we know that nurses don’t follow the same principles of a healthy lifestyle – nutritious diet, moderate, regular exercise and so on – that they ask of their patients). Furthermore, shift workers more often complain of insomnia, fatigue, lack of concentration, irritability and clumsiness. If you have any combination of these symptoms and you work shifts, you may have what is now termed “shift work sleep disorder”.
What you can do
Although some literature suggests that there’s a “perfect” rota scheme, in fact chronobiologists and sleep scientists agree that no shift-working rota can meet an ideal. Even in general terms it’s hard to establish a best practice. However, if there’s a consensus it’s that shifts that follow a day–evening– night rotation are better than day–night–evening – probably because the former follows the direction of the body clock.
If you’re a shift worker and want to get the best out of your sleep, so that you can get the best out of your waking hours, both at work and at home, try to follow a few basic principles:
• Sleep whenever you can, even if this is in short two-hour bursts. Your body will ensure that you maximize the time you spend in deep, restorative sleep, and also in dreaming sleep. Also, don’t be afraid to take naps during your shift breaks if you need to. Talk to your manager to try to ensure there’s somewhere you can go to sit and shut your eyes for 20 minutes (but 20 minutes is enough). Now that we live in a 24/7 culture, workplaces are becoming much more aware and tolerant of the need to look after their night shifters.
• Try to keep if you are on a fast rotating shift your biological clock on a “normal” 24-hour schedule. One of the simplest ways to do this is to eat according to the usual schedule of a morning breakfast (keep it fairly small and carbohydrate-rich), a light lunch in the middle of the day and a main meal at supper time. If you’re working a night shift, you’ll need light snacks to keep you going – but be careful how you choose them (see box, p.122).
• Maintain your exercise levels. Making sure you do 30 minutes of exercise every day helps to keep you healthy and reduce the risks associated with shift work and/or obesity. Try to perform your 30 minutes (or more) at roughly the same time every day – even on your days off.
• Avoid caffeine and any other stimulation (including vigorous exercise) just before you intend to sleep.
• Read Chapter 3 on sleep hygiene and follow its advice as carefully as you can. Take special care to keep your bedroom dark, at the right temperature and for sleeping (and sex) only. Winding down and setting a bedtime routine is also especially important – your brain needs lots of triggers that it’s time to sleep (see below).
• Don’t forget you are responsible for your own awareness as far as the law is concerned in most if not all jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions will allow your doctor to prescribe modafinil, a stimulant, to help maintain awareness.
Timing your sleep
Try to identify a particular period in every 24 hours when you’re always asleep. Routine helps your body adjust to the constant changes to your working/sleeping patterns. Unfortunately, in order to maintain the new rhythm, you should also commit to sleeping at that time during your days off. So, for example, if your shift usually begins at 11pm and finishes at 7am, you should ideally make sure that you’re asleep between the hours of 8am and 11am, every day.
If your shifts work on a rota system, keep to your given “sleep hours” as closely as you can throughout the rota. You might need to work out carefully which hours will always be your sleep hours, but usually the system can work, give or take 30 to 60 minutes.
A final tip
It may help to wear sunglasses on your way home from work (as long as it doesn’t make travelling dangerous). Reducing the amount of sunlight in your eyes in the morning helps slow down the cessation in melatonin secretion that part of the mechanism that signals your body it’s time to wake up (just at the time that you will be thinking about sleep).
I work night shifts and find that the only way I can get through them is to snack on chocolate bars. It’s not helping my waistline! What can I do?
First and foremost, make sure that you’re eating healthily during the day. This means avoiding high-fat, spicy and salty foods, and also doing your best to eat as though you were not working on shifts (see main text) – remember that in the middle of the night your digestive system slows down. If you’ve eaten well during the day, you shouldn’t need to fill up on energy during your shift, although inevitably being active will occasionally make you feel peckish. Take healthy snacks with you into work – fruit, nuts and seeds, or a light salad will fill a hunger gap so that you’re less tempted to reach for the sugar.
Drink lots of water, too, so that you feel less like you need sugar to keep going. Finally, if you feel sleepy early on in your shift, have a caffeinated drink. Although it’s not good to drink caffeine shortly before trying to sleep, caffeine at the start of a nightshift shouldn’t affect your ability to sleep later.
A DRIVER’S GUIDE TO GOOD SLEEP
From truck drivers to sales people, there are many workers who drive long distances on a regular basis, sometimes sleeping in unfamiliar places in between. With more than a quarter of Americans admitting that they regularly drive when they feel sleepy, there’s never been a greater need for some tips on how to ensure you can drive with full alertness, and what to do when you feel sleepy at the wheel.
In the UK in the 1960s, the British Highways Agency opened a number of motorways that traversed the country, with the aim that drivers could avoid snarled-up towns and instead use fast routes, particularly out of London. Before long the Automobile Association – a private support network for motorists – noticed that there were more accidents in the Lake District (in the north of England) in which characteristically the driver did not appear to take any action that would avoid the accident, nor reduce his or her speed before colliding with a stationary object. It turned out that in many cases the drivers had started their journey in London – leading to the conclusion that they had fallen asleep at the wheel. With such stark evidence for the dangers of driving when tired, the Government immediately introduced measures to try to ensure that motorists took alertness seriously.
As far as the law is concerned, a driver has a responsibility to drive safely – there can be no excuse for falling asleep nor even a lapse in attention. Nonetheless, in the USA it’s thought that over a quarter of a million drivers may fall asleep at the wheel every day, and falling asleep while driving may lead to around 40,000 US deaths every year.
Danger zones
There are two predictable circumstances in which you are at greater risk of falling asleep at the wheel. Think of these as the driving “danger zones” and avoid them at all costs.
1. Time
Sleep-related motoring accidents are most likely to occur at two particular times of the night and day – even if you’ve had adequate sleep the night before your drive or you’re driving only a short distance. The first is at 4am, when your biological clock has turned your body to its furthest point from waking alertness.
The second most likely time is during the afternoon, at your natural post-lunch energy dip and beyond, 2–4pm (older drivers particularly are most likely to have an accident at this time).
2. Boredom
Monotony increases sleepiness and that’s why sleep-related crashes occur more frequently when we’re driving on fast, long single- or dualcarriage roads, or on motorways or highways.
3. Time on task
Take breaks every two hours if you can. The longer you drive in one bout, the greater the danger.
Sleep deficit effects
There’s nothing complicated about the links between the amount of sleep you get and the risks associated with driving a car – the greater your sleep deficit, the higher your chances of being involved in a driving incident. It’s important to remember that you needn’t necessarily fall completely asleep to cause an accident. Falling asleep means closing your eyes, but before that point you may become drowsy and have microsleeps. These are a mixture of sleep and wakefulness, lasting between three and ten seconds each – the longer they are, the more likely you are to perceive or remember them. Under normal circumstances – for example, when you’re in bed – microsleeps lead to sleep, and laboratory experiments show without doubt that, if they happen when you’re doing something active, they cause errors in judgement and response. In driving simulation this usually means reduced ability to control steering. The message is simple and clear (and in many countries is now part of the law): if you’re driving and you feel you’re becoming sleepy or tired, you must pull over.
What you can do
Listening to music, driving with the windows open and so on might help you feel more alert for a bit, but they won’t prevent you from falling asleep. The following are actions to take both during an emergency situation (such as when you hear the “rumble strips” because you’ve veered into the hard shoulder) and when you know that you have a long, boring journey ahead of you so you need to prepare to stay awake.
In an emergency:
If you’re driving, hear the sound of your tyres on the rumble strips and realize that you can’t remember actively driving moments beforehand, you need to take an emergency break.
• Stop driving – pull over as soon as it is safe and legal to do so, ideally in a service station.
• Have a cup of caffeinated coffee and then take a nap or rest with your eyes closed for 15 to 20 minutes (your body will absorb the coffee while you nap). You should need to do this only once during your journey. If you need to nap more than once, you must try to find a hotel so that you can stop altogether for the day (or night). Remember to allow 10 to 15 minutes after your nap to become fully alert before driving again, and note that you shouldn’t use caffeine to keep awake on long journeys or if you still have a long way to go, as the perceptible effects are short-lived.
For long journeys:
• Plan your journey and organize yourself before you set out. For example, avoid driving when you would normally be asleep and avoid driving during the nighttime and mid-afternoon danger zones (see pp.123–124). Consider whether you could share the driving with someone else, taking the journey in two-hour shifts (giving you two-hour naps in the passenger seat). Ensure that the night before your drive, you optimize your chances of a good night’s sleep and avoid alcohol or other drugs.
• Before you leave, work out where you might be able to stop overnight if you have to – and do stop. Your safety and the safety of other road users is always the priority.
• If you have a long stretch of any single road to drive along, consider whether or not you can re-route your journey so that you drive through a town or have to make several turns. This is a trade-off – in the end it may earn you an extra half an hour, but you’ll have forced yourself to be more alert. However, the longer journey may also increase your fatigue, in which case do what you know will work best for you.
• Plan for rest breaks every two hours and factor these in to your journey time. If you feel sleepy when you stop, take a nap for 20 minutes. Otherwise, get out of the car, stretch your legs and get some fresh air. Obviously, if you feel sleepy before you hit two hours, stop as soon as possible.
• Keep a supply of caffeinated drinks and sugar-free chewing gum in the car with you (studies show that chewing gum can improve alertness in the short term).
In 2011, Chicago-based car salesman Thomas Stuker celebrated ten million air miles with United Airlines – he’s thought to have flown more miles than any other passenger in history (although no one can be sure). He has spent his adult life frequently crossing time zones both within the USA and around the world. Of course, his story is exceptional, but generally more and more of us, on business and for pleasure, are travelling greater distances every year. But what are the effects on sleep both before and after time-zone travel, and how can we minimize them?
Studies show that there are three main factors that affect how a flyer feels when he or she arrives at a destination: jet lag, fatigue and stress.
Jet lag
Jet lag occurs when you move quickly from one time zone to another. Put simply, your travelling speed is faster than the speed of your internal 24-hour clock, so the clock doesn’t have time to adjust before you reach your destination. It won’t surprise you to know that there was never such a thing as “boat lag”, when people travelled long distances slowly by sea. The symptoms of jet lag are fatigue, insomnia, restlessness, irritability, reduced appetite or feelings of nausea and altered bowel movements.
I’m trying to plan how long I should make my business trip. How long will it take me to adjust?
As a rough rule of thumb, adapting to a new time zone can take as much as one day for each hour travelled westward (although often less than this), and one and a half days for each hour travelled eastward. Using light exposure and avoidance shortens this adjustment period considerably. It might surprise you to know that I recommend operating on your home time for the duration of your trip if you aren’t travelling across more than six time zones and your trip is short – say only two or three days long. Although this can be awkward to manage if you have meetings, it does mean that you won’t need your body to readapt twice (at your destination and when you get home) in a short period of time.
The world is divided up into 24 time zones, each equivalent to one hour of time. The zones are measured from a single point – Greenwich in London. From Greenwich, we add hours travelling eastward and take them away travelling westward. Generally, travelling somewhere that’s between one and three hours ahead or behind your “home” time shouldn’t cause any major difficulties, although this will partly depend upon how sensitive you are to the demands of your biological clock. “Larks” (those people who bounce out of bed early in the morning; see box, p.18) tend to be a little more sensitive. If this is you, you may find that you have to take steps to reduce the effects of as little as three hours time difference.
All of us, however, tend to feel the effects of changing time zones if we add or take away four hours or more. Generally, we tend to find it easier to travel westward – to a time zone behind rather than ahead of our own. To set the biological clock back in time, the internal mechanism simply has to slow down more than it’s used to. As a biological process this is easier than trying to speed it up. Given that most flights westward arrive during the day, it becomes fairly easy to get extra hours of daylight on arrival and in doing so slow down the biological clock so that it steps relatively quickly into rhythm with the new zone.
Furthermore, even if you arrive feeling sleepy, simply forcing yourself to stay up and awake helps the body’s adjustment – you’ll fall asleep easily when the local time for sleep comes and you’ll sleep for your normal number of hours (possibly a little bit more), waking at local morning time. Within a couple of days, you should have reset your biological clock to the new time.
However, adjusting to eastward travel – speeding up the clock to reset it forward in time – tends to be more difficult. The timing of your light exposure is the key. There are excellent online jet lag calculators (see Resources, p.234) to help you work out when you need to expose yourself to light, but as a rule of thumb:
• Decide the time at which you usually wake up.
• Subtract two hours from that time to get a “start time”.
• In your new destination, find light from that start time for at least two hours. (To slow down the clock, you should get light exposure for two hours up to the start time.) Over three to four days you should synchronize with local time, but it can take up to a fortnight, depending upon your age (the older you are, the harder the adjustment) and your biological-clock sensitivity.
THE ARGONNE DIET
The US military uses a special diet, known as the Argonne Diet, to help soldiers readjust quickly to new time zones. Four days before a posting, the soldiers alternate feast and fast days, beginning with a feast day and ending with a fast day. During feast days they have no calorie limit and eat breakfasts and lunches that are high in protein and low in carbohydrate. Suppers are high in carbs and low in protein. Fasting days have an 800-calorie limit and consist of fruit for breakfast and lunch and vegetable soup for supper. The results are encouraging, as soldiers do seem better able to adjust quickly to their new time zone – up to 7 times more quickly travelling westward and up to 16 times more quickly for eastward journeys. In my own experience, I’ve found that limiting food intake on the day prior to travel can help on a long-haul flight simply because it minimizes the feelings of bloatedness that can occur in the low cabin pressure of an airplane.
Five ways to get into the zone
In addition to light therapy, the following are my top five tips for helping you to adjust to a new time zone.
• Avoid taking sleeping pills to help you sleep during your flight. Sleeping pills prevent you from reacting quickly in an emergency, and they can also cause you to stay still in your seat for too long, increasing your susceptibility to deep vein thrombosis. However, you may want to consider melatonin which is available over the counter in the USA and by prescription in the UK (see box, p.131).
• Take your meals according to the new time zone rather than the old one, as this helps to reset the circadian clock that governs your digestion. Mealtime synchronization is not a magic cure for jet lag, but it can have a knock-on effect that helps your sleep–wake cycle to readjust, too.
• At your destination, get up and do some light exercise in the morning, preferably in the open air. This will expose your body to natural light at the right time for waking, as well as giving your body a burst of energy and feel-good hormones that can set you up to feel positive and alert for the day.
• At your destination, structure your activities to take into account your body’s existing circadian rhythm. For example, don’t drive long distances during times when your body thinks it’s nighttime, particularly between the hours of 2am and 6am at your home time zone.
• Break the normal rules and use caffeine to see you through patches of sleepiness, as long as they don’t occur too close to the time when you do want to sleep.
• Some people find it helpful to set their watches to the new time zone as soon as they get on the airplane. This is fine, but beware if you take timed medication – make sure that you don’t miss a dosage or, just as importantly, that you don’t take too many dosages. If you do change your watch, keep something else (such as your cell phone) on home time, so that you have a point of reference for your medication.
Fatigue
Long-distance travel involves not only the time you’re actually on the plane travelling (whether that’s an 8- to 12-hour flight across one ocean, or 24 hours across several), but also the time it takes to get to the airport, check in, make your way through immigration, pick up your luggage, re-check it for very long journeys, collect it again and eventually head to your accommodation. It’s hardly surprising that fatigue is an issue for long-distance travellers.
MELATONIN – TIME ZONE TREATMENT
If you’ve ever seen a pharmacist or a doctor about overcoming jet lag (or dealing with shift work sleep problems), you may have been told about melatonin.
Secreted by the brain’s pineal gland, melatonin is the hormone that responds to light and dark, telling you when to sleep and when to wake up. It acts as a chronobiotic – which means it can alter the “time” of the biological clock and in doing so help you to cope with jet lag (or shift work). Most formulations release melatonin much more quickly than we’d ever expect when the body secretes it naturally.
Different countries have different rules for the use of melatonin as a sleep-aid supplement. For example, in the UK melatonin is available only by prescription issued by a medical practitioner; in the USA, they’re available over the counter. Either way, as a rule, 1mg taken when you go to bed in the new time zone for up to three nights is sufficient to adjust to the new zone.
The best thing you can do for your body in order to minimize fatigue is to try to clock up some extra sleep one or two nights before your journey begins. Think of this as charging up your “sleep battery”.
Once you’re on your way, work out when your normal sleeping hours would be if you were still at home, and aim to get some sleep on the plane during those hours. In my experience, sleeping on the plane according to your home time zone does not hamper readjustment to the new time zone. In fact, you’re more likely to adjust quickly if you don’t feel fatigued.
If your natural sleep time is during a period of activity for the aircraft crew, use an eye mask and ask the crew to leave you if you’re sleeping when the food comes round.
Take something from home that you associate with falling asleep. For example, you could put a certain fragrance on your pillow for the nights running up to your trip. Lavender essence, which is claimed to have soporific qualities, is perfect. Take a handkerchief with that scent on the plane and put it where you can smell it as you try to sleep.
Stress
Many of my clients find travelling inherently stressful, which means that they are already set up for losing hours of sleep both in the nights before their journey and during the journey itself. In the week running up to your departure, try to practise this simple breathing meditation: close your eyes and visualize a square. As you breathe in, in your mind’s eye you trace along the top of the square, and down one side as you breathe out. Breathe in again as you trace along the bottom of the square, and out again as you trace the line up to your starting corner. Based on a yoga breathing technique, this method is a quick-fix for when you need to relax on the plane, and it’s my favourite way to make sure I arrive at my destination feeling as fresh as possible. Practising it before you travel ensures your brain associates it with calming down.
AN ATHLETE’S GUIDE TO GOOD SLEEP
Whether you’re a runner or a swimmer, a hurdler or a soccer player, all athletes (and sportspeople in general) need to sleep soundly if they are to gain the competitive edge in the sports arena. Sleep is essential for increased energy, performance and stamina, as well as improved alertness and mental agility. This is because:
• Sleep restores energy in our brain cells – mental energy becomes depleted over the course of the day as the mind processes information and directs the body in its daily tasks.
• Sleep can promote muscle growth and actively supports the mechanisms that store and restore energy in the muscles, in turn improving performance.
• Sleep helps to improve “muscle memory”, a form of procedural memory (see pp.29–30) in which continued repetition of a certain muscle movement means that the movement becomes second nature – that is, the athlete can perform it without conscious effort (see box, overleaf).
• Sleep maintains and improves waking mental processes.
One study at Stanford University in the USA has shown that athletes who increased their sleeping time from the normal seven to eight hours a night to between nine and ten hours, also significantly improved their speed and stamina in their sport.
Sleep time and performance
Elite performance demands the optimum in flexibility, strength, cardiovascular endurance, reaction time, memory and attention. This means that during exercise both your muscle and your brain need to have a steady energy supply – which means a steady supply of glucose. Too few hours spent in good-quality sleep can have a dramatic impact on the body’s metabolism, reducing its efficiency at converting glucose (sugars derived from carbohydrates) into usable energy by around a third. When your glucose reserves begin to run out, your body calls upon another carbohydrate called glycogen, which is mainly stored in your liver and fat cells and which provides an emergency source of energy during peak expenditure.
It’s up to the hormone insulin, which regulates your metabolism and signals when your body needs to release energy stores, to make sure that your glucose and glycogen levels meet your energy output. For some reason (we still don’t know why), sleep deprivation interferes with your body’s insulin signalling mechanism, which can result in inadequate supplies of glycogen when you need it. Quite simply, you start to run out of energy, a bit like a car running out of gas.
MUSCLE MEMORY
Whatever sport you practise, you need to learn the movements – whether they’re for jumping hurdles, kicking a ball or swinging a racquet. You need to hone your movements to respond quickly and accurately, perhaps even faster than your conscious processing allows. If you panic (in scientific terms, this means when your focused attention regresses to the point of almost forgetting what action you were supposed to take) or start to think too hard and lose automaticity (known as “choking”), your performance immediately deteriorates.
The fact that sleep improves muscle memory makes it an essential part of sports “training”. Your body’s memory of the movements you need for your sport is consolidated better when you’re “offline”. There are two reasons mooted for this. It could be that during sleep the consolidation of old or repeated memories is not subject to interference from ongoing (waking) activity. Or, it could be that during sleep your brain prunes down the action sequence to its greatest efficiency so that when you recall the action during practice, it’s as honed as possible. Either way, through sleep your complex movements can become automatic, reducing incidence of panic and choking. All athletes aspiring to do their best need a good night’s sleep.
Training schedules place significant demands not only on the body but also on your time, with many athletes training early in the morning and late at night (this is particularly true of amateur athletes, who often have a day job to do in the meantime). The important thing is to try to make sure you get a good amount of good-quality sleep over the course of 24 hours – but how?
What you can do
• Set yourself a regular training/life schedule that you can follow every day, even at the weekends. Keeping to a regular routine helps to entrain your body so that it knows what to expect, including when to sleep. If you need to and can, consider having a siesta. Establish a good pre-sleep routine (see pp.67–72) for this reason,too.
• It’s better to do more training in the early morning (getting up early) so that you don’t have to train later than 9pm in the evening. This should give your body enough time to settle down (including restoring normal body temperature) for a bedtime of 10pm, so that you’re asleep by 10.30pm and can clock up eight hours sleep by 6.30am.
• Good athletes take rest days, but do try to get up and go to bed at the same time on your rest days as on your training days, so that you keep to your overall sleep– wake schedule.
• Read the advice for performers on pp.136–137 for tips on how to sleep after evening training sessions and how to time your siesta if you need one.
As with so many things to do with sleep, we’re still exploring the precise relationship between sleep, performance and movement control. This makes it very hard to give definitive advice for athletes in general. It may be that your sport involves easily memorized sequences that don’t require consolidation during sleep, or you may have no choice but to practise in the evening (and so need to find a sleep routine that allows you to get enough sleep). Use the advice that’s applicable to you. In addition, consider whether or not you need to increase your sleeping hours in the run-up to a competition. Some athletes experience measurable improvements in their performance when they have a well-stocked sleep bank.
A PERFORMER’S GUIDE TO GOOD SLEEP
It might surprise some people to know that I’m not only a sleep expert, but also a dancer – although only in the amateur sense. I’ve found my feet in weekly sessions of the Argentine tango. However, if you’re someone for whom performing – whether that’s dancing, acting or singing, among others – is a job, a beloved hobby or a way of life, special guidance can help you to get the best out of your sleep and also the best out of your performance.
Some individuals can perform in the evening, go home and fall quickly asleep, but this isn’t the case for the majority. The physiological reasons you might find it hard to sleep after a performance are:
• Increased body temperature from sustained activity, which makes it harder to fall asleep.
• Increased levels of cortisol (the stress hormone), which is released naturally when we’re doing something physically and emotionally demanding such as dancing, singing or acting.
• Increased levels of brain tryptophan and serotonin during activities that are physically and emotionally demanding, which cause initial feelings of fatigue, but then deplete, delaying sleep onset.
• Increased likelihood of phase delay – consistent late nights resulting in “owlish” tendencies.
• Use of caffeine supplements to enable prolonged periods of physical and mental activity.
Studies reveal that actors, dancers, musicians and even athletes who train during the evenings have a greater chance of turning to opiates, cigarettes, alcohol, recreational drugs and sleeping medication in order to wind down and get a good night’s sleep. Such a lifestyle inevitably leads to casualties – including performers who have died as a result of addiction. Furthermore, performers for whom “ideal” body image is perceived as an essential part of the work have a greater chance of developing an eating disorder, such as bulimia or anorexia, not just because of how they look, but because a dysregulated metabolism (as a result of irregular cycles of wakefulness and sleep, activity and inactivity) causes bingeing or unhealthy eating and changes in appetite.
What you can do
The key is to look at natural ways to optimize your sleep following a performance or evening rehearsal. Given that each of us is individual, what works for one may not work for others, so experiment with the guidelines below to identify what does work for you.
• Establish a pre-sleep ritual that helps to trigger your body and mind to understand that it’s time for sleep. Follow this ritual every night – regardless of what time you get home. (Some or all of the following suggestions could form part of your ritual, if you like.)
• Before you go to bed, have a warm milky drink and a small piece of milk chocolate.
• Have a warm bath before you go to bed to relax your muscles, ease away any anxiety about your performance and gently relax following the adrenaline rush of being on stage, as well as to help to lower your body temperature.
MAKING UP THE DEFICIT
When you’re performing, your schedule may make it impossible for you to get enough sleep during the hours of 11pm and 7am. You need to make up the deficit while keeping your internal clock set to the right social time as closely as possible.
1. Accept that you might need to keep a slightly unconventional daytime routine that includes a siesta. Do your best to keep to your sleep–wake routine even on your days off.
2. Take a nap in the early afternoon. Dim the lights, draw the blinds or curtains and get into bed. Sleep for between one and a half and two hours, which will give you enough time to have a whole cycle of sleep (see p.21). This nap will not only help you to repay the sleep debt, but also give you the stamina to provide a great performance later on. Make sure that you have 20 to 30 minutes to wake up fully before you have to go out.
3. Set your internal biological clock to the right social time by making sure that you face natural light, ideally bright sunlight, in the morning. Aim to get up at the same time every day, perhaps as early as 7.30am, but certainly not later than 8.30am.
• Keep your bedroom cool, and throw back your bedcovers in the morning so that your bed itself is cool when you get in.
• If you’re using caffeine supplements to keep you energized, try to cut back on them and aim to take the last one no fewer than four hours before you intend to go to bed.
• Establish a daytime routine that you can stick to and that keeps your body clock on the right social time.
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO GOOD SLEEP
We already know that in sleep terms adolescence lasts from age 12 to about age 25, which for many people coincides with the years of being a student. Before we look at the specific sleep issues affecting students and how to overcome them, it’s good to recap on the particular sleep–wake problems facing this age-group in general.
• The adolescent body clock operates more slowly than the true circadian rhythm (a condition known as phase delay), meaning that young people tend to have late nights and would naturally sleep later as a result.
• Adolescents have increased commitments to after-school clubs or extra-curricular activities that don’t affect younger children, or even older adults, keeping them out later at night; they also inevitably have a time-consuming academic workload, particularly in the run-up to exams.
• Young people discover a burgeoning social life, which pulls them in a completely new direction that has to be slotted in with existing work and extra-curricular commitments.
All in all, the student years conspire to hamper good-quality sleep.
Student life
One study showed that only around ten per cent of students at one university felt that they had a good night’s sleep – which means falling asleep easily, sleeping undisturbed and waking up feeling refreshed.
In order for a student to perform to the best of his or her ability, he or she needs to be alert, focused and composed under pressure. Only then can the brain become the perfect sponge for taking in new information, assimilating and storing it effectively and then recalling it accurately on demand. A good night’s sleep is essential for all those processes to take place, so students need to do their best to work around the changing sleep patterns that go hand in hand with adolescence.
What you can do
If you’re a school student living at home, it’s important that you involve your parents in getting your sleep schedule right for your age and commitments. Talk through the following points with them and agree something that suits both of you – that way you’ll reduce the risk of argument about whether or not you’re getting enough sleep and you’ll both know what you’re aiming for.
If you’re a college student, living on campus or in rented student accommodation, you’ll be surrounded by temptation – parties, alcohol, recreational drugs – but you need to take responsibility for yourself, and that includes your commitment to your education, as well as to your health, well-being and lifestyle.
• Set a sleep schedule that you can stick to – having a routine is essential for making sure your body knows when it’s time for sleep and when you need to be awake and alert. Use the guidelines in the box on page 142 to help you.
• Don’t eat less than four hours before you go to bed, and if you attend an evening sports club, try to make sure you have a good four hours between exercising and bedtime.
• Most students in college accommodation, and even students at school living at home, have a computer in their bedroom for study. Shut it down at least one hour before you go to bed. Your eyes (and brain) need time to rest before sleep.
• Don’t use caffeine to keep you awake to make a deadline. If you feel sleepy – go to sleep! You’ll work more effectively the following day, even if you have to get up early to finish off in time. Caffeine less than six hours before bedtime may disrupt your sleep if you’re caffeine-sensitive (see pp.76–77).
• For those students of legal drinking age in the country in which you live, avoid alcohol altogether, or keep it to a minimum or for occasional dedicated nights out only. No one wants to be a party-pooper, but alcohol is a considerable sleep thief and will not help you with your studies!
Sleep and study assessment
In one survey at the University of San Diego, USA, almost 24 per cent of college students believed that they had dropped grades in projects or examinations they’d undertaken at times when they felt particularly tired. That’s almost a quarter of that year’s college students who believed they could have done better. The problems they had may have ranged from misunderstanding questions to being unable to concentrate and (most crippling of all) “forgetting” everything they thought they’d learned. Elsewhere, I’ve known of students who’ve fallen asleep during an examination!
Playing hard and then cramming in the academic bits is not the way to sail through college. Instead, it’s much better to pace yourself.
Both deep sleep and dreaming sleep enhance memory performance. However, if you’ve left the learning to the last minute with only a small window of opportunity to revise everything you need to know, try to stick to the following rough-and-ready rules.
• You’ll remember better the information you learn between one and six hours before you go to sleep than what you learn outside the six-hour time window and under an hour before bed.
• Stop learning one hour before you intend to go to bed, so that you have time to wind down and so that learning can reach your hippocampus ready for consolidation.
• Set an alarm to wake you at your normal waking time in the morning, so that you don’t worry about oversleeping.
• It will take you at least 30 minutes to overcome “sleep inertia” – the fuggy period that occurs just after you wake up. On a revision day don’t think about getting out of bed to begin cramming straightaway. Have a shower and breakfast before you sit down to the first period of study for the day.
• Take regular breaks during your revision (every two hours or so), and if you feel sleepy, allow yourself a 30-minute nap. Many students find that a good pattern is to learn in the morning, then have lunch, a nap and another period of study, and then to stop at least an hour before bedtime so that they have a good night’s sleep and are set up for more learning the following day.
MAPPING OUT YOUR STUDENT ROUTINE
So, you want to party, but you also know that it’s important to get the most out of your education. Follow these steps to try to find a balance that permits the best of both worlds.
1. Make a list of the activities you’re committed to (such as sports teams, any clubs or a part-time job) and the times they occur. Taking the schedule as a whole, work out a time for bed – set a time that you can achieve to within half an hour every night.
2. Work out what time you need to get up in the morning in order to give yourself enough time to have breakfast, prepare for the day and make it to school or college in good time.
3. If your allotted bedtime and rising time give you fewer than nine to ten hours sleep a night, consider what commitments you could scale back on. Remember that your sleep is essential to your overall performance in academia – it’s worth setting good sleep habits now to maximize what you get out of your education, and then later out of your adult life.
4. Once you’ve identified a routine that fits in with your lifestyle, try to be as strict as you can about sticking with that schedule. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t have any fun. If you’re out at a party and get in late occasionally, that’s fine – but make sure you get up at the usual time the following morning, making up the sleep debt by going to bed a little earlier the following night if necessary.
A PARENTS’ GUIDE TO GOOD SLEEP
This section is not about setting sleep routines for your newborn – all that is covered on pages 85–92. Rather, this is an area reserved for parents, an essential survival guide that helps you gain back the lost hours of nighttime sleep that inevitably come with a new baby. And not just with a newborn or a toddler but even a teenager too.
A new baby’s erratic and broken sleeping patterns can last for the first two years of life – and sometimes beyond. For parents this is a difficult time of juggling their own sleep needs and their ability to function during the day, with their instinct for nurturing, soothing and comforting their babies. In all likelihood, it’s a time of limited sleep.
Whether or not a baby sleeps well doesn’t seem to be an inherited trait. Even if you, your partner and all your family always slept well, your baby may well be the exception. Either way, your baby’s sleep affects you. Sadly, there’s no definitive research to tell you the best way to handle your child’s sleeping so that you get the most out of your own sleep, especially as so much depends on cultural expectations of childhood sleep. For example, in Italy and Japan it’s common to allow children into the parent’s bedroom (where they might disturb you more often). In warmer climes, children may take a siesta and then stay up far later into the night. All you can do is take some advice and work out what works best for you and for your child.
What you can do The baby years
Babies represent an “emergency situation” for parents. Babies’ sleep schedules involve a lot of nighttime awakenings for food and comfort. Conventionally, the advice has always been that in order to make up the lost hours of sleep, mothers (and fathers) should nap during the day. In 2010, research published by West Virginia University in the USA revealed that mothers who follow this guideline do appear to get enough hours asleep, but the poor quality of that sleep means that they still feel unrefreshed. The research likened the sleep of a new mother to someone with sleep apnoea – frequent awakenings, some of them barely perceptible, but amounting to broken sleep cycles and so non-restorative sleep. On top of that, on average mothers were awake for up to two hours a night for feeding and comforting. We know that mothers who rack up a large sleep debt are more likely to suffer post-natal depression, so it’s essential to find ways to halt the trend.
To get through this difficult time (and it’s worth remembering that these early months of sleep debt will pass), both parents need to share the workload as much as possible, both of you getting as much sleep as you can (see also the box, pp.146–147). Don’t worry about the washing, the dishes, the cleaning; and ignore the sleep-hygiene rules about daytime napping – do take naps and make them as long as you can. If you can nap for two hours, you can clock up at least one complete sleep cycle, and in this way wake feeling more refreshed. As far as is practicable, if one of you is napping and the baby wakes, the other can take charge. Most babies can go for a couple of hours between feeds, so in the early days even breastfeeding mums can get long naps if someone is on hand to help to take care of the baby.
As your baby gets slightly older (say, between 3 and 12months), and into more of a routine, try to “anchor” your own sleep at certain times of day. That is, even if you aren’t getting a full night, try to nap at the same times every day, aiming for 90 minutes to two hours each time. Above all, don’t resort to sleep aids or alcohol, which dull your senses and reduce your sensitivity to your baby’s needs.
The toddler years
The period from babyhood to toddlerhood is time to start introducing the principles of sleep hygiene to your child and to reinstate those principles in your own life, too. Once your baby understands about the long sleep through the night, your own sleep should begin to take a turn for the better. Nonetheless, children often have nightmares or night terrors, and they are far more susceptible than adults to many other parasomnias (see pp.178–182). Comforting your child during the night means that your own sleep is disturbed, and the only way to balance this is to keep napping during the day if you need to. Time your nap for early afternoon, though, and if you have a pre-school age child, encourage him or her to nap then, too. At the very least, both of you should have an hour of quiet, calm activity, sharing a book or doing a puzzle or even watching a little TV together.
The teenage years
Just as parents get used to their children sleeping more soundly, come the teenage years. The chances are you’re likely to get plenty of sleep yourself (except on the nights when you have to pick up from a late party), and the problems are more likely to shift to managing your teenager’s sleep. See pages 92–97 for advice.
I want to help at night with our new baby, but I have to go to work in the morning. I feel guilty. What can I do?
Many companies are sympathetic to the demands of new parenthood, but if your company can’t offer you a place to have a lunchtime nap, the easiest way round your problem is to set an agenda at home to cover the nightshifts that have the least impact for you at work and on other days for you to make an active contribution to running the household.
During the week the majority of the sleep bank goes to you; but for one night in the week if you can, and certainly at the weekends, you swap roles. This means that for three nights out of seven (say, Friday, Saturday and Sunday; or Thursday, Friday and Saturday), you deal with the baby’s nighttime waking. If your partner is breastfeeding, perhaps she could express the feeds for your nights so that she can get the most out of her nights off.
During the week, pick up the groceries on the way home, make simple suppers and put on the odd load of laundry so that your partner doesn’t feel that he or she needs to run the household alone, as well as to look after the baby. Sometimes just knowing that you don’t mind coming home to dirty dishes is enough.
At the weekends or on your days off, revel in some extra baby-time, so that your partner can catch up on some sleep. (Incidentally, this rest should be in bed and far away from chores.) This is a great time for you to bond with the baby, as well as to help your partner.
If you both need to catch up on some sleep at the weekends, don’t be afraid to ask for help from family or close friends you can trust. Most babies have an army of willing relatives who will relish some time to get to know the family’s newest member. Don’t be embarrassed to capitalize on that. Well-rested parents are happy parents, and that means that the baby’s happy, too.
A DREAMER’S GUIDE TO GOOD SLEEP
Jim Horne, Emeritus Professor of Psychophysiology at Loughborough University in the UK, once described dreaming as our own personal cinema. However, unlike a movie, dreams are not necessarily of our choosing. Nightmares aside, some people suffer from a disorder called “epic dreaming” in which dreams become kaleidoscopic, rollercoaster journeys that appear to last all night, apparently leaving the dreamer exhausted. Others claim to have no dreams at all.
I’ve never been fascinated by the interpretation of dreams. To me, when I consider the literature, dream interpretation tends to be specific to a particular society or culture, even though some psychoanalysts, such as Carl Jung (1875–1961), did explore the possibility of universal “archetypes” – symbols that are common to us all. My interest in dreams lies more in trying to understand their lucidity (our awareness of them; see box, p.25). Lucid dreams become really interesting when you can start to control them – we can have unlimited adventures, and safe rehearsal time to deal with nightmares or traumatic events; lucid dreams can even help with problem-solving (see pp.154 and 149–152).
Will cheese help me to dream?
While I haven’t been able to find any scientific evidence that cheese promotes dreams, many people do say that a good, ripe blue cheese will do the trick – but the evidence is anecdotal. On the other hand, a study in 2002 revealed tentative findings that vitamin B6 supplements might indeed promote more vivid dreams. You can find B6 in such foods as avocados, brewer’s yeast, broad beans, bananas, molasses, salmon and herring. A warm cup of milk spiced with a little nutmeg two to three hours before you go to bed is also supposed to work.
Recognizing and remembering your dreams
In Chapter 2 we looked at the science of dreaming – the neurological processes that go on in our brains in order for dreams to happen. Here, we’re going to take that science and apply it to the activity of dreaming, so that we can learn to dream lucidly.
Throughout this book I’ve considered sleep and wakefulness as highly synchronized brain states that involve parts of the brain either shutting down or switching on. If that synchrony fails, new states arise – one of which is dreaming (this is why dreaming sleep is sometimes referred to as “paradoxical sleep” – we have an active, but sleeping brain while our muscles are paralysed). In dreams we perceive what’s going on in our brains while we’re in the dreaming (R) stage of sleep, and occasionally in other sleep stages, too. Sleep paralysis, out-of-body experiences and hypnagogic hallucinations are other examples of a lack of synchrony.
THE APP OF DREAMS
Modern technology has provided us with many new ways to understand from our own beds the nature of sleep. Smartphone app technology enables you to place your phone on your bed and use it to influence your dreams. Certain apps will detect when you enter dreaming sleep and then play pre-recorded sounds of the sorts of landscapes or scenarios you want to enter in your dreams. For example, if you tell the app you want to dream about being by the sea, it will play seascape sounds as you enter dreaming sleep. See the Resources on page 234 for information on how to find the app.
The first thing to say is that we’re all capable of dreaming. We go into dreaming sleep roughly every 90 minutes, and we tend to have longer periods of it toward the end of the night. This happens for everyone. Recalling our dreams usually occurs when we wake shortly after, or even during, a period of R sleep. Those people who think they don’t dream, probably do – it’s just that by the time they wake, their last period of dreaming sleep is too far from consciousness for them to remember what they dreamed about.
So, before we can learn to control our dreams, we have to learn to notice and to remember them. You can simply go to bed with the positive conviction that you’ll connect with your dreams when they happen. Also, since ancient times people have been developing methods of “dream incubation” – sowing the seeds of a dream during waking hours and directing their minds to attend to whatever is going on in it. In this simple technique all you have to do is spend a few minutes contemplating the subject of your dream before you go to bed and tell yourself that you’ll recall your dreams when you wake. I’ve set out the method in the box on page 151.
I recommend that you keep a dream journal. The more you make a point of recalling the details of your dreams (whether you incubated them or not), the more attentive you’ll become to them, and this forms the beginnings of lucid dreaming. Keep a notebook and pen beside your bed. If you wake up in the night from a dream and want to note it down, you can do so (while the details are fresh). Otherwise, write down what you can recall in the morning. Don’t try to edit your notes – allow the dream visions to come back to you in the same fragmented ways that they appeared. You aren’t necessarily trying to make sense of what you dreamed about, merely to recall as much detail as possible so that your dreams start to gain your full, sleeping attention.
Achieving lucidity
Research is still not entirely clear as to what technique is best to achieve lucidity, but there are two main approaches that appear to work. The first is the mental or cognitive approach and the second is through physical stimulation. In general, though, both these rely on some work while you’re awake to prepare you for lucid dreaming.
There are two cognitive approaches that appear to work best to promote lucid dreaming. Using either of these, or combining them, along with using physical techniques provides the best basis for lucidity.
Tholey’s method
The German psychologist Paul Tholey (1937–1998) developed the “reflection technique”. During the day ask yourself at several points, “Am I awake, or am I dreaming?” and consciously work out how you know you’re awake. Then you imagine what your surroundings would be like if you were in a dream. In these ways you become more attuned to the differences between wakefulness and dreaming, so that you can learn to recognize your dreaming state more easily when it happens. As you fall asleep you repeatedly tell yourself, “I am going to lucid-dream.” The combination of reflection and auto-suggestion enables you to put yourself in your dreams and to begin controlling them.
INCUBATING YOUR DREAMS
You can use the following exercise as a pre-sleep relaxation in place of any other you already perform (if you do).
I suggest you sit comfortably on your bed or on your bedroom floor.
1. Sit in a balanced position with your back straight and your shoulders relaxed. Breathe deeply for a few minutes.
2. Bring to mind the topic or scenario you want to dream about. You’re going to turn it into a creative visualization – imagining it in as much detail as possible. For example, if you want to dream about being on vacation, call up the landscape in fine detail; imagine yourself in the scene – swimming in the ocean, horseback riding through the forest, hiking along mountain paths. Who is with you? What are you wearing? What’s the weather like? What can you hear, smell, see?
3. Spend ten minutes in quiet reflection on your dream scenario. Then, repeat to yourself five times, slowly and softly: “I will dream. I will remember my dreams.” Now you’re ready to go to bed. (In the morning, compare your dream scenario to the one you’d imagined. What fantastical elements did your unconscious create that your conscious imagination did not?)
The American psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge has developed a technique he calls MILD – Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams. Involving a fair amount of preparatory work, MILD requires you first hone your waking observation and memory. LaBerge recommends taking four target occurrences from the day, and making a point of noticing when these occur. For example, you might choose a dog barking, turning right, seeing a flower and seeing your face in the mirror. Each time you encounter one of these targets in a day, you make a conscious note that it’s happened. Every day you choose four new targets and you practise the method for a week, after which time hopefully you’ll find yourself competent enough to use your entry into a dream as a target to achieve lucidity. In a way that is similar to Tholey’s method, you go to bed resolving that you’ll be lucid during your dreams and that you’ll recall your dreams in the morning. Tell yourself, “Next time I dream, I want to remember I’m dreaming.”
Physical methods
Methods that involve light, acoustic or tactile stimuli to alert you to the fact that you’re entering dreaming sleep used to be the province of the sleep laboratory, but there are now several gadgets and gizmos that you can buy to use at home. You have to go to bed telling yourself that once you realize a light is flashing, or you hear a particular sound or feel a particular sensation (the trigger will depend upon which gadget you’re using), you’ll know you’re in R sleep and therefore dreaming.
For all the methods, you have to go bed with a detached and neutral mind, so that you don’t get too excited when you realize you’re in dreaming sleep and wake yourself up! Once you notice you’re dreaming, you can start trying to manipulate your dream. You can try to fly, walk on water, achieve superhuman feats, vanquish monsters, practise your dance moves or overcome issues from the day … whatever you like.
A PROBLEM-SOLVER’S GUIDE TO GOOD SLEEP
From Albert Einstein to Paul McCartney and from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Jack Nicklaus, the great, the good and the utterly brilliant have claimed flashes of inspiration and creativity during their sleep. In the case of Einstein, it’s said that he germinated the Theory of Relativity when he dreamed of sledging down a mountainside and noticing how the appearance of the stars changed relative to his speed. Paul McCartney is said to have written the tune for “Yesterday” in a dream; Coleridge dreamed his poem Kubla Khan; and Jack Nicklaus dreamed up a new grip for golf clubs. Whatever the problem, it seems that our sleep, and our dreams, may have the answer.
Most of us know the experience of “sleeping on it” – leaving a problem unresolved only to experience a “eureka!” moment (or, indeed, the slow advancement to a solution) during the night. Sleep does more than just allow the passage of resting time. It reduces the interference of daytime activity so that there are fewer distractions, and fewer mounting problems to deal with or responses to give, permitting the problem-solving parts of the brain to work undisturbed.
Previously I’ve described how different stages of sleep have different effects on different types of memory; and memory experiments have shown that the way individual memories relate to each other (associate) actively changes during sleep – all of which facilitates problem-solving. Furthermore, tentative studies in the USA have shown that, following periods of dreaming sleep, subjects are better able to find solutions to creative tasks. During sleep, and particularly during R, the brain seems better able to make new pathways (associations) between pieces of data, and so finds more efficient routes to the answer to a problem. In one experiment, researchers asked participants to work out the next numbers in a sequence. Subjects were given a lengthy method for finding the answers, which they used perfectly successfully. Then, some participants were asked to sleep and others merely to rest. On repeating the task, those who’d slept were more likely to have found a hidden shortcut to the answers, while the resters mostly continued to use the long method they’d been taught in the first place. It appears that during sleep the brain had had a “eureka!” moment, working out the quickest route to resolution.
Now it’s your turn
It’s all very well that the brain can randomly solve a problem that it encounters during the day, but is it possible to “ask” it to tackle something specific? One method would be to use lucid dreaming – I’ve described in detail on pages 150–152 how to begin to control your dreams, and there’s no reason why you can’t adapt the techniques given there to include musing on a particular problem. Alternatively, you can simply hold your problem in your mind as you fall asleep, in the hope that as it was the last thing you thought about, your brain will take the problem and run with it, creating pathways that can take you to the answer when you wake.