The amount of sleep - the total amount of sleep that you get - starts to decrease the older that we get. On how the quantity and quality of sleep decreases with age We have to abandon that attitude and we also have to change the educational practice as well. But it's more than that, because it also turns out that they are trying to sleep off a debt that we have actually saddled them with by way of this incessant model of early school start times. It's not their fault it's their biology that wants them to be asleep at that time. Parents will often pull the covers off their teenager weekends and say, "It's daylight out! It's noon! You're wasting the day!" And that's wrong for two reasons. So the brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep that you've been lumbering it with during the week in terms of a debt. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment, as it were. And the reason is this: We know that if I were to deprive you of sleep for an entire night - take away eight hours - and then in the subsequent night I give you all of the sleep that you want, however much you wish to consume, you never get back all that you lost. Sleep is not like the bank, so you can't accumulate a debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. You're trying to sleep off a debt that you've lumbered your brain and body with during the week, and wouldn't it be lovely if sleep worked like that? Sadly it doesn't. On whether you can make up for a sleep deficit by sleeping longer another day So that's another solution if people would choose not to go to a different room. And that can really have some efficacious benefits too. It just quiets the mind and it dampens down what we call the "fight or flight" branch of the nervous system, which is one of the key features of insomnia. And I started doing it myself, particularly when I was traveling with jet lag, and I found it to be very effective. Being quite a stoic, hard-nosed scientist, I actually didn't really believe the data, even though the data is very strong. And that way your brain relearns the association with your bedroom being about sleep rather than wakefulness.Īnother thing that people can do if you don't want to get up and go to a different room is actually try meditating. Just read a book - no screens, no phones - and only when you're sleepy return to the bed. So you should go to another room - a room that's dim. You should not actually stay in bed for very long awake, because your brain is this remarkably associative device and it quickly learns that the bed is about being awake. Walker discusses the importance of sleep - and offers strategies for getting the recommended eight hours - in his new book, Why We Sleep. "So that classic maxim that you may heard that you can sleep when you're dead, it's actually mortally unwise advice from a very serious standpoint." "Every disease that is killing us in developed nations has causal and significant links to a lack of sleep," he says. Sleep deficiency is associated with problems in concentration, memory and the immune system, and may even shorten life span. He points out that lack of sleep - defined as six hours or fewer - can have serious consequences. Walker is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. "Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it." "Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain," Walker says. The National Sleep Foundation recommends an average of eight hours of sleep per night for adults, but sleep scientist Matthew Walker says that too many people are falling short of the mark.
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