Sleep is vital. We simply cannot live without it. When we don’t get it, we will try pretty much anything to get it.
Yet suddenly, our talk about sleep seems to be urgent; conduct a search on the web for sleep and you’ll find increasingly numerous articles on how to win at sleeping. New apps, and fancy alarm clocks, eschew blue light. Thousands of services, products and columnists will convince you that you’re sleeping wrong. Snoozing away the early hours, sleeping all over the place and on your front.
Worse still, you might come across terrifying messaging to suggest that, if you aren’t sleeping right, your life is going to be shorter, and you’ll contract all sorts of ailments. One of the biggest concerns surrounding our sleep is that we aren’t getting enough of it and that, unless we get at least seven hours sleep a night, we’re on a one-way ticket to bad health, from hypertension to Alzheimer’s disease.
However, there are two problems with this type of messaging. The first is that it’s not strictly true. Seven to eight hours of sleep per 24 is recommended for adults, but it’s really just a mean (an average). Messages also have to be simplified for health communication to the public, but sometimes in the process of simplifying, nuance gets lost. And yes, if you’re sleeping too few hours on a long-term basis, that’s typically associated with health problems such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and depression. So if a newspaper headline tells you that you need to get seven or eight hours of sleep, you should pay attention. But there’s a substantial amount of sleep between seven and eight that people need to sleep well. It’s possible that a ‘good night’s sleep’ needs to be a slightly shorter or longer period of time for different people.
The second problem with this type of Armageddon messaging is that it can be counterproductive — a real no-no for people of the sort who have trouble sleeping anyway. In 2019, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that a full 21 per cent of adults in the US were wearing sleep trackers. And that’s probably on the up-go. Of course, it’s a fascinating thing to learn how many hours you slept each night and to know what periods of the night were the deepest and what were the most dream-filled. But all that sleep data is, it would appear, convincing some people to beat themselves up about their sleep habits, leading to a label some call orthosomnia — the incessant obsession with attaining the perfect night of sleep. And what variants of this unnerving condition is itself resulting in — ironic, wouldn’t you say? — more sleeplessness. Now orthosomnia might be the extreme case but the anxiety not to have a good night’s sleep is, for some of us, what keeps us awake anyway.
Here then is what the experts are advising: So, stop looking at the number. That’s what will likely set up your expectations for sleep, according to Dr Colleen Carney, a psychologist and the director of the Sleep and Depression Laboratory at Ryerson University in Ontario. The basic questions to ask yourself on a daily basis, she says, are:
Do I feel reasonably well-rested during the day?
Am I able to sleep at night without being interrupted? If not, can I quickly drift off again?
Can I stay awake through the day without involuntarily falling asleep?
If the answer to all three is yes, then you probably don’t need to be worried about your sleep. And if you’re losing sleep over your sleep, rather than buying pricey blue-light filters or fancy sleep-tracking devices, talk with your doctor to rule out any medical issues and then follow the evidence-based advice of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
The fact is, there is a treatment — cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I for short — that works really well, without any drugs. And it has a phenomenally low failure rate.