Why You Should Forget the Eight Hour Myth
Have you ever had lots of sleep but felt shattered, or just had a few hours but felt great? This tells you two things, firstly that sleep can’t be micromanaged, and many different factors affect how refreshed we feel, and also that quality is much more important than quantity.
So, forget eight hours! What matters is not the amount of sleep you get, but how good it is.
If you move your focus to this and work on techniques which are proven to improve sleep quality, then you can change your sleep and your life for the better.
So here are three tips to help you sleep well, and live better:
1. Go to bed later. Spending too much time in bed or going to bed too early can damage our sleep cycle. This is because it reduces our appetite for sleep. So, even if you feel tired, don’t go to bed too early. Instead, try and relax downstairs or watch a bit of TV in the living room until your usual bedtime. Also, however badly you’ve slept, in the morning make sure you get up and out of bed at your usual time and get your day started. Remember, lying in bed after a rubbish night’s sleep never makes us feel better.
2. Leave the room. If you wake in the night, and can’t get back to sleep, get out of bed. It may sound counterintuitive, but the longer you spend in bed tossing and turning and unable to sleep, the more you will begin to relate your bed to feeling stressed and to being awake. If you’re struggling to drift back off to sleep, get up and go to another room, read a book or do something you enjoy, and then when you’re feeling sleepy again, head back to bed.
3. Write things down. Writing stuff down is a great daily practice to get into. It’s a therapeutic way of seeing things in black and white, and realising that things are never as bad as they seem. Equally, having things written down in front of us enables us to see what we can and can’t control. When it comes to sleep, it’s a way for us to pass a message to our brain saying, ‘I am dealing with this, and giving it the time it deserves, but I don’t need to do it at 3am!’
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