How to Improve My Sleep. Part 1: Sleep Hygiene.
Sleep Hygiene.
Introduction: The main purpose of today’s post is to explore basic definitions of “sleep hygiene” and “arousal” as they relate to sleep. After covering these core concepts I will go over a couple of important elements of sleep hygiene that can help you improve your relationship with sleep.
So, what is sleep hygiene? Simply put, this term refers to how well the rest of your life is setting you up for consistent, restful sleep. Sleep hygiene most often refers to behaviors and how the presence or absence of certain behaviors can contribute to better or worse sleep. However, a more complete definition of sleep hygiene also includes an understanding of how cognitions (i.e., thoughts and beliefs) and emotional states impact our ability to fall asleep and stay asleep easily. Before fully understanding sleep hygiene it is critical to understand the concepts of arousal and circadian rhythm. Understanding each of these will help you be able to apply sleep hygiene to your life and get better sleep.
Arousal: For the purposes of sleep, arousal can be thought of as how sleepy you feel or how awake and alert you feel. Arousal can be experienced both psychologically and physiological (i.e., in the body). States of high-arousal typically correlate with feeling awake and alert while conversely, states of low-arousal typically correlate with feeling sleepy and/or drowsy. As you might guess, states of low arousal are ideal for falling and staying asleep whereas states of high arousal are not.
Circadian Rhythm: Circadian rhythm is your body’s natural body clock. For better or worse, many of us are generally forced to be awake and asleep during certain hours of the day and night, depending usually upon your work schedule, other life responsibilities or accommodating things that you enjoy. However, the times that you are sleep for the above reasons may or may not align well with your body’s natural sleep schedule, which we can think of as the sleep schedule that your body would naturally fall into if there were no external demands placed on you. If you’re curious about what your natural circadian rhythm might be take a few minutes to fill out the “Morningness-Eveningness Scale.”
Understanding your body’s natural circadian rhythm is important mostly because it relates back to arousal. For example, if you have a job that starts at 7:00 a.m., this might require you to wake up at 5:00 a.m. in order to get to work on time. Assuming that most adults require about 7-9 hours of sleep in order to feel well rested, this schedule might not be a problem for you if you are someone who starts to feel sleep around 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. - you might be what might be casually referred to as “morning person.” However, if you are more of a “night owl” and do not typically start to feel sleepy until around midnight or 1:00 a.m., if is of course going to be difficult to fall asleep at a time that is conducive to your early morning work schedule. To boil down the predicament here: the person in this example will be trying to fall asleep (which is a task most easily accomplished when in a state of low arousal) at a time of day when their body is still in a relatively high state of arousal or wakefulness.
Times when our bodies internal clock do not match up with our external clock can be very frustrating and (for reasons I will explain on my next post), these are situations where we might start to see poor sleep hygiene and/or symptoms of insomnia creep up.
Sleep Hygiene - Behaviors: So, now that we understand a bit about arousal and how it relates to sleep, as well as circadian rhythm and how it relates to arousal, we have a nice lens through which we can evaluate certain behaviors in terms of whether they contribute to low arousal or high arousal. Consequently, we can understand whether they contribute good sleep hygiene or poor sleep hygiene. Today, I will take a few of the more prominent behavioral factors that can affect sleep and discuss how they might impact our level of arousal:
Routine: Routine and regularity are perhaps the most important elements of sleep hygiene and unfortunately, they can also be some of the most difficult elements to keep in line. Routine and regularity are important because our sleep drive runs on rhythm. For example, for many of us, we can generally predict when we will be hungry for dinner, based on what time we ate lunch just as we were probably able to predict what time we would be hungry for lunch based on what time we ate breakfast and how much we ate. This is why as children we might have all heard the warning not to eat too many snacks too close to dinner so as not to “spoil our appetite.” Well, in very much the same way we have a fairly predictable appetite for food, our bodies have an appetite for sleep! What research tells us is that one of the best ways we can fall asleep easily and predictably is by having as much of an appetite for sleep as we can and one of the ways we can best ways we can build up a healthy sleep appetite is by avoiding naps and waking up at the same time every day (yes, even on weekends).
Exercise: Exercise, as we may all know has the effect of making us tired and feel sleepy. Accordingly, it makes sense that regular exercise is a part of good sleep hygiene. The only caveat being that high-intensity exercise close to bedtime (i.e., within one hour or less) has been shown to interfere with sleep (LeWine, 2019). Additionally, if you are exercising outside and exposing yourself to sunlight you’re receiving the added benefit of fine-tuning your circadian rhythm with help from the sun, while also helping your body to produce an added measure of melatonin, a natural hormone that exists in our bodies, which helps with inducing sleepiness and circadian rhythm and regularity.
Caffeine: Because we all know that caffeine helps with increasing our level of arousal and/or alertness, we can probably guess it’s not great for sleep. Everyone’s body, tolerance and metabolism are different, but as a general rule to limit all caffeine intake to before noon or early afternoon at the latest to give your body plenty of time to metabolize the caffeine and get it out of your system. The earlier you got to bed, the earlier you will want to discontinue caffeine use.
Alcohol: While many people will report that alcohol (some types more than others) can make them feel sleepy, alcohol is actually a well known sleep disruptor, particularly during the middle of the night. If a person has the experience of falling asleep easily and sleeping soundly in the early hours of the night, this is because alcohol is known to suppress REM Sleep (a lighter stage of sleep) leading to more hours spent in deep sleep earlier in the night. However, many people will report waking up in the middle of the night and having difficulty falling back to sleep and/or experiencing light/fitful sleep from the middle of the night until morning. This is because as the alcohol is metabolized out of the bloodstream, people often experience what is called a “REM rebound” where they will then spend a disproportionate amount of time in those lighter stages of sleep that they missed earlier on in the night. The result, is often a pretty poor and unrestful night of sleep, despite the potential of falling asleep quickly in the beginning of the night.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the content of this post and learned something that you can apply to your life. This is just the tip of the iceberg so stay tuned for additional insights on sleep in future blog posts.
If you’re interested in learning more about how therapy can be a highly effective strategy for insomnia treatment, I would love to talk with you about scheduling a free initial consultation.