10. Eating turkey at Thanksgiving makes you sleepy.
Turkey contains tryptophan, an essential amino acid that is present in meat, poultry, fish, dairy, eggs, bananas, chocolate, and other foods. It’s important for growth and development, bone health and immune regulation, but since it is in many foods, it’s rare to be deficient in this amino acid.
What it does not do, however, is make you pass out while pretending to care about football, a parade, or your relative’s ideas about politics. That’s far more likely to be a combination of carbohydrates, stress, alcohol, and the fact that, well, Thanksgiving occurs during a time of limited daylight.
9. Older people need less sleep.
It’s not so much that you need less of it, it’s just that it’s harder to get.
Older people have greater occurrence of disorders like apnea and insomnia from obesity, greater amounts of interruption, and side effects from medications that rise in complexity and frequency over time. In addition, circadian rhythms can weaken with age, and lead to self-selecting behaviors.
Older people may not need the same amount of sleep as a baby or teenager, when the body is undergoing dramatic changes and development. But the idea that you can just make do with a lot less later is not true.
8. The snooze button is your friend.
Snooze sleep is, by its very definition, fragmented and of extremely poor quality. It can also contribute to sleep inertia, which is when you feel so drowsy and sluggish on waking that you just want to go back to bed.
If you can possibly manage it, rise at the same time every day, even if you do not feel fully rested. The discomfort you endure then will pay off later, as your mind and body reset to an optimal cycle.
7. An hour of sleep before midnight is better than two hours of sleep after.
Historically this may have been true, given the role that cortisol and melatonin play in our sleep cycles, and there’s still a bit of veracity to this from the difficulties that many shift workers have in achieving healthy sleep cycles.
But while living life on non-traditional hours may be hard, it’s far too simple to point to a specific hour of the day when you are more likely to get a full cycle of restful sleep.
Control your environment, diet, and sleep hygiene, and reap the benefits. Regardless of exactly when that cycle begins and ends.
6. Measuring and getting a perfect sleep score is important.
Many personal apps and wearable devices will now generate a sleep score for you. As with all metrics, trends are more important than individual data points and obsessing about individual data points can lead to undue and unhelpful amounts of stress.
If knowing your sleep score helps you achieve better sleep hygiene and deters sleep inertia, you have our full endorsement for the practice. But if it’s just one more thing to worry about in a life full of worry, don’t use it.
5. Snoring means someone is sleeping well.
About 4 out of 9 adults snore occasionally, and 1 out of 4 snore regularly. The cause is an obstruction in the breathing process, which can occur from weight, age, illness, sleep position or other factors.
The problem with snoring goes beyond disrupting the sleep pattern of others, though this is no small thing. If the snoring comes from a bypass and gasp for air, that’s sleep apnea, which can easily lead to a host of other complicating health issues.
As an all-natural and non-addictive sleep aid, Sonnet restores sleep cycles… but apnea is a long-term condition that needs the attention of a healthcare provider. Many people with apnea use special apparatus to ensure full breathing and more restful sleep. If you are snoring but not at the level of apnea, other measures like improving your sleep hygiene, losing weight, and reducing alcohol intake can help cut down on snoring.
4. You can catch up on sleep quickly and routinely, especially when you have a day off.
“Sleep debts” are not so simple and transparent. While you might feel better after a longer period of rest, this is only in comparison with the short-sleep days, and is no way to maintain long-term health, happiness, and productivity.
It’s a little bit like riding a roller coaster ride that never really gets back to its starting point. The comparatively good feeling that you get from “catching up” does not mean you are living life to the fullest.
3. You can train yourself to need less sleep.
Deprivation is not training, so there is no way to do this without a physical and mental cost, often paid by more than the “trainee.”
While the amount of sleep that you need varies from person to person, there are very few people who can operate well when they experience a dramatic drop in sleep amounts. If your sleep is routinely short-circuiting REM cycles, the only training that you are doing is learning how to live a compromised life.
2. Alcohol helps you sleep.
There’s a difference between being unconscious and being asleep.
An unconscious person cannot be aroused, even by loud noises or shaking. That’s why you can’t just wake someone who is in a coma. It is not a natural or particularly restful state and may be a medical emergency.
High doses of alcohol can lead to unconsciousness. At some point, that unconsciousness is likely to become a sleep cycle. But it is often not a normal or restful one, and REM and deep sleep are typically significantly compromised. That hangover feeling is not just coming from the alcohol.
1. Your body isn’t really doing anything when you are asleep. It’s just not awake.
While major muscle groups may be at rest, our brains and bodies are actually highly active, and maybe even more so while you are in a dream state. Your mind is processing information and forming long-term memories as it cycles through REM and non-REM sleep. Your glymphatic system is clearing away the day’s waste from your brain. Your body repairs and grows tissue, releases hormones, fights infection and inflammation. Your heart rate, body temperature, hunger levels and blood pressure all drop.
Just because your conscious mind may not regard sleep as important or interesting, that does not mean it isn’t. That’s why we say…
Sleep well, live better!