If you follow Professor Richard Wiseman's tips, you could become a 'super sleeper' and never wake up tired again
Insomnia is the modern malaise. But in a new book, Professor Richard Wiseman explains the simple techniques you can use to get the sleep you need. On Saturday, he revealed why some lucky individuals are ‘super-sleepers’. Today, he explains how you can become one, too . . .
We are now living in a world that never sleeps. Because of this, scientists across the world have started to examine what happens to people’s brains and bodies when they become sleep-deprived. Their results are enough to keep you up at night.
In the 1980s, a scientist from the University of Chicago conducted perhaps the best-known, and most disturbing, study into the topic.
He and his colleagues wired up a group of rats to a machine that measured their brain activity, and then placed each of the animals on a stationary disc above a bowl of water. Every time a rat’s brain activity indicated that the animal had fallen asleep, the disc would slowly rotate. This, in turn, forced the rat to wake up.
Despite having access to more than enough food, within a week these sleep-deprived rats started to lose weight and their fur developed an unhealthy yellowish tinge.
After a month, all of them had died, thus proving that sleep is essential for life. Of course, this was extreme sleep-deprivation. You might expect that losing a smaller amount of sleep — say, just an hour or so each night — would not be especially detrimental.
In fact, even a minor reduction can dramatically increase the chances of you having a serious accident in everyday life.
In 2003, Gregory Belenky and his colleagues at the Sleep And Performance Research Centre at Washington State University staged one of the world’s most comprehensive studies into sleep loss.
Volunteers who obtained nine hours’ sleep each night remained highly alert, while those spending just three or five hours in bed quickly became tired and inattentive.
However, the results from those getting seven hours’ sleep per night proved especially surprising.
Although these volunteers constantly assured the researchers that they were as wide awake as those on nine hours, the data revealed a very different story.
After just a couple of days of getting seven hours’ sleep they became significantly less alert, and remained sluggish for the remainder of the experiment.
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There are two rules to ensure you wake up refreshed in the morning: The 90-minute rule and the power of taking a nap. Pictured: File photo
Belenky’s study revealed the highly pernicious nature of even a small amount of sleep deprivation. Spend just a few nights sleeping for seven hours or less and your brain goes into slow motion.
To make matters worse, you will continue to feel fine and so don’t make allowances for your sluggish mind. Within just a couple of days, this level of sleep deprivation transforms you into an accident waiting to happen.
In another study, researchers from University College London spent 20 years examining the relationship between sleep patterns and life expectancy in more than 10,000 civil servants.
The results, published in 2007, revealed that participants who obtained two hours less sleep a night than they required nearly doubled their risk of early death.
In a similar study, another group of researchers analysed data from more than one million Americans and found that getting less than seven hours sleep each night was associated with an early demise.
However, there are two invaluable techniques I’d like to share with you that can offset some of the damage caused by getting too little sleep. The first is the 90-minute rule; the second is the power of taking a nap.
THE 90-MINUTE RULE EVERY SLEEPER SHOULD REMEMBER
Speak to sleep researchers and you will soon discover that most of them use a little-known trick to help them feel refreshed the next day.
This is based on the knowledge that our sleep cycle contains five distinct phases, divided into four stages of non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, followed by a stage of REM sleep (in which we dream).
Each of these cycles takes roughly 90 minutes, followed by a brief interlude when we are relatively wakeful, before a new cycle starts again.
This process is repeated usually for a total of four or five cycles a night.
In other words, if we were to sleep completely naturally, with no alarm clocks or other sleep disturbances, we would wake up, on the average, after a multiple of 90 minutes.
This means that you will feel most refreshed when you awake at the end of a 90-minute sleep cycle because you will be closest to your normal waking state.
To maximise the chances of this happening, work out when you want to wake up, then count back in 90-minute blocks to find a time near to when you want to go to sleep.
Let’s imagine that you want to wake at 8am and wish to go to sleep around midnight.
Counting back in 90-minute segments from 8am would look like this:
8am>6.30>5.00>3.30>2.00>12.30>11pm
8am>6.30>5.00>3.30>2.00>12.30>11pm
In this example, you should aim to fall asleep around either 11pm or 12.30am in order to feel especially refreshed in the morning.
SLEEP YOUR WAY TO THE TOP
When you are preparing for an important exam or interview, you might be tempted to stay up late the night before, trying to cram information into your head.
Avoid the temptation. It’s a terrible idea and you will be much better off getting an early night.
Not only will you be more refreshed when you wake up, you will also be much better able to remember what you learnt the day before.
Not only will you be more refreshed when you wake up, you will also be much better able to remember what you learnt the day before.
The effect that a lack of sleep has on academic performance is far from trivial. A study a few years ago at Tel Aviv university randomly separated primary school children into two groups.
Those in one group were instructed to go to bed 30 minutes earlier each night, while those in the other group were asked to stay up 30 minutes later than usual.
Three days later researchers tested the children’s performance on various educational attainments tests.
The results revealed that the small amount of sleep loss was equivalent to the loss of two years of development.
In another study, psychologist Amy Wolfson from the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts surveyed more than 3,000 high-school students, and discovered that A- and B-grade students were going to bed about 40 minutes earlier, and sleeping around 25 minutes longer than those getting lower grades.
THE POWER OF NAPPING
Napping is often seen as a form of laziness. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Hundreds of experiments have demonstrated its enormous benefits and so it is vital that you make napping part of your daily routine.
Putting your head down for just a few minutes each day will help you develop a better memory, be more alert, increase your reaction time, and boost your productivity. It may even save your life.
A recent six-year study into napping by Harvard University looked at the lives of more than 20,000 adults aged between 20 and 80.
All of the participants were asked about their dietary habits, levels of physical exercise, and the extent to which they napped.
DID YOU KNOW?
Alaska's Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 destroyed the surrounding wildlife and habitat, and is widely considered to be one of the worst environmental catastrophes in modern history.
Accident investigators concluded that sleep deprivation had played a major role in the incident.
The third mate had only slept six hours in the previous two days, and was simply too tired to notice that the ship was not changing course, or to respond to the warnings from the lookouts.
Unfortunately, this is not a unique event.
Similar investigations have revealed that sleep deprivation played a key role in several other catastrophes, including Three Mile Island, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, and the Chernobyl meltdown.
Even after taking age and level of physical activity into account, those who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37 per cent lower risk of heart-related death.
Even the shortest of naps can have a surprisingly big impact on your memory. In 2008, scientists from the University of Dusseldorf asked volunteers to memorise a list of words and then randomly allocated them to one of three groups.
The first group remained awake, the second slept for about 40 minutes, and the third took a quick six-minute nap. When asked to recall the words, the Wide Awake Club did OK, the 40-minute sleepers did better, and those who nodded off for just six minutes came top of the class.
Developing a super-powered memory is not the only psychological benefit to be gained through napping.
Research by Nasa revealed that pilots who take a 25-minute nap in the cockpit — hopefully with a co-pilot taking over the controls — are subsequently 35 per cent more alert than their non-napping colleagues and twice as focused.
In 2009, sleep researcher Kimberly Cote from Brock University in Canada reviewed the vast amount of psychological work into napping, and concluded that even the shortest of snoozes causes significant improvements in people’s mood, reaction time, and alertness.
So it’s vital that you get rid of any lingering doubts about whether napping is a good use of your time.
In fact, you should start to feel guilty if you are not taking a nap during the day. But first, it is important to know the optimum time to take it. The body’s natural ‘circadian rhythms’ affect our energy levels through the day, so it’s best to time your nap for when there is a natural slump — which depends on the time you woke.
In fact, you should start to feel guilty if you are not taking a nap during the day. But first, it is important to know the optimum time to take it. The body’s natural ‘circadian rhythms’ affect our energy levels through the day, so it’s best to time your nap for when there is a natural slump — which depends on the time you woke.
Here’s a simple table to guide you:
A handy timetable to help you work out your perfect nap time
PS: don’t worry if you don’t fall asleep. Research shows that even just lying down with the intention of napping is enough to cause a healthy reduction in your blood pressure.
And if you need to feel wide awake directly after having a short nap, drink a cup of coffee or other caffeinated drink just before dozing off.
The caffeine will start to work its magic about 25 minutes later — just as you are waking up.
HOW TO BANISH SNORING FOREVER!
One (or both!) partners snoring can be a big problem in relationships. Professor Richard Wiseman is on hand to offer some tips to stop snoring forever
Roughly 40 per cent of men and a quarter of women are snorers — causing problems both for their partners’ sleep and their own. But there are simple steps that can help minimise the risk of an interrupted night.
First, it is helpful to find out what kind of snorer you are.
The results of this quick test will help us discover whether the problem is with your nose, mouth, and/or tongue.
1. Close your mouth. Now shut your left nostril by gently pressing on the side of it. Keeping your mouth closed, take a deep breath through your right nostril.
Now repeat the test, but this time close your mouth and right nostril, and then take a deep breathe through your left nostril. Finally, still keeping your mouth closed, take a deep breath through both nostrils. Did you feel like your nostrils were congested, and therefore breathing was difficult, during any of these exercises?
2. Open your mouth and try to make a snoring sound. Now close your mouth and try to make the same sound. Are you able to make the same snoring sound with your mouth closed?
3. If you can make a snoring sound with your mouth closed, stick your tongue slightly out of your mouth and gently grip it with your teeth, ensuring that your lips are sealed around the sides of your tongue. Now try to make the snoring noise again. Is the sound of your snoring reduced?
If you answered ‘yes’ to question one, then you have a blocked nose. If just one nostril appears blocked then this might be due to a physical abnormality, such as a twisted septum or polyps. You might find it helpful to try using adhesive nasal strips to pull your nostrils apart, and so help prevent them narrowing when you are asleep.
If both sides of your nose appear blocked, and you don’t have a cold, then you might be suffering from an allergy.
DID YOU KNOW?
Sleep scientists have come up with all sorts of exercises to strengthen snorers’ throat muscles. Perhaps the most enjoyable techniques involve a series of specially designed singing lessons.
In 2000, drama therapist Alise Ojay from the University of Exeter brought together a group of 20 chronic snorers and asked themto spend three months completing a series of singing exercises for 20 minutes each day.
The result was a significant drop in their snoring. On the basis of this work, Ojay created a series of Singing For Snorers CDs that encourage people to perform specially designed vocal exercises to simple tunes.
See www.singingforsnorers.com for more.
If your nose only tends to become blocked at night, you might be sensitive to the type of allergens produced by the dust mites that tend to inhabit old pillows and mattresses.
If you think this might be the case, try washing your bedding frequently at a temperature of at least 60C, avoid putting old blankets on the bed, and place your pillows and — if possible — your duvets into plastic bags and then put them in your freezer for 24 hours at least once a month, which kills off the mites.
If you answered ‘no’ to question two, then there might be an issue with your mouth. If this is the case, then you probably sleep with your mouth open, and often wake up with a dry throat. You may benefit from a ‘chin strip’, which is essentially a strip of tape that runs under your chin and helps stop your mouth falling open while you sleep.
Finally, if you answered ‘yes’ to question three then your snoring might well be due to your tongue vibrating. Typically, you will have an unusual bite, wherein your lower teeth are behind your upper teeth when you close your mouth. If this is the case, you might want to think about using a ‘mandibular advancement device’. This is a plastic gum shield that is designed to fit into your mouth, help push your jaw forward, and increase the space at the back of your throat. It’s quite possible that you might be one type of snorer, or be a combination of any two, or even all three.
In addition to these techniques, you might want to try losing weight, stopping smoking, drinking less alcohol, and trying to sleep with your head at a 35-degree elevation by placing a foam wedge under your pillow. Also, it is important to avoid sleeping on your back, as your tongue and soft tissue in the throat are likely to fall backwards and obstruct your airway.
If you find this tricky, try placing a tennis ball in a sock, and sew the sock to the back of your pyjama top (or whatever else you wear in bed). This will make lying on your back very uncomfortable, and so encourage you to turn on your side.
Strengthening the throat muscles also helps combat sleep apnoea — where the sleeper’s breathing stops for brief periods.
Roughly 40 per cent of men and a quarter of women are snorers - causing problems both for their partners' sleep and their own
In 2009, researchers from the University of Sao Paulo Medical School in Brazil had patients suffering from sleep apnoea practise a series of tongue and throat exercises for 30 minutes each day for three months.
The group experienced a 39 per cent drop in apnoea episodes after the treatment.
Similarly, in 2005 Milo Puhan from the University of Zurich and his colleagues gave sleep apnoea patients didgeridoo lessons, and then asked them to practise the instrument for the following four months.
Compared to a non-didgeridoo-playing control group, the patients experienced a significant reduction in apnoea and their partners reported fewer disturbances during the night.
In some more serious cases, however, snorers may need to be prescribed a treatment referred to as ‘continuous positive airway pressure’. In this method, the sufferer is required to wear a special mask over their mouth and nose when they go to bed.
This is connected to a small unit that uses mild air pressure to keep their airways open throughout the night.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2587568/How-feel-refreshed-little-sleep-MUST-afternoon-nap-Never-wake-tired-again.html#ixzz2wtjAD846
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