The Sleep Solution: why your sleep is broken and how to fix it

by W. Chris Winter

Do you sleep well? Maybe or maybe not, but you do sleep.

With sleep, however, the brain retains the final say and actually has the power to force sleep on us all. We hope this doesn’t occur when we are driving home from work.

If you sleep well, feel well, and don’t have symptoms of excessive sleepiness, whatever amount of sleep you are getting is probably okay.

Don’t get too hung up on the idea that “If I could only sleep better, then I would feel better.” You may feel tired from a cause other than lack of sleep or poor-quality sleep.

Fatigue refers to a lack of energy, rather than a desire to sleep. You can be fatigued or sleepy or both. You could be neither. If you are neither, why are you reading this book? What you really need is a book to help you understand why everyone hates you and your fresh and energetic life. True sleepiness is caused by one of three things: medication, sleep deprivation, or sleep dysfunction. Our sleep is based on two systems, the homeostatic and circadian. You are or you are not sleepy. If you were brave enough to take some sleepiness assessments, you should have a feel for how sleepy you are or are not.

Sleep perception and sleep reality are not always related.

how we view ourselves as sleepers and the labels we give ourselves may be more predictive of daytime dysfunction than our actual sleep quality. In other words, if you are a poor sleeper who views yourself as being a confident, good sleeper, you may function as well during the day as a person with far better sleep quality.

You are sleeping, but you might be spending a disproportionate amount of the time in light sleep.

it is essential that we focus on reducing the anxiety surrounding the act of sleeping.

The important take-home message is that if you are reading this book and feel like you are not sleeping, you are not alone. In fact, you are so not alone that a sleep doctor devoted a whole chapter to this one phenomenon.

It is possible to sleep at night and have a limited ability to perceive your sleep. While not perceiving your sleep is not the same as not sleeping, it is still abnormal!

“shift work sleep disorder” came into being (the name has since been shortened to shift work disorder).

Ridding your bedroom of the faintest light is important

Put your hands in front of your face. Can you see them? If yes, keep working. Your room isn’t dark enough.

Any light exposure in the late evening or early night can have a negative impact on your circadian rhythm and sleep, so keep your environment dim at the end of your day for great sleep.

I typically encourage people to wear less, not more to bed.

set your alarm, and forget about the time. It’s best if you can’t see what time it is when your room is dark.

when you need a midnight snack. Look for dried fruit, cereal, or bananas. High-glycemic-index foods produce sleepiness, so if food must be consumed at night, these are good choices.

It’s important to remember that resting even without sleeping is good for you too. You’re not wasting your time if you are lying in bed and not sleeping.

resting without sleeping improved cognitive performance. Resting is not wasted time; in fact, a 2009 study revealed that for some cognitive tasks, the benefits of resting are indistinguishable from those of sleep. So don’t worry too much about getting into bed and not sleeping immediately or having a prolonged awakening during the night.

Insomnia expert Charles Morin theorizes that people with slight anxiety tendencies are more likely to struggle with insomnia.

bad sleep is much more dangerous in your mind than it is in real life.

Insomnia without worry is like Gollum without his precious ring: weak, pathetic, and powerless.

One incredibly powerful tool in your fight against sleep disturbances is acceptance. Accept your sleep for what it is, optimize what you can, and move on with your life.

In other words, to feel great, you don’t have to sleep well. You just have to believe you do! Unfortunately, the opposite can be the case as well. To feel poorly, you don’t have to sleep poorly (or sleep too little); you just have to believe you do. This too was seen in studies. Good sleepers with high distress functioned more poorly than good sleepers with low distress.

Sleep is the most important thing in the world. Tonight’s sleep is relatively meaningless.

Insomnia ≠ Sleep Deprivation These terms are not synonyms. Please divorce them in your head.

When you talk with good sleepers, they all have a flip-flops-and-Hacky-Sack mentality toward their sleep. “Whatever, dude.” Within them is an inner belief that they are basically going to be okay no matter what happens that night in bed.

for sleep to have an impact in your life, it needs to include a robust amount of deep sleep and all of the restorative things that go along with it. This is sleep. Simply sedating someone does not produce this effect.

Sedation, at times, can be dangerous and should never be confused with sleep.

Spending twelve hours in bed to get seven hours of sleep may not leave you feeling sleepy the next day, but it is often going to leave you feeling as if you’d been hit by a train.

A nap is not meant to make up for lost sleep when the sleeper had the opportunity to sleep but did not.

humans wake up when they sleep. That’s not only okay, but normal. Even if you are not aware you are waking up, you do, so aiming for 100 percent is an unrealistic goal.

Sleep doctors have a saying: An early nap adds to the previous night of sleep but a late nap subtracts from the upcoming night of sleep.

Just leave that mind on and running. Don’t worry—if you need to sleep, you’ll conk out for your nap. And even if you don’t, you’ll get up feeling rested.