Sleep better, live better

ONE of the most under-rated ways to feel better and feel less stressed is to really think about how we recover and rest – specifically, how well do you sleep?

For many it seems the goal is to sleep less and do more. This puts us at risk of starting each day, already carrying stress and fatigue.

Sleep is essential for consolidating our memories and filing them away for later recall.

Research shows that brief bursts of brain activity during deep sleep, called sleep spindles, effectively move recent memories, including what we learnt that day, from the short-term space of the hippocampus to the “hard drive” of our neocortex, so it can take in new information.

Sleep also turns on the “rinse cycle” of the brain, which washes away metabolic debris, including sticky proteins that can contribute to amyloid plaques in diseased brains.

If you’re not getting enough slow wave sleep, which is the deepest phase, then you’re not clearing out that waste well.

We have several examples where some of the longest-lived cultures with very low rates of dementia are getting close to nine or nine-and-a-half hours of sleep a night, which sounds ridiculous for most of us.

Maybe we have to stop thinking of sleep as a waste of time and instead consider it as the most important antidote to cope with stress and to combat the modern disease of ‘busyness’.

I now track my sleep with my watch and I’m very diligent about it. I consistently get at least seven hours a night. When I don’t, I don’t feel at my best!

If you’re not sleeping long enough, don’t expect to fix that overnight. Dial back your bedtime routine by 15 minutes for a few days at a time until you feel ready to trim back another 15 minutes.

Repeat that until you reach a fully blocked sleep time of at least seven hours. It might just be the most important thing you do this year.

Infinite possibilities!

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