How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep #1
Why we sleep and the 4 sleep cycles
Did you get a good night’s sleep last night? Do you feel rested? Did you sleep soundly and deeply? Or, perhaps like millions of other people in the UK, you experienced issues with sleep? Recent research shows:
9 in 10 people in the UK are currently experiencing sleep issues,
3 out of 4 people in work in the UK reported sleep issues in the last 6 months due to workplace stress.
A third of people are experiencing sleep poverty: where their quality of sleep is negatively impacted by poor living conditions, not having access to a comfortable bed, and noise pollution (The Sleep Charity, 2024).
All in all, that makes for a lot of people asking themselves “how can I get a good night’s sleep?” If you are someone looking for respite from sleep issues so you can sleep soundly, this mini-series of blogs aims to unpack how to get a good night’s sleep.
Do you long for a good night’s sleep where you wake up rested and satisfied?
This mini-series of blogs aims to help you address sleep issues so you can support your physcial health and mental wellbeing.
In my therapy practice, here in Preston, I meet lots of people who are struggling with sleep in some way – with stressors, trauma and pain leaving them exhausted. They long to sleep soundly and get regular good nights’ sleep. In therapy, we often explore the deeper issues that lie underneath these sleep challenges. Yet, it’s also helpful to have strategies that can support sleep. That’s why I wrote this mini-series of blogs: to provide some insight into the role and function of sleep for our health and wellbeing, and to provide some simple self-help strategies around sleep. We’ll be covering what hinders and helps sleep, and how our sleep cycles operate. I’ll share with you some research-backed methods and practical techniques you can implement to help you feel more satisfied with your sleep, so you can feel better in yourself – physically and psychologically. In the first of these three blogs, we’ll focus on why we sleep, the impact of poor sleep and the function of sleep cycles. In the later blogs in the series, I’ll outline some simple internal and environmental self-help strategies you can implement to increase your chance of sleeping soundly.
Knowing what helps and what hinders sleep could help you sleep as if you have no cares in the world
Why is it important to sleep soundly?
Sleep is one of the building blocks of optimal health. There’s a strong link between poor sleep and a whole host of health conditions that include cancer, stroke, infertility and depression. Put simply, if you don’t sleep well, you don’t feel well. But it works both ways - if you don’t feel great about life, you’re likely to find your sleep is impacted. Taking steps to look after your sleep health pays dividends with your mental, cognitive, emotional, and physical wellbeing.
Why do we sleep?
So, if sleep is important, it’s useful to ask why do we sleep as humans? What is the purpose of sleep? Afterall, we sleep for around one third of our life, so it makes sense to assume it has some function for us. Like eating and breathing, sleep is essential for us to live and vital for good health. It’s one of the building blocks for wellbeing. Perhaps you’ve seen Media reports of people dying suddenly after lengthy online gaming sessions? In these cases sleep deprivation is believed to be a significant factor in the cause of death (Kuperczko, et al., 2022). Sadly, these stories remind us of the fact that sleep is essential to life. That’s the reason why some corrupt regimes use sleep deprivation as a form of torture (AMA, 2024).
Sleep is critical for brain health
Sleep allows your body and your mind to rest and recharge.
Sleep allows your body and mind to rest and recharge and without sufficient sleep, your brain won't function optimally. You’ll notice your ability to concentrate or remember things are reduced if you aren’t sleeping well.
That said, knowing sleep is essential to health and wellbeing, and knowing exactly why we sleep are not quite the same. The science of sleep has not yet been able to precisely determine why sleep is so essential. Current scientific hypotheses that explain why we need to sleep include:
To allow our brains to mature
To support learning and memory
To allow our brain to erase information that is no longer important
To process waste products within the brain
To conserve energy (Frank & Heller, 2019).
When you don’t sleep well, you suffer. If you’ve parented a baby, you’ll know something of the impact sleep deprivation has on body and mind. Or, if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to go more than 24-hours without sleep, you’ll know how your sense of health and wellbeing begins to suffer without adequate sleep.
The Impact of Sleep Related Issues:
Scientific research provides data on how sleep related issues impact both physical and mental health. Sleep deprivation has been shown to impact cognitive function by decreasing your:
Concentration
Reaction time
Memory function
Reduced reaction times means we are more prone to accidents or making mistakes (Khan & Al-Jahdali, 2023).
Sleep deprivation also impacts on your physical health by increasing your chance of developing:
Type 2 diabetes
Coronary heart disease
Breast, prostate, and thyroid cancers
Obesity (Luyster et al., 2012).
And your mental health can be impacted by poor sleep. There’s a link between sleep quality and stress, and between difficulty in sleeping (insomnia) and stress (Gardani et al., 2022). Poor sleep is a risk factor for depression, and you are more likely to feel fed up and irritable if you aren’t sleeping well. Good sleep health means reduced risk of negative health outcomes and increased likelihood of good health and wellbeing. It’s a two-way street, however: if you’re living with anxiety or depression, you may find sleep issues are a symptom. That’s one reason why, in counselling, a therapist may enquire about your sleep patterns and whether there’s been any change for you with sleep.
Poor sleep imapcts your mental wellbeing…
… and declining mental health can lead to poor sleep.
Common questions you might be asked about your sleep by a counsellor include:
In the last 2 weeks, how often have you difficulty in getting to sleep or staying asleep?
In the last 2 weeks, to what extent have you had trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much?
How much sleep should I be getting?
Many people ask how much sleep is enough? Perhaps you worry you’re not getting enough sleep? In responding to any question about how much sleep you need, it can be helpful to distinguish between quantity and quality of sleep. For a good night’s sleep, is it important you get enough sleep (duration) and that this sleep is of a high quality. You want to wake up feeling satisfied. Sleep quality has much to do with sleep cycles, which we’ll explore below. Sleep quantity requirements varies from person to person. But as a simple rule of thumb, most adults require somewhere between seven and nine hours of sleep, which is the amount of sleep the NHS recommends for healthy adults (Sleep problems, NHS website).
Children and adolescents need more sleep than adults. Older adults (65+) typically wake around 1.5 hours earlier than younger adults (aged 20 to 30) (Patel et al., 2022). You may already have an idea of how much sleep feels just right for you? Knowing what you need in relation to sleep is more important than meeting an arbitrary “average”.
Are you getting enough sleep?
“Enough” relates to both quality and quantity of sleep.
The role of sleep cycles in a good night’s sleep
Whether you wake feeling satisfied, rested and restored has much to do with your sleep cycles. Sleep is not simply a matter of “sleep” or “awake”. For quality sleep, you need to move through different sleep cycles, which can be thought of as different phases involved in your sleep.
There are four different sleep phases. As you sleep, you cycle through these phases that include light or shallow sleep, deep sleep, and REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep.
Sleep cycles have an impact on whether we experience our sleep as “quality sleep”. If you have had insufficient opportunity to enter these different phases, or too little of a given phase, you are likely to feel that your sleep was not of a high quality. Let’s look at the different phases of sleep:
Light sleep (phase 1):
As you transition from awake to sleep, you enter a phase of light sleep. Your muscles relax. Your brain activity, heart rate, breathing, and eye movements begin to slow. This phase typically lasts a few minutes.
Deeper sleep (phase 2):
As you enter a deeper sleep phase, your heart rate, breathing and brain waves slow further, and muscles become more relaxed. Your body temperature drops, and your eyes remain still. This is typically the longest of the four sleep phases in each cycle.
Deep sleep (phase 3):
Your heartbeat, breathing, and brain activity will slow further when you enter this deep sleep phase. Your muscles enter their most relaxed state. This phase of sleep is critical for feeling refreshed on waking. In the earlier sleep cycles, this phase is longer than in later sleep cycles. This phase of sleep is thought to be important in restoring your physical energy.
REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep (phase 4):
This is the final phase in your sleep cycles and typically first occurs around 90 minutes after falling asleep. In REM sleep, your eyes move back and forth quickly under our eyelids. There is an increase in your breathing, heart rate and blood pressure.
REM sleep is the phase of sleep when we dream. In REM sleep, your arms and legs become paralyzed. Typically, REM phases are shorter in length at the beginning of our sleep, increasing with later cycles closer to waking. This phase of sleep is thought to be important in restoring memory functions such as memory or concentration.
4-6 sleep cycles:
To experience quality sleep, you need to move through each of these 4 phases in a cycle several times each night (Memar & Faradji, 2018). Many smart watches or health tracker devices provide a breakdown of the amount of time you’ve spent in each phase. You may find you are aware of a brief period of wakefulness as you transition from REM sleep back to a light phase of sleep. It is usual for people to have these brief periods of waking in the night.
Impact of stress upon deep sleep:
Stress has a negative impact on deep sleep
Each of these phases are important to overall sleep health. Many people recognise they don’t experience enough deep sleep (phase 3). Research shows that people who experience stress are less likely to have reduced deep sleep. Tackling the causes of stress and implementing relaxation strategies can help with increased deep sleep, and sleep trackers can help to keep an eye on the levels of deep sleep you are getting. Of course, it is also possible to become stressed and anxious about not sleeping or not having enough of a certain sleep phase! That becomes counterproductive – anxiety makes it harder to relax and sleep well. So, whilst sleep trackers can be of use, it is important not to get stuck in an anxious cycle of monitoring and checking your sleep patterns. In our next blog, I’ll be exploring in more depth some of the strategies you can use to support yourself to feel relaxed and to make a good night’s sleep more likely.
My wish then, is that you can sleep well – and gain the mental and physical health benefits of a good night’s sleep. And, if you’d like to get some strategies and ideas about what you can do to support yourself towards that goal – please check out my next blog. Don’t forget, also, that therapy can be a helpful space to explore the stressors and the contributing factors that might be hindering your sleep, so you can better understand yourself and your relationship with sleep at a deeper level.
Get in touch
If you’re curious how counselling can help you with sleep issues, do make contact with me, Claire Law.
We can talk through how online counselling or face-to-face counselling at my therapy room in Preston can help with sleep issues.
References:
· AMA J Ethics. 2024;26(10):E784-794.
· Frank MG, Heller HC. The Function(s) of Sleep. Handb Exp Pharmacol. 2019; 253:3-34.
· Gardani M, Bradford DRR, Russell K, Allan S, Beattie L, Ellis JG, Akram U. A systematic review and meta-analysis of poor sleep, insomnia symptoms and stress in undergraduate students. Sleep Med Rev. 2022 Feb;61:101565.
· Khan, M. A., & Al-Jahdali, H. (2023). The consequences of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance. Neurosciences (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), 28(2), 91–99. https://doi.org/10.17712/nsj.2023.2.20220108
· Kuperczko, D., Kenyeres, P., Darnai, G., Kovacs, N., & Janszky, J. (2022). Sudden gamer death: non-violent death cases linked to playing video games. BMC psychiatry, 22(1), 824. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-022-04373-5
· Luyster, F. S., Strollo, P. J., Jr, Zee, P. C., Walsh, J. K., & Boards of Directors of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society (2012). Sleep: a health imperative. Sleep, 35(6), 727–734. https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.1846
· Memar P, Faradji F. A Novel Multi-Class EEG-Based Sleep Stage Classification System. IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2018 Jan;26(1):84-95.
· NHS website, Sleep problems,
· Patel AK, Reddy V, Shumway KR, et al. Physiology, Sleep Stages. [Updated 2022 Sep 7]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2022 Jan-.
· The Sleep Charity (2024). Dreaming of change: A manifesto for sleep.