HOW TO IMPROVE QUALITY OF SLEEP AND HEALTH

When it comes to staying healthy, everybody knows that "get a good night's sleep" is up there with "eat a balanced diet" and "get plenty of exercise." 

But what exactly is a "good night's sleep"? It hasn't really had a medical definition—until 2017, when the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) published new recommendations in the journal Sleep Health.

 What Makes a Sleep "Good"?

You know when sleep is bad—you snore a lot, you toss and turn, maybe you do a bit of sleep-eating (no judgments here). But what makes it good has been a point of contention among sleep researchers. 

That's why the NSF assembled a panel of experts to define it. The panelists pored through nearly 300 studies on sleep quality, reviewing and discussing their findings with one another. Finally, they voted on which criteria they thought were good indicators of sleep quality.

Humans have been sleeping throughout our existence, so why announce this now? According to the press release, it's because we're finally at a point where average people can measure their sleep quality on their own. 

Activity trackers and other gadgets seamlessly track how long you're sleeping, along with other criteria such as how much you toss and turn and how often you wake during the night. The researchers wanted to give people a way to truly know what that data means.

The Four Criteria Of Good Sleep

Without further ado, here are the qualities the panel thought categorized a good night sleep:

1. Taking longer than 30 minutes to fall asleep

Very few people fall asleep the moment their head hits the pillow. Taking up to 30 minutes to go to sleep is normal and nothing to worry about.

If it regularly takes you longer than 30 minutes, there are some possible approaches you might consider. These are:

• Try and make the hour before bed a quiet and relaxing ‘wind down’ time.
• If you’re worried about work, life, family or health, you could try some relaxation or mindfulness techniques.
• Try to avoid checking emails, social media or playing video games before bed.
• You may be going to bed too early, rather than when you’re tired enough to sleep.

2. Waking up too often at night

Do you wake up for 5 minutes or longer, more than once per night? Or if you’re over 65 years old, more than twice per night?

During normal sleep you go through various stages of light and deep sleep. So if you wake up a couple of times, but go back to sleep reasonably quickly, it’s probably not a problem.

But if you find you wake up lots of times, it may disturb your sleep phases and result in poor quality sleep.

If this happens to you on a regular basis, you might also want to consult your doctor, as frequent awakenings could be due to a treatable health issue, such as sleep apnea.

Equally, it could be due to other factors, such as eating a big meal late at night, drinking alcohol before bed, medication, external noise, you or your partner snoring.

3. Fall back to sleep within 20 minutes

Most people probably hope they’ll fall asleep again pretty quickly if they wake up in the night. But the researchers suggest that taking 20 minutes to fall back to sleep isn’t unusual and is nothing to worry about, especially if you’re relaxed in bed.

However, it might become problematic if you wake up in the night several times and often take that long to fall back to sleep.

If it takes you longer than 20 minutes, you might worry that you’re never going to get back to sleep again that night. In which case you might fall into the vicious circle of worrying about sleep making it even harder to get to sleep.

So if it does take you longer than 20 minutes, the experts often advise that you get out of bed for 10-15 minutes. During that time, you could do something relaxing such as reading, listening to music or having a relaxing caffeine-free drink.

Equally, it’s better to avoid the temptation of watching TV, surfing the internet, checking emails or social media.

You might also want to consider how you feel in bed. Are you comfortable and cozy? If you’re uncomfortable or you’re too hot or cold, you might want to make changes to your bed, bedding and room temperature.

Even simple things like mattress toppers, heated or cooling mattress pads, or different bed sheets and pillows can make an enormous difference.

4. You sleep for 85% of the time you’re in bed

Ideally, the best outcome is if you’re asleep for 85% of the time you’re in bed. So once you subtract the time it takes to fall asleep and any nocturnal wakings, the idea is that you’re in fact still asleep for most of the night.

If you’re within the normal ranges for the first three characteristics above, then this final point should take care of itself.

The table below shows the times you should aim to sleep for compared to the total time between going to bed and getting up in the morning.

Time in bed for sleep   - Asleep for

9 Hrs -     7 Hrs 40 Mins

8 Hrs -     6 Hrs 50 Mins

7 Hrs -     6 Hrs

How do you know how well you slept?

Sleep professionals will often say that we’re not always the best judges of how well we’ve actually slept. In many cases, sleep studies suggest that people sleep better and for longer than they think they do.

One way of checking is to keep a detailed sleep log, trying your best to calculate the times, but without spending half the night checking your clock of course. And you could also try using a sleep tracker.

How you feel during the day

A key point really is that we’re all different, and although some people can get by on less sleep, others need a full night’s sleep to be at their best.

So as well as following these useful guidelines, an essential question is how you feel during the daytime. Do you feel refreshed when you wake up and alert all day? If not then you’re probably sleep deprived.

For me, the subjective ‘how I feel’ assessment is just as important as trying to compare your own sleep with normal sleep characteristics .

Nevertheless, if you’re not a consistently good sleeper, these guidelines will hopefully provide some clues as to which aspects of your sleep are average and which might not be normal.

And just knowing this might help you focus on one aspect at a time, rather than trying to solve all your sleep problems in one go.

Your thoughts

I’m interested to hear if you found any of the above points useful. And do they seem to you to be the right parameters for judging your sleep quality?

Please feel free to leave a comment below.