Your sleep is linked to how well you’re living your life, and in the grind, it can be hard to overlook it. Sometimes we may oversleep in the day on the weekend and lose sleep at night time. This cycle can lead to reduced sleep quality at night, but you’ve probably slept more in the day and night time combined. Sometimes you may even end up sleeping more in the night but end up waking in between multiple times lying in bed staring at a wall. So, how do such patterns impact our lifestyle and, most notably, our health? It is critical to know when to sleep, how to sleep, but most importantly, to know whether to sleep more or to sleep better.
Before we jump into determining how well or how long you should sleep, it is essential to know the variance of sleep quality by age. Over the years, we tend to need less and less sleep, and you should keep the quantity in mind to know if you’re sleeping the necessary hours. Here is how much you need to sleep depending upon age:
1. Newborns and infants: Newborns (0–3 months) and infants (4–11 months) need 14–17 hours and 12–15 hours, respectively.
2. Toddlers: Toddlers that are between 1–2 years old need 12–15 hours of sleep.
3. Preschool: Preschoolers (3–5 years) need to sleep between 10–13 hours.
4. School: School-going or middle school children (6–13 years) need around 9–11 hours of sleep.
5. Teen: A teenager (13–17 years) needs 8–10 hours of sleep.
6. Adult: Young adults (18–25 years) need up to 7–9 hours of sleep. Adults between 26–64 years need 7–9 hours and senior citizens between 7–8 hours.
If you can find yourself sleeping fewer hours than the mentioned healthy range as per age, it is time to look at your sleeping patterns.
So here is how sleep quality and sleep quantity affect your overall well-being and how to improve both.
Sleep quality:
Your sleep quality is a measure of how well you sleep or how easily you’re able to sleep without interruptions. Sleep quality also takes into consideration different factors that impact your short and long-term health:
1. Sleep environment: Your sleeping environment constitutes everything from your room humidity, air ventilation, sleeping aids like mattresses and pillows, to lighting. While it may not be possible to attain perfection in each, improving your sleep environment plays a critical role in your sleep quality levels. Using the right supportive and comfortable mattress for your body type, the proper lighting, air conditioning, and circulation are factors that play an essential role in allowing you to sleep comfortably without interruption.
2. Sleeping habits: Our daily lives are chaotic enough as it is, and one of the best periods to sit back, relax, and unwind. Unfortunately, some unwinding methods may be comfortable in the short and conscious waking term, but not so much in the long term. Catching a movie with snacks just before going to sleep may be comforting and help you sleep but severely impacts your REM cycles and long-term sleep. Similarly, your sleep hygiene also plays a vital role in your sleep quality. Sleep hygiene is what you eat, watch, read, or expose yourself that could either stress or help you unwind.
3. Evening/late night diet: Your late-night diet or heavy evening snacks also impact your sleep quality heavily. Hard beverages, oily or fatty junk food like pizzas, fried chicken often dehydrate your body and make you tired. You feel exhausted afterward but having oily or fatty junk food late at night uses a lot of energy to digest, which goes against the principle of resting and sleep. So, to avoid waking up for water or bathroom breaks, it would be best to munch on light and non-processed food that helps you sleep better. Chamomile tea, turmeric, and other options can help you soothe, whereas caffeine, hard liquor, or junk food would end up keeping you awake.
4. Sleep disorders: Sleep disorders like sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, parasomnias like night terrors, and sleepwalking have the worst impact on your sleep quality. Not only do they pose short and long-term health risks, but they also impact your sleep quality, and as a consequence, your waking lifestyle too. Although you can improve your lifestyle and eventually prevent sleep disorders, most severe disorders often need advanced medical care.
How to improve sleep quality:
1. Go for mindful sleep habits: You can change your sleeping habits one step at a time. Motivation may only last a day, but small gradual changes and powerful motivation go a long way into creating discipline. To improve your sleep quality, work on improving your sleep hygiene and changing bedtime habits. Habits like reading (on non-electronic devices), cleaning your room, planning the next day are beneficial. Generally, habits that need a longer attention span and avoiding social media, action games, electronic exposure, spending time with family are suitable for your mental health. These habits directly influence and improve your sleep quality, improving your lifestyle and life quality.
2. Regulate your diet: As mentioned earlier, your diet should be light and free of processed food, especially if you’re having trouble sleeping. An essential thing to keep in mind when you’re aiming for better sleep quality is not eating close to bedtime. The closer you eat to sleep, the more time your body spends energy in digestion, eventually waking you up for washroom breaks or water in the middle of the night. Having a healthier diet in the daytime is definitely helpful.
3. Better sleep environment: Your sleep environment should have a mattress that supports and comforts your body as per your preferences and body requirements. The same type of mattress doesn’t support or cushion everyone the same way, and it is one of the most critical factors in ensuring you sleep better. Your pillow and mattress are essential for the physical sense of comfort and security, which is primal in ensuring better sleep quality. Similarly, air regulation, room temperature, and even your room cleanliness are a part of your sleep environment. You can start with small steps and ensure you’re sleeping right no matter what.
4. Limit digital exposure: Your smartphone/PC or any digital exposure decreases your sleep quality drastically. Pandemic or not, most people prefer taking their work, entertainment, or other activities to bed with digital assistance. You may have emergency uses for calls on rare occasions, but most of the time, digital exposure is something you can avoid when going to bed. The screens emit a bright light spectrum that contains a blue wavelength, perceived by our monkey brain as daylight. The best way to ensure better sleep quality is not by eliminating screen usage altogether but slowly decreasing usage until you can see how better you sleep without it.
5. Exercise: Exercise is one of the most important factors of our lives to ensure we don’t attract diseases, and they’re just as essential to prevent sleep disorders and sleep better. Exercise not only keeps your body in shape (obesity is one of the causes of sleep apnea, overheating, snoring, among other disorders) but also keeps your body working in top shape. Because of these preventative measures and our body’s healthier working to promote an optimally working circadian rhythm, exercise and diet go hand in hand.
Sleep quantity and how to improve:
Your sleep quantity is simply how long you sleep each night. Most people may even prefer an afternoon siesta, but it’s not the best to ensure a healthy lifestyle and nighttime habits. Afternoon power naps are beneficial, but if you’re sleeping from afternoon till evening, you’ll need less sleep at night, resulting in low sleep quality and quantity. As mentioned above, sleep quantity varies by age, but we all need continuous, no-interruptions to sleep to be in good shape mentally and physically.
If your sleep quality is not up to the mark, your sleep quantity would be worse off too. How well you sleep impacts your deep sleep, your metabolism, body clock and directly impacts your sleep quantity. To ensure that you go to sleep on time and wake up on time, you should follow all the tips above to aim for better sleep quality and more:
1. Body clock timing: Your body clock plays an essential role in how you sleep and sleep. One of the best ways to ensure you sleep the correct number of hours every day is consistency in your schedule. It could take discipline and significant life decisions (changing graveyard shift jobs to morning), but your body and mind would be better off in the end. Your body clock appreciates consistency and sleeping at odd hours, late-night, or random times (some sleep in the afternoon and some at night), aren’t the best options. Sometimes it can be easier said than done, but if you’re looking for ways to sleep longer, being aware of your waking routine is the first step.
2. Daytime diet: Do you tend to feel sleepy or yawny and finding it challenging to keep your eyes open after lunch? Your lunch nutrition (excessive carbohydrates, oil, or processed sugars) could be the culprit. The best way to ensure you sleep longer at night is to avoid foods that make you sleepy in the evening or daytime. Your diet also plays a vital role in ensuring better sleep quality at night, and if you can avoid sleeping long hours in the day, your nighttime sleeping hours would increase.
3. Manage overall well-being: There’s no doubt that your lifestyle impacts everything about your sleep. Your professional and personal problems, inability to control lifestyle issues lead to chronic diseases. Improving your lifestyle not only improves your sleep quality but quantity too. Exercise, the proper diet, your mindfulness, and overall positive habits can help you sleep better. However, the most critical factor in ensuring you sleep right is your stress levels at any time of the day. Higher blood pressure can severely impact your sleep, cause you chronic diseases, make it difficult for you to focus and even rest properly.
4. Better sleep hygiene: Parasomnias happen when you’re not in a deep sleep, and either sleep disorders or subconscious brain activity causes our body to act weird, despite being asleep. Often, parasomnias may result from bad sleep quality, but they impact our sleeping hours, and most importantly, how we feel after waking up. To improve your sleep quality, work on your sleep quality- avoid digital exposure in the first place. Here are some tips to improve sleep hygiene:
a. Avoid action/horror media: Although the two aren’t comparable, your work stress and the kind of exposure your brain gets before bedtime determines how well you sleep. It feeds into your subconscious mind, to eventually manifest in nightmares or physical sleep disorders. That is why you should avoid any stressful or anxiety-inducing media or thought patterns before sleep.
b. Dark bedroom: A dark environment is essential in helping us sleep longer. Before sleep, your lighting should be mostly warmer in color and wholly dark or minimal direct light exposure. Your body needs a dark environment to sleep better and longer as we get more melatonin during the night than in daytime or well-lit sleep environments.
c. Consistency: Go to bed early and rise early. If you’re planning on waking up early yet unable to sleep or leave work to go to bed on time, you should hit the pillow at least 8–9 hours in advance. As adults, you need to sleep up to 7–9 hours, and going to bed early can help you unwind than leaving work at the last moment.
Conclusion:
Your sleep is one of the essential things in life. We might take it for granted, but we need both better and longer sleep in our lives. So, if you’re having issues sleeping even after attempts to manage your habits, visit a sleep doctor to consult for a potential diagnosis and work on your health accordingly.
