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Sleep is so important.
We need it to live.
And when we can't sleep, we're desperate for help.
[Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter]
But lately, our
.
fascination
with sleep feels as if it's taken on an
Do a quick internet search for sleep and you'll find a
of articles
about how to make your sleep perfect.
New
gadgets
, fancy alarm clocks,
stay away from
blue light
.
There are lots of services, products and advice columns
that tell us we're sleeping wrong.
Not enough,
no quality sleep, wrong position.
Even worse, you might find scary messaging
claiming that if you're not sleeping right
your life is going to be shorter
you're going to get all kinds of diseases.
One of the biggest worries we have about our sleep
is that we're not getting enough
and that anything less than seven hours a night
means that we’re
to bad health
everything from high blood pressure to Alzheimer’s disease
But there are two
with this kind of messaging.
The first flaw is that it's not completely accurate.
Seven to eight hours of sleep,
while recommended for adults, is just an average
And while messages have to be simplified for health communication to the public,
sometimes important nuances get lost.
So yes, it's true that not getting enough sleep in the long term
is associated with health problems like cardiovascular disease,
diabetes and depression.
But
fixating
solely on seven to eight hours
ignores the fact that there's a range of sleep that people need.
The duration of a good night's sleep can be different for different people.
Some adults need eight, but some are just fine on six.
The second flaw with this kind of
messaging
is that it can be
,
especially for people who do have trouble sleeping.
For instance, in 2019
it was estimated that 21 percent of adults in the US
were wearing sleep tracking devices.
And that number is probably growing.
And I get it.
It's
fascinating
to see how much sleep you've gotten each night
and to know what part of your night was spent in deep sleep or dreaming.
But having all of that sleep data
is causing some people to become
with it
so much so that it’s leading to a condition some call orthosomnia:
a preoccupation with the constant need to achieve perfect sleep.
And this condition,
, is causing more sleep problems!
Now orthosomnia might be an extreme example
but the anxiety of not getting enough sleep
is keeping some of us up at night.
So here's what some experts are saying.
Stop
fixating
on the number
because that can lead to unrealistic expectations of sleep.
According to Dr. Colleen Carney
a psychologist and the head of the Ryerson University Sleep Lab
the basic questions you should ask yourself are:
Do I feel reasonably well-rested during the day?
Do I generally sleep through the night without
?
Or, if I wake, do I fall back asleep easily?
Can I stay awake through the day without
falling asleep?
If your answers are yes to all three,
you probably don't need to worry about your sleep.
And if you're struggling with your sleep,
instead of buying expensive
blue light
filters
or fancy sleep trackers,
try talking with your doctor to make sure there aren't any medical conditions
that need to be explored first.
Then try
evidence-based
recommendations
laid out by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
What's really cool is that there's a highly effective therapy
called cognitive behavioral therapy for
, or
CBT-I
,
It doesn’t have any
involved.
And it has a really low failure rate.
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