What Is a Good Night's Sleep?

What Is a Good Night's Sleep?

Let's define the perfect snooze. Like many people, you may be so used to your own sleep patterns, however imperfect, that you don't know what you might be missing.

For most people, the best sleep takes eight hours, runs from dark to dawn – ideally from ten p.m. Or earlier to six a.m. or so – and leaves you feeling great. You should actually start to feel sleepy within about three hours after the sun sets as your sleep-promoting brain chemicals are triggered by by the reduced light. When you actually hit the pillow, it should take only a few minutes for you to get to sleep. Once you get to sleep, you should stay asleep through the night (without bathroom trips!). Ideally, you'll go through a series of vital sleep sequences that take at least eight hours to complete (children need twelve hours). At least six of those hours should be ininterrupted.

There are five stages of sleep that constitute a sleep cycle, and you need to go through four to five sleep cycles in one night. You'll usually pass through the first two superficial sleep stages in your first half hour of sleep. Then, hopefully, you'll drop into two progressively deeper sleep stages and stay there for most of the next few hours. This first half of the night, literally between ten p.m. and two a.m., potentially provides the most restorative sleep, because only while you sleep deeply can your immune system, your growth hormones, and other repair crews emerge to heal your body from the day's ravages. Finally, you dream in the REM (rapid eye movement) stage, which seems to be designed particularly for psychic repair. These five stages repeat throughout the night, though the second half of the night has more rapid ups, downs, and dreams than the first half.

If you sleep poorly, your mind and body are deprived of crucial cellular repairs that can be made only if you sleep long and deeply. You know what happens when you can't bring your car into the shop for its routine maintenance? You run it into the ground and shorten its “life span”. Same thing here. So you should find out what's really keeping you up. But first let's get clear on what your particular sleep disturbance looks like.

In desperation we look into the hoary old idea of remote-controlled mining. Photo by Elena.

What is your sleeplessness like?

Do you sleep habits include any of the following basic flows?:

Are you a night owl? If so, like many people, you may not think that you have a sleep disturbance at all. You may actually consider your late nights a blessing. It can be fun – you get things done, you get some time alone when everyone else is asleep (unless you've spawned some baby night owls). But it's not fun in the morning if you need to get up so early that you can't get a full eight hours of sleep. Chances are, you are chronically undersleeping and feeling out of sync with your spouse – and the rest of the world. Being a night owl is a key symptom of either abnormally low serotonin or excessively high stress-coping hormones.

On the other hand, you may lie awake in frustration most nights for too long. Do you go over and over worries about the past day or the next day before you can finally get to sleep? Or do you just lie there? Do anxiety, pain, panic, or disturbing dreams wake you up in the night or too early in the morning? Or do you take too long to get back to sleep or not get back to sleep at all? Are you a restless, thrashing sleeper or a light one? Do you wake up at the slightest sounds?

Are you proud to call yourself a “morning person” who wakes up very early no matter what time you get to sleep?

Do you rarely get more than six hours of sleep a night? Do you wake up worried or anxious and have to get up and exercise or work on whatever is bothering you? Finally, are you one of the four million poorly adjusted shift workers who try to sleep during the day? Whatever part of your night's sleep you're missing, you should think about it.

Why aren't you getting enough sleep?

If you answered yeas to any of the above questions, you are likely to ave at least one deficiency in your body's sleep-producing chemistry. Let's start with the most common cause of sleep disturbance. It has to do with the brain chemical serotonin. But serotonin is an antidepressant, you might be thinking, what does it have to do with sleep? What you may not know is that this extraordinary biochemical mood marvel is also the only substance from which your brain can produce its most potent knockout drop: melatonin.

Your sleep is supposed to be induced by a biochemical concert that features gradually increasing levels of melatonin, starting in the afternoon and reaching crescendo at about ten p.m. Melatonin is produced out of serotonin by your pineal gland, a pea-size structure embedded deep within your brain. The pineal gland, which consists of pigment cells similar to those found in your eyes, is light sensitive. Very gradually throughout the afternoon a and evening, as light gives way to darkness, the transformation of serotonin into melatonin is supposed to increase until it lullabies you to sleep. But here's the catch: Melatonin can be produced in adequate amount only if you have enough serotonin on hand from which to make it.

(From The Mood Cure, by Julia Ross, m.a. Author of the Diet Cure).

We can't appreciate the condition of sleep. Photo by Elena.