Is your quality of sleep really worth the candle?
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my sleep over the last few days. The two main reasons for this are, a series of recent nights where I had very poor sleep, followed by watching the BBC Horizon programme last Thursday evening with Dr Michael Mosely highlighting the importance of a good night’s sleep.
My book, Find Time for Exercise, focuses on the benefits of regular exercise, but in chapter 25 I emphasise my belief that a healthy lifestyle has five key elements that I remember with the mnemonic SHEDS.
SHEDS stands for Sleep – Hydration – Exercise – Diet – Stretching.
Although the central message in my book is about adopting a physical exercise challenge, that exercise will be far more beneficial if you also make improvements in these other key areas of your life.
A quote that I really like is ‘you can’t outrun a bad diet’ which means that any benefits from a good exercise regime are only going to be cancelled out if you accompany your exercise with a bad diet. My suggestion in chapter 25 is to strive to make improvements in all five of these areas of your life. That way, you don’t get punished for neglecting one or two of these vital aspects.
Making improvements in four of these five aspects can be pretty straightforward. Make a conscious effort to drink more water, increase your determination to take more exercise, spend a bit more time doing stretching exercises and build more fresh fruit and vegetables into your daily diet. These all require a bit of thinking through and a certain amount of commitment and determination if the changes you make are going to become long-term improvements in your life. Finding and harnessing that commitment and determination is what my book is all about, so please check it out if you want to make those improvements.
The fifth aspect, sleep, is a bit more difficult to grapple with and presents something of a challenge if you want to make improvements in the quality and quantity of sleep that you take. You can get up on a morning and say, ‘I will drink two litres of water today and walk five kilometres’ and then just make sure you do it, but the night-time equivalent is getting into bed and saying, ‘I need eight hours sleep tonight’ and then just hoping that you soon drift off into a good nights’ sleep. But what happens if you’re still lying there at 03:20, wide awake, with your body refusing to sleep? You know that it’s going to affect the whole of your day ahead - your performance at work, your exercise, your relationships and the safety of yourself and all the people around you, but despite all that, you still can’t drop off to sleep.
I’m happy with the amount of exercise that I take and satisfied with my diet. I used to spend a lot of time dehydrated and had to make an effort to increase the amount of water I drink, but I’m content now that I drink the right amount of water. I increased the amount of stretching I do during the Covid lockdowns, and although I need to do a bit more, I feel I’m close to having the stretching aspect of my life about right.
Ah, but then there’s sleep. Last week’s Horizon programme has got me thinking about the subject of sleep and I now recognise it as the area that I most need to work on. My current sleep levels are nowhere near as bad as they were about thirty years ago when I went through a particularly bad phase, and for two or three years I rarely got more than about 90 minutes sleep per night. I don’t want to go back to that level of insomnia, but nevertheless, my sleep could be better and my task for the next few weeks is to learn more about sleep and make some improvements to my quality of sleep.
Have a think about the five aspects of SHEDS and ask yourself where you most need to make improvements and where you could maybe make some quick wins. If, like me, you feel you need to improve your sleep quality, then watch the Horizon programme, read into the subject and make an effort to adopt some kind of strategy to improve your sleep. The trick that I often use if I’m just lying there wide awake is to break the monotony of waiting for sleep to happen by getting up to go to the toilet and/or reading for a while. More often than not, that ‘break-the-cycle-then-try-again’ tactic works and I get off to a good sleep at the second attempt.
A term that was used in the Horizon programme was ‘sleep crisis’. For many people, it really is a crisis. That is the correct word to use. If sleep problems are affecting you, then my advice is to seek help and make every effort to do something about it.
