Editorial: A Winter’s Sleep

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In a town with as many A-type personalities as Greenwich, CT, we collectively do not get as much sleep as we should. This is as true at the Sentinel as it is anywhere.

Multiply the average recommended number of hours we should sleep in a day—eight—by the number of days in an average lifespan and we should spend more than 9,500 days resetting our brains. That’s one third of an average life asleep.

That is a lot of time not doing all those important and valuable things which need to be accomplished! How much sleep do we actually need?

In a series of experiments, researchers have proven that eight hours (not six or even seven) is the specific number human beings need in order to function at optimal levels.

What happens when we deprive ourselves, as many Greenwichites do, of some of those recommended eight hours?

Multiple studies have confirmed that to your brain, one sleepless night is the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk. Even the studies of groups that slept seven hours a night—a luxury!—showed clearly that they did not function at optimal levels.

We should all be getting no less than eight hours of sleep per night and it does not, apparently, count if we average eight hours over the course of a week. There is not a “sleep bank” that allows human beings to catch up on sleep.

Fun fact: human beings are the only animal species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep so if you regularly get six hours of sleep and feel terrific, you are not alone. After the first night of reduced sleep, researchers asked the participants of one study group, the six-hour-a- night group, how well they thought they did on their cognitive tests. They reported doing as well as they had after eight hours of sleep—even better perhaps. In reality, the tests were significantly worse than the ones done after eight hours of sleep.

There is hope for you die hard six-hour-a-night people though. If you’re feeling sleepy and want to wake yourself up — there is a new trend called a coffee nap: drinking a cup of coffee and then taking a quick nap.

It sounds crazy because caffeine interferes with sleep. The trick is to caffeinate immediately before napping and then to sleep for 15 or 20 minutes.

If you nap for longer than 15 or 20 minutes, your brain is more likely to enter deeper stages of sleep leading to sleep inertia — and it takes around 20 minutes for the caffeine to get to your bloodstream and affect your brain activity.

If you nap for those 20 minutes, you’ll wake just in time for the caffeine to kick in. The caffeine will actually be more effective in making you alert.

Experiments show coffee naps are better than coffee or naps. A Japanese study found those who took a coffee nap performed significantly better on tests compared with those who just took a nap.

Taking a coffee nap is pretty straightforward. First, drink coffee. Drink it quickly. Immediately try to go to sleep. Even reaching a tranquil half- asleep stage can be helpful. Make sure to wake up within 20 minutes.

Of course, getting the recommended eight hours is ideal and we hope Greenwich will recommit to this resolution in 2020.

We all respond to Robert Frost’s words: The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Getting enough sleep affects more than just how intelligent you are capable of being, it also makes you more patient, it makes it easier to lose weight, it wards off depression and other mental health issues, it improves your reaction times, and it generally makes us nicer human beings.

Something to consider in our very full lives in Greenwich.

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