Self Help

Are you getting enough sleep at night? No one knows how much sleep you really need, it varies from person to person. What matters is how you feel when you wake up. Do you wake up in the morning feeling refreshed? Do you feel energetic? Are you able to concentrate on your everyday task? If so, you may have no problem sleeping at all.

However, if you identify with the following statements, you may be having trouble either falling asleep or staying asleep:

1. Waking up feeling tired.
2. Cannot fully concentrate.
3. Feeling drowsy and always needing a nap.
4. Experiencing memory loss.
5. Nodding off while driving or eating.
6. Lacking energy throughout the day.

If you feel you need help, talk to your health care provider. He may refer you to a sleep clinic where they will monitor your sleep patterns. This is the most accurate way to ascertain the type and quality of your sleep. It can also quantify how much sleep you are getting.

The data will help your doctor prescribe the appropriate treatment, particularly in the event that you have sleep apnea, narcolepsy, or some other sleep disorder. During just one night at a sleep clinic, brain wave measurement tests can tell whether a person is asleep, what kinds of sleep he is experiencing, and the duration of sleep.

If you don’t have a sleeping problem, but are curious as to what your sleep requirements are, you can conduct your own private experiment, best carried out on a holiday, when you are not pressured for time, stressed, or unable to establish a fixed routine. The process is simple. It is designed to pinpoint what time you would wake if you could respond only to your own needs.

Every night for two weeks, go to bed at the same time, keeping a note of how long it took you to fall asleep and what time you woke up. Do not use an alarm clock. This test is designed to establish at what time you would wake naturally. Expect to sleep longer than usual the first few days or so. If you have been working hard or sleeping less than you should, your body may need a while to make up that deficit.

After two weeks, an overall pattern should emerge, and you can work out more accurately what time you should be going to bed and how much sleep you really need. You can then adjust your sleeping habits accordingly. If it takes, say, one and a half hours to go to sleep, this could indicate a circadian rhythm problem. If that is the case, give up trying to defeat your biological clock and delay your bedtime accordingly.