![]() ![]() Ah, I know you're thinking, Wouldn't it be great if we cut down on this “wasted” time to be able to do more! When I was younger, I, too, lived by the motto “You can sleep when you're dead.” But I've woken up to the fact that for optimal, long-term physical and mental health, we need sleep. Cumulatively, this amounts to several decades' worth of sleep over the lifetime of an average person. We spend about one third of our lives in a state of repose, defined by relative behavioral immobility and reduced responsiveness to external stimuli. Fortunately, fatigue is reversible and disappears after a night or two of solid sleep. Attention wanders, your reaction time slows, you have less cognitive-emotional control. The reasons for sleeplessness may be many, but the consequences are always the same: You are fatigued the following day, you feel sleepy, you nap. You toss and turn but can't find the blessed relief of sleep. But sometimes your inner world does not turn off-your mind remains hypervigilant. A timeless interval later, you wake up, refreshed and ready to face the challenges of a new day (note how you can never catch yourself in the act of losing consciousness!). You go to bed, close your eyes, blanket your mind and wait for consciousness to fade. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever.” My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. Your GP could also look at any possible underlying health conditions.“It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. There is some research to show that exposure to sunlight in the morning also helps regulate your body clock, and if you frequently get up late, or don’t go outside, you may not get this exposure. Both of these things could help to shift your sleep cycle to an earlier sleep/rise pattern. Your GP may also be able to prescribe melatonin for you in the short term to help you get to sleep earlier, and you may want to consider getting a light box, possibly to use in the morning. ![]() I would go to your GP and ask to be referred to your nearest sleep clinic (it may not be that near and the waiting lists are long). If you have a cycle that starts later than the “norm”, you won’t be producing melatonin until later. When we start to feel sleepy, our body produces melatonin to help us fall asleep. You may be a person who not only needs more sleep, but who has a delayed sleep cycle. I think we can get very hung up on averages and forget that there are people above and below that average. If you were to “consistently go to bed in the early hours, that might tell us your circadian rhythm is delayed compared with the norm – and if you sleep for 10 hours, that would tell us you have a longer-than-average sleep requirement”. If you score more than 11, that might be something a sleep clinic looks at.ĭr Zeman wondered what happens when you are totally left to your own devices to go to bed when you want and get up when you want, without family or work expectations. Do you nap? Do you feel sleepy? There’s a useful Epworth sleepiness scale quiz you can do to test daytime sleepiness. Dr Zeman would also look at what you’re like during the day. If anything is disrupting your sleep (and you may not realise it) you may not be getting the restorative sleep you need, so need to sleep for longer. Your GP may prescribe melatonin to help you get to sleep earlier, and you could consider getting a light box to use in the mornings “Conditions I would have in the back of my mind during this assessment include obstructive sleep apnoea, in which snoring leads to pauses in breathing which disrupt sleep and, less likely, narcolepsy which can disrupt both sleep and wakefulness,” he added. He said that if he were seeing you in his sleep clinic he would take a full sleep history. I went to Dr Adam Zeman, a professor of neurology at the University of Exeter medical school who has been treating sleep disorders for 25 years. I don’t want to burden my husband with all the morning childcare either, nor do I want to miss out on doing fun things as a family because I couldn’t get up in time. I’ve been worrying about it more recently because my husband and I are going through the process of adopting a child, and I worry that I won’t be able to get up to see to their needs, or that I’ll be a grumpy parent all the time. I don’t feel this is depression because I have a lot that I look forward to, and this has been a problem all my adult life. I feel like requiring more than 10 hours a night in order to feel energised is excessive. ![]()
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