You lay down and try to get some sleep, but after tumbling around, rolling from side to side you realize you can’t sleep. So you grab your smartphone and take a look at Instagram and see what Kanye West posted, watch a few YouTube videos that got recommended, watch docus about serial killers and then you look at the time and it is already nearly 2 am. Fuck. You think to yourself: “If I sleep now I have about 6 hours left to sleep”. You may have noticed, but these scenarios happen quite often and to quite a lot of people.
Studies show that the majority of people think they sleep not enough and this can lead to long-term consequences. Less sleep can cause obesity, a weakened immune system, mental illness and it also increases the probability to get a heart attack and cancer. Our productivity suffers from it.
Let’s take a step back and see what happens if we sleep. Our temperature sinks, our breathing, and heartbeat slow down. The muscularity gets calmed and our brain goes through different phases. Our latest information and events get processed and maybe we also dream. We recover from our daytime and our vital energy is restored. The required sleeping time is dependant from human to human, but in general, you can say 8-10 hours is a good time.
The biggest impact on our sleep schedule is the light. Our body has adapted to the change of night and day through the years. After it gets dark the body releases the hormone “Melatonin”, it sinks our heart rate and our body temperature, which makes us tired. In the morning the hormone “Cortisol” is released, which makes our heart beat faster and sinks the melatonin rate leading to us waking up. So our sleep is regulated by the sun you can say.
But nowadays our sleep schedule is not only influenced by the light. We stay more at home and stare at our smartphone while in the evening we put the light on and let us entertain by watching a series or spending time on our smartphones. We don’t get enough light in the daytime and the nighttime, we get too much. Our body can’t distinguish daylight with lamplight and so our biological clock gets irritated and our sleep schedule gets shifted to sleeping later. That alone is not something bad. But in modern society, we live in a world with constant change and we have to wake up very early to get to work/school, etc. Most of us can’t afford to lay down and sleep more. When our biological clock and social clock don’t align so we don’t get enough sleep you call that a “social jetlag”. That is the reason that the majority lacks sleep. A study in german schools proved that people waking up early have better grades than students waking up late.
So in conclusion what can we do to deal with this problem? I recommend getting more light during the daytime. It doesn’t hurt to take a walk and bathe yourself in the sunlight. And in the evening you should try turning it down a little bit, especially blue light should be avoided, and while trying to sleep it would be best to put your phone away.
Wish you all a good sleep.
Harry August 