This Is the Most Important Habit To Have if You Want To Get 8 Hours of Sleep Tonight
If you want to fall asleep quickly and sleep all night, read this.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a third of adults in the United States report getting less than the recommended amount of sleep, defined as “seven or more hours a night" for adults.
“Sleep is essential for both your body and mind to function well,” explains Michelle Drerup, PsyD, Sleep Disorders Center, Cleveland Clinic. Healthy sleep allows your body to repair and rebuild and stay healthy, she adds. For example, many important processes happen during sleep including muscle repair and tissue growth, enhanced immune functioning, hormone release and protein synthesis.
“Sleep helps regulate the hormones that control appetite and metabolism, helping maintain a healthy weight and metabolic function,” adds Dr. Christine Won, MD, associate professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine and director of the Women's Sleep Medicine Program at Yale Medicine. It also helps regulate cytokines that help fight infections and helps balance cytokines that cause inflammation.
There is a mental health component to getting enough sleep as well, per Drerup. “In addition to physical health, sleep is important for your mental health and ability to manage stress,” she says, citing research suggesting that lack of sleep contributes to the onset and maintenance of mental health problems. Sleep is also critical for learning and memory consolidation.
Unfortunately, sleep deprivation or lack of sleep can “[cause] poor memory, poor learning, over-estimation of threat, reduced sociability, weight gain and increased susceptibility to infection or long-term inflammatory disease,” Won says.
Related: 13 Tips on Improving Sleep, Including a Coffee Nap
What Is the Best Habit To Get 8 Eight Hours of Sleep?
According to both Drerup and Won, the number one best habit if you want to get eight hours of sleep tonight is quite simple: stick to a consistent sleep schedule—and don’t sleep any longer than eight hours!
“Go to bed and get up at the same time every day, including weekends,” says Drerup. “Being consistent reinforces your body's sleep-wake cycle.” Dr. Won explains that doing this involves action—mainly building a bedtime routine that encourages a full eight hours of slumber. “It is easy to cut corners with sleep when busy with life tasks. However, getting enough sleep is important [for] performance, mood and health, so [it] should be prioritized,” she says. Not only does building a bedtime routine force you to prioritize sleep, but also promotes efficient and quality sleep, training your body “to be optimally sleepy and optimally alert when you want it to be,” she says.
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What should a bedtime routine look like? It may involve light stretching or exercise, relaxation activities, and/or a hot shower—“activities that demarcate your busy day from your bedtime,” notes Dr. Won.
More importantly, however, it is important to wake up around the same time every morning, and get some light within a few minutes of waking up, she says. “This is important to anchor your circadian rhythm, and to ensure that you are able to fall asleep when you want to fall asleep at night, and to feel alert during the daytime.”
Related: 6 Ways to Get More Deep Sleep Tonight
A Habit That Will Stop You From Getting Good Sleep
We’ve all been there: lying in bed awake, staring at the ceiling, trying to fall asleep. According to Drerup, lying awake in bed is the number one worst habit that will come in between you and your eight hours." If someone is having trouble falling asleep, the worst thing to do is lie there awake, getting more frustrated and anxious about sleep. If this happens frequently, one tends to associate their bed with anxiety and not being able to sleep,” she says.
Dr. Won adds another big offender: using electronics at bedtime, “and more so, using them in bed,” she says. “They not only expose you to bright light that can suppress your melatonin secretion and delay your circadian rhythm, but can also stimulate you to stay awake longer than you intend,” she says. “It is best to stop using all electronics several hours before bedtime.”
Next up: What Is Insomnia? Here's What You Need to Know
Sources
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Sleep and Sleep Disorders
Christine Won, MD, associate professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine and director of the Women's Sleep Medicine Program at Yale Medicine
Michelle Drerup, PsyD, Sleep Disorders Center, Cleveland Clinic
