Cheat on the Need to Sleep
Quality not quantity. No matter how much your mother tells you that you need eight hours of sleep, if you're not tired and you can't truly relax, your sleep time will be worthless.
Robin Lloyd of Live Science reports that at the 2006 National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference, experts agreed, according psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego on the following recommendations for obtaining optimum sleep value:
* Do not take sleeping pills. This includes over-the-counter pills and melatonin.
* Don't go to bed until you're sleepy. If you have trouble sleeping, try going to bed later or getting up earlier.
* Get up at the same time every morning, even after a bad night's sleep. The next night, you'll be sleepy at bedtime.
* If you wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back to sleep, get out of bed and return only when you are sleepy.
* Avoid worrying, watching TV, reading scary books, and doing other things in bed besides sleeping and sex. If you worry, read thrillers or watch TV, do that in a chair that's not in the bedroom.
* Do not drink or eat anything caffeinated within six hours of bedtime.
* Avoid alcohol. It's relaxing at first but can lead to insomnia when it clears your system.
* Spend time outdoors. People exposed to daylight or bright light therapy sleep better.
A six-year study Kripke headed up of more than a million adults ages 30 to 102 showed that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep. The risk from taking sleeping pills 30 times or more a month was not much less than the risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, he says.
