Sleep for Recovery Part 2: Sleeping

We all know how to sleep, right? Yes, but there are some things you can do to ensure a better night of rest.

The Right Environment

When it comes to creating the ideal sleep environment there are some hard and fast rules and personal preferences. Human bodies like to sleep in dark and cool spaces (around 18-19 degrees Celsius). Knocking down the thermostat and limiting ambient light in your bedroom can go a long way towards facilitating some great sleep.

When it comes to noise, everyone’s a little different. I prefer perfect silence but am also totally okay with some white noise or even a bit of music or nature noises. If you find you are easily kept awake by irregular noises (e.g. traffic noises or neighbours) consider getting a white noise machine or turning on a fan to generate white noise to drown them out.

Similarly some people love sleeping next to their partner and some people don’t. If you find your partner’s snoring or tossing about keeps you up then it’s time to do something about it (within reason). Snoring can be muffled by earplugs (or by the snorer using a CPAP machine or nasal strips) and tossing can be mitigated by each sleeper having their own blanket and investing in an appropriately sized bed (for maximum sleeping real estate consider getting a king sized bed or even a California king rotated so that there’s maximum width at the expense of a little length).

The Right Mindset

Everyone with stress-induced insomnia knows that circuitous thoughts can keep you up for hours. Sometimes there’s little that can be done about this, but if you find yourself thinking about a specific thing (or things) nonstop while trying to sleep there are some things you can try.

For starters, don’t keep it bottled up. Sometimes just talking something out with someone can help ease that mental burden, at least for a little while. If the matter is too private to discuss or if there’s no one around to listen then you can always dump it onto the page. Journaling before bed is a great way to organize your thoughts and can sometimes be the circuit breaker in a chain of endlessly looping worried thoughts.

Even if you’re not plagued by negative thoughts you can still improve your sleeping mindset by focusing on positives (such as looking forward to that first cup of coffee that will be yours when you wake up).

Staying Accountable with your Sleep Health

I started this post by saying that everyone knows how to sleep and this is true, but almost to a fault. We’re so confident in our natural ability to sleep that we can be oblivious when we’re not doing it well. When it comes to sleep quality is just as important as quantity.

Obviously it doesn’t help that we as a society are collectively more sleep deprived than ever and also unconscious while we sleep (two things that make it hard to assess the actual quality of our sleep). But there are clues. It makes sense that the number one indicator for poor sleep quality is daytime sleepiness even when a sufficient quantity of sleep (7-9 hours) has been achieved consistently. A number of things can cause poor quality sleep. One of the most common is frequent wakings during the night (caused by the need to use the bathroom, loud noises, nightmares, bed-fellows, pain, etc.). Other causes may be more subtle.

One of the most common sleep disorders, sleep apnea, is also one of the most undiagnosed disorders in all of medicine. Sleep apnea is a condition where breathing stops periodically throughout the night causing a drop in blood oxygen and frequent wake-ups. Recent research suggests that close to a tenth of the population may have sleep apnea. I attended the annual World Sleep Congress meeting in Vancouver in 2019 and was shocked to hear one of the keynote speakers claim that up to 80% of sleep apnea cases are undiagnosed! Some indications of having sleep apnea include waking up with a headache/sore throat and being told you snore dreadfully or stop breathing in the night. If you have any suspicions it’s worth getting tested. It’s free and can be done in the comfort of your own home.

Sleep issues are incredibly common. What’s not common, however, is getting help for those issues. For some reason poor sleep is something that many of us have decided to just accept as part of our lives. But it doesn’t have to be. Good sleep is worth striving for and whether it’s seeking information from books and experts or going for a visit to your family doctor, it’s worth pursuing with just as much tenacity as you might any other medical issue.