And why do you wake up in the first place?
There’s nothing more annoying than waking up in the middle of the night, feeling very tired, and not being able to go back to sleep. (On second thought, it’s more annoying if your partner sleeps peacefully next to you, and more so if they’re snoring.)
But seriously, who has gone to bed at 10 p.m. to sleep without worries and wakes up six hours later tired and activated?
“It’s a very common question and the first thing we have to recognize is that we wake up multiple times a night because of sleep cycles,” said Dr. Dev Banerjee, a sleep specialist at Integrated Sleep Health.
” Cycles are about 90 minutes or two hours, but I think we tend to have more cycles the bigger we are and we can’t maintain deep sleep for as long as we used to.
But most of the time we wake up after a cycle, turn around, change positions or drink water and go back to sleep. So we woke up several times in the night.
“When people come to me and say, ‘I wake up a lot at night and can’t go back to sleep, I explain to them that the problem is not that they wake up, but that they can’t go back to sleep.'”
Why is it so easy to fall asleep at first but not at 3 in the morning?
“You have to think of sleeping and waking up as being like yin and yang,” Banjeree says. “You go to bed at night and immediately start paying off sleep debt that accumulated for more than 16 hours.”
“By the time you wake up at 4 a.m., you’ve already paid off some of that debt. So it’s harder to go back to sleep at that time, even if you need those extra couple of hours.”
Potential causes
-Stress
“ Stress can be a factor that can lead to that feeling of being ‘tired and activated'” that we mentioned earlier, Banerjee said.
Even if you arrive exhausted at bed, the brain is still busy. So you may be exhausted but after a cycle or two, you may still be in your ‘run or fight’ mode. I see this a lot with anxious, stressed people who have a very busy life. At first they sleep well but when they wake up at night they cannot go back to sleep because the brain is hyper alert and a little more awake
-Alcohol
“A little alcohol can be good for relaxing, to be honest, but if you drink too much sleep breaks up,” Banerjee says
“And that has to do with the chemical response of neurons in the brain.”
“There’s no doubt that those who drink a lot have fragmented sleep, and if your sleep is fragmented then you tend to wake up more.”
-Depression
“Waking up early in the morning and not being able to sleep is a common symptom of depression. People with depression tend to wake up early in the morning more often.
“If someone comes to me and tells me that they regularly wake up at four and can’t go back to sleep, I think inside myself that it’s some mood problem.
Tips & Tricks
– Be proactive
Preparing for a good night’s sleep doesn’t start in the middle of the night when you’re awake and staring at the ceiling.
“If you go to bed very tense and fall asleep, the result is disastrous,” Banerjee says. “We have to slow down and put everything in order.”
“Don’t take your phone to bed with you, make lists of all the to-dos to get out of your head before bed, all those common sense things we do for sleep hygiene, and it’s all important and you have to do it before you get to bed.”
– Count sheep (yes, really)
They don’t have to be sheep.
Benerjee says “I don’t know why sheep. Is it something from New Zealand? I don’t know why it’s so popular? In Beijing it would be people, wouldn’t it? Why not count people?
“Seriously, I think it’s a distraction therapy to get those thoughts out of your mind. It’s always silly thoughts, the ones that keep you awake, things like ‘the potatoes are over’ or ‘I think it’s going to rain tomorrow?’.
– Don’t force it
“Some people try too hard to get back to sleep. Falling asleep should be a simple thing,” Banerjee says.
“I asked a patient what he did to get back to sleep and he said, ‘I repeat to myself: I have to sleep, I have to sleep, I have to sleep.'”
“In fact, the result was exactly the opposite. So I suggested that he try to repeat, ‘I have to be awake, I have to be awake, I have to be awake.’ He tried and it worked.”
“The brain is a cunning animal and it cheats you. Forcing yourself to sleep can become a spectacular failure.”
Avoid:
- Watch TV or a movie.
- Play with your phone or tablet.
- Drink tea.
- Eat.
- Get out of bed.
According to Banerjee, what seems counterproductive may be the secret to your sleep problems.
“Some people try and leave the bedroom, as if the bedroom were the place of bad sleep, the brain associates the bedroom with bad sleep,” he says. It is called controlled stimulus memory.
“So it’s one thing to get out of bed and meditate, or read something very boring, like how to clean mold from the microwave. What you should not do is put on a movie and two hours later you are watching it.
“I am also fascinated that the people get up and make themselves a tea. It has caffeine, so it doesn’t make sense. Some people swear that a glass of warm milk is the solution, but I think drinking liquids at night will force you to pee later.
“Something that people also do is get up to eat. That’s not good. If you make it a habit you run the risk of gaining weight.”
See a sleep doctor
“There are situations that cause a transient problem of fragmented sleep, such as cough or cold or if you have some particularly stressful problems at work,” Banerjee says.
“In this case, I guess it’s good to look for a short-term solution like sleeping pills, if you’re very desperate.
“But if this has been happening for a long time, what I think should be done is to look for a sleep doctor to try to understand what is happening.
“I would recommend seeking medical help because a lot of these things are easily fixed.”
Source: Huffington Post
