AGONY aunt Kirsten Antoncich writes:

ARE you getting enough? To help us move through the new and slightly uncertain New Year, I’m going to cover a different aspect of self care each week, starting with sleep this week.

Ask yourself whether you feel rested after your night’s sleep? Do you feel as though you need to nap during the day or are you relying on caffeine to help pull yourself through those long Zoom meetings?

We typically need an average of eight hours sleep a night throughout our week. There will be many of us who burn the candle at both ends and don’t manage the goal of eight hours.

For those of us getting smaller amounts of sleep a night, research shows we are at higher risk of diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart conditions and Alzheimers.

Getting less sleep has an impact on our emotional wellbeing.  Research studies have shown that being sleep deprived exacerbates depression, increases impulsivity, makes it harder for us to keep our mood stable and sadly, can even increase suicidal feelings. Happily, when we start to increase our sleep and our sleep quality, we can start to increase our mental well being.

Our dreams have an essential way of allowing us to  process difficult events and memories, reducing the difficult feelings associated with them when we wake. When we are facing difficulty and uncertainty in our lives, we need to prioritise sleep even more to allow this process to happen.

What’s your rhythm?

Our sleep is governed by a number of elements, imagine that you have an internal clock that tells your body when it needs to sleep and when it needs to wake, we call this the circadian rhythm and its programming is largely genetic.

 The early birds amongst us are programmed to wake up early and go to bed early, whereas the night owls feel most active in the evening and need to sleep in longer to get their eight hours. The way our working days runs often means night owls are losing some of the deeper parts of their sleep as they get up before they have run their full sleep cycle.

When we cant sleep…

One of the biggest causes of chronic insomnia is stress. In order for us to fall asleep our brains and bodies need to gather a few things together: they need to drop the bodies’ temperature by a degree, they need to start to decrease brain activity, melatonin needs to increase and we need something called “sleep pressure” to be reaching its peak.

Ironically, as we lay our head on the pillow to sleep, our stressed brain becomes active. Thoughts about work, have you locked the front door, have the kids got everything they need for school, that embarrassing thing you did last week… thoughts clamour for attention triggering alertness provoking chemicals in the brain making sleep difficult. 

The more we do this, the more of a habit it becomes. Once we feel we are struggling to sleep, we start to predict we will have more trouble sleeping and begin to associate sleep with anxiety, producing more alertness chemicals which in turn keep us awake further.

Prioritising your sleep this New Year and getting into some healthy January habits can only help your physical and mental wellbeing.

If you are struggling to sleep, here are a few ways to support your sleep this new year

Check the temperature in your room. Our bodies need to cool down by a degree to activate sleep enhancing chemicals. Cut out caffeine, it can have a half life of up to 7 hours meaning the coffee you had with lunch really is still with you. Make sure your room is dark and avoid any devices that use blue light at least an hour before bed. You’ll have heard this one before, blue light - in fact any light before bed reduces melatonin, a chemical needed to tell our brains and bodies to go to sleep. Remove any clock faces from your bedroom Diets lower in sugar have been shown to promote better sleep. Try setting aside some time before you start your bedtime routine to listen to those thoughts that need your attention, journaling is a good way of getting them out of the way before bedtime. Avoid napping, it gets rid of the sleep pressure chemical that needs to build up through the day If you are feeling anxious before bed, look up progressive muscle relaxation on the internet and try some of their exercises. Try to set a routine for yourself, with the same wake and sleep times each day. If you really can’t sleep, don’t stay in bed, move to another room until you feel tired, try to always associate your bed with sleep.

All Best Wishes, Kirsten