Sleep we all talk about it, we all want more of it but we know for sure is that most of us aren’t getting enough of it, and it’s affecting our health in a very big way. what you need to know about sleep,is it’s a very important part of your life. it’s what you do all day long it sets you up either for a good night’s sleep or a bad one. we have to take it seriously and sleeping pills are generally evil.
We all need it we don’t all get it that is sleep in a nutshell, and according to a national poll for example almost 60% of Canadians would say they’re not getting enough sleep maybe you’re one of them so let’s start with the basics and the impact of not getting enough sleep.
Parents intuitively know that if their kids do get enough sleep then they’re they’ll be sharper they’ll be brighter they’ll be in a better mood.
and what else do we need to know sure so it’s not just parents there’s really good science that lets us know that children who are chronically sleep-deprived so not getting enough sleep, they’ll have problems with memory learning attention behavior, there can also be effects on the immune function obviously they’re not going to exercise because they’re gonna be tired so a whole lot of effects from not getting enough sleep and with the child progress I mean into adulthood things seems to be more complicated.
We all intuitively know that our mental health is deeply linked to our sleep both when you’re not feeling well mentally or emotionally that will affect your sleep and vice-versa. our social interactions our capacity to concentrate and perform well at work and then there’s all kinds of physical and physiological functions that sleep serves including memory and the way that your brain stores information there’s a lot of background work happening in the brain as you sleep and a lot of repair going on and healing all throughout the body of different kinds.
It’s just important for people to remember that as you get older you don’t sleep as deeply as you used to. so you might have more interrupted sleep, your sleep might not be as longer but the key is it’s still important to get a good night’s sleep as an older person. because if you wake up tired and fatigued it might affect your memory and especially if you have some memory concerns or you might have some physical concerns that could increase and diminish or diminish some of your senses and increase your risk of falling.
According to the Canadian Institute for health information one in ten seniors take sleeping pills. many people can generally fall asleep with no problem but the issue is the they wake up tired and super groggy. the doctors give them some prescription sleep medication.
and you may ask is good for health or not?
Dr. Samir Sinha, a geriatrician and the director of geriatrics at Sinai Health System and the University Health Network Mentioned that the challenge of sleeping pills especially in older adults as they can affect they can make you groggy and feel more drugged in the morning which can affect your thinking and memory but also can significantly increase your risk of falling that’s why we try and avoid sleeping pills especially in the elderly. because the key is if there’s a perfect medication that lasts exactly the length of sleep that you have and that would be a miracle medication but right now what I always say to my patients is that even though you wake up at 8 a.m. that medication may still be in your system for up to 24 hours and that’s where those things can be especially problematic in older adults but even younger people when they take sleeping pills they find that it doesn’t
necessarily do the trick.
Does cannabis help you sleep?
Sleep aids cannabis is a common form of self-medication right and not just cannabis but alcohol is well people will often say that they find having cannabis in whatever form or you know a drink of some kind before they go to sleep helps them to relax and go to sleep and that may be true that it helps to helps to initiate sleep.
But what we know is that the quality of that may not be the same and so very often people won’t wake up feeling as refreshed or as rested as they would if they had fallen asleep on their own.
steam so to speak that we know a lot more about alcohol than we do about cannabis you know as an emerging field of research there’s a lot still that we don’t know but but for now there’s no good evidence that it’s a safe or effective way to help you to get a good night’s sleep.
The fact that you feel tired or aren’t getting enough sleep that actually just may be a sign of some under something else going on and so sometimes we need to get under to the next layer down to try to figure that out.
ensuring a proper and effective sleep environment so that children and adults sleep better in a cool comfortable dark quiet room obviously also safe but a space especially for children where they feel safe and all those conditions are met is going to lead to the optimal sleep.
Sleeping with a pillow is it comfortable?
The most important thing is comfort and the other important thing especially for children is that the environment is the same when they fall asleep as when they wake up at night because we all wake up several times at night some people think we just wear either awake or asleep but actually that’s not how sleep works.
Sleep is a very complicated we have very complicated architecture, and our brains when we’re sleeping so we cycle through periods of sleep.
The important thing is that every time we wake up we will fall back to sleep very quickly if everything is the same so if you have a buckwheat pillow or you have no pillow that doesn’t matter as long as the environment is the same as when you fell asleep the first time.
How Long Should I Nap?
Naps are typically defined as a shortened period of sleep up to 90 minutes.stages, leaving you with a feeling of sluggishness when you wake up. this is called sleep inertia.
But if you have time for a 90 minute snooze, you will cycle through the deepest sleep stage and back again, leaving you feeling revitalized with a memory and creativity boost!
Studies have also shown that naps can increase your attention span, improve your overall performance, and help with depression.
We know that without sleep, our body and mind are not at their best.
wouldn’t it be lovely to think that sleep was like the bank that you could accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off, at a point in time it’s not like that. we now know that you can’t get back that which you’ve lost so even if i deprived you of sleep for an entire night, you will try to sleep longer the second night, but you will never make up that eight hours that I took away.
so there is no system there’s no credit system in the brain where you could store up sleep and then spend it when
you go into debt.