Sleeping Beauty

When it comes to sleeping, I would tell everyone that I have no trouble falling asleep anywhere, anytime; whether on a plane or in a car. I felt proud about this fact, as if I had an edge over those picky sleepers who have trouble falling asleep at night or wake up in the middle of the night and cannot go back to sleep; until I stomped on the article which I will discuss in a bit. It is ironic though that I came across this article, a couple of weeks later after I had the discussion on sleep and sleeping habits at night with my friends. We were discussing about how one cannot fall asleep at night or that they would go to sleep and be awakened by the slightest noise and would have trouble going back to sleep. I had suggested that they use prayer beads and keep repeating the prayers for every bead in the chain (similar to counting sheep) and that they eventually would fall asleep or they could pop in a couple of Tylenol, an hour before bedtime and that would knock them out. My friends were going to try and were going to get back to me on their sleeping pattern. But if one cannot go to sleep because of problems they are having in their lives or if they arouse because of nightmares of incidents, they should workout enough to tire themselves off, so the tiredness would knock them to sleep.


National Sleep Foundation had researched sleep patterns and has reported that more than 20 percent of Americans get less than six hours of sleep in a day. When you don’t get enough sleep, you have difficulty getting up the following day, you are tired and grumpy throughout the day, have hard time focusing on work and sometimes end up giving your boss weird excuses for not coming to work on time. But these are just mundane effects of not getting enough sleep. Chronic, inadequate sleep leads to cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes, obesity and it affects metabolism, making people eat more and build up that belly fat. Knowing this, I resent all those people who come in my dreams giving me nightmares and disturbing my beauty sleep. Sleep deprivation also leads to majority of road accidents that we hear about in our daily news.


Even if you sleep for six to eight hours after taking Tylenol or any sleeping pills, some complain that they are still tired or not satisfied with their sleep. That is because that they get poor-quality sleep. What I meant by that is, when you sleep, you have different phases of sleep during the night. Among them are REM, the Rapid Eye movement phase (where you get your sweet dreams about floating in a tub of ice cream or bad dreams about slapping the person you have been meaning to), and Deep or slow-wave sleep. REM phase is needed during sleep for consolidating memories, learning, creativity (Einstein figured out theory of relativity during this phase), problem-solving and emotional balance, whereas Deep phase is needed for the body to secrete human growth hormones for development and physical repair of wear and tear. That is why we let babies and young kids (but kids are supposed to be young – no?) to sleep a lot and we don’t disturb them while they are sleeping, no matter what time of the day, so their body can develop properly. But these phases get affected as we age and also because of caffeine and alcohol. That is why we are advised as to not drink coffee after evening sets. Also, if you have trouble waking up or feel like sleeping during daytime, it just means that you did not get enough restorative sleep. That “falling asleep anywhere, anytime” that I mentioned at the beginning is not to be so proud after all. Maybe it is due to the lack of restorative sleep.


One can monitor their sleep pattern either by admitting themselves in a hospital (expensive proposal) or get a new sleep-monitor device that is available in the market (Zeo Personal Sleep Coach). It has a head band that you wear and go to sleep as usual and the sleeping pattern, and brain waves are recorded in a clock radio like device. The monitor would display your actual sleep time and also the duration of REM and Deep sleep. The device costs about $400 and you get to upload your data from every night on to a web site which would analyze the data and send your coaching instructions for six months, to get better sleep or to improve sleeping habits. This would be a means to figure out your sleep pattern and really know why you wake up tired each morning. I think $400 is worth it for the enduring beauty sleep.