Do you feel like you get enough sleep?
Chances are, the answer is no. But the science suggests that how you feel about the sleep you get, and whether you actually get enough or not, are two quite different things.
We can get a bit hysterical about sleep these days, and that really doesn’t help us get to or stay asleep. Obviously sleep is important, and we know some people don’t get enough of it. But we probably don’t need to pay quite as much attention to what time we go to bed and how long we stay in it, as we are currently encouraged to do.
Most of us probably do get more or less enough. But because so many of us track our sleep, we think and worry about it more than is helpful. And that matters: a clever study in 2014 showed that if you believe you’ve had a good night’s sleep – even if you haven’t – you feel better the next day and you perform better too. Another, more recent study showed that ‘sleep satisfaction’ is very important to how we feel when we wake up, and again this isn’t always about whether someone’s was sleep the night before was measurably ‘good’ or not.
Despite everything you may have read or seen on social media there is no perfect way to sleep, nor amount of it to get. (And we don’t all need the same amount - the perfect eight hours is also a myth.) But that is not how sleep is presented to us and as a direct result, for many of us, the thing which keeps us awake at 3am is worrying about being awake at 3am.
Unfortunately, the way we have timetabled society doesn’t really fit with how a lot of people’s body clocks work, and that does contribute to some of us not getting enough sleep, at least some of the time.
I am a night owl. If I had my way, I’d go to bed at about 1am, and get up around 8.30am. When I worked as a bar manager in my early twenties, this worked delightfully well. Today, with a school run to do? Not so much.
The majority of the world is scheduled for larks, who like to go to bed just as the evening is getting interesting, and get up before any human has a right to be conscious. I am married to a lark. He likes to get up at 6am and go to the gym before it gets light. On the rare occasions I have attempted this – usually on some kind of misguided and very short-lived health kick involving doing pilates before the kids get up – lurching awake that early for no good reason has made me feel almost seasick. I can really only cope with a very early morning if it comes with a side order of adrenaline, like when I need to catch a flight or appear on live television.
A couple of years ago, I wrote something for the Guardian about “revenge sleep procrastination”. RSP is when you claw back some time for yourself at the very end of the day, making yourself more tired by staying up late in the glorious solitude of the late evening and even into the early hours of the morning. (Can you tell I like it?)
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