Sleep experts say you need to get enough sleep. But this one thing might be even more important than that
Lesson summary
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Today’s story is all about sleep, one of my favorite topics. We did two episodes about sleep earlier—those would be Lesson 292 and 293 . They were some of our most popular episodes of 2020. But we’re back today to revisit the topic, with some news that might be music to your ears , especially if you can’t get your recommended seven to nine hours of sleep a night.
In the second half of today’s audio, I’ll show you how to use the English expression “catch up.” And, since it’s Monday, we have a quote of the week for you. Let’s get going.
Can’t sleep 8 hours? There’s hope for you yet
Getting enough sleep is important for your health. Those who sleep longer tend to also live longer, healthier lives. The accepted guidance is between seven and nine hours per night for adults, on average.
Meanwhile , back in the real world, about a third of people in developed countries don’t get the recommended amount of sleep. And one survey showed a fifth of people say they rarely or never wake up feeling fully rested.
Careers, family obligations, child-raising, long commutes, household chores, hobbies—they all reduce the number of hours people have available to sleep. But if you can’t get eight hours per night, there’s still hope for you.
A recent study showed that regularity of sleep is just as important as the amount of sleep you get. In other words, if you can’t get your seven to nine hours of sleep per night, at least try to sleep on a regular schedule.
The study found that people who slept six hours per night on a regular schedule had a lower risk of early death than people who slept a full eight hours, but on an inconsistent schedule. Think about that for a second. Six hours regularly is better than eight hours irregularly.
The National Sleep Foundation, based in the U.S., convened a panel of sleep experts to review over 40,000 other papers on sleep health. The purpose was to specifically study existing knowledge on sleep regularity. Most doctors emphasize sleep duration—how many hours are you sleeping?—but the panel wanted to see whether sleep regularity was just as important.
It was. They found that irregular sleep patterns can negatively affect your metabolism and cardiovascular health and can increase inflammation. Irregular sleep is also associated with higher levels of depression.
The review also found that performance suffers with inconsistent sleep, too. Study participants with odd sleep patterns had problems concentrating, had worse reasoning, and performed worse on tasks.
Importantly, no study in the 40,000 papers the panel reviewed, no study showed any type of positive effect to getting irregular sleep.
All right, so maybe you’re convinced: you need regular sleep. But what does that mean? Does it mean going to bed at the exact same time every single night? Can you really not go to a late movie ever again?
There is no rock-solid definition of what “regular” sleep means. And there haven’t been deep studies on what, exactly, counts as “regular.” But one of the panelists summarized it this way. He said that over a long period of time, your average should be the same time, and about seventy percent of nights, the time you fall asleep should be plus or minus one hour from the average.
So if your average bedtime is 10:00 p.m., then on seventy percent of nights, you should go to bed between 9:00 and 11:00. And significant, multi-hour variations from that should be rare. Not prohibited, just rare. That sounds achievable.
But what if the weekend arrives, you go to bed on time, but you just want to catch up a little bit? The conventional wisdom has been that you can’t “catch up” on lost sleep from previous nights. But this review found that it is helpful to extend your sleep an hour or two when you need it, and when you can get it. But sleeping more than two hours beyond your typical wake-up time is not helpful.
I can vouch for this. I used to travel a lot for work and that involved, sometimes, 4:00 a.m. wake up calls to catch a 6:00 flight. And the irregularity just killed me. Like a lot of people, I recovered the consistency of my sleep during the pandemic.
I definitely sleep more, and more regularly, than I did when I was commuting and traveling, and I’ve never felt better. I know that’s a luxury that not everyone has, but if you can’t get eight hours of sleep, at least try to make your six hours the same ones every night.
Quote of the Week
It’s Monday, so we have a quote of the week for you. Here it goes: “There’s nothing like biting off more than you can chew, and then chewing it anyway.”
To bite off more than you can chew is an English idiom. It means, to start a bigger project than you can finish. Or, to start something that seems too big or too complex. The conventional wisdom sometimes says this: “don’t bite off more than you can chew.” And that means, don’t try to do something too big or too complex.
But I like today’s quote. “There’s nothing like biting off more than you can chew, and then chewing it anyway.” And that is from Mark Burnett, a television producer.
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