When was the last time you woke up feeling really refreshed from sleep? With the average UK resident getting just 6.66 hours sleep per weeknight, it’s likely that it was quite a while ago. April is 2022’s Stress Awareness Month and one sound way of assessing your stress levels is considering how sleep fits into your list of priorities each day.
Although we all know an early bedtime is important, sleep disturbance is on the rise; between forty-one and fifty-six per cent of people reported poorer quality sleep during the pandemic, compared with pre-pandemic levels of between fourteen and twenty-five percent. Aside from global issues, the pressures that daily life can bring, from money worries to relationship problems, cause many people to experience stress. Despite it being a common issue, stress so severe that it affects sleep is a serious concern for our health and wellbeing.
After a tense day, most people don’t find it easy to switch off their worries and drift off into a peaceful eight hours of sleep. To make matters worse, an interrupted night’s sleep has a serious knock-on effect on your mood the following day, making the cycle a vicious one that is hard to escape once you find yourself in it.
Planning for a full forty winks by prioritising sleep in your routine, however, can help you to harness the replenishing and restorative power of rest to combat the stresses of daily life, allowing you to get out of the right side of bed and off to a good start every day.
How does stress disturb sleep?
Feeling stress, whatever the cause, raises our cortisol levels and stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight or flight instinct. When we experience stress, our blood pressure and heart rate increase and we become more alert and vigilant. Since ancient times, this has helped us to survive dangerous situations by allowing us to quickly respond to threat. However, in daily modern life, experiencing stress caused by a work or personal problem can mean that our fight or flight response becomes more of a hindrance than a help if it disrupts our rest.
Normally, as the body prepares itself for sleep in the evening, cortisol levels fall. Having high cortisol levels at night as a result of stress interferes with the release of melatonin, an essential chemical in maintaining a regular and natural sleep cycle. To make matters worse, poor sleep itself can worsen this interference, making the problem a recurrent issue. When stress disrupts the normal structure of sleep, the usual pattern of brain waves related to concentration and creativity are affected which can cause fatigue and affect our mood. A poorly rested brain and body are less functional, our decision making abilities are weaker and our thinking is clouded. However, despite all of this, many of us don’t prioritise a good sleep schedule and suffer from the consequences.
Why isn’t R and R our number 1 priority?
Although many poor-sleepers may already be convinced that a full night’s rest is key, it is often tricky to follow through and maintain a routine with a bedtime that allows for a good eight hours before the alarm rings. Whether binge-watching your favourite TV show into the early hours, finishing off the last chapters of a book you can’t put down, perusing flights for next year’s holiday or checking out social media, there always seems to be something more entertaining than logging out and switching off to catch up on beauty sleep.
Feelings of guilt about making time for rest and sleep can stem from toxic productivity – an over prioritisation of continual activity and busyness at the expense of your own wellbeing, family life or relationships. Although getting your lengthy to-do list ticked by the end of each day might help you excel in some areas, not allowing yourself to rest (as that is not “time well spent”) can lead to a serious burn out and a deterioration in mental health and wellbeing.
After all, taking a break is natural in many areas of life, both personal and professional; anybody who is serious about sport knows the importance of planned rest days in order to achieve fitness goals. According to the 4 Day Week Global campaign, even two weekend days out of seven aren’t sufficient to maintain a healthy lifestyle. They claim that a working model with an additional free day, a three day weekend, “improves business productivity and worker health outcomes” as well as supporting families and communities by lowering the gender pay gap which is, in part, caused by the impact childcare issues have on parents, predominantly on women.
Can resting help to reduce stress?
Even when you can’t make time to have an afternoon nap or a full night’s sleep, allowing yourself periods of “quiet wakefulness”- a term that defines resting your eyes for a few minutes without falling asleep – can be very beneficial in lowering stress. During even just a few minutes of good rest, blood pressure drops and heart rate slows which allows the brain to slip into an alpha rhythm, often referred to as the “relaxation rhythm”.
This type of heart rhythm is not the same as those which occur during sleep but can, nonetheless, help to reduce stress and improve mood as well as boosting mental clarity, creativity, alertness and motivation. Resting also activates the parasympathetic nervous system – the opposite of our fight or flight response. This helps us to conserve energy for use later on in essential processes such as urination and digestion, as well us refreshing us mentally.
Taking it easy and allowing time for rest can significantly help to reduce the impact of stress on our daily lives and on our sleep schedules. Many people can also attest to the positive power of mindfulness, meditation and other relaxation strategies to support our wellbeing and lift our mood.
However, although it is certainly true that rest and relaxation can be helpful tools in managing stress, good and regular sleep is by far the best natural stress reliever. Some types of brain waves, such as delta waves, k-complexes and sleep spindles, occur exclusively in deep sleep and allow essential replenishing and restorative processes to occur and so, sleep cannot be substituted by regular napping or resting.
Why is deep sleep so important?
Sleep has four stages, from N1 to N3 and ending with REM (rapid eye movement), which get progressively deeper. We go through this cycle of stages several times in a night, with an adult’s average full cycle lasting between ninety and one hundred and ten minutes. Different wave patterns in the brain and their associated processes come with each stage of sleep and several full cycles of the sleep stages are necessary in order to fully replenish after a long day. To allow this to happen, a good number of hours of uninterrupted sleep are needed.
For instance, during the N2 sleep stage, the brain experiences sleep spindles which allow us to perform many vital functions, such as memory consolidation and brain development. Whereas in the N3 sleep stage, delta waves in the brain help to process new information and tasks and arrange them into memories. This stage also gives you a refreshed feeling when you wake up, telling your body that you have rested well. Allowing yourself plenty of time for good sleep allows all of these processes to take place, clearing and calming the mind as well as optimising your decision making ability, meaning that the expression “sleep on it” really is based on fact.
Although sleep is the best natural stress reliever, its benefits go far beyond the brain. The middle sleep stages are not only responsible for an essential and significant cognitive boost, they also help to optimise the immune, endocrine and metabolic systems. Good sleep also helps to regulate effective releases of hormones, such as those responsible for appetite, satiety and growth and as such reduces the risk of diabetes and helps with weight management. A full night’s rest also allows your body to flush out neurotoxins including those associated with an increased risk of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
What should I do if I can’t sleep?
Unfortunately, lying in bed and trying to force sleep when it doesn’t come naturally rarely leads to a good night’s rest, particularly when we’re under stress. If counting sheep doesn’t do the trick, the mind tends to wander to tomorrow’s to-do list and starts to panic about the ring of the alarm clock ticking ever closer, meaning tomorrow will be another long and gruelling day after getting far less sleep than you need.
Advice from experts on how best to sleep if you’re not able to drift off naturally can be conflicting but the general consensus is to focus on relaxing in the build up to bedtime and keeping light low. They also advise a ban on screens, as the blue light emitted by phones and tablets can trick your brain into thinking it’s daytime. Consistency is also key and establishing bedtime routines and good sleep habits usually pays off in the long run.
The health benefits of maintaining a good sleep routine are clear and unfortunately, not prioritising rest can lead to issues with depression, anxiety and, of course, stress. Although prioritising sleep and rest over being productive may be tricky, it is important to recognise that a good sleep routine is an integral part of basic self-care and an easy way to boost your general health.
So the next time you find your self-worth taking a knock because you haven’t really “achieved” much over the weekend, challenge yourself on what you have in fact gained from a restful few days. And if you’d still like to get the to-do list ticked, you’ll have the right tools to achieve anything – a healthy, well-rested and refreshed body and mind.
You can read more about the relationship between work-related stress and sleep, top tips for getting a good night’s rest and how cognitive behavioural therapy can help people suffering from stress and anxiety related sleep problems in some of the articles written by our specialists at Top Doctors.
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