Sleep can be our best friend—or our biggest enemy. A night of sleep can make or break your day or week.
This month I will be focusing on aspects of sleep and discussing tips to help you up your sleep game! If you have time, go back and read last week’s article on the importance of REM sleep and its impactful role on learning and memorization.
This week, I will focus on how you can improve your REM sleep, as well as other tactics to help you fall asleep and stay asleep. Some may be no-brainers or ones you've heard before. Just as you need to repeat CPR and First AID training every so often, it’s good to revisit these lessons to remind yourself of what is important.
As noted last week, the longer and more peacefully you sleep, the more likely you are to categorize and retain information. The latter stages of sleep are essential for learning. This is the most important time of your life to be getting the best sleep—being a medical student and all. Here are some key tips:
- Create a routine; try to go to bed and awake at the same time each day/night. This will help your circadian rhythm set and remain stable.
- If you cannot fall asleep after twenty minutes, get up and leave your room. Do something peaceful to you (that does not involve electronics) until you feel tired. You can repeat this as often as you like, but do not lay in bed and watch the clock. This will only cause more stress. Try to resist checking your phone. Even blue-light blockers will not be effective as the excitement of being on a screen will “waken” your brain.
- Avoid using alcohol or tobacco, especially within hours of your bedtime. These drugs are known to cause fragmented sleep patterns. Alcohol is known to wake you later in sleep cycles and tobacco earlier in sleep cycles.
- If you are one who finds it difficult to fall asleep, try to incorporate a soothing nighttime activity such as taking a bath, doing meditation, using aromatherapy, or drinking a warm, non-caffeinated beverage. You may have heard that you should drink warm milk, and yes, this is an actual thing! Milk includes the amino acid tryptophan, the chemical that induces serotonin and melatonin. Warming it up increases the absorption rate for your body—it’s like a big Thanksgiving-style hug at bedtime!
- Keep a cool and dark bedroom. Lower the temperature in your home or room at nighttime. As your body cools down, your pineal gland will release more melatonin, telling your brain and body it’s time to sleep.
- Speaking of keeping your body cool, I did mention taking a bath. If you do make this a part of a routine, try to space out your bath so that you are not too warm before you go to bed. OR take a cooler bath or shower. Also, if you work out try not do so too close to bedtime. Not only will all of those feel-good chemicals and hormones stimulate you, but your body temperature will be too elevated to promote a sleep-inducing state. If you do work out in the evening, it is good to so at least ninety minutes before you calm down for sleep. Your body temperature will cool down ninety minutes after the workout and, you guessed it, produce hormones that incite sleepiness.
- If you create a regular exercise routine, only if it’s walking, you can vastly improve your chances of getting more deep sleep. Research has shown that getting in moderate amounts of aerobic exercise increases slow wave sleep, that awesome sleep that enhances cognitive processes.
In addition to the guidelines above, you may have read/heard/been advised to take melatonin or other sleep aides. Truthfully, most factual resources will advise you to decrease the amount of sleep aides, or cease using them altogether, if possible. However, this is absolutely something you should discuss with your primary care physician.
Additionally, if you are considering altering any medication you are on, or considering taking a new one, to help with your sleep, please discuss this with your doctor. And while it is true that certain antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs may reduce or suppress REM sleep (something you may learn in phase one courses), or cause REM rebound if stopped, those medications should not be stopped or altered without the supervision of a physician. If you feel as though your sleep may be disturbed by your current medications, please discuss this with your provider to see if there are alternative medications you can try.
Making sure you get enough REM sleep, and sleep overall, could be the most important thing you do for yourself, especially at this time in your life. In this age we have so many amazing things that fight for our attention, but don’t let them rob you of all the hard work you do during the day to be the person you want to become in the future.
Play the tape forward... If you get those z’s now, you can do so much more tomorrow!
