Tired of insomnia and getting up in the middle of the night? Many French people will have taken this year as a good resolution to take control of their sleep and put an end to nighttime worries. Because sleeping badly is not only more likely to pitch down during the day, but it is also more likely to fall ill, increase your cardio-metabolic risk or gain weight. Hence the importance of pampering your sleep. In Well done for you on Europe 1, Professor Pierre Philip, sleep specialist at the Bordeaux University Hospital, details how to understand your sleep and make sure you spend the most pleasant nights possible.
Sleep, an innate characteristic
While paying attention to your sleep is important, not everyone is equal on the subject. Some need long nights, others are fresh as roaches with only five hours of sleep. A part of the population considers itself to be a morning person, while the other prefers to be an evening person. If we can say that “90% of people need 7 to 9 hours of sleep” summarizes Pierre Philip on Europe 1, this remains an average.
These differences in sleep, according to the professor, are not subjective, but “innate”. “There are two components that we inherit: the clock, which explains whether we are morning or evening, and the duration of sleep.” A child of a couple of long sleepers then has a high chance of also being a sleep lover. Thus, it is difficult to change one’s nature, and it is better to understand one’s clock and adapt to it.
“Assess your sleep”
To try to understand one’s sleep, one must “learn to evaluate one’s sleep a little like one evaluates one’s food consumption”: “What we have observed is that people who begin to watch how they sleep over a period prolonged with sleep diaries, in fact reduce their sleep complaints”, underlines Professor Pierre Philip on the antenna of Europe 1. By observing his nights, we generally realize that we are not as bad sleeper than that.
In behavioral therapies, the professor thus shows that it is not necessary to treat the worst of the nights but to increase the number of good nights. “Ultimately, if you have five very good nights in the week, it’s not that bad. There are keys, in particular consistency.”
Forcing yourself to lie down, the wrong good idea
Building a sleep rhythm is essential to improve it. But forcing yourself to go to bed every day at a specific time is not necessarily a reflex to adopt. “Through constant rising, you will accumulate awake time which will give you sleep pressure [l’envie de dormir, ndlr] and which makes it easier to fall asleep”, explains Pierre Philip at the microphone of Europe 1. “So the idea is not at all to go to bed every day at the same time. On the contrary, it is to set up a marker according to your social imperatives and to accumulate approximately 17 hours of standby time.
For an adult, 17 hours of wakefulness (or wakefulness) corresponds to the necessary and sufficient period to fall asleep more easily but also to avoid awakenings during the night. Going to bed earlier, even when tired, is risky to not reach this quota and therefore take time to fall asleep, wake up during the night and have poor sleep. “You need to delay your bedtime so that when you go to bed, you have the greatest speed of falling asleep and the greatest continuity.” This principle of regularity is the most important thing to respect in order to improve the quality of your nights.
Nevertheless, sleeping in on the weekend is always possible, by remaining “reasonable”. Professor Philip recommends one hour of variations between weekdays and weekends.