Sleep better
Slept for a long time and still tired? Then a sleep strategy can help
© Svyatoslav Lypynskyy / Adobe Stock
Want to jump out of bed in the morning feeling rested and cheerful? Only possible if we slept well. The Dutch Floris Wouterson is a coach and sleep consultant and explains in his new book “Super Sleep” how we achieve exactly that.
Who doesn’t know it: you went to bed on time and slept the recommended eight hours. The next morning you open your eyes and feel as if a whole line of trucks had rolled over you. This may be due to our non-existent or incorrect sleep strategy, as Floris Wouterson writes in his book “Super Sleep – Practical Tips for the Best Sleep Ever”. We explain here how we create this.
You need a sleep plan
Maybe you’ve already tried a lot of things, but somehow you still can’t get a good night’s sleep? Then maybe you just don’t have the right plan or, as Wouterson calls it, the right sleep strategy. We have often trained ourselves to have poor sleep over the course of our lives. But that also means that we can unlearn this again and establish new routines. Above all, it’s about getting back in harmony with our internal clock in order to significantly improve our lives. By the way, this can even lead to a deterioration in sleep at first, but Wouterson promises: It’s worth persevering and then you’ll get the super-duper sleep.
Forget what you previously believed about sleep
We all have many beliefs about family, relationships, money and friends – including sleep. And it is important to identify them and then forget them as quickly as possible. As a rule, our principles about sleep consist of a mixture of half-knowledge and old wives’ tales.
Step 1: Don’t think in hours, but in cycles
Our internal clock determines our entire life, but unfortunately we have forgotten how to listen to it. It has a lot to do with good and healthy sleep.
Here come the facts:
- Their period length is longer than the 24-hour rhythm by which we live and is 26 hours. These 26 hours in turn are in Cycles of 90 minutes each divided – which corresponds to a complete sleep cycle, which also lasts around 90 minutes
- A sleep cycle consists of: Fall asleep, light sleep. Deep sleep and REM phase. At the end of each sleep cycle, we feel rested because we have reached a state that is most similar to our waking state. However, if we are woken up in the middle of the sleep cycle, we often feel disoriented and overwhelmed
- To avoid this condition, you can Sleep duration measured in units of 90 minutes and use this to calculate the best time to go to bed in order to be woken up at a convenient time. So if you have to get up at 7 a.m., you should be in bed by 11:30 p.m. at the latest in order to start the day fresh and alert.
- One is also important fixed bedtime and wake-up time, which is also observed on weekends because otherwise we mess up our internal clock. The much-loved lie-in at the weekend often takes its toll on Monday.
Step 2: How much sleep do I really need?
Forget what you once learned about 8-hour sleep. Sleeping is individual and so is the number of hours of sleep that each individual needs to be productive.
But how do we find out how many hours we should sleep?
Our goal is to wake up in the morning without an alarm clock or before the alarm clock. Then we determined our sleep needs. And it goes like this:
Let’s assume you need between seven and eight hours of sleep and have a fixed get-up time of 7 a.m. (which you also stick to on weekends). So you calculate back in blocks of 1.5 hours and arrive at a bedtime of 11:30 p.m. For the next ten days you do this, go to sleep at the same time every day and get up at the same time. Our brain likes regularity. If you wake up before your alarm clock at the end of the ten days, you have determined your sleep needs. If you don’t, go to bed fifteen minutes earlier and repeat the procedure. If that’s not enough, go to sleep even earlier. Do this until you wake up before your alarm clock and have determined your sleep window.
Step 3: Keep a sleep diary
We see our successes best when we document them. This is the only way we can see afterwards whether improvements have actually occurred. An important benchmark here is sleep efficiency. This puts the time we spend in bed in relation to the time we actually sleep. To do this, we record all important data in a sleep diary (templates for this can be found on the Internet, for example). Among other things, information about sleep quality is entered there, but also how long it takes us to fall asleep, how often we were awake and how long it took us to actually get up after waking up. But things like alcohol, a party, sports, illnesses or emotionally charged moments should also be recorded in order to then draw conclusions about sleep behavior, what is good for us, what we should stick with and where there are still adjustments we can make to learn to sleep well again.