We all love our sleep. It’s the only time we have to ourselves, and rightly so, we should be selfish when it comes to healthy, restful sleep.
Getting a good night’s sleep is incredibly important for your health. It’s just as important as eating a balanced, nutritious diet and exercising.
Sleep helps your body and brain function properly. A good night’s sleep can help improve your learning, memory, and decision-making — in addition, it supports a healthy immune system. What’s more, getting insufficient sleep has been linked to a higher risk of conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
Before digital clocks, engineers were restricted to nine-minute snooze periods by the gears in a standard bedside clock — and because the consensus was that 10 minutes was too long and could allow people to fall back into a “deep” sleep, clockmakers decided on the nine-minute gear.
But then we keep hitting the snooze bar. Again and again and again. Most sleep researchers say snoozing won’t make you any more rested. If anything, it can make it harder for you to wake up.
That grogginess and disorientation that we experience upon the first few waking moments are called sleep inertia. Hitting the snooze button repeatedly disorients your body, raising the chances of this sleep inertia extending two to four hours into your morning.
What’s happening? You’re disrupting that REM sleep or dream sleep. If a person feels the need to hit snooze repeatedly, it could indicate that they’re either not getting enough sleep or might have an underlying sleep disorder.
What can you do?
Figure out the perfect amount of sleep you need. Most people need 7-8 hours of sleep to feel well-rested. I found out I need 7 hours of sleep and no more than 8 hours. After 8 hours, I feel groggy and disoriented, like a slight hangover. So I make sure that I get exactly 7 hours during the week and 8 hours on the weekends.
Set up times to go to bed in relation to when you will get up. I go to bed most weeknights at 10 PM and plan to get up by 5 AM. This allows me to get a jump on the day and start coaching my executive and business clients at 6 AM. Make it a habit, and you’ll find it gets easier after a few weeks.
Stop using your clock to wake you up. For over five years, I’ve been using an app on my phone called Sleep Cycle — it tracks and analyzes my sleep, waking me up at the perfect time, feeling rested. It tracks your sleep cycles by listening to your sounds and wakes you up at the ideal time by slowly increasing the volume on beautiful music alarms when you come out of REM sleep.
IMPORTANT: Here comes legal stuff: I am not a doctor, nor do I have the ability to give medical advice. Please consult your doctor if you feel you might have a sleep/health issue. In addition, Sleep Cycle is not a sponsor — I’m just spotlighting an excellent tool for my readers. Use at your own risk. End of legal stuff.