When I help people with stress management I always start with sleep. Good health habits along with stress management help protect us from the damage stress can cause. Stress overload raises cortisol and weakens the immune system. Stress interferes with sleep by raising levels of the brain’s modulators norepinephrine and serotonin. The result can be insomnia and the inability to function effectively during the day.
The best way to ensure adequate stress management is to sleep well. Most adults need seven to eight hours per night. Teens need 8-9 hours and children need 9-10 hours of sleep. Adequate sleep is probably the single most important habit for keeping the mind and body healthy.
This is not an easy habit to maintain for most people. Constantly changing lifestyles make it hard to "turn the brain off" at night. Access to the internet 24 hours a day, television, movie channels, and heavy work schedules all make sleeping seem like an inconvenience. Sleep becomes expendable in order to have more time for all our more "stimulating" activities. At the turn of the century, before easily affordable lighting was available the average adult slept nine hours per night. The average adult now sleeps seven hours. Leisure time has also decreased an average of ten hours per week in the last ten years.
Complicating the time crunch is the feeling of pressure that we all have to get more things done in a 24 hour period. We feel pressure to monitor current events since everything is changing so quickly. We crave more leisure time. We also have to change schedules after early flights and late meetings. Shift work makes it hard for many people to have control of consistent sleep schedules. Unfortunately, sleep does not respond well to control because you can’t "do sleep."
One study found that working mothers with young children still spend the same amount of time per day with them as do mothers that work at home, which is 4 1/2 hours. The bad news is that they are doing it at the expense of 2 hours of leisure and 1 hour of sleep per day. Our bodies adapted over thousands of years to a life of being outdoors and physically active all day. There was no artificial light or high stimulation in the evening. Now it’s 24-7. Daylight regulates sleep through the body’s natural system, melatonin. In today’s world, we are mostly indoors. We have become like "cave dwellers" and our brains have no idea what time it is. Without the regulation of daylight the brain goes on a natural cycle of 25 hours. This causes a tendency to go to sleep one hour later every night.
New advances in medication give us the ability to control sleep. Only a few medications provide normal sleep. These include Sonata, Ambien, Gabitril, Neurontin, and Xyrem. They allow normal stages of sleep to occur.
