I’ve spent decades helping people sleep and have treated everything from sleep-walking to sleep apnoea. This is the mistake everyone desperate for shut-eye makes… and the method that will guarantee a good night’s rest
For the two decades I’ve worked as a sleep psychologist, my clinics have been filled with people with sleep disorders ranging from parasomnias (abnormal behaviours such as sleep-walking or sleep-eating) to sleep apnoea (where your breathing temporarily stops).I’ve treated everyone from Premier League footballers and high-profile CEOs to new parents and shift workers, fixing their broken sleep.But, increasingly, I now see people whose biggest issue isn’t a medical disorder – it’s sleep fear.And by fear, I mean significant, sustained and debilitating dread about their sleep – the quality of it, as well as the impact they’re convinced it’s having on their mental and physical health.These patients usually come in with reams of data and measurements from their sleep trackers, convinced the occasional ‘bad night’ has ruined their health.They don’t just struggle with sleep, they panic they’ll never be able to get their sleep ‘right’. In their mind, they are just one bad night away from a health crisis.They then develop elaborate routines of things they ‘must’ do before bed, pre-bed rituals that include everything from mouth taping (social media gurus claim this increases oxygen intake and improves sleep – it doesn’t) to obsessive wind-down routines.In fact, they’re only making their sleep worse – by treating it as something fragile and elusive, something that needs to be perfected, rather than a natural process.Indeed, I believe the more we’ve been told to optimise and protect our sleep, the more we’ve started to fear it. Suddenly, sleep has become a source of stress, something to calculate and control. Increasingly, I now see people whose biggest issue isn’t a medical disorder – it’s sleep fearOf course, it’s good that we’re more aware of sleep’s importance to our long-term health. Studies have shown chronic insomnia – defined as persistent difficulty in falling asleep, staying asleep or waking too early at least three times per week for three months or longer – combined with short sleep duration can raise blood pressure and increase heart rate.But some headlines appear to suggest that if you don’t get at least six hours a night, it’s a death sentence.Yet the scientific studies that drive this notion – and the sleep fear I see in my clinic – fail to distinguish between sleep duration and sleep quality.They group together people who sleep short amounts but who sleep well, with those who sleep short amounts and have fragmented, poor-quality sleep – and then attribute the health outcomes to sleep duration alone, rather than recognising it’s poor quality or disrupted sleep that could be driving the risk.In a more accurate representation, a review of studies found that poor quality sleep amplifies the health risks of short sleep – it’s not short sleep alone that’s the problem, reported the journal Frontiers in Medicine in 2022.Critically, another review, in the journal Sleep in 2010, found that long sleep durations – commonly assumed to be healthier – were also linked to increased mortality, particularly when sleep was fragmented.So both short and long sleep are linked to risks when sleep quality is poor – not because of the number of hours alone.Indeed, there is no single ‘right’ duration of sleep. For years, we were told we need eight hours. More recently, there’s been a shift to seven hours as a new magic number.But large-scale studies show huge individual variability in sleep need – from around six to nine hours a night in healthy people (and it’s vital here to note that no one will get this every night). It feels empowering to quantify the mysterious hours you spend unconscious. But there’s evidence sleep trackers can do more harm than goodThis matters because forcing people to chase a specific number of hours can drive anxiety and worsen sleep, leading them to spend longer in bed, which leads to more broken sleep – the very thing that causes health risks in the first place.After my years of clinical practice and research at Harvard Medical School, as well as developing sleep programmes for NHS sleep centres, my first piece of advice for those who really want a good night’s sleep is: stop worrying about it!Here I explain why, as well as offering other simple tips to improve your shut-eye…Monitoring sleep will only make it worseSo prevalent is sleep anxiety now that it’s caused a new sleep disorder – insomnia caused by being anxious about achieving perfect sleep, or orthosomnia.I’ve seen this increasingly in my clinic and my observations are matched by research findings, such as a study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine in 2017, which found that participants who excessively monitored their sleep became more anxious and experienced poorer sleep, even though when their brain activity was monitored it showed their actual sleep patterns were normal.This is because the amygdala, a brain region involved in processing fear and anxiety, becomes more active in those who develop orthosomnia. The knock-on effect is that they’re more susceptible to stress about their sleep – a vicious circle.Another fascinating study from the same journal in 2014 found that people with high levels of ‘sleep reactivity’ (i.e. how much stress about sleep impacts their lives) were more likely to develop chronic insomnia. Not because they were sleeping poorly, but because they worried about sleeping poorly.My patients describe how their sleep fear kicks in when they’re lying in bed, all too aware that time is passing and they’re still not asleep. If you’ve binged a Netflix series while lying still, your tracker might credit you with an hour of ‘light sleep’This sleep fear, though, only chases sleep away on a biological level – altering your brain chemistry, increasing your cortisol levels. Cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, is naturally released by your body first thing in the morning to wake you up and get you going. So it’s definitely not what you want your body to release in the middle of the night. Worse, sleep fear also suppresses melatonin, your sleep hormone, which makes sense on a primal level – after all, if your body perceives a threat, why would it let you sleep and be exposed to danger?Anxiety about sleep, then, only forces your body to wake you up.Feeling groggy doesn’t mean you slept badlySo many people equate the groggy feeling on waking up with their sleep being inadequate – and then panic. However, this grogginess is a normal reaction caused by your brain taking time to move from sleep to full alertness – and can last up to half an hour.It’s especially common if you’ve woken from deep sleep stage – a stage when you’re very asleep, and your brain is clearing out waste. You can reduce this feeling with a consistent wake-time: set your alarm for the same time, weekday and weekends. Your body cleverly adapts to this by automatically shifting your lighter sleep stages closer to that moment of wake-up. You’re then less likely to be pulled out of deep sleep by your alarm and wake feeling clearer.Believe you slept well… even if you haven’tA std=udy published in 2011 in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research found that people who experienced objectively poor sleep (as measured in a sleep lab) but didn’t perceive it as a problem were less likely to experience daytime fatigue and had better mood regulation and fewer symptoms of depression, compared to those who worried about their sleep.It’s about perception. I encourage my patients to reframe the impact of a bad night, before a big event, for example. Indeed, research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 showed that believing you’ve slept well – even when you haven’t – can improve your cognitive performance and mood the next day.This phenomenon, known as ‘placebo sleep’, highlights the power of mindset.Trackers can’t tell if you’re a couch potatoSleek, high-tech and whispering promises of better sleep with the power of ‘data’, sleep trackers are everywhere – from smartwatches to wearable rings. For the two decades Stephanie Romiszewski has worked as a sleep psychologist, her clinics have been filled with people with sleep disordersIt feels empowering to quantify the mysterious hours you spend unconscious. But there’s evidence sleep trackers can do more harm than good.Most consumer-grade sleep trackers use a combination of motion sensors and heart rate monitoring to infer sleep stages. But here’s the catch: they’re not measuring your actual sleep.With polysomnography, the gold standard method used in sleep clinics to assess sleep, sensors attached to your head and body record brain waves, eye movements, muscle activity, heart rate, breathing patterns and blood oxygen levels, while a camera records your movements.Sleep trackers, however, rely on algorithms to guess if you’re asleep, awake or in a specific sleep stage.That’s why, if you’ve binged a Netflix series while lying still, your tracker might credit you with an hour of ‘light sleep’ – for while trackers are great at detecting movement, they’re terrible at understanding why you’re not moving. Furthermore, researchers have found that when the tracker results are manipulated in studies to show that participants have had poor sleep – even when it’s been good – their health outcomes are much the same as someone who did indeed sleep poorly. This is a crucial finding because it shows how influential these devices can be. Even when the data is false, it can have the same negative effects as actual poor sleep.That ‘sleep score’, then, is far more of an arbitrary measure than your tracker suggests. So it’s important to understand that your sleep shouldn’t be defined by a score, but by how you feel during the day…. and they’re worryingly addictiveWhen you start using a sleep tracker, your brain may release dopamine, the chemical messenger associated with reward.Initially, this feels great. The act of using the tracker becomes rewarding, even if the device itself doesn’t contribute meaningfully to sleep quality.Over time this can create a dopamine loop, where the brain begins to crave the ‘reward’ of using the tracker, reinforcing the dependency.But this has real consequences: the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, planning and managing expectations, starts to prioritise these external signals over your body’s natural cues about how well you’ve slept. This leads to heightened sleep anxiety.Don’t panic about enough ‘deep sleep’Another issue with trackers is the way they encourage us to attempt to micromanage the four stages of our sleep: light, stable, deep and REM.This is not only counterproductive, creating yet more sleep anxiety, it’s actually biologically impossible. Sleep is a series of repeating cycles of the different stages. Each cycle lasts 90 minutes or so. A full night consists of four to five of these four cycles, and each stage within these cycles serves a different, crucial function.On average, it’s normal to take around 20 minutes to fall asleep, and enter stage one, light sleep, where you transition from wakefulness to sleep, drifting in and out. This stage is around 5 per cent of overall sleep time.Stage two is stable sleep, around half of your total night’s sleep time, when the brain does a clean-up, deciding what to remember or not. It’s the vital bridge to move from light to deep sleep – yet is ignored by many sleep-tracking apps, which often group stable sleep into ‘light sleep’. Instead, they prefer to overemphasise the third and fourth stages of sleep: deep and REM.Deep sleep should be around 15-25 per cent of your overall sleep time: it’s when your body tissues repair, muscles grow, and your brain flushes out waste. REM – or rapid eye movement – sleep is the dream stage, which should be around 20-25 per cent of your night. The lightest stage, it’s crucial for processing emotions.Your body naturally works with your sleep stages to ensure you get the right amount of each you need. It doesn’t necessarily make up for a lack of sleep by increasing total sleep time. Instead, it reallocates how much time you spend in certain sleep stages to prioritise what’s missing.For instance, if you’ve been physically exhausted or recovering from illness, your body will increase your percentage of deep sleep, even if your total sleep time stays the same.If you’ve been emotionally drained or stressed, your body will increase REM sleep, even condensing deep sleep slightly to make room for it.This process is known as selective rebound – your brain’s way of prioritising what’s most important, even without increasing total sleep time.Despite sleep trackers’ obsession with deep sleep and REM sleep – which, after all, sound sexier than plain old ‘stable’ sleep – all stages of sleep are vital. And we really can’t control how much of each stage we get.This was proven when military organisations attempted to create ‘super soldiers’ who needed less sleep. They thought removing ‘unnecessary’ sleep stages while preserving deep sleep and REM would maximise performance. They stimulated the soldiers’ brains to eliminate light and stable sleep – but it only led to disoriented, memory- impaired soldiers.Crucially, studies have also shown that trackers are often less than 50 per cent accurate at identifying individual sleep stages compared to polysomnography. So when your app proudly tells you that you had 17 per cent REM sleep, take it with a very large pinch of salt.Adapted from Think Less, Sleep More by Stephanie Romiszewski (Atlantic Books, £14.99), to be published January 1. ©Stephanie Romiszewski 2026. To order a copy for £13.49 (offer valid to 11/01/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to the Mail’s Bookshop or call 020 3176 2937.
Publicado: 2025-12-22 17:03:00
fonte: www.dailymail.co.uk
