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Health

Sleep sense

According to one expert, the secret of a long life isn't diet and exercise, it's eight hours a night.

By ROBERT N. JENKINS
Published March 28, 2006

Three-quarters of the 1,018 American adults who participated in a survey in February indicated they are insomniacs. That word is misunderstood - it doesn't mean you prowl the house at all hours, just that you can't easily fall asleep when you go to bed or that you don't stay asleep.

Among the celebrities who admit to this are Julia Roberts, Courteney Cox Arquette, Madonna - okay, we might have figured she has enough on her mind to keep her awake - and even TV's poster boy for the Genial Host, Regis Philbin.

But you aren't going to bump into any of them when you do quit tossing and turning, unless you see them on TV, hoping that will put you to sleep. So put down that cup of coffee - especially if it's after lunch - and listen to someone who has been studying our dysfunctional sleep patterns for nearly 40 years: Dr. James B. Maas.

A professor of psychology and former chairman of that department at Cornell University, Maas is also the author of Power Sleep: The Revolutionary Program That Prepares Your Mind for Peak Performance. That bestseller was translated into 10 languages on its publication in 1998.

Because this weekend the nation switches to daylight saving time, which exacerbates sleep problems for many people, we interviewed Maas by telephone. Here's a look at his decades of research, and it's so brief it won't put you to sleep:

Pulse: So, just what is a normal night's sleep?

Maas: Seven and a half to 8¹/₂ hours a night, for adults. In our society, it's macho to brag you don't need much sleep. But you're fooling yourself. Too little sleep creates mood changes, forgetfulness, irritability, anxiety. The percentage of people who function well on five hours a night is zero.

The survey, sponsored in February by sleep aid Tylenol PM, found that 73 percent of the men and 77 percent of the women responding need more sleep. What causes this insomnia?

First, it is not unusual to wake up for up to 10 minutes during the night's sleep. The waking could be caused by noise, light, room temperature.

What is abnormal is not going back to sleep. The various symptoms are diagnosed as apnea, restless leg syndrome - there are 81 known sleep disorders.

Causes of insomnia include stress and certain medications, including those for rheumatoid arthritis and heart problems. Check with your physician if your sleep pattern is different after you start a new medication.

What do we most commonly do to ourselves to forestall a good night's sleep?

Avoid caffeine after 2 p.m. and alcohol less than three hours before bedtime. Caffeine, tobacco and alcohol disrupt REM sleep, the nice, continuous sleep that is most important to us.

Alcohol will put you to sleep, but you'll wake up every 90 minutes: It's a terrible sedative and a great stimulant.

So much for the common vices; how about eating at night?

You should go to bed hungry, rather than overloaded with calories.

People who regularly have truncated sleep - six hours or less - one-third of them are obese, studies show. That's because secretion of the hormone leptin is lowered when you don't sleep enough; that hormone suppresses appetite. The lack of leptin makes you feel starved. Consequently, those people sleeping too little consume too many complex carbohydrates.

One of the best diets is more sleep.

Many of us figure that we can catch up on sleep on the weekends. But if we have trained our body clocks to wake us at, say, 6:30 for the workday, how do we turn off that clock on the weekends or on vacation?

First, it is good to automatically wake up at the same time. We want to train our body to follow the circadian rhythms (biological cycles lasting about 24 hours).

We do not want a different schedule for the weekend. When we try to do that (by adding hours in bed), we put ourselves into eastbound jet lag without leaving St. Pete.

That's why Mondays are full of grumpy people, and more accidents happen (on Mondays) because of altered sleep routines.

And starting daylight saving time, when we "lose'' an hour by turning the clock ahead?

Accidents increase just after we have that time shift.

How about taking naps?

Ah, I coined the term "power nap'' about 40 years ago. This would be a 20-minute nap - all you need to be alert the rest of the day. And if you keep it to 20, you won't be worthless that night trying to fall asleep at the regular time.

That's why we don't like seniors to take long naps: They can't easily fall asleep at night.

In your book, you say that we really do need to "sleep away'' a third of our lives: eight hours a day. Just how important is sleep over the course of a lifetime?

The best predictor of a long life is not exercise and diet but the role of sleep. Only now are we getting the topic of sleep into medical school curriculums.

Robert N. Jenkins can be reached at (727) 893-8496 or jenkins@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 28, 2006, 09:18:24]