Sleep is a vital, yet often overlooked, component of good health and wellbeing. In particular, the restorative effects of sleep play a crucial role in maintaining optimal physical and mental health, and promoting recovery from ailment. In particular, sleep loss:
- impairs attention, learning and memory, and reasoning and problem-solving, and the ability to cope with stressors and challenges
- impairs the breakdown of stress hormones and impairs the immune system and the body’s ability to combat illness
- disrupts blood pressure control, appetite, breathing, and general cardiovascular health
- increases vulnerability to a range of physical health conditions, including stroke, heart disease, obesity, diabetes
- increases vulnerability to a range of mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety disorders, and ADHD
On average, adults need 7–8 hours of sleep per night. Babies typically sleep about 16 hours a day. Children aged 1-2years need 11-14 hours a night, children 3-5years need 10-13 hours, while children 6-12 years should get 9-12 hours per night. Teens aged 13-18 years need 8-10 hours. To attain the maximum restorative benefits of sleep, getting a full night of quality sleep is important.
Did you know?
Even subtle sleep restriction can be significant. The negative impact after just two weeks of losing only two hours sleep a night is equivalent to the impairment experienced after a night of total sleep deprivation!
A good night’s sleep consists of 4 to 5 sleep cycles. Each cycle includes periods of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when we dream, and deep non-REM (nREM) sleep. When a person first falls asleep, they enter into nREM sleep. REM sleep occurs next. During the night we cycle between nREM and REM sleep, and this pattern of cycling is critical to good sleep.
The rest and rejuvenation provided by sleep represents a basic dimension of good physical and mental health. Unfortunately, common sleep strategies often cause more problems than they solve. While medications like Valium, Temazapam, or Xanax (known as benzodiazepines) have short-term sedative effects, they actually further disrupt sleep, changing how many sleep cycles a person experiences, how long they stay in nREM sleep, and how often they enter REM sleep. Benzodiazapines also have addictive properties, making it hard for people to stop taking these medications, and creating withdrawal symptoms when they do try to stop, which further worsen sleep. When people can’t sleep, many try watching tv or spend time on their phones and tablets until they feel sleepy. However, the bright artificial light from these devices, so-called “blue light,” actually signals the brain that it’s time to be awake, making it even harder to fall asleep.
At neuroCare we have combined cutting edge technology with neuroscience principles of learning to develop scientifically proven therapies to improve sleep. Using sophisticated brain mapping techniques, we identify personalised neural markers of your sleep health. A customised neurofeedback training program is then used to optimise the brain networks related to the induction and maintenance of nREM sleep. Our programs significantly decrease the time taken to get to sleep, and significantly increase the total time spent asleep. Better sleep corresponds with improvement in cognitive and behavioural symptoms, and enhanced physical and mental health.