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You Might be Sleeping All Wrong

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Behind on sleep? Try these simple tips today!

My dear friend says I’m the most sleep-deprived person she knows, and that it’s been that way every year since college.

As one of the people who probably found me sleeping in the freshman study lounge, my nose on a tedious philosophy book, she would know.

I realize she’s probably spot on when I start to tick off the things people tease me about over the years:

  • Classmates in college used to mimic my “head bob” during certain afternoon classes in which it was particularly difficult to stay focused on the conversation.
  • I once stretched in a child’s pose on my bed after a full day’s work teaching third graders and woke up two hours later. I would not recommend that position for sleeping, by the way, as you cannot move your hips at all when you awaken and will get a bit panicky wondering how you’re going to get off the bed!
  • My husband always kids me about the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert where I fell asleep during my first pregnancy.
  • When we returned to visit our college church with our new baby and he slept in his carseat all through Mass, the priest joked afterward: “Just like his mother!”
  • We were talking in my family recently about how I felt sick during the first part of my pregnancy with our little girl, moreso than the boys, and I defined it as really, really tired. That same little girl, now six, immediately came back with, “But Mommy, you’re always tired!“

So we’ve established that I have some terrible sleep habits and am always overtired. How’s a girl supposed to catch up?

You Can’t Always Get What You Want…

Can You Catch up on Sleep? Yes you can!

I love sleeping, truly. It may not sound like it when I’m answering emails at one in the morning, but let me tell you, once I’m in bed, I’m a happy girl. It’s pretty hard to get me up in the mornings in fact. Sleeping in is a rare treat as a mother of three, but I embrace it every time…and then usually regret it once it’s noon on a Saturday and I’ve hardly gotten anything done because I’ve only been up a few hours.

I’d always read that you can’t make up sleep, that a few hours extra on the weekend isn’t the same as having regular, sufficient sleep. I was pondering that idea and juxtaposed it in my mind with what my colleague and friend Donielle of Natural Fertility and Wellness had recently told me about Vitamin D (use the coupon KS10 for 10% off!) and taking cod liver oil: that you can, in fact, “stock up” on Vitamin D and just take a bunch of CLO every few days instead of incorporating it into the daily routine (not always easy).

I probably should have been sleeping, but pondering random thoughts is much more fun, right?

I started wondering what other sorts of healthy things you can and can’t “make up” on the weekends, and the idea for these posts was born (Here’s the companion post, on what supplements you have to take every day vs. stocking up on the weekend).

It’s very humbling to write, because not only did I open it with some very unhealthy truths about your favorite real food blogger, but I’m about to begin the meat of the research with a big ol’ “I was wrong all along” discovery…

Repaying the Sleep Debt

It turns out, much to my heavy eyelids’ great joy, that you CAN actually make up on lost sleep – just not in one huge “sleep until noon” Saturday session.

Best ways to “catch up” on sleep:

  • Get an extra hour or two of sleep a night.
  • If just a bit of sleep deprivation happens on weekdays, a few extra hours on a Saturday may just do it.
  • Regular naps are the very best long term – but a 15-20 minute nap after a night of poor sleep also showed positive effects on alertness in a study, and even 5 minutes can have attention benefits. Some cultures normally split sleep into about 6 hours at night and 90 minutes or so in the afternoon, which is a research-based way to get sufficient rest. Naps of 30-60 minutes don’t show great benefits for the long-term.
  • You can also “bank” sleep by getting a bunch of extra hours before you chaperone that all-night lock-in, drive overnight to Florida or prepare to give birth with potential through-the-night labor.
  • For chronically sleep deprived (preaching to the choir here, obviously), a few months of an extra hour or two a night may be necessary to get into a regular sleep pattern. For me, that ought to take me right up until baby no. 4 comes along and disrupts it all again!

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Will Poor Sleep Kill You?

Facebook You Can Actually Catch Up On Sleep But Not in the Way You Think

It may be welcome and rather exciting news to know how to make up for some lost sleep, but for those of us chronically sleep-deprived individuals, we probably shouldn’t rest on our 15-minute nap laurels too quickly.

Sleep is important for many areas of health, and “making up” on it will only help a little.

For example, a more well-rested individual deals with stress better throughout the day, and those who are aren’t under a lot of stress tend to fall asleep and stay asleep better, quite the two-edged sword.

Sleep is vital for regeneration, proper digestion, memory, and so much more. The cycles of the liver, surprisingly, play a vital symbiotic role with the body’s need for rest.

The liver goes through its “night” cycle of storing sugars from about 3 p.m. until 3 a.m., with peaks of activity between about 1-3 a.m. If you’re not sleeping during those hours, your liver, metabolism, digestion and overall health can really suffer.

Beyond the liver’s need for sleep, its cycles also determine your tired times – if you’ve ever experienced a “second wind” after 10 or 11 p.m., that’s really your liver reversing its function (since you’re not sleeping when it wants you to anyway) and beginning to convert its stores to energy, its daytime cycle. The unfortunate result of what seems like a boon to your productivity at the time is that you feel worn out the next day because your liver cycles are off and have used some of your daytime energy to keep you up at night. (Phooey.)

So the best bedtime for your liver is likely between 9-10 p.m.

Does “Early to Bed, Early to Rise” Really Make You a Smart, Rich Person?

I was also able to find a handful of sources that confirmed what I’d heard a few years ago, that sleep before midnight is more restorative than sleep after midnight (some say “counts double”). Your willpower and productivity are also typically higher in the earliest morning hours than late at night, so if you can only fit in 5-6 hours of sleep, try getting at least an hour or two before midnight and waking up early to complete your to-do list and see how it goes.

The ironic little twist to an early bedtime is that your REM sleep (the very deep, dream-inducing kind) is more likely to be longer after 3 a.m., and the nonetheless good, deep non-REM sleep is greater earlier in the night. The lesson there? If you can sleep in on the weekends, go for it! Except of course for all the wisdom that says a regular, unchanging bedtime and waking time are the most important of all. (Nothing is easy, is it!?)

What’s your experience with how sleep affects your mood during the day? After reading, might you make a small change in your schedule?

If your weekend mornings are less hectic than the weekdays, you’ll be excited to find out which supplements and vitamins you can cheat on and only take on the weekends rather than trying to remember “one more thing” in the rush of a busy weekday..

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Disclosure: There are affiliate links in this post to Amazon from which I will earn some commission if you make a purchase. See my full disclosure statement here.

28 Bites of Conversation So Far

  1. So glad you’re doing this! I have been getting 8-9 hours for over a year now and notice a huge difference, especially when I don’t get it.
    I would suggest that when you do have the next baby, you go to bed at least an hour before the amount of sleep that you want to get. In other words, go to bed for nine hours of sleep in order to actually get eight. Also, cosleeping and nursing in bed are great. I never really felt that sleep-deprived!

    • I found the research totally fascinating…it’ll be putting it into practice that will take some serious baby steps for me!! (written at 11p.m. of course, blah…) I should do a sleep challenge and make my readers keep me accountable to go to bed by 10 and get up at 6 or something. That sounds impossible!!

      • Nope, in bed by 9:00 and up at 6:00 once you have the baby. Really. Just have to change your standards for a clean house… among other things!

    • Thank you for putting this out there. I am mother to a little boy with no Daddy now. I have almost insurmountable stresses that are emotional, financial, and trauma-related that are put away for the day so I can focus on being a happy and loving mother for my son, but they surface when it’s just me… so I “fight the night”.

      I have aged 10 years in just a few. My thyroid and liver are not really playin’ with the team anymore and the once youthful face in the mirror is looking… harder. Along with Averaging only 3-4 hours of sleep almost every night for 4 years will probably do that. Almost put an LOL there, but it’s really not that funny as I see this typing.

      Ultimately, everything I do and want is for my amazing son and I want to be alive to be there for him. I have always known I need sleep, academically… all of that. Something in your blog was different. Perhaps it was the hope. Maybe I can do something more- bank more- reverse some of this- maybe start to heal.

      Action- purchased some melatonin and whole food supplements and going to bed at 9 (!?!#@???) tonight. Will most likely wake up very early at first while training my body and mind to allow longer sleep. We’ll see how it goes. Charting it to keep accountable, and can certainly post progressions here if you or a reader are interested.

      Again… a sincere thank you.

      • My heart goes out to you. I clicked on this article because I’ve recently learned that I have a circadian rhythm disorder that makes it hard for me to fall asleep before 2am (and keeps me sleeping in til 10am, unless I fight it, and then I”m sleep deprived). I have more than a decade of sleep deprivation behind me. Lots of articles have said you can never catch up on it, but I didn’t believe them. I believe in the body’s ability to heal. I found a few articles that explained what Katie’s post here said- that you can slowly catch up on sleep. But I wanted to share with you what has helped me sleep in time with the rest of the world, and get more sleep overall- light therapy and microdose melatonin therapy. I got myself a dawn simulator, which is a light that slowly gets brighter to signal to my body to wake up at whatever time I set it to- it’s set to 7am right now. And most melatonin supplements are way more than your body ever produces- like a melatonin bomb going off in your body- and in my experience, you end up needing more and more for it to work. I’m taking 600mcg (that’s MICROgrams), about 6 hours before I want to sleep (It’s time release) and it’s working wonderfully. Sleep deprivation has wreaked havoc on my body- metabolism, adrenal fatigue, thyroid- and probably more ways than I know- but now I have hope that since I’ve found the root problem I can heal. Anyway, I just thought I’d share how I did it.

  2. I like to sleep in on Saturdays. It does give m more energy for the long day of projects and cooking. Also, I find that if I m tied I just have to sleep. That’s it. Like a nap or a snooze where I am, sometimes pulling over while driving even! I’m a night owl. Have not been able to change that since I was in middle school. My dad was too! Even when I get up early for something, I’m still alert at night. It’s the mid morning where fade. Or 5pm. No amount of early to bed and early rising can keep me from be on tired at 5PM!

    Anyway, this works for me. I don’t get sick very often, because of our real food diet and herbal supplements etc, and as long as I get my naps in, I’m a happy girl!

  4. Oh my gosh. Sleep is SO important. I worked nights at the hospital right after nursing school and it was NOT worth the extra money. My body was so messed up, especially with trying to change over to a day schedule on the weekends. After about 6 months of that, I had a seizure-type episode. It really shook me up and I realized that you can’t just “push on” or make your body do more than it is able. That was really interesting about the liver and metabolic cycles. I believe it 🙂

  5. Sleep = the most important aspect of health!

    Of course, some people need more sleep than others depending on age, stress levels, and personalities. I find I do best with 8-9 hours in a 24 hour period. A new baby means sometimes those hours happen during day time naps!

    But I’ve gone from being grouchy and scatterbrained to fairly level headed and I actually remember stuff now.

  6. I had to laugh at your head-bob comment. When I was in graduate school many years ago, I would fall asleep any time anyone dimmed the lights. One time I was advancing slides for the professor I was TA’ing for and fell asleep during a particularly long slide. After that I decided I should get to bed earlier, and I’ve done that ever since. My husband and I try to get to bed before 10, and now I know why that’s a good idea (it’s harder to do in summer, and the liver thing may give me the extra incentive to make sure we do it).
    As far as waking up with kids go, I co-slept with my kids until they were sleeping through most of the night (~3 years old). As long as I didn’t get up out of bed, I could go right back to sleep. Now I sleep with earplugs to sleep through my husband’s snoring and he (bless his heart) is the one to get up when someone calls (which fortunately isn’t that often anymore).
    Best of luck making your schedule work for more sleep. As habits go, it’s one that has so many rewards that it’s pretty easy to change!

  7. Did you just announce that you are expecting Baby #4 or did I miss something along the way?!?! That is spectacular news! When are you due?

  8. As a Gentle Sleep Coach for kids I loved reading this article about sleep for adults. Thanks for sharing it…and now I better go to sleep! 🙂

      • Katie, I would love to help you – I have lots of resources for kids 0-5 yrs! There is a lot that can be done to help babies and kids sleep better (without crying it out) that I didn’t even understand until I was trained as a Gentle Sleep Coach. Our first two were terrible sleepers and our 3 month old is sleeping well – partly personality and partly because I know what to do now! Feel free to send me an email/contact me if you need or want any help :-). Also thanks so much for your blog, books and resources! I recommend you to my friends and anyone having a new baby to have your Healthy Snacks To Go E-book while nursing! 🙂

  9. Thanks for this informative post! I am naturally a night person so going to bed before 11:30-12:30 is difficult for me, but I know the value of it. Thank you for the reminder. I do love my sleep, too. Getting up in the morning is the most difficult part of my day. Perhaps I would find it easier if I went to bed earlier. Thanks, again, for the great info!

  10. i’m the type who NEEDS more than the typical person, always have, since i was a kid – i get ridiculously emotional when i don’t get enough sleep. i try very hard to get 9-10 hours, but with 5 kids ages 7 and under (and #6 on the way) i tend to not get anywhere near as much as i wish i could. what’s working best for me lately is to put my two youngest girls and oldest son to bed with me at night (between 6 & 7pm) until they fall asleep (if i’m lucky, i fall asleep with them) while my husband (provided he’s not on travel for work) puts the other 2 boys to bed. after everyone is asleep, we then carry them to their own beds/crib for the rest of the night. they fall asleep much faster and with far fewer ‘excuses’ when we all lay down together. i get at least 1 extra hour of sleep each night this way. not ideal, and not a long term solution with baby #6 coming in 15 weeks, but at least i’m getting a little more sleep and bed time is a little easier on me now!

  11. I hear you! I have always been a person who needs a lot of sleep. Luckily, I’m a person who falls asleep very easily, unlike my husband who can’t sleep in, can’t nap, and has a really hard time going to bed early either. So if I have a bad night (with kids, that’s not my fault!) I really can make it up later.

    A lot of practice has shown me I do best with going to bed early, rather than sleeping late or napping. The kids sleep soundly the first part of the night, for one thing, whereas the nightmares are always at 3 am, or they get restless at 5 when the birds start singing. And for another, I can get the sleep in a solid chunk, which seems to help — after a nap, I always seem to need a good hour to really wake up again!

    The hard part is that evening is that precious time for parents when we can actually relax and have time to ourselves. And so often that seems so much more valuable than sleep …. I am so overwhelmed and testy when I don’t get my “me time” in the evening. But I’m also cranky if I don’t get my sleep. It’s tough to choose.

    But with being pregnant and having a night-nursing toddler, I realized I have to choose sleep. I was hearing that “nasty voice” so often, having more and more mommy meltdowns that left me apologizing again and again ….. honestly I was worried I would abuse my kids. I didn’t even feel tired, I felt constantly angry. That, and my skin would crawl every time they touched me. Of course that only made them clingier.

    Well, I nightweaned the toddler at 21 months. He still wakes at night most nights, but nothing like how he did. I am so thankful I did it, because my kids needed a good mother a heck of a lot more than one of them needed to nurse at night. He just needed some help learning to fall back to sleep without it. (Dr. Jay Gordon has a page that explains how to do it without leaving your kids to cry alone, which comes up right off if you google it.)

    That, and going to bed at 9:30 as many nights in a row as it took to feel human again. It was an amazing feeling one morning to wake up before any of the kids did and think, “I could go back to sleep, but I’m NOT TIRED!” Or to have the energy to clean the house and snuggle my kids. Sleep is no joke. If there were a pill that could get rid of that horrible anger and give me energy, I would have paid any price for it. I had to make up my mind to pay any price for the sleep, even though I want so much to stay up and watch a movie or something at night, it is better to be happy and functional.

    • “Me-time” and husband time happen at night here too, it’s so tough!! I hear you on the constantly angry… I stayed up too late on Monday, and even though I didn’t feel tired at the time and didn’t feel terrible Tuesday, I wasn’t a very nice person and every little thing made me totally PO’d. Kind of thinking I know the reason now that I’m paying attention…you did well making the right choice!!!
      🙂 Katie

  12. I love the idea of ~6 hours at night, with a nice long nap during the day. Maybe someday my schedule will allow for that! (I currently work 7a-5p, which makes that schedule rather difficult…)

  13. My parents have been doing a ton of research about the effects of sleep and are understanding that chronic sleep deprivation can really impact the brain… to the point that someone starts to show signs of demensia. Decisions making, response time, logical processing, tracking conversations, etc can all be affected by lack of sleep. Not something to mess with. Glad you’re helping get the word out!

  14. I need quite a bit if sleep and even with five kids, the last three less than three years apart, manage to get lots of sleep. They napped at the same time, so me too! But in the last few years I’ve been quite tired and it was really bothering me. What finally got me out of the rut was cutting out all alcohol (except very occasionally) and only drinking coffee once and a while, plus a five day a week running, fitness schedule. I now only need 7h30 hrs of sleep and feel great. There are so many things that come in to play with our health and sometimes the influences are hard to find.

  15. “I burn my candle at both ends. It will not last the night. But ah, my foes and ah, my friends, it gives such a lovely light!” ~Edna St. Vincent Milay

  16. Jennifer Stewart Love that – good for you to figure out your triggers. You are so right, the human body is SO complex and it’s incredibly tough to troubleshoot something like “I’m tired.” Phew!

  17. 1-3am being awake is your liver… what about if you wake up at 3am? What organ does that relate to? Also, what about time zones?

    • Rebecca,
      I wish I knew your answers – my logic says that the body regulates based on sunlight, so time zones would adjust for that (might be 30 mins off or whatever if you’re on the far east or west side of the time zone, right?). Maybe waking at 3 is the liver finishing? No idea! 🙂 katie

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Please remember that I’m just a gal who reads a lot and spends way too much time in her kitchen. I’m not a doctor, nurse, scientist, or even a real chef, and certainly the FDA hasn't evaluated anything on this blog. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Please talk to your health professional (or at least your spouse) before doing anything you might think is questionable. Trust your own judgment…I can’t be liable for problems that occur from bad decisions you make based on content found here.

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