When you lead a hectic life, one of the first things to go by the wayside is sleep. I know I find myself running all the time, from one event to another and from one task to another. There’s always more to do than I have time…so I push myself to the limit. For years I’ve even bragged that I could get by with very little sleep. Four hours wasn’t uncommon when the kids were much younger. I wore it as a badge of honor.
But you know what…I was stupid.
Yup, stupid!
While I was sometimes able to keep up that pace for a week, maybe even two…there was always the inevitable crash. Several days spent sleeping. Falling asleep in the middle of the day. Skipping events because I was just too tired. And a general fogginess surrounded me during those few days of catchup. While I would sometimes recognize I’d fallen into a sleep deficit, it never really dawned on me that I might actually be falling into sleep debt.
According to dictionary.com the two don’t seem to have all that much in common:
Deficit: a lack or shortage; deficiency.
Debt: a liability or obligation to pay or render something
In my mind, the deficit definition makes a lot of sense, especially when related to sleep. Let’s face it, we all know that we need a certain amount of sleep to function. If you don’t reach that minimum you’re not going to be anywhere near your best. Heck, you’re lucky to get through the day. Am I right? You betcha! When you’re running up a deficit, you’re going to have to make it up sometime. Hence the crash and several days of lethargy, naps, and reduced productivity.
Debt is more permanent. It doesn’t seem to go away quickly, mostly because it took a while to build up. As I’ve gotten older I’m afraid that I’m paying for my many years of sleep deficits now. I know that part of it is simply getting older. I’ve reached the point where I need at least seven hours of sleep every night to be able to function decently. Anything less and I’m in a mental fog. I don’t have energy to do things. Heck, I have trouble making decisions. And as I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to wonder if it’s the accumulation of all those years of sleep deficits. Maybe I wasn’t really catching up after each stint in deficit with those days of sleep. Maybe I was just getting back far enough from the precipice of total shutdown that I thought I was all caught up.
That’s a scary thought.
It’s especially scary when you figure that I’ve run in a sleep deficit/catch-up phase for something like 28 years. Yeah, years!
The big question is whether I can really do anything about those 28 years of deficits. As I’ve mentioned in another post, I’ve tracked my sleep for a while and have begun to look into ways to improve my sleep. It’s become obvious to me that the raw number of hours that I’m in bed, trying to sleep aren’t enough. I need to get sound, quality sleep. Through my tracking I’ve become more aware of how I feel in the morning. Not just the physical stuff (heck, I’m getting older and I’m working out every day…pretty much everything is going to hurt to some degree), but also how I feel mentally. I’m trying to assess my level of alertness in the morning, and then throughout the day. I’m beginning to dabble in some mindfulness practices that are helping me recognize when I’m alert and also when I’m off. I’m not exactly sure what to do about those days when I’m off, but the first step is recognition…right?
According to Harvard Health Publications there is hope for repaying even longstanding sleep debt. Near the end of the article, the authors refer to Dr. Lawrence J. Epstein’s book The Harvard Medical School Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep. In the book, Dr. Epstein lists three things that you can do to erase a sleep debt:
- Settle short-term debt (what I call a sleep deficit)
- Address a long-term debt
- Avoid backsliding into a new debt cycle
To settle the short-term debt, Dr. Epstein recommends adding three to four hours on a weekend to makeup for up to ten hours of missed sleep from the prior week. In addition, you need to add one to two more hours per night for the following week. That’s up to 18 hours of extra sleep during the makeup week…a nearly 2:1 ratio for missed sleep!
He further recommends that long-term debt is best addressed through a vacation with a lighter schedule, no alarm clock (so you wake up naturally), and fewer obligations. If you’re anything like me, this is pretty much a dream rather than any sort of reality. Unless you count being woken by the kids as “waking up normally”…usually at some ungodly hour like 5am. While this is great advice, I’m just not sure how practical it is for a parent of small kids.
Finally, his best advice is to avoid falling back into the bad habits of developing more sleep debt. Of course, a big part of that is figuring out how much sleep you actually need. Not how much you can be by with, but how much sleep you need to actually function at your best.
So over the next few months I’m going to continue working on my sleep habits. My accountability partner is already nagging me about getting to bed earlier and getting enough sleep. I’m using my Apple Watch to remind me to shut down my electronics earlier in the evening and then to remind me to go to bed. Overall, it’s been working pretty well. But I still need to get better at treating sleep like a necessity rather than a luxury. Just like good nutrition and plenty of hydration, getting enough quality sleep is vitally important for my overall health and productivity.
So my question to you: Are you getting enough sleep? If not, what are you going to do about it?
