Dream a Little Dream... In one year, your average adult will sleep for just under 3,000 hours. But 2020 hasn’t exactly been a normal year, and a lot of us are grappling with changes to our normal sleeping schedule – whether that’s an extra afternoon nap to combat the constant feelings of lethargy, or a loss of night-time hours due to anxiety triggered by watching the news. To help put your mind at ease when it comes to quarantine shut-eye, we’ve delved deep into the world of sleep to (hopefully) help you lot get a better slumber... By the time we reach 75, we’ll have spent a solid 25 years of our lives snoozing. To some – such as the business-obsessed CEOs who thrive off checking in with their Tokyo office at 4am on the way to the gym – that might sound like a lot of wasted time. But, those hours spent in bed are invaluable to us and our ability to function as human beings. As neuroscientist and certified sleep-expert Dr Matthew Walker once said during an appearance on This Morning in 2018: “We used to ask the question: ‘Why do we sleep?’, as if there was one single function, and that’s the equivalent of saying ‘why are we awake?’ We’re awake for lots of reasons. The same is true for sleep.” Dr Matthew released his international best selling book, Why We Sleep, in 2017, which not only runs through the nitty-gritty details of why we need sleep to function, but also details how to harness the power of sleep to improve your health both physically and mentally. Matthew completed his undergraduate degree in neuroscience at the University of Nottingham in 1996, and currently resides as a professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley – so there’s no doubt we have a lot to learn from him. From the obvious benefits of restoring energy levels, reducing stress and repairing the body, sleep also has a major impact on your body’s ability to boost your immunity and fertility, slim your waistline and prevent illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease. Without a decent amount of shut-eye, you can become emotionally unstable and unable to recall information, carry out basic tasks or understand logical reasoning and, in extreme circumstances, seriously damage your health. In a study conducted by the University
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of Chicago in 1989, when rats were deprived of REM sleep, they died almost as quickly as they would from total food deprivation. We are currently living through a sleep-loss epidemic. Surveys show that in the 1940s, the average adult was sleeping for 7.9 hours a night; now, that figure is closer to just 6.5 hours during the week for most adults. For centuries, our bodies have been programmed to demand a certain amount of sleep per night, but our lifestyles have undergone a significant change in those eight decades, and that’s before we’ve even begun to address the effect this pandemic is having on our slumber. Sleep and anxiety have a complicated and intertwined relationship – when you’re suffering with anxious thoughts, the levels of adrenaline in your body are similar to those of your ‘fight or flight’ response, meaning the last thing your body will feel like doing is nodding off. But, this lack of sleep can have an even worse effect on your mood, as even small bouts of sleep deprivation will chip away at your happiness and, in turn, make you more irritable and worried. Thanks to the dramatic change of routine, concerns about the health of ourselves, our family and friends, and the constant bad news coming from our TVs and social media feeds, it’s no surprise none of us are feeling particularly rested. People all over the world have begun to report more vivid dreams since the beginning of the pandemic too. In his book, Dr Matthew states: “REM sleep dreaming offers a form of therapy… takes the painful sting out of difficult emotional episodes you have experienced during the day, offering
