How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Night’s Sleep

Life is too short to waste it by sleeping, right? Too much to do, and not enough time to do it. After all, the early bird gets the worm. Gotta keep your eye on the ball, shoulders to the wheel, nose to the grindstone if you want to get ahead. You can sleep when you’re dead. Besides, you get along just fine on five to six hours of sleep, and you can always catch up on the weekend. Except, of course, that’s all a lot of baloney. Studies by the National Sleep Foundation show that while we are all a little different, adults need a good seven to eight hours of sleep each night to function at peak efficiency. Get less sleep than that and you risk loss of attention span, diminished productivity and a range of health issues from high blood pressure to depression. Recent studies have even suggested that people who repeatedly deprive themselves of sleep may lose the ability to recover their alertness, even after binge sleeping on the weekend. But if you are one of those people who believes you can beat the odds, here are some suggestions for ruining a perfectly good night’s sleep.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A computer with an Internet connection
• A television
• A snack stash with chocolate, soft drinks and coffee
• Exercise equipment of your choice

1. Exercise vigorously within a few hours of bedtime. There are tons of studies that show exercise is great for you and helps to improve your quality of sleep--as long as it is done early in the day. If you want to ruin a perfectly good night’s sleep just jump on that treadmill for a brisk 30 minute jog just before jumping into bed. That will stimulate your sympathetic nervous system for several hours making it more difficult to fall asleep.

2. Chow down on a chocolate candy bar and guzzle a soda to replenish all that energy you burned on your treadmill jog. Some late night snacks, like an oatmeal cooking and glass of milk, contain calcium and tryptophan which help the brain manufacture melatonin which is a sleep inducing chemical. Snacks with high fat, high protein and high caffeine content cause the level of adrenaline in your blood to rise triggering an increase in heart rate, breathing rate, urinary output, and the production of stomach acids--basically the reverse of everything you need for a good night's sleep.

3. Install your computer and television in your bedroom. While a study in the Journal of Advanced Nursing indicated that listening to soft music before bedtime was conducive to a good night’s sleep, you can always counter its effects by turning on the TV, particularly if there is a good horror movie or action adventure flick on to get your heart racing. The National Sleep Foundation calls watching television "anti-sleep." The noise and light produced by the television, even at low levels, can make falling asleep more difficult. Light prevents the brain from producing the hormone melatonin which is critical to sleep. If there is nothing worth watching on the tube, you can always log on to the Internet to chat with friends who can't sleep either, catch up on the latest news or play a video game. This will both stimulate and agitate your brain cells keeping them from reaching the relaxed state necessary for a good night’s sleep.

Tips & Warnings

• While sleep needs vary by age and other factors, if you want to ruin a perfectly good night’s sleep make sure you get less than 11 to 13 hours for preschoolers, 10 to 11 hours for school-aged kids, eight to nine hours for teenagers, and seven to eight hours for adults.
• Too little sleep can impair your ability to think, to moderate your emotions, to handle stress or to maintain a healthy immune system. Sleep deprivation has been proven to be fatal in lab rats. Without adequate sleep the brain works harder but operates less effectively. Concentration levels drop. Memory becomes impaired. Ability to problem solve is greatly reduced. Decision-making abilities are compromised. Other typical effects of sleep deprivation include depression, heart disease, hypertension, irritability, slower reaction times, slurred speech and tremors.