Another discovery made in the sleep laboratory is that a normal adult will wake up a few times during the night. Some may wake as often as 10 to 15 times. Each time can be as short as a minute. The person then falls back into sleep and never remembers that he has in fact woken at all. This discovery is important for allaying the fears of problem sleepers. When people who suffer from insomnia wake up in one of these normal awakenings they panic. They say to themselves, ‘This is it, I am awake in the middle of the night, and I will not be able to sleep again tonight’. This fear and anxiety of not being able to sleep after awakening at night causes further insomnia.

So next time you wake in the middle of the night, tell yourself that this is completely normal. Just relax, do nothing, let nature take its course, and you will fall back into natural sleep again. Never look at the alarm clock; in fact, knowing the time of night will normally increase your anxiety. You will find yourself sleeping better if you put your alarm away.

As a person becomes older his sleep pattern changes. He has many more awakenings throughout the night. His sleep is much lighter, and he rarely enters stages 3 and 4; instead these are replaced by a lot of awakenings and there is a kind of natural insomnia. However, most older people do not understand that they no longer need somuch sleep. They feel distressed lying in bed alone at night, and some still want to recapture the feeling of ‘sleeping like a baby’.

My advice to the elderly is that we are becoming wiser and more respected as we grow older. We should be proud of our grey hair and hard-earned senior status in society. We should feel lucky that we have outlived our unfortunate associates. We are no longer babies, and do not need all that sleep anymore. We can relax and rest at night, and should keep ourselves more active both physically and mentally in the daytime. During the day, if we are inactive, we may have a lot of microsleeps. Microsleeps are brief periods of sleep activity which can be recorded on the EEC These microsleeps last only a few seconds, but, if all these microsleeps during the day are added together, they will replace most of the need to sleep at night.

Many of my older patients regularly sleep three hours a night and have one hour of afternoon nap. They are all healthy and they function perfectly well in the day. They understand that they do not need all that sleep. It is sad to see older people, who biologically need only a few hours of sleep each night, extending their sleep time artificially with sleeping pills.

To summarise, the two different kinds of sleep, REM and NREM, alternate with each other, and we have a few sleep cycles each night. We used to tmnk that sleep is passive and peaceful and that if we dream a lot we have had a poor sleep. Now, with the help of the sleep laboratories, we know that we have at least four or five dream periods at night and at least one-quarter of our sleep is spent in dreams, although we cannot remember most of them. The other surprise is that it is normal to wake up in the middle of the night. These findings have dispelled the myth that good sleep means no dreams and no awakenings in the night.

*11/23/6*

Related Posts:

• DREAMS AND PHILOSOPHY
• SLEEP LABORATORY: POLYSOMNOGRAM
• SLEEP LABORATORY: BRAIN WAVES
• WHY SLEEP?

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