MICROSLEEPS & OFFICE SIESTAS (and why it’s normal to wake up at 2am)
Could a catnap at work mean a better night’s sleep? Dr Nerina Ramlakhan thinks we could all benefit from a break from the routine. Sarah Orme finds out more…
More people than ever are suffering from insomnia. Why are we sleeping so badly?
Insomnia has been around for a very long time but it’s particularly a problem at the moment because the world is going so fast. There are so many demands.
What happens to our body when we don’t get a good night’s sleep?
Humans are designed to spend roughly a third of their lives sleeping. When we sleep deeply it repairs the body on every level: physically, mentally, emotionally, and I believe spiritually as well. So we wake up in the morning and we feel inspired and passionate and creative, looking forward to the day ahead. When we don’t sleep well, we get the opposite of that. I’ve been working with sleep problems for over two and a half decades and I’ve noticed that when people don’t sleep well, and this goes on for too long, they might have physical problems – stomach problems, back problems, headaches, skin problems. And also emotional and mental health problems.
I’ve worked in psychiatry for over ten years, and the biggest part of my remit for that work was to help patients to get good sleep, because it was healing them. It was helping them to recover emotionally.
In your book The Little Book Of Sleep, you mention the different types of sleeper. Can you explain a bit about these?
If you look at the work of other sleep researchers they’ll talk about sleep chronotypes – the ‘owls’ and the ‘larks’, depending on whether you’re an early riser or a night owl. A night owl tends to go to bed late and wake up late; a lark goes to bed early and wakes up early. In my sleep classifications, I put people into two extremes. At one end of the scale you have the Martini sleeper, named after the cocktail of the 70s with the strapline “the drink that you can drink any time, any place, anywhere”. Your Martini sleeper can sleep any time, any place, anywhere.
Then you have the sensitive sleeper, who wakes up at the slightest noise and needs things to be just right before they go to sleep. They need to sleep on their side of the bed, or they won’t sleep on an argument. Where your Martini sleeper will say “We’ve had an argument, I need to go to bed and sleep this off ”, your sensitive sleeper will say “How on earth can you sleep? How can you go to bed sleeping on a problem?” Those are the two extremes, but
