Here is a question I answered at Quora.com.
If you have anything to ask about sleep, simply leave a message here below.
I keep waking up too early. I never had at least 7 hours of sleep ever since the lock-down. How can I return my sleep and get at least seven hours of sleep a night?
There are several neurological systems that play a key role in how your sleep progresses during the night:
- Sleep-drive
- Wake-drive
- Negative neurological stress
Based on your question, it seems that you can fall asleep with ease, and that isn’t a surprise, based on the fact that you get in average less than 7 hours sleep per night, which over time, leads to sleep deprivation. And the more sleep deprived you get, the stronger your brain's sleep-drive gets. As a result, when you go to bed, you’ll fall asleep in a few minutes. But the way you sleep is also affected.
What makes you wake up too early?
When you sleep, there are three main operations going on:
- Body maintenance system
- Brain cleaning system
- Brain self-reorganizing system
From these operations, brain’s self-reorganizing system claims the first place. This means, that when you get sleep deprived, your sleep structure forces you first into sleep-type that allows your brain to do self-reorganizing. But at the same time, your physical body doesn’t get the rest and maintenance it needs and as a result, the level of negative neurological stress grows and persists.
At some point the negative neurological stress will wake you up!
Normally, when the sleep structure is healthy, the body gets maintained before and in-between the brain’s cleaning and self-organizing. As a result, enough body-stress gets released so that the body-brain system can keep sleeping and at the end, achieve the 8-9 hours of sleep it needs.
Weakening of the sleep-drive
Also, what plays a role here, is the weakening of the sleep-drive, which is normal. When you wake up, after sleeping, let’s say 6 hours, the power of your sleep-drive is not any more that much. Now, the situation gets very challenging, because the negative neurological stress starts to power all kinds of systems, physical sensations, emotional responses and intellectual thinking. As a result, even you know you need more sleep, especially during these unusual times, it is hard to induce sleep if you don’t know how to do it.
How to return your sleep
To get back to sleep and to improve your sleep quality, the best way is to evoke a relaxation response by doing sleep-inducing movements the way I show in the Moving into Sleep method.
As a self-treatment, the Moving into Sleep Method is based on educational neuroscience. By doing gentle and subtle movements you can calm down your nervous system and fall asleep.
Thanks for reading,
Oliver
“Better sleep is a gentle movement away”