Tagged: Your Guide to Better Sleep

I love hearing from readers who respond to my articles with questions, comments, and sleep stories of their own. My readers make up an incredibly bright, thoughtful community, with a lot of strong opinions and a lot of motivation to harness the power of sleep for mind-body health.

Your emails, tweets, and messages stand out for all sorts of reasons—they’re curious, thought-provoking, sometimes funny. And then, every so often, I get a message that sends a chill down my spine, as I did with the one I’m about to share with you.

Let me be clear: I don’t know this reader’s identity. This person wrote to me under complete anonymity. But what he says has the ring of truth, in alignment with the scientific evidence on shift work, sleep, and circadian rhythms. Here’s part of the note:  

I work as an air traffic controller, and I’m curious how much you know about our schedule and if you’ve ever specifically studied it or been asked to comment on it. We work what are known as “Rattlers”, which is a varying schedule

I’ve been writing about what sleep looks like at every age. Last week, we covered sleep in young adulthood, right up to the start of middle age. This week, I’m jumping back in to talk about how we sleep during middle age and throughout our older years.

At every stage of life, we face different challenges to sleep. But often, sleep starts to get increasingly complicated during middle age. Changes to hormones that influence sleep and circadian rhythms, greater risk for presence of health conditions that interfere with sleep, and the presence of chronic stress are some of the most common reasons why sleep tends to become more challenging the older we get.

If young adulthood gave some of us a hall pass when it comes to paying attention to sleep and investing time and attention in cultivating sleep habits, well…middle age is when that free ride typically ends. In order to sleep well and reap the benefits and protections of high-quality rest, we’ve got to pay attention to sleep on a daily basis. It helps to know what to

From our first days as newborns all the way to our old age, sleep changes throughout our lifetimes. Sleep is a dynamic process, one that affects (and is affected by) every other aspect of our lives and our biology. Bio rhythms shift, sleep architecture changes, hormone production rises and falls, all of which deeply affect how, whenand how wellwe rest. Throughout it all, the demands of daily life affect the amount—and the quality—of our nightly sleep.

There are some challenges to sleep that are perennial: inconsistent sleep routines, overconsumption of stimulants such as caffeine, over-exposure to artificial light—especially blue light. (I just wrote about blue light blocking glasses, how important they are and how to pick the right ones for you.)

But some important aspects of sleep change as we grow older—and those changes need to be met with new and different attention to sleeping well.

Wondering what sleep looks like at your age? Read on to find out the most common sleep challenges we face throughout every stage of life, and how to navigate them.

Most of the United States is just cooling down after a difficult, stifling, sleep-depriving heatwave. About two-thirds of the country was affected by this latest heatwave, which saw temperatures near and above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and heat indexes even higher. (The heat index measures how the body actually feels, taking into account both heat and humidity.) 

This wasn’t the first heatwave of the summer. And it’s not likely to be the last, especially since we’re headed into what are typically the hottest days of the year. As many of us have just been reminded, hot temperatures and high humidity make it a lot harder to sleep. And when you can’t rest comfortably and sleep soundly, that makes everything else you do harder. Let’s take a look at how the body handles sleep and heat, and how you can set yourself up to sleep better when temperatures soar. 

How heat hurts sleep 

Sleep is highly dependent on temperature. Internal body temperatures play a critical role in sleep onset and sleep maintenance—those are scientific terms for our ability to fall asleep

How much time do you spend thinking about your light consumption? If you’re like most people, the answer is: not enough.

Controlling light exposure isn’t something our pre-industrial, pre-digital ancestors had to worry about. But in today’s perpetually lit-up world, it’s important for us all to regulate how we consume light–and the timingof light our consumption. Light has tremendous effects on sleep and health, and too much light, especially in the evenings, can seriously undermine sleep. Blue light, we’ve learned, is especially detrimental to sleep and health, when we’re exposed to too much of it and our exposure comes at the wrong times of day and night.

Where’s all this blue light coming from? Screens are a major source. But so is environmental lighting, including the energy efficient lights in our own homes and public spaces, from airplane cabins to movie theaters.

Limiting screen time is one way to reduce and control light exposure. But for most of us, it’s not going to get us consistently the protections we need from excessive blue light exposure. That’s why blue light