SLEEPING OUR WAY TO FITNESS

In a small study of Stanford University's swim teams, researchers tracked swimmers' performances during their usual sleep/wake patterns, and then after they extended their sleep to 10 hours per day for 6 to 7 weeks. After getting more sleep, athletes swam a 15-meter sprint 0.51 seconds faster, reacted 0.15 seconds quicker off the blocks, improved turn time by 0.10 seconds, and increased kick strokes by 5 kicks. I need anything between 6 to 8 hours of sleep for a healthy day ahead. I have many friends who I see finding themselves wide awake after a few hours of sleep, or waking up often during the night. This happens to me too many a times. It is called "parasomnia" or "sleep maintenance insomnia," and it's much more common than people think. A new generation of sleep scientists are overturning the conventional wisdom about parasomnia. They say: You can do it. With a few simple changes in our routine, a little visualization, a couple of surprisingly counter-intuitive moves and perhaps an attitude adjustment, a peaceful night of slumber can be ours. Here's their best advice: Throw out your definition of a good night's sleep: Just as three square meals a day has given way to all-day grazing and smaller portions, "what's good for us" has changed here, too. Thinking its necessary to stay asleep for 8 hours straight may be unrealistic for may who have the problem of "parasomnia". Just as we experience a dip in alertness mid-afternoon, the inverse is a dip in sleepiness in the middle of the night. There's strong evidence that there's a kind of awakening that's totally normal. I have read somewhere that even waking every 60 to 90 minutes can be part of a healthy sleep pattern. The deeper stages of sleep, or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, occur about every 90 minutes and get longer as the night goes on, so our brain might become more alert between those cycles. Since we're conditioned to think that waking during the night is a problem, when it happens, we panic. That reaction causes our brains to awaken even further. If you find yourself awake in pre-dawn hours, we should first assess our physical state. Do we have an ache, a cramp, or need to go to the bathroom? If so, we need to take care of it. If we don't have a physical complaint, then chances are we are experiencing a normal stage of the sleep cycle. Knowing this helps replace worries that we will be useless without 8 solid hours of sleep with more neutral thoughts. The useful thought is: ‘I can handle the disruption and still feel rested.’ Getting bed-ready: Simply taking 15 minutes to sit quietly, meditate, pray, or do rhythmic breathing can allow our mind to slow down enough to sleep through the night. Establishing any ritual that we do before bed -- anything but checking our e-mail! -- will do more than relax us right then and there. The repetition also conditions our brain and body for sleep.