Sleep, perchance to dream?

good sleep takes hard work and consistency.

‘‘We’re really like Pavlovian dogs; we need a pattern before we go to bed,’’ he says.

The sleep cycle is the same for all of us; the initial part of sleep, a very light sleep, lasts two minutes or so. A deeper sleep, or Stage Two sleep, follows, before we enter into Slow Wave sleep, which Veale describes as being when ‘‘you could vacuum the room out and you wouldn’t wake up’’.

‘‘And then we start to dream, and that cycle runs over 90 minutes or so and is repeated throughout the night,’’ he says.

When sleep is disrupted, there can be a number of physical and mental impacts aside from the obvious groggy, fogginess we are all familiar with.

According to the NZ Health Navigator website, not getting enough sleep, or enough goodquality sleep, can increase the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes.

An international study published last year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, found subjects who were asked to restrict their sleep by two to four hours a night for two nights, rated themselves substantially angrier than those who got an average of seven hours of sleep a night.

And in 2018, research from the University of California,

Berkeley, suggested a lack of sleep can trigger the same brain mechanisms that make us sensitive to anxiety.

Researchers found the day following poor sleep, their subjects experienced 30 per cent higher anxiety than on the day following restful sleep. Half of those studied had anxiety levels that met the threshold for a clinical anxiety disorder.

So, how much sleep should we get each night to avoid it impacting on us in the longterm?

Veale says the ideal average is exactly what we’ve all been told – between seven-and-a-half and eight-and-a-half hours a night. The key word being average.

‘‘So there are people who like six hours and some people who want to sleep 10 hours or 12 hours – and that’s all still within the normal range.’’

He says the signs of sleep deprivation are easy to spot within our own behaviour; if you can get back to sleep after you have woken up – you needed some sleep.

‘‘And if you sleep longer [during your] holidays than you do in your work [week], then you are chronically sleep-deprived by the choices you make during your work time,’’ he says.

Often though, all the best efforts in the world can’t stop a middle-of-the-night wake up. But Veale has some tips for what to do when you find yourself staring at the ceiling at 3am.

‘‘Generally, I tell people, try and get back to sleep for 15 minutes or so, perhaps up to 30 minutes, and if they are still awake, and their mind is active, get out of bed and do something else that is not stimulating.’’

When you are ready to go back to bed, go back through your normal nighttime routine – cleaning your teeth, washing your face – which should help you drift off again.

The good news is that we can catch up on sleep, but Veale says filling up the tank isn’t as simple as a Sunday morning lie-in. He says sleep studies suggest it can take as long as three or four nights of restorative sleep to get back on an even keel.

And when it comes to a little kip in the middle of the afternoon, Veale suggests, if done right, it can be just what the doctor ordered.

‘‘If we are sleepy, we should nap. But it is important to make that a short nap. By setting your alarm for 20 or 30 minutes, you wake from stage two sleep and you feel refreshed.’’

To watch the series, go to stuff.co. nz/beinghuman