Feeling Tired? – Get More Energy By Sleeping Less!

In today’s quick paced society a lot of people suffer from tiredness. Fortunately, tiredness is not something you have to live with for the rest of your life. For most people it is possible to sleep less and have more energy.

The reasons for tiredness vary depending on the individual. Sometimes it is simple to find the cause, for example illness or anxiety. But sometimes it is not possible to find the cause or it may be a combination of different factors. Some people feel tired once in a while but some others are feeling tired most of the time.

Most of the well loved ways of getting rid of fatigue don’t work. A lot of medication is available but as a long term solution medication has a lot of disadvantages. Sleeping more sounds like the best solution but for many that does not help. Sleeping more can really make you more tired. It is not the quantity of sleep that is vital, the quality is much more vital.

There are a number of people who reckon the way to get rid of tiredness is to drink more coffee and other drinks containing caffeine. While caffeine delivers a quick energy boost, it is a small-lived boost. After a while you feel even more tired than before. If you try to get more energy by drinking coffee or using medication, you are trying to fix the symptom, not the cause. This is the incorrect way, it is always better to try to fix the cause rather than the symptom.

One very fascinating solution is to pay attention to your sleep cycle. A sleep cycle is made up of different sleep phases. For most people a sleep cycle last about 90 minutes, so during the night a number of sleep cycles are completed. By waking up at the end of a sleep cycle you feel much more energized than if you get up in the middle of a sleep cycle.

Sleeping during the day is generally a terrible thought, you don’t get more energy and you may have distress falling asleep in the evening. But small naps, often called power naps, done the right way can boost your energy.

The main benefit of sleeping less is that you have more time for other activities. But not only that, you have more energy to get more things done during the day. Given such advantages, it is well worth trying to optimize your sleep, even if it can be uncomfortable in the beginning.

Sleep Problems Can Lead to Living Less

I have read varying opinions as to the impact distress sleeping has on one’s overall health. One of the most vital things to remember, if you can’t sleep for a night or two, is it will not have much of a negative impact on your performance the following day. So, if you are lying in bed at 2:00 in the morning and can’t sleep, don’t start worrying. You will be fine tomorrow. You will have an occasional night where you will not sleep well; you will then call on your adrenaline supply a small more than normal the following day. Also your fatigue after one night will not be that terrible. The problems will be worse if you worry too much about the lack of sleep. Worrying about it will make it harder to fall asleep. Any sleep and rest that you are able to get will help you tomorrow, so don’t get so stressed that you end up getting no sleep. There is no question that, if your lack of sleeping lasts over a period of time, your performance will ultimately start to diminish.

Our bodies change in many ways as we get older. Sleep is no different. Realizing that changes in sleep are a common part of aging will provide you with a sense of control over sleep. As we age, the amount of sleep we obtain changes, sleep decreases from sixteen to eighteen hours a day in newborns to nearly ten hours for ten-year-olds and to approximately eight hours during the teenage years. We sleep about seven hours a night in middle age and by our seventies sleep time decreases to roughly six and half hours. But, we compensate by obtaining about an hour of additional sleep in the form of daytime naps.

Experiments have been done with volunteers who tried to reduce their sleep from the usual seven and half hours to five and a half hours by decreasing their sleep by thirty minutes every two weeks. Most of the volunteers had small distress reducing sleep by a half-hour, or even an hour, but they started to notice some difficulty when sleep was reduced by more than this. They were able to awaken on time, and they were able to function at work and in their social life, but they found themselves simply more fatigued. The sleep reduction did not seem to pose a threat to anyone’s health, but they found themselves to be more irritable, more pessimistic, and less fun to be with. For most adults, reduction in the amount of sleep is possible, but fatigued and changes in mood make it undesirable. It is estimated that about half of the adult North American population is already sleep deprived and any further reduction would have marked changes on mood and performance.

The amount you sleep does affect your chances of living longer. There was a study conducted by the American Cancer Society for over a period of six years with one million Americans in San Francisco. Their survival was rated against many lifestyle factors, including sleep patterns. Surprisingly, men who slept four hours a night or less had a mortality rates ten times greater than that of those who slept between seven and eight hours. It seemed that any deviation from usual sleep requirements for adults of six to eight hours was accompanied by a significant increased risk of mortality. In fact, the National Center for Health Service Research in the United States considers adequate sleep one of the six most vital factors affecting illness and death rates; the other lifestyle factors include regular exercise, not smoking, limited consumption of alcohol, regular meal schedules, and maintenance of proper weight.