This article is featured on nine.com.au and is republished with permission.
Consistent wake and bedtimes has been touted as the key to better sleep and health, but it’s not as simple as going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 7am every single day.
In fact, one of them makes more of a difference than the other, not just because of our body clock but because it is easier and less stressful to put into practice.
Leon Lack, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health, Flinders University, told nine.com.au that the advice for having a regular bedtime is “problematic” because it’s difficult to achieve.
“If your body clock isn’t ready to fall asleep, then you may go to bed at your desired bedtime, 10pm or 10:30pm, and not be able to fall asleep, so you’re lying in bed getting worried about the fact that you’re still awake,” he said.
“[Thinking] ‘I just need to go to bed at the same time every night’ ... might get people into the dilemma that they’re going to bed at their desired sleep time, but they’re not falling asleep.
“If this happens on a regular basis, it can develop some insomnia in the person, some conditioned alertness response as a result of feeling a bit worried every night when they’re lying in bed because they’ve gone to bed earlier than their body clock will allow them to fall asleep.”
Instead, he recommends going to bed when you start “feel noticeably sleepy” and focusing on a consistent wake-up time. This is not only easier for us to control, it also has the benefit of allowing us to get exposure to morning light to help regulate our body clock.
“If you get exposed to light from 7am onwards on a regular basis, that ensures that your body clock stays fairly stabilised in clock time and doesn’t become delayed,” Lack said.
A consistent wake-up time doesn’t just mean weekdays though, it needs to be on weekends too.
So if you’ve been catching up on sleep by sleeping in on your days off, you’re actually getting into a cycle of pushing your sleep on Sunday night later, and you don’t get as much sleep that night.
“You then are short-changed on your sleep on those first few nights of the next week, you build up sleep pressure again, you pay off that sleep pressure on the weekend by sleeping in late, and that exacerbates your delayed body clock, and it just continues on like that,” Lack said.
“Trying to maintain a relatively consistent wake-up time by not sleeping in very late on the weekend, but getting up and getting exposed to light on the weekend as well will help keep your body clock stabilised and prevent it from becoming delayed and becoming a problem trying to sleep at an appropriate time in the evening.”
That doesn’t mean we need to rule out the weekend or occasional sleep in entirely, though.
“If you sleep in an extra half hour on the weekend or something like that, that’s not going to have a big effect, as long as you get up and get outside in the sunshine on the weekend, even if it’s half an hour later than normal, that would be fine. That’s not going to allow the body clock to delay very much,” Lack said.
Now we know consistent wake times are helpful for good sleep, how do you actually get in the habit of it? Sure, we can set an alarm, but that doesn’t automatically instil in us the discipline to get up when it goes off.
To start with, Dr Kelly Gough, clinical psychologist and President of the Australian Psychological Society, encourages being kind to yourself.
“Consistency is good, but also we live in this life and so don’t beat yourself up too much if you can’t be consistent. Try and be as consistent as you can in the lifestyle that you’ve got… if you’re regularly getting up around the same time, and you have a day a week when you get up a bit earlier, that’s not going to have any real problem,” he said.
Gough recommends small adjustments to your wake-up time to make it easier to achieve some consistency.
“If you’re currently getting up at 11am and you need to get it back to 9, don’t just go from 11 until 9. Maybe go to 10:30 or 10 and then sort of just slowly incrementally change it. Give yourself a few days to get used to that and then maybe bring it down again, but little adjustments seem to help,” Gough said.
Ultimately, Gough said try not to worry about it as that makes it harder to get to sleep.
“If you have a bad night tonight, you’ll probably have a better night tomorrow; you don’t have to catastrophise, you can go to work and do your job, and you’ll be tired, but it’ll be fine – you’ve been tired before. All that sort of stuff, I think, can make a big difference.”