Sleep Hygiene Tip of the Week: "But I use my cellphone as my alarm!"

"Man, asleep with cellphone," by tracy r, 2008 (CC BY 2.0, image has been enhanced) 

The cellphone as alarm... 

This is the most common excuse people have for keeping their cellphone close to bedside every night when they go to sleep.

For some, it's only an excuse. They tend to keep checking their email, responding to texts, or scrolling social networks well after lights are out (like this guy, above).

It's a behavior akin to an addiction, and while people intellectually know it's not healthy to practice it, they still do, using this particular reason as an excuse.

But then there are those among us (including yours truly, the curator) who actually do use the cellphone as their morning alarm (when necessary).

However, this does not mean the phone needs to be kept at bedside.

A nearby closet or hallway with a plug in, or a bathroom, makes the perfect place to charge and stash your phone at night.

There are distinctly good reasons for charging your cellphone in a separate room adjacent to your bedroom:

• If you need it as an alarm, then you cannot hit snooze (which is poor sleep hygiene). You have to get out of bed to turn off the alarm. Problem solved! Most people are not going to get back into bed after that. 
• Even if you turn the sound off, a cellphone can light up periodically depending upon how you set your notifications. By placing it in a separate room, face down, this problem is corrected. 
• You can't participate in another bad sleep hygiene habit―checking the clock all night―if it's charging in a different room. (Or, I guess, you could, but then how will you get your sleep?) Clock watching is a significant problem for insomniacs. Removing all digital and analog time pieces from the bedroom is first on the to-do list for addressing the problem of nighttime "vigilance."

A final tip: There are ways to silence your smartphone during your sleeping hours so that you can predetermine what calls or texts can come through. (This does not mean you have the green light to keep it at bedside... but it can certainly give you some peace of mind knowing that only the important calls or texts can get through―the ones you don't want to miss at night.)

Be judicious about choosing who you will accept calls or texts from. Parents of teenagers, people with elderly parents, or people with loved ones who are seriously ill may wish to adjust notifications to only allow calls or texts from these people in the event of emergencies. Also, people who are on call 24-7 can silence their phone except for those contacts who might need to reach them in the middle of the night. These are reasonable exceptions, and if your phone goes off at night with these settings in place, you will know right away that it's an important message.

If you have certain friends, coworkers, or other associates who tend to text or call at inappropriate hours, and these are not urgent messages (meaning, they can wait until morning), you can use your smartphone settings to silence them until you wake up in the morning. You don't have to tell these people you are doing this: if they complain, you can just say, "Sorry, I was asleep and didn't get your message." Repeating this enough times might drive home the message that calling or texting during one's sleeping hours is not acceptable.

Not sure how to set your settings on your smartphone to achieve this? Read our post on the subject.

ABCs of SLEEP || F is for Fragmentation

Fragmentation is what occurs during sleep when you struggle to maintain one long stretch of uninterrupted sleep. Instead, you awaken frequently, and can't get good blocks of deep sleep, as a result. It is a marker of sleep-maintenance insomnia, the kind of insomnia in which you have no trouble falling asleep, but you arouse easily and often and, therefore, cannot maintain sleep.

What makes fragmentation particularly difficult is that if you have multiple periods of awakening, you become conscious that you aren't sleeping, but that you should be sleeping. Rumination and hypervigilance about sleep loss tend to perpetuate anxiety, which then only adds to your inability to fall asleep again. If you have ever watched the clock all night long, after falling asleep easily but waking up frequently after you've fallen asleep, then you are experiencing fragmented sleep.

The worry that comes with not getting good sleep isn't without good reason. Fragmented sleep can be a nighttime devil for many.

When your sleep is fragmented, you are less likely to cycle through the slow-wave sleep that helps your body heal and you are more likely to wake up unrefreshed in the morning (because you've been awake, on and off, all night).

Sleep fragmentation also threatens certain brain processing functions like memory consolidation and can even interfere with the brains ability to keep consciousness and memory separate.

As we age, our sleep is more likely to fragment, though it's not well understood as to why. It could be a normal byproduct of aging or the result of medication use or the presence of other illnesses.

People with depression and anxiety, who also have fragmented sleep, may see their mental illness worsen. Also, people with Parkinson's Disease, dementia and other neurological troubles may report broken sleep patterns as a symptom of their condition.

Other sleep disorders, like narcolepsy, periodic leg movement disorder, restless legs, UARS and sleep apnea, may also lead to sleep fragmentation.

Treating sleep fragmentation requires identifying its root cause first and treating it. Easier said than done...  If there are no physical or mental illnesses or medications that could explain the sleep fragmentation, then doctors have little else to go on except for the presence of sleep-maintenance insomnia. Patients with this sleep disorder may benefit greatly from cognitive behavior therapy.

Sleep Hygiene Tip of the Week || What alarm clock?

Ask yourself... do you really NEED to see what time it is in the middle of the night?

After all, if you WERE asleep, you wouldn't know, and it would be fine, right?

Insomniacs often suffer from something called "hypervigilance," a behavioral problem in which one cannot shut off the brain for the night. It's a problem related to anxiety; all sensory details are super present to the minds of these sleepers. Instead of willing away these thoughts in order to relax and fall asleep, these people burden their sleep process by allowing the mind to race. The good news: it can be easily fixed with some cognitive behavioral therapy or training in meditation, both which can empower the sleeper to consciously deter racing thoughts so the brain and body can do the work of sleep.

What does the alarm clock have to do with this? Paying conscious attention to the passage of time while you aren't sleeping can actually aggravate insomnia. If you are in the habit of checking the clock every time you wake up, you may be unwittingly putting yourself into a hyperalert emotional state (fed by stress hormones) which will just enhance your sense of wakefulness.

This is almost always a negative experience for people and can lead to emotional upset, anger, frustration, even depression and suicidal ideation. Once inside this constellation of emotional disaster, what are the odds you will ever get back to sleep?

SLEEP HYGIENE TIP OF THE WEEK: Turn your alarm clock around once you have it set (or, turn off the sound and vibration settings on your smartphone, then turn it face down on your nightstand so it doesn't present unwanted noise or light while you sleep). Retrain yourself to NOT check the clock every time you wake up.

Cut yourself some slack! It's normal and okay to wake up several times at night. You might need to change positions, fix your blankets, drink some water or use the restroom. No need to complicate these normal activities of nighttime sleep by adding the unnecessary pressure of clockwatching into the equation.You can try a number of things to fall asleep, such as doing a body check to relax muscles, counting your breaths and falling into a breathing pattern, or imagining fantasies like what your dream vacation might be like. Eventually you will retrain yourself to go back to sleep and no longer automatically check the clock every time your eyes open.