Alternative Health Blog

Logging seven to eight hours of sleep each night apparently in not enough. Not that any sleep researcher is proposing more hours. Instead, a new study published this month in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests even mild sleep disturbances will lead to less deep sleep, which in turn causes memory lapse and reduced learning.

Now that will make you toss and turn. While previous research showed that missing one night’s sleep is enough to significantly reduce activation in the brain’s hippocampus, the short-term memory center, this new report indicates just getting a lousy night’s sleep is problematic. What’s more, it is common that many of us get a poor night’s sleep most very night.

Poor sleep is caused by such factors as sleep apnea, obesity, stress, environmental noise, too much ambient light or an uncomfortable bed. The study involved 13 healthy volunteers whose age was an average of 60. Subjects were tested after a deep sleep and during an induced night of shallow sleep through use of moderate but consistent beeping noises. The individuals were tested for memory recall after each night’s rest.

The researchers wrote best ways to convert shallow or disrupted sleep into a deep sleep is "avoiding caffeine from the afternoon on, avoiding strenuous work or stress or worrying in the last few hours before sleep, exercise during the day, getting enough daylight, and making sure that the bedroom is for sleeping and not for watching television or working or angry telephone calls."

To the point of how many sleep hours is enough each night, researchers had a response for that too: "A less intuitive suggestion would be to reduce the time spent in bed to the time you actually need to sleep," the investigator added. "Don't lie in bed for 10 hours thinking that at least your body will get some rest, and end up sleeping only 7 of those 10 hours."

"It is better to restrict your time in bed to 7 hours and make sure that time in bed equals time slept, rather than drifting in and out of sleep, because that causes sleep fragmentation."

Bob Condor blogs for Alternative Health Journal every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.