How to feel refreshed even after too little sleep

We are now living in a world that never sleeps. Because of this, scientists across the world have started to examine what happens to people’s brains and bodies when they become sleep-deprived. Their results are enough to keep you up at night.In the 1980s, a scientist from the University of Chicago conducted perhaps the best-known, and most disturbing, study into the topic. He and his colleagues wired up a group of rats to a machine that measured their brain activity, and then placed each of the animals on a stationary disc above a bowl of water. Every time a rat’s brain activity indicated that the animal had fallen asleep, the disc would slowly rotate. This, in turn, forced the rat to wake up. Despite having access to more than enough food, within a week these sleep-deprived rats started to lose weight and their fur developed an unhealthy yellowish tinge. After a month, all of them had died, thus proving that sleep is essential for life. Of course, this was extreme sleep-deprivation. You might expect that losing a smaller amount of sleep — say, just an hour or so each night — would not be especially detrimental. In fact, even a minor reduction can dramatically increase the chances of you having a serious  accident in everyday life.In 2003, Gregory Belenky and his colleagues at the Sleep And Performance Research Centre at Washington State University staged one of the world’s most comprehensive studies into sleep loss. Volunteers who obtained nine hours’  sleep each night remained highly alert, while those spending just three or five hours in bed quickly became tired and inattentive.However, the results from those getting seven hours’ sleep per night proved especially surprising. Although these volunteers constantly assured the researchers that they were as wide awake as those on nine hours, the data revealed a very different story. After just a couple of days of getting seven hours’ sleep they became significantly less alert, and remained sluggish for the remainder of  the experiment.Belenky’s study revealed the highly pernicious nature of even a small amount of sleep deprivation. Spend just a few nights sleeping for seven hours or less and your brain goes into slow motion. To make matters worse, you will continue to feel fine and so don’t make allowances for your sluggish mind. Within just a couple of days, this level of sleep deprivation transforms you into an accident waiting to happen.In another study, researchers from University College London spent 20 years examining the relationship between sleep patterns and life expectancy in more than 10,000 civil servants.The results, published in 2007, revealed that participants who obtained two hours less sleep a night than they required nearly doubled their risk of early death. In a similar study, another group of researchers analysed data from more than one million Americans and found that getting less than seven hours sleep each night was associated with an early demise.However, there are two invaluable techniques I’d like to share with you that can offset some of the damage caused by getting too little sleep. The first is the 90-minute rule; the second is the power of taking a nap.Speak to sleep researchers and you will soon discover that most of them use a little-known trick to help them feel refreshed the next day. This is based on the knowledge that our sleep cycle contains five distinct phases, divided into four stages of non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, followed by a stage of REM sleep (in which we dream). Each of these cycles takes roughly 90 minutes, followed by a brief interlude when we are relatively wakeful, before a new cycle starts again. This process is repeated usually for a total of four or five cycles a night. In other words, if we were to sleep completely naturally, with no alarm clocks or other sleep disturbances, we would wake up, on the average, after a multiple of 90 minutes.This means that you will feel most refreshed when you awake at the end of a 90-minute sleep cycle because  you will be closest to your normal waking state. To maximise the chances of this  happening, work out when you want to wake up, then count back in  90-minute blocks to find a time near to when you want to go to sleep.Let’s imagine that you want to wake at 8am and wish to go to sleep around midnight. Counting back in 90-minute segments from 8am would look like this:In this example, you should aim to fall asleep around either 11pm or 12.30am in order to feel especially refreshed in the morning.(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az