Sleep plays an incredibly important role in your health and wellbeing throughout life.
According to recent research, adults between 18 and 64 need seven to nine hours of sleep per night – adults over 65 needing at least 7-8 hours.
Let’s delve into why those figures are so important.
Getting enough sleep can improve your quality of life and protect both your mental and physical health. For children and teenagers, quality sleep is especially important as it aids their growth and development. Getting sufficient sleep also keeps you safe and healthy – sleep deprivation can lead to tiredness, ill health, and poor concentration, which can all have potentially dangerous consequences.
Sleep deficiency has been defined as not reaching your allotted sleep requirements within a single night, and it can have immediate and devastating consequences – for example, recent research has revealed that, in the United States, drowsy driving is responsible for more than 6,000 fatal car crashes every year.
Regular disruptions to your sleep can cause long-term problems too – for example, it can increase your risk of chronic health problems and can affect your social skills, reactions, and decision-making abilities. In fact, people with severe insomnia are seven times more likely to have work-related accidents than their well-rested co-workers. Another study revealed that nurses working 12.5-hour shifts report committing an alarming three times as many medical errors than those working 8.5-hour shifts.
In short, getting quality sleep is essential. In this blog, we’ll break down:
- What lack of sleep does to the body
- Which factors disturb your sleep
- How to improve your sleeping habits
What lack of sleep does to the body
Regular disruption to your sleep, like insomnia, can stop your brain from functioning as it should. During a good night’s sleep, your brain prepares itself for the following day, forming new neuronal pathways to help you learn and remember important information.
Chronic insomnia is an extremely dangerous issue, long term it can cause your brain to interpret information incorrectly, which in turn can lead to difficulty solving problems and making decisions. This may be mildly frustrating if you’re attempting the daily crossword, but when behind the wheel of a car or in a tough work situation, the consequences of decisions is paramount.
Lack of sleep can also affect your mood, many chronic insomnia sufferers display problems controlling their emotions and behaviour and find any sudden changes overwhelming.
As you can see, sleep deficiency can have an extremely negative impact on your mental wellbeing, both in the short-term and over much longer periods. It has been linked to anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and risk-taking behaviour. In the most severe cases, it has been shown to cause mania or hallucinations – seeing or hearing things that aren’t truly there.
If you’re overly tired from a lack of sleep, you may experience microsleep at inopportune moments throughout the day – which is when you, unintentionally and often unknowingly, fall asleep for several seconds. This can obviously be incredibly dangerous when you’re completing a task where concentration is at a premium such as driving or operating machinery.
It has also been suggested that sleep deprivation can reduce the effectiveness of your immune system – if you don’t get enough sleep, your body doesn’t have time to build up its strength and may be unable to fend off unwanted germs and diseases. It may also take you longer to recover from illness and may dramatically increase your chances of developing chronic conditions, like diabetes and heart disease.
The role of blue and natural light
Our ancestors didn’t have any artificial means of lighting the night, so the human body is designed for sleeping whilst it is dark and being awake during daylight. For this reason, light, especially artificial light, can significantly affect your natural sleep-wake cycle (otherwise known as your circadian rhythm).
The biggest culprit for sleep disruption is blue light. Blue light is found in televisions, LED lights, phones, and computer screens, but can be emitted from any artificial light source in today’s modern technologically-driven world. It has been shown to disrupt your body’s ability to prepare for a good night’s sleep because it blocks a sleep-inducing hormone called melatonin. Spending too much time on screens before bed can lead to difficulty falling asleep and may even lead to insomnia (next time you’re struggling to sleep try to not keep checking the time on your phone, you may be making it harder for your brain to ‘switch off’!)
Natural light also plays a huge role in your circadian rhythm and the time at which you fall asleep. Natural light is a key driver of when and how much melatonin your body produces. Exposure to light in the morning can cause you to wake up earlier (some ‘natural’ alarm clocks use slowly increasing light to wake you up in a more biologically relaxing way), whereas exposure in the evening can cause you to feel more alert and less sleepy. When in darkness, your body starts to produce melatonin – but even a small amount of natural light can reduce or halt production.
In summary, exposure to light at night-time, blue or natural, at the wrong times can significantly disrupt your sleeping pattern and lead to all kinds of sleep related issues.
How sound disturbs sleep
When you’re asleep, your brain still processes any sounds occurring around you. This was highly beneficial when our ancestors needed to know if they were being attacked by a predator, less so in today’s modern world where noises emanate from all corners of our towns and cities.
It may be that noises can prevent you from falling to sleep in the first place or wake you in the middle of the night, or it may be that background noises leave you waking unrefreshed the next day. Even if you don’t wake fully, noise can seriously affect the quality of your sleep and the much-needed transition from lighter to deep sleep, a great indicator of sleep quality. To get the sleep that you need, it’s therefore important to protect your sleep environment from any unwanted noise, from the time you go to bed to when you wake up in the morning.
How well-made blinds and curtains can enable a better night’s sleep.
Fortunately, there are actions you can take through smart design choices that can have a considerably positive effect on sleep quality. Installing well-made, specialist blinds and curtains into all rooms where light can find a way to seep in is the ideal place to start.
Bedroom curtains are about more than just matching the bed sheets – closed curtains offer extra warmth, enable privacy, and have a strong effect on the quality of your sleep. As mentioned before, even the slightest amount of light can jolt you awake and disrupt a good night’s rest.
Curtains form the first line of defence to prevent light from entering your room – meaning you can keep the room in perfect darkness, even in the brighter, summer months.
Our motorised curtain tracks, allow curtains to open and close automatically, giving the occupant the opportunity to allow light into the room at their own pace, not to mention get those extra special few minutes in bed.
For an extra layer of protection, our blackout blinds are a great solution for blocking unwanted natural light from bedrooms. The material used in blackout blinds is specially designed to cut out light and prevent the morning sunrise from disrupting sleep. Blackout blinds also offer noise reducing qualities that can help to shield those unwanted noise disturbances all throughout the night.
At Umbra, we offer a variety of blind and curtain fabrics and colours to choose from for optimum level shading or blackout. We will work with you to create the ideal conditions for a restful night.
If you’re interested in installing roller blinds, blackout blinds or motorised curtain tracks, contact us.