Imagine you wake up thinking I had a wonderful night’s sleep, I feel fantastic and I’m
going to get up immediately. If you’re anything like me, that never happens.
No matter how much sleep you get, there’s always that niggling voice inside your head
[just a little bit more], the snooze button, more alarms, and you thinking
about how tired you are.
But simply thinking you got a good night's sleep can improve your brain function.
In a recent study researchers told participants that those who spend more than 25% of their
time asleep in REM sleep have better cognitive functioning.
Last week I mentioned when we sleep, we cycle through stages of light and deep sleep. The
first and second stages are light sleep and we can be woken up easily. When you reach
the third stage you enter deep sleep. And following that is rapid-eye-movement, REM
sleep, where your eyes actually move back and forth and you’re most likely to dream.
But the study was all a set up. The participants slept in a lab and the researchers told some
that they had 16% of REM sleep and others they had 29% of REM sleep the night before.
When they were tested for their attention spans and processing speeds, those told that
they had above-average REM sleep performed better and those told they had below-average
performed worse.
The researchers called the effect Placebo sleep because it’s kind of like the placebo
effect, where in medical treatments a fake treatment like a sugar pill is given to a
patient and it actually improves their condition because they believe it will help.
In this case, simply believing that you had a good night’s sleep, even if you didn't,
improves performance. But can you really fake sleep? Not in the Homer Simpson way but in
the way where you actually believe you had more or better quality sleep the night before.
It’s totally unrealistic that you would be in a lab setting every night or you would
have an expert with you every morning to say you slept well. That would be weird.
But you could stop thinking and talking about how tired you are, and plan a nap. Researchers
say an afternoon nap is the ideal remedy for fatigue from sleep loss. Again, that's kind
of unrealistic for those of us with jobs who aren't as brazen as George Costanza.
One solution is active rest or progressive muscle relaxation. You focus on one muscle
group in your body, like your hands, make them really tense for about 15 seconds then
release and you do that up and down your body. You should feel recharged. Like napping, active
rest improves our mood and is good for feelings of fatigue and your stress levels.
While it’s really hard to tell what the quality of our sleep was actually like, if
you’re feeling fatigued you should snooze less and nap more. Or active rest. It's almost
napping.
So it seems that the key to faking sleep is actually... Faking sleep. In the Homer Simpson
way.
Chances are you've woken up feeling really drowsy and confused. Check out my video last
week, which is an explainer on severe sleep inertia or sleep drunkenness. And if you've
tried active rest instead of napping, let me know what that's like in the comments or
if you haven't, try it at work and let me know how it goes... if you can get away with
it. And if you haven't already, subscribe to BrainCraft! I have a new brainy video
every Thursday.