Up to 25% of school aged children can have difficulties with sleep!

Research shows that there are no human functions that do not benefit from a good night’s sleep. We can think of this the other way round too – after a bad nights sleep, all of our functions actually show some impairment or damage! This alone, demonstrates the importance of a good nights sleep.

Many people tend to neglect sleep, and often think other things like diet and exercise are more important. However, research actually shows that the physical and mental impairments caused by one bad night of sleep exceed those caused by poor diet and exercise. This has been shown in some research, teenagers who didn’t sleep for one night, had a 40% deficit in their ability to remember information given the previous day.

Sleep has been traditionally divided into two categories: non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM). Both are exactly how they sound – your eyes either remain still or move rapidly under your eyelids. Together these types of sleep make up a single sleep cycle where your brain moves through 4 different stages of sleep: wake, light sleep, deep sleep, REM and repeat.

There are 4 stages that happened 5 times a night:

1. Wake or NREM stage 1: this is time spent in bed, before and after falling asleep. It also includes brief awakenings during the night. May last 5-10 mins 
2. Light sleep or NREM stage 2: this initiates your sleep cycle and acts as a transition to deeper sleep. During this, your muscles begin to relax, heart rate and breathing slows down and your body temp drops. May last approx. 20 mins.
3. Deep sleep or NREM stage 3: This focuses on your body and is the most restorative stage, promoting muscle growth, repair and removal of waste in your brain. You will have difficulty waking up in this stage and may feel groggy if you do awake. What is interesting about deep sleep is that at the start of mid-late childhood, the patterns in deep sleep change and this appears to come before cognitive and developmental milestones – such as the development of reasoning and critical thinking. From this, we can take away that deep sleep is helping our brains mature and become more adult like.
4. REM sleep: this is essential to re-energising your mind and your brain becomes more active. It is associated with dreaming, memory consolidation, learning and problem solving.

By the final cycle, your body may even skip NREM deep sleep. This means that if you start off really tired at night, you are likely to go straight back to sleep but by the time you get to cycle 4/5, you are in a light sleep, so if you wake up, you are much more likely to struggle getting back to sleep. From this we can take away that you are more likely to sleep at the start of the night rather than the end of the night.

In adolescence, if you don’t sleep, you have an increased vulnerability to:

• Anxiety
• Low mood
• Poor impulse control
• Decreased motivation
• Poor emotional regulation

The number one rule to getting a good night’s sleep is regularity.

Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time every day. No matter whether it is the weekend or weekday, regularity is KEY. By going to bed the same time every day, your body will start to associate the times of day with sleep, and this will help you fall asleep faster. We appreciate that this will be tricky at weekends as you may not want to get up as early, we are all human and not robots so we know this may be hard. However, the more consistent your sleep, the better it is.

Go to bed when you feel sleepy- listen to your body and go to sleep when you feel tired! This might be in line with your melatonin peak. Melatonin is a hormone that helps us sleep. During the day we don’t have any of this but in the evening, this starts to peak. This is different for everyone:

• Children’s peaks around 7:30pm

• Adult’s around 10/11pm

• For teenagers (15/16) it peaks around 12 but then peaks earlier when you turn 21/22

The loss of day light allows melatonin to be released which signals to our bodies that darkness has arrived, and it is time for bed

But the artificial evening light in modern homes, delays the signal of melatonin and this can make it considerably less likely that you will fall asleep at a reasonable time. One of the earliest studies found that using an iPad—a device enriched with blue LED light—for two hours prior to bed blocked the rising levels of melatonin 23 percent! However, this isn’t just related to iPhone, iPad, laptops and electronic devices, but every day light sources, such as a bed side lamp.

Keep your environment comfortable, quiet and clean.

Introduce lavender sprays or rub on oils have the ability to relieve stress, stabilise your mood, relax you and therefore, improve sleep.

You are more likely to struggle to sleep if you feel tense or are over thinking, therefore, it is important that you relax before you go to bed. One way of doing this is to develop a bedtime routine, for example, showering by 8pm, phone away at 9pm and something relaxing for an hour.

You could also try some meditation which trains us to be aware of the present moment. At nighttime, the mind has a tendency to get caught up in thoughts so we need to learn to let these thoughts go so we can rest our minds and bodies.

Apps:

1. Head space: you can practice breathing exercises, visualisations and try focused based meditation specifically for sleep. It makes it as simple as possible to do meditations. If you scroll down on this link, you will find a free 10 min meditation to get you thinking about your relationship with sleep and a mini relaxation meditation. You can download the app to listen to more meditations that will help you get to sleep!
2. Calm: a meditation app for beginners that offers stories for kids and adults to help you relax and sleep better.
3. Stop think and breathe: This is a meditation and mindfulness app that helps you find peace anywhere. It allows you to check in with your emotions, and recommends short, guided meditations, yoga and acupressure videos, tunes to how you feel. It has a unique feature: the check-in. This option allows you to express yourself and based on that expression it will recommend meditation sessions to you.
4. Smiling mind: This app is a modern meditation app. The programs our designed to assist people in dealing with the pressure, stress, and challenges of daily life