LISA'S WEEK
“This week has been really good,” says Lisa Walsh. “I’ve had a couple of great sleeps.”
Walsh has had a couple of Eureka moments this week. The first was during a conversation she had with Dr Johnny Walker. “He was telling me about listening to my body,” Walsh says. “He told me that if I feel groggy I should take a nap. He told me not to fight it. Basically he gave me permission to do something that I would have thought was lazy.”
Mindfulness is something Walsh practises and applies to her life, but she realised that she needs to apply the same principles to her sleep. “The busier I get, the less I listen to my body and I realise that needs to change. Just to hear someone say that I need to look after myself and tune in to what my body needs – to take a nap when I need one – is really useful.”
Interestingly, another realisation Walsh has had, is to do with the fact that she may never get to a point where things are ideal. “Dr John Faul said in his advice that, my sleep, because of the nature of my shift work, is never going to be perfect. That was actually quite liberating. I have to stop stressing over the fact that I’m not getting perfect sleep and try to make the best of what I have.”
She is certainly more tuned in to what helps her sleep and what hinders it. “It can be difficult when you’re busy to connect one thing with another,” she says. “I feel like I know my triggers now. I’m drinking water, I’m eating dinners, I’m back exercising and it’s all helping. I’m not saying that it’s fixed my sleep but everything is certainly much better than it was.”
LISA WALSH'S SLEEP IN NUMBERS
Feb 20-21
Time to sleep 00:07 hrs
Sleep onset 23:23
Sleep duration 10:42 hrs
Unscored sections 01:10 hrs
Final awakening 11:51
Sleep efficiency 95 %
Feb 21-22
Time to sleep 00:06 hrs
Sleep onset 00:39
Sleep duration 10:02 hrs
Unscored sections 01:42 hrs
Final awakening 12:31
Sleep efficiency 99 %
Feb 22-23
Time to sleep 00:02 hrs
Sleep onset 00:48
Sleep duration 10:14 hrs
Unscored sections 00:38 hrs
Final awakening 12:56
Sleep efficiency 89 %
Feb 23-24
Time to sleep 00:02 hrs
Sleep onset 00:48
Sleep duration 10:14 hrs
Unscored sections 00:38 hrs
Final awakening 12:56
Sleep efficiency 89 %
Feb 24-25
Time to sleep 00:06 hrs
Sleep onset 23:44
Sleep duration 06:10 hrs
Unscored sections 01:30 hrs
Final awakening 07:34
Sleep efficiency 97 %
Feb 25-26
Time to sleep 00:10 hrs
Sleep onset 00:12
Sleep duration 09:32 hrs
Unscored sections 01:15 hrs
Final awakening 11:25
Sleep efficiency 96 %
Sleep efficiency:
Your “Sleep Efficiency” provides a metric of how well you slept. This simply means working out the percentage of time spent in bed asleep each night. If you spend 8 hours in bed, but only 4 of those hours are spent asleep, then your sleep efficiency is very low at 50%. Sleep efficiency is based on the assumption that we go to bed in order to sleep. Most normal sleepers spend nearly all of their time in bed asleep, i.e. a sleep efficiency of 90-95% or more. People with insomnia generally have an average sleep efficiency of less than 85%.
Sleep duration:
This is the actual length of your sleep while in bed. Most healthy adults require 7-9 hours of sleep, with experts recommending 8 hours. Some people only require only 6 hours, but others may require 10 hours of quality sleep.
Sleep onset:
This is our estimate of when the person first feel asleep.
Normally, you should try to maintain a regular sleep schedule. For instance, if you stay up late on Friday, sleep late on Saturday, you are set up to sleep even later on Saturday night. This can give rise to Sunday night insomnia.
In practice, this means trying to get up at the same time every day, even after a late night party. It also suggests that “sleeping in” at the weekend to make up sleep debt from the week may not be completely be effective – especially if you encounter Sunday night insomnia.