Overcome Insomnia NOW: Benefit #4: Good Sleep QUALITY
Have you ever had a full night of sleep and still woke up not feeling refreshed or rested?
If so, it means you didn’t have good sleep QUALITY that night.
You might be getting enough hours of sleep, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting the highest quality sleep during those hours.
Poor sleep quality is common with insomnia, because you’re not getting deep, restful, relaxing sleep.
Today I cover:
What “Sleep Quality” is (the 3 ways I measure it)
How you will feel when you have good quality sleep
Other things that can affect the quality of your sleep
How CBT-I helps you regain good sleep quality
If you’re interested in getting rid of your insomnia NOW, check out the CBT-I playlist below and learn about the first-line treatment for insomnia and where you can find it.
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WHAT I DO:
I help people overcome insomnia and get good sleep (without medication, drugs or supplements).
To Your Sleeping Better!
- Steve
RESOURCES
CBT-I Playlist
00:00 Introduction to Sleep Quality
00:24 Understanding Sleep Quality
01:02 Impact of Medication on Sleep
02:05 Anxiety and Sleep Quality
04:12 Defining Sleep Quality
06:57 Factors Affecting Sleep Quality
09:11 Overcoming Insomnia with CBTI
10:41 Conclusion and Encouragement
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction to Sleep Quality
In today's video, I'm going to talk about another amazing benefit of overcoming insomnia, which is excellent sleep quality.
So have you ever had the experience of getting a full night of sleep? So this is 7 to 8 hours of sleep and you wake up the next morning and even though you got a full night of sleep, you don't feel rested and refreshed.
That is sleep quality.
Understanding Sleep Quality
Sleep quality is the quality, the deepness, how refreshed you feel after a full night of sleep.
So sometimes with insomnia, you might be getting a full night of sleep, meaning you're getting somewhere between seven to eight hours of sleep. Some people that may not be true. You may not ever be getting that amount of hours, but sometimes people on some nights when they have insomnia will still get seven, eight hours of sleep, but they wake up and they don't feel refreshed and they don't feel rested.
This goes to sleep quality. Sleep quality is the quality of the sleep, meaning how deep and refreshed you are.
And there's a few reasons why your [00:01:00] sleep quality may not be really good.
Impact of Medication on Sleep
Number one, if you're taking any kind of medication, whether that's over the counter or it might be you're drinking alcohol or using THC, marijuana to help you sleep, those things can interfere with the quality of your sleep because they interfere with your sleep stages, in particular, your REM sleep, your dream sleep, and because those stages are blocked or partially blocked, you're not getting your full cycles of sleep. Therefore, you're not getting that full recovery that you would feel if you weren't taking that medication or using that substance.
I've seen a lot of people where they're taking a medication and they might be getting on some night, seven, eight hours of sleep, like a full night of sleep. But when they wake up in the morning, they don't feel so good. They have kind of a foggy feeling or a groggy feeling. Or kind of a hangover feeling in their head from the medication. So the medication or the substance kind of knocked them out and gave them the ability to be able to sleep through that full night. But when they woke [00:02:00] up, they didn't feel so rested and refreshed because the quality of the sleep wasn't very good.
Anxiety and Sleep Quality
Another common thing that happens with insomnia, even if you're not taking medication, is you're Anxiety. So anxiety or sleep anxiety in particular is a common thing with insomnia. It's part of insomnia for pretty much everybody, unless you've had insomnia for a really long time and you get kind of used to it in a sense, and then you, you might lose that anxious part of the insomnia.
But for most people, they have a lot of anxiety and worry around their sleep because you're not actually sleeping very well. But what happens is you go to bed, and because you're feeling all that anxiety, even if you end up falling asleep, and even if you get a decent number of hours of sleep, when you wake up the next day, you could still not feel so rested and refreshed.
And what's going on there is when you're sleeping and you're still anxious, you're still kind of not fully relaxed into the sleep. The quality of the sleep isn't as good because you don't fully [00:03:00] relax into it. You don't fully let go. And even though you're getting a certain number of hours of sleep, you're not getting the full benefit of it because you're kind of tense in a sense while you're sleeping.
Because we carry anxiety. We can carry that into our sleep. That's why sometimes people when they have insomnia or having kind of anxious dreams, or you might wake up anxious, or you might wake up and you're sweaty. That's coming from anxiety and that's going to interfere with the quality of your sleep.
And this is also the case with stress in general, meaning you may not be really anxious or worried about things, but if you have a lot of stress going on in your life, your job or relationship, something that's very stressful and you don't decompress or, or get rid of that stress before you go to sleep, you can carry that stress into your sleep.
And therefore, again, the quality of your sleep isn't going to be as good because you aren't going to be fully relaxed. You're going to be kind of tense as you're sleeping.
We don't have to be always fully relaxed to be able to fall asleep. You have to be [00:04:00] relaxed enough and you have to be able to let go of your mind to be able to sleep.
But you could sleep and still be feeling anxiety and still have quite a bit of stress. And that is going to interfere with that quality of the sleep.
Defining Sleep Quality
So I define sleep quality in three different ways. Number one, it's restful. So that means that as you're sleeping, it's relaxing, it's calm. It's enjoyable. It's chill. Basically, it's tranquil, it's a pleasant experience.
And when you have insomnia, sleep generally isn't so pleasant and it can be very negative experience because it's not restful because it's restless because you aren't tranquil because there's a lot of anxiety. Whereas when you're getting good sleep quality, usually you're, you feel restful, you feel calm and peace. When you get in the bed, you have a positive feeling about sleep and therefore sleep goes much better.
Another part of restful is that there are not too many awakenings in the night, meaning because you're, you're more calm and tranquil with the sleep and you're more [00:05:00] relaxed as you sleep, you don't wake up as much, or if you do wake up, you don't remember it. I mean, it's common for people to wake up a few times during the night when you're going in between your, your sleep cycles.
But generally, we don't remember those wake ups or we might wake up for, you know, a few like 30 seconds and we're aware that we're awake and then we go right back to sleep or you might get up and use the bathroom and then come back and be able to go right back to sleep.
So what will happen is when you're having restful sleep is you're getting fewer wake ups in the night or you don't remember having any wake ups and you just feel like you slept all the way through the night.
The second way I measure sleep quality is, is it restorative? When I say restorative, I mean you feel restored physically, emotionally, mentally the next morning when you wake up.
And what I mean by restored is your muscles and your joints. So if you go to bed and you're sore because you had exercise or just because you've been feeling kind of fatigue in your body. Well, when you get that good quality sleep, you wake up and you feel like your muscles feel better. You feel looser. You feel more [00:06:00] relaxed.
The third way that I measure quality sleep is you feel refreshed. And refreshed is that energized feeling. You feel more energized the next morning because you've gotten this, this deep restoration during the night.
You basically, you have a spring in your step, you know, you wake up and you feel light and you feel like a spring in your step, and that's when you know the quality of the sleep was really good.
You also tend to have more confidence in yourself. I mean, this is a strange thing I've noticed is that, you know, when I get really good quality sleep and I wake up and I have that refreshed, light feeling, I feel more confident. And I think it's because of the energy. Because when you have a lot of energy and you feel sharp and you feel good in your body, you generally feel more confident because you, you feel like you can handle life better.
You're just more resilient. You're more able to handle things. Things that would normally just kind of wear you out or stress you out, are easier to handle and then that actually makes you more confident in the day.
Factors Affecting Sleep Quality
There are other things that can also affect the [00:07:00] quality of your sleep outside of your sleep. Even if you have insomnia, how we feel during the day and how we sleep at night is not just determined by whether we have insomnia or not. So you can not have insomnia and still not be getting that good quality sleep because of these other factors.
So number one, fatigue. So fatigue is kind of like built up. tension or a lack of recovery in the body or usually over a long period of time. So if you have a really busy or stressful life over time, fatigue builds up, meaning that you're not getting your full recovery from the activities of your life just through your sleep or just on the weekends and you need kind of a longer period to restore.
And this is why vacations or taking time off, Periodically is really important. It's not just to go and have fun. Yes, that's really important but it's also to get that like longer recovery where you're just Relaxing and chilling out and [00:08:00] decompressing for more than just one night or for the weekend but for like a week Um, and you do this periodically through the year and that tends to give you that deeper recovery that can kind of dissipate and get rid of that fatigue.
Because otherwise you could carry that fatigue into your sleep. You could get a full night of sleep, you have no insomnia, you still wake up and you don't feel refreshed because that fatigue, that tiredness, that tension in the muscles builds up over time and therefore you need to relieve that.
Okay, another thing that can affect the quality of our sleep is side effects from medication or substances that we're taking. I mentioned this one at the beginning, but this is important because even if you don't have insomnia, if you're taking medications for other things, or if you're, using other substances like alcohol, That could affect the quality of your sleep, particularly drinking alcohol in the evening can affect the quality of your sleep because it interferes with your REM sleep.
So it interferes with the stages of your sleep and you get what's called fragmented sleep and that could make the [00:09:00] sleep quality less and therefore you don't feel fully rested in the morning. This can also happen with different types of medications that you might be taking. So that's something to be aware of if you're not getting good quality sleep.
Overcoming Insomnia with CBT-I
So sleep quality is a huge benefit that you get when you overcome insomnia. It's usually the last thing to come. So when you're going through the process to overcome insomnia, which is CBT-I or cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, that's the gold standard treatment for insomnia.
And I'll put a link to that I've created about CBT-I. I talk about it a lot. It's really the treatment that you want to do.
But as you go through this process of overcoming insomnia using CBT-I. You go through different stages, and usually the first stage is improving power of your sleep, which is called your sleep efficiency, and that's the amount of time you're sleeping in bed versus being awake.
When you have insomnia, you generally have a very low sleep efficiency. So that's the first thing that comes back.
The next [00:10:00] thing that starts to come back once your sleep efficiency goes up is the sleep quantity, or the amount of sleep that you're getting. And obviously we want to get that to somewhere between seven to eight hours of sleep on average consistently, and you're getting the full length of sleep and you're, you're more relaxed around your sleep.
And then the sleep quality is something that then comes back as you're going through this process of overcoming insomnia.
And then once that happens, you will experience the things that I talked about in the video in terms of feeling refreshed and restored and bright and energized, where you have like a spring in your step during the day, and you actually feel more confident in yourself as a result of feeling so good after a good night of sleep.
Conclusion and Encouragement
Okay, so this is another amazing benefit. I think one of the best benefits of overcoming insomnia is getting that sleep quality back, which you can kind of forget.
You know, if you've had insomnia for a long time, it's easy to forget. how good it feels to have an amazing night of sleep. It might've been months or even years for some people [00:11:00] where they've had a really good night of sleep and you feel that full recovery and that restored feeling in the next morning and you carry that through your day. It totally transforms your experience of life.
So if you haven't tried CBT-I or you haven't done it, you know, in the right way, With the right person. I encourage you to check it out. Check out the playlist below. I talk about what CBT-I is, I talk about, you know, all these different places where you can find it and how to kind of vet and evaluate whether you're doing it in the right way and with the right person.
So, I hope you have a good rest of your week, and I will see you next time.