A good night sleep
- positively influences our cognitive performance and we will be able to perform better
- increases the power of paying attention and we will focus more easily
- help us think clearly and we can make decisions faster
- stimulates our creativity and we will synthesize new ideas faster
- improve long and short-term memory and we will remember things very easily
The importance of these facts and the way they influence our daily life led us to create a sleep calculator
During sleep, our brain is repairing and growing cells, tissues, and nerves that regenerate and boost the hormone and immune system. Therefore, having a restorative sleep is vital for your optimal physical, emotional, and mental health. It helps us to perform much better in all respects of our life and increases our personal productivity.
“Sleep is a vital physiological requisite for humans, needed for survival like air, water and food. Sleep loss, disruption of circadian rhythms, and work overload are critical fatigue-causing factors that can compromise safety and lead to increased errors and degraded performance and productivity. … Furthermore, costs in lost workplace productivity due to poor and insufficient sleep can be substantial”
Factors that influence sleep and which we took into account in the Sleep calculator
Circadian rhythm
By respecting the circadian rhythm, which is the internal rhythm of the body in terms of a sleep-wake cycle within 24 hours, we benefit from an energy boost which, through efficient time management, can be transposed into maximum productivity.
The circadian rhythm works perfectly when you have constant sleep and wake-up habits, like going to bed around the same hour every evening and waking up around the same time every morning. Since the circadian rhythm influence among other important bodily functions also the sleep-wake cycles and hormone release, disrupting it repeatedly can lead to various chronic health conditions like sleep disorders, depression, or seasonal affective disorder.
Chronotype
A person’s chronotype is determined by the way that the circadian rhythm does manifest in human behavior and this changes over a person’s life cycle. Thus, almost all adolescents are ’Night owls’, then between 30–50 years the chronotype is evenly distributed among morning and evening people, and over 50 years most people become ‘Lark persons’.
The Morning (Lark) persons are those that tend to go to sleep early and wake up early. They thrive in activities that start early in the morning because it is when their level of energy is up and their productivity is best.
Evening persons or ‘Night Owl persons’ are people that prefer to go to bed well after midnight and also wake up closer to midday. Their energy level rises rather in the evenings and then is when they are most productive.
Designing the working hours according to chronotype means to benefit from maximum efficiency and productivity. This is why PlanArty’s Sleep calculator also considers it.
Sleep affects our physical and emotional well-being as well as our productivity
According to the latest National Sleep Foundation’s Sleep in America® poll, only 34–38% of people without regular sleep can report feeling well-rested on weekdays. Compared to them, about 50–56% of Americans that maintain regular and consistent weekday sleep schedules report feeling the same. This means almost 1.5 times more people are feeling well-rested just for maintaining a consistent and regular sleep schedule.
Physical and emotional well-being, as well as productivity, are also affected by sleep. A percent of 39–46% of the people that answered the same pool states that changes in their sleep schedule influence the way they feel both physically and emotionally, as well as in terms of their productivity the next day.
Types of naps (taken into account in the Sleep calculator)
A nap is a good way to relax, improve mood, restore alertness, and enhance performance and very useful especially when nocturnal sleep was restricted to about 5 hours.
Brief naps have been shown to be at least as restorative as longer naps.
Power nap
An example of a short sleep during the day is a 20 minutes Power nap and is meant to maximize the benefits of sleep versus time. The effects of this type of nap will be felt within minutes after waking up and last up to 2 hours after napping.
It also has been shown that in terms of improved alertness and performance for an hour following the napping, a 10 minutes sleep can be at least as recuperative as a 30-minute nap. More details about the power naps can be found in Amber Brooks, Leon Lack, A Brief Afternoon Nap Following Nocturnal Sleep Restriction: Which Nap Duration is Most Recuperative?, Sleep, Volume 29, Issue 6, June 2006, Pages 831–840
Stimulant nap
Another example is the Stimulant nap (included in Sleep calculator), which means that first is consumed a caffeinated drink and then is taken a 15–20 minute sleep. It takes up to half an hour to have an alerting effect from the coffee, therefore it will not influence the nap. After this type of nap, alertness is improved and also cognitive functioning. In this regard, it is definitely more effective than regular naps.
The idea of stimulant nap appeared in Driver sleepiness, by J.A Horne and L.A. Reyner, Sleep Research Laboratory, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, UK, a study that shows high inter-correlation between
Normal nap
Napping for more than 20 minutes can develop into a full sleep and become counter-productive due to post-sleep inertia. Therefore a normal nap (included in the Sleep calculator) is one that stops before entering deep sleep or continues until the end of a natural sleep cycle which takes about 90 minutes. More than that it may be sometimes too much and it can affect the night’s sleep.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that depending on the timing of sleep within the day and sleep quality, sleep restorative properties may vary.
Noteworthy that time in bed and time sleeping are usually not the same, actual sleep time is typically less than time in bed.
Night sleep
The average sleep cycle is 90 minutes long and a typical night of sleep includes 5 full sleep cycles. This means we normally should take around 7.5 hours of sleep. But, we have to take into account that it may take a few good minutes to fall asleep and that during sleep there may be some other periods of wakefulness for various reasons.
Appropriate sleep ranges
Depending on age groups, there are some recommendations of appropriate sleep ranges that can help us scheduling sleep in a healthy range. We included these recommendations in the Sleep calculator. The recommendations are published in Sleep Health: The Journal of the National Sleep Foundation.
Originally published at https://www.planarty.com.
