I don’t like to “turn off” my mind whether I’m reading fiction where each chapter ends with a cliffhanger or thought-provoking nonfiction and this late night reading has been an overall negative in my performance in school and work from oversleeping, tardiness and morning grogginess. I would be interested to know how many people have found that their love of reading in bed at night is a factor – and maybe the MAIN factor- in their sleep pattern. “But flies need to know what time it is too.” “We don’t have a lot of similarities with a fly,” Pelayo says. That mechanism-governed by so-called clock genes, which regulate our circadian rhythms-exists across the animal kingdom, even in flies. But in reality, “the brain is trying to predict dawn and dusk at all times.” Many people assume that the time they wake up depends on the time they fall asleep, which seems logical, he says. “The sleep time is the totality of all time spent sleeping in that bed until you get out of it.” “Bedtime is what time you get into bed,” he explains. Pelayo addresses his patients’ waking times first, he says, because “it’s easier to lock in a wake-up time than to force a sleep time”-which, he notes, is different than a bedtime. “I ask my patients, if you could wave a magic wand and fall asleep easily and wake up feeling refreshed, what schedule would you like to be on?” he explains. To set your sleep schedule, you must first identify the ideal wake-up time. So, for those of us who would like to wake up earlier to get a jump start on the day (or, heck, just to get to work on time) and who don’t have a sleep disorder that requires treatment, Pelayo offers some tangible tips: And although there is nothing inherently unhealthy with being late to bed and late to rise, Pelayo says, a sort of chronic jet lag can crop up when night owls need to conform to society’s standard schedule and expectations. and 8:30 a.m., respectively.īut adolescence aside, sleep habits are more adaptable than we think. It requires middle and high schools to start no earlier than 8 a.m. To accommodate the realities of teen biology, Pelayo testified in support of a California law that passed in 2019. “Sleep is inherently a dangerous thing to do, so in a tribe of people, it makes sense that some people are more alert at some times than others,” he says. This is especially true for teenagers, who tend to go to bed later and sleep much deeper as they transition into adulthood, and for older people, who are generally light sleepers. “But your tendencies are not your destiny.”īiology does play a role in our sleep patterns, Pelayo points out. “We all have genetic tendencies toward being a morning person or being an evening person,” explains Pelayo, who came to Stanford in 1993 as a fellow to work with the late William Dement, who was known as the “father of sleep medicine,” and continues to teach the popular undergraduate course Dement created, now called Dement’s Sleep and Dreams. The answer, it turns out, is that it doesn’t matter. Today, Pelayo is a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and a leading expert in the field of sleep medicine (his 2020 book is called How to Sleep). Like most of his peers, Pelayo found that he often pulled all-nighters, taking short breaks around midnight to decompress with his friends. four years later, classes started later in the day. When he was a medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, N.Y.
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