5 Things We Get Wrong About Sleep
Sleep is the bedrock of good mental health. I say that to nearly every client I work with, and for good reason. Sleep affects mood, attention, memory, stress tolerance and emotional resilience. When sleep is off, mental health symptoms often follow.
Most people understand that sleep matters to our mental health. Where things tend to go off track is not in whether sleep is important, but in how it works and what actually helps. Below are five common assumptions that quietly interfere with getting the kind of rest our brains and bodies need.
1. You can train your body to need less sleep
Many assume that if they’ve been sleeping six hours a night for years, their body has adapted. Research suggests otherwise. While people may learn to function under sleep deprivation, the brain does not become immune to its effects.
Chronic poor sleep is associated with mood issues, reduced concentration, impaired memory and increased emotional reactivity. Importantly, sleep deprivation does not require dramatic sleep loss. Experts note that consistently getting even 15 minutes less sleep than needed can qualify as deprivation when it occurs over time. 15 minutes!
In therapy, this often shows up as anxiety that feels harder to manage, lower frustration tolerance or a sense that coping skills are no longer working as well as they used to.
2. More sleep is better
Short sleep is clearly linked to poor health outcomes, but consistently sleeping more than nine hours per night has also been associated with increased mental health risks, including depression.
For most adults, the recommended range is seven to nine hours per night. If you feel the need to sleep more, consider visiting a sleep specialist who can assess whether you have a disorder like sleep apnea, which causes fragmented, poor-quality rest.
3. You can make up for lost sleep on the weekend
Sleeping in occasionally is not a concern. However, regularly relying on weekends to compensate for weekday sleep loss often leads to cumulative sleep debt.
Missing one hour of sleep each night during the workweek adds up to nearly a full night of lost sleep by the weekend. Trying to recover all of that sleep at once is rarely effective and can disrupt circadian rhythms, making it harder to fall asleep on Sunday night and restarting the cycle.
A more sustainable approach is gradual change. Shifting bedtime earlier by 15 minutes at a time and observing how mood, energy and focus respond is often more effective than dramatic schedule shifts.
4. Waking up during the night means your sleep is poor
Many people believe that good sleep means falling asleep quickly and staying asleep all night. In reality, brief awakenings are a normal part of sleep as the brain moves through different sleep stages.
Waking during the night, including early morning hours, is not always problematic. What tends to interfere with rest is prolonged wakefulness combined with frustration or anxiety about not sleeping.
If it takes longer than about 15 to 20 minutes to fall back asleep, sleep specialists recommend getting out of bed and doing something calm and nonstimulating, like stretching or working on a puzzle, returning to bed only once sleepiness returns. This helps prevent the bed from becoming associated with wakefulness and stress.
5. Grogginess is cause for concern
There’s something called sleep inertia, which is the groggy, foggy feeling you get right after waking up. During this period, which can last anywhere from a few minutes to about half an hour, reaction time, attention and mood may be impaired. We often assume this grogginess means we slept poorly, but that is usually not true. Sleep inertia can happen even after a full, high-quality night of sleep, especially if you wake from deep sleep or wake up abruptly with an alarm. It’s a normal physiological process, not a sign that your sleep “didn’t work.”
More about sleep and mental health to come…