Sleep For Surgeons

Sleep feels like a waste of time but it underpins our physical and cognitive function, in the immediate and longer term. During sleep, our bodies and brains clean, repair and grow, and we encode and make sense of experiences and new information.

It’s recommended that adults get between 7-9 hours of sleep.[2] Individual requirements vary, but it is rare to need less... rarer than being struck by lightning, according to Matthew Walker.[3] Yet, a third of us suffer from ‘insufficient sleep syndrome’, a ‘voluntary’ state of chronically reduced sleep to accommodate lifestyle or work demands; and insufficient sleep has been declared a global public health issue because of its impact on our health.[4,5]

We sleep in 90 minutes sleep cycles, with more restorative deep sleep at the beginning of the night and more creative, emotionally regulating REM (or ‘dream’) sleep in the second half of the night. We need to sleep deeply enough to get enough deep sleep, and for long enough to get enough REM sleep (see figure, above [6]). You can read more about sleep here, or hear more, here.

Everyone has a rubbish sleep, or is woken on call every now and again, but how do you optimise sleep as much as possible? 
I’ve divided this topic into: Going to sleep, staying asleep, and waking up refreshed.