Are you getting enough sleep?
Getting your full eight hours can be a difficult task, especially if you deal with insomnia — which around one-third of adults do. Dr. Aric Prather, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at University of California San Francisco, is the author of "Sleep Prescriptions: Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest." He told KMOX about how he uses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help patients sleep.
The first thing to think about, he said, is your bedroom.
"It turns out that our bed and our bedroom are really critical for telling our body what's supposed to happen, and they have lots of environmental triggers," Dr. Prather said. "The bed is just a critical one, you want to make sure it's a shrine to sleep, so that when you get in your body knows what to do. That means kind of keeping it decluttered and only doing sleep in that area."
Keeping your bedroom a sleep-specific environment, he said, will help create an association between the room and sleeping.
Prather also explained the idea in his book that sleep is the "dishwasher of the brain." Prater said new science has shown that the fluid that washes over our brain reaches more areas of our brains when we sleep.
"What it does is it clears away the metabolites that build up throughout the day. And so it seems like it might be something that clears out kind of toxins in the brain," he said. "And it may help explain why people, when they don't get enough sleep, over time might be at increased risk for a kind of negative health outcomes like neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's."
Another thing he said is that sleep loss can often lead to a cycle of stress.
"We can go without sleep, it's really when you begin to worry about the fact that you're not sleeping, and that distress, and kind of making kind of changes to your schedule to try to get that sleep, that might actually undermine how sleep works naturally, when people have short nights of sleep," he said.
Dr. Prather also talked about the harm phones and social media do to our sleep cycles, how stress management can help, and more.
Hear more about sleep loss and how to help it from Dr. Prather:
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