Better Sleep Starts with Understanding with Dr. Aric Prather

(chimes ringing) Headspace Studio. Hi, I'm Dr. Aric Prather, a psychologist who helps people get more restful sleep, a sleep evangelist if you will. And if you've ever had insomnia or even one sleepless night, you know it can affect everything from your mood to your productivity to your overall health. So I'm here to share the science behind sleep, how it happens, and the tools you need to help you sleep well, 'cause let's face it, who couldn't use more quality shuteye? Today I'm going to debunk the biggest sleep myths out there and show you what to try instead so you can literally sleep easier. It's interesting to think about what the origin of the eight hour sleep recommendation comes from. In general, if people sleep in kind of a consolidated fashion, they will sleep between seven to nine hours if they need to, and so it's thought that this might represent someone's sleep need, but historically people haven't necessarily slept in one big chunk like that. Several decades ago now, Robert Ekirch, who was a historian, wrote a book documenting the fact that there may have been a time in which we had polyphasic sleep, where we slept in two chunks, which has to do with the fact that before industrial lighting, we would go to sleep when the sun went down, we would sleep for say, three to four hours, wake up for some period of time where people would do things, have rituals, procreate, and then go back to sleep for several more hours and wake up when the sun came up. And the thinking is that potentially when there was indoor lighting and changes in industrialization, workforces were put on schedules and as a consequence, had to consolidate that time for bed, and it turned out that for many people, it was in this kind of eight-hour chunk that we could stitch together. Though of course, we know that many people wake up throughout the night, and perhaps that is a reflection of this evolution of how our sleep has come to be. So we don't have a great understanding of how we would define sleep need, and we think it probably varies. Can we catch up on sleep? In the long term, there is a cost. So a lot of people, and most of us honestly, spend the week probably not getting the sleep that you need or the sleep that you want, and so we often try to make that up on the weekends. And so what we're basically trying to do is kinda make up that sleep debt, that difference between how much sleep we got and how much sleep we need. And if the debt is really high, we are unlikely to be able to pay that off, and we know this from laboratory sleep studies. So if we keep people awake across the course of a whole night, so that's, say, eight hours of opportunity and they don't sleep...