How many times does the average person change position while sleeping? Can you train yourself to get by on less sleep? Test your sleep knowledge with our Everwell Challenge.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Ah, sleep. One of life’s true great pleasures. But for many, an elusive one. If your slumber is less than sound, it could be because you don’t have all the facts. Follow along as we pose an Everwell Challenge to mattress shoppers. This is one you definitely don’t want to sleep through!
1. True or false: you can train yourself to get by on fewer hours of sleep.
2. Snoring can be controlled by
A. Losing weight
B. Cutting back on alcohol
C. Sleeping on your side
3. How many times on average do people change sleep positions during the night?
4. Which does not happen during sleep:
A. Body temperature drops
B. Hormones are released
C. Brain rests
5. On average how many dreams do most people have each night?
A. 2
B. 5
C. 10
D. 20
Answers:
For the correct answers, we turned to sleep expert Dr. David Schulman.
1. People who routinely get by on five or six hours a sleep may feel like they’re acting at their full potential but there’s pretty good evidence that they’re chronically deprived and they’re functioning below their full potential.
2. All of the above. There are a number of ways you can have somebody who’s a simple snorer to treat their snoring or to decrease the volume. One way is to have them sleep on their side. The airway is shaped like this. The reason they snore is because the airway is collapsing and vibrating.
When you’re sitting on your back or lying on your back it’s very easy to collapse the airway. But when you rotate on your side it’s much more difficult.
Alcohol can increase snoring by over-relaxing muscles around the airway. Being overweight means extra fat around the neck and more pressure on the airway, so losing weight could help reduce the roar
If the airway closes off during sleep that’s a more serious problem called sleep apnea. So if your bed partner has snoring, but the snoring is interrupted intermittently with periods of silence or gasping that would be very concerning for sleep apnea and should probably have him or her see a sleep specialist for that.
3. The answer to this question is 13. And this is based solely on observational studies.
A little tossing and turning or even waking up during the night is normal. Dr. Schulman says it’s only if you find yourself sleepy during the day that there might be a problem.
If you’re sleeping seven to eight hours a night and you’re continuing to complain about daytime fatigue that’s probably something that should be evaluated by a specialist.
4. C. The brain doesn’t rest during sleep. During some stages of sleep the brain is actually more active than it is during wakefulness. Particularly this occurs during REM phase sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement. This is something that occurs during normal sleep every 90 to 110 minutes.
There’s some people who believe the role of REM phase sleep is to help us consolidate memory. And so there’s pretty good evidence that if you go for many days without REM phase sleep your ability to remember things will be impaired
5. The answer to this question is five. People typically dream during REM sleep. So depending how long the sleep period is you can have four, five or six REM periods in a given night. There’s evidence that people have dreams during other stages of sleep but their uncommonly remembered and so they’re not classically called dreams.