If Eugene Levy’s punchy Sleep Country Canada ads are any indication, most of us could use a Sleep Daddy who preaches the virtues of getting serious about our shut-eye. While most Canadian adults (61 to 77 percent) say they meet the eight hours of sleep a night we’ve always been told we need, Statistics Canada says far fewer report catching quality zzzs. Sure, we might be sleeping eight hours, but few of us feel refreshed come morning.
Eight hours has been the universal sleep sweet spot for generations. Before the Industrial Revolution, people practiced segmented sleep – they went to bed after dusk and slept for four hours, woke up to tend to the fire, then went to bed for another four hours until dawn. Later, in the early 1800s, Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist and foundational figure in the British labour movement, campaigned hard against 16-hour workdays in factories and coined “the 888” slogan. He advocated for eight hours of labour, eight hours of recreation time and eight hours of sleep. At the time, there was no clinical data that backed up the notion that we need eight hours of rest, but it didn’t take long for that magic number to catch on.
In the years since, there has been a plethora of research that supports the eight-hour-average theory, but the journal Nature recently published a study suggesting 6.4 to 7.8 hours a night gives those in mid- and late life (37 to 84 years) “better functioning of the immune system, brain and heart, as well as other organs when measured on the molecular level.”
Seven or eight hours may be the recommended average, but you’re certainly not alone if you’re someone who only spends a few hours a night in dreamland. Some people function just fine on fewer hours of sleep. History’s famous short sleepers include Benjamin Franklin (who slept no more than five hours a night), Thomas Edison (who typically got four) and Nikola Tesla (who apparently only slept for two hours each night).
If you aren’t getting enough shuteye (join the club), there’s a reason: Poor sleep quality could be caused by restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, perimenopause, loneliness, drinking alcohol two hours before bed, chronic pain, mental health illnesses, screen time and revenge procrastination, which is when we stay up late to try to buy some “me time” back. Sleep monitors can help you track and compare the kind of sleep you’re getting, but experts say you should take the info with a grain of salt – it’s better to go by how you feel in the morning. For Jennifer Caro, eight hours is her sweet spot. The 79-year-old who lives in Newcastle, Ont., says she typically gets seven hours a night, but she admits to feeling better when she gets eight. To realize her sleep goals, Caro now wears a CPAP machine to treat her sleep apnea. She’s upgraded her pillows, wears blue-light-blocking glasses while watching TV in the evening (they prevent your brain from thinking it’s daytime), listens to instrumental music while falling asleep and keeps her space dark and cool, but she doesn’t feel rested when she wakes. More on that later.
But as we reach our 60s, there are a multitude of reasons why many of us struggle to hit the recommended sleep sweet spot. As we age, it’s not atypical to go from needing, say, eight hours a night in your 30s or 40s to seven in your 60s – this transition could be an indication that you’ve retired, life is generally less stressful and you’ve found a bedtime and waking time that works for you. “What matters most is how you feel when you wake up in the morning,” says Dr. Charles Samuels, medical director at the Centre for Sleep & Human Performance in Calgary.
“If you don’t need to nap during the day, you wake in a good mood and you don’t have sugar cravings first thing in the morning, it’s a pretty good indication you’ve slept well”
This rings true to Dr. Wayne Lai, a neurologist, sleep physician and the medical director of the Kelowna General Hospital Sleep Laboratory in Kelowna, B.C. “Patients frequently describe difficulty falling asleep, waking repeatedly during the night, waking too early or sleeping for what appears to be an adequate number of hours but still feeling tired, foggy or irritable during the day,” he says. “Others report loud snoring, witnessed pauses in breathing, waking with headaches or dry mouth, restless legs, abnormal movements during sleep or difficulty maintaining a regular sleep schedule.”
Dr. Jen Parsons, a naturopathic doctor in Toronto, notices that as her patients get older, there’s not always a big shift in the amount they sleep, but she does see a change in how much deep sleep (REM) they get. “This could be because of medication that impacts sleep, as well as pain caused by arthritis, stiffness, difficulty getting comfortable and even loneliness,” she says. There are obvious signs you can use to gauge the quality of your slumber. “If you wake up refreshed and you’re able to get out of bed within about five minutes of opening your eyes without requiring coffee to feel like you’re functioning, that’s a good sign,” says Dr. Parsons. “If you don’t need to nap during the day, you wake in a good mood and you don’t have sugar cravings first thing in the morning, it’s a pretty good indication you’ve slept well.”
What’s trending now for those who toss and turn at night isn’t a pill, device or magic potion. Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, dubbed CBT-I, is hot again, after enjoying a huge boom during those insufferable COVID years. It’s a first-line treatment that doesn’t rely on meds for those, like me, who suffer from chronic insomnia. One of my goals is to get off sleeping pills, so when I was approached to try CBT-I by Coven Women’s Health in Toronto – a virtual clinic that provides patients with personalized health care focusing on perimenopause, menopause, hormonal health and yes, sleep – I jumped.
During four sessions with Dominique Williams, a registered social worker at Coven whose clinical approach is rooted in mindfulness and cognitive behavioural therapy, I learned CBT-I is all about identifying and changing your thoughts and behaviours around sleep. Williams helped me understand my long-standing insomnia certainly has to do with my diagnosis of treatment-resistant depression, but it’s also caused by too much nighttime doomscrolling, worry and overthinking in the evening, fatigue and now perimenopause. “Mood, stress and perfectionistic thinking can make sleep harder to sustain,” she says. “The main goal for you has been to help your brain relearn that bed is for sleep, while keeping the changes realistic and manageable.”
“Some nights will go better than others. The best results usually come from continuing the same core strategies consistently, even when the changes feel small”
Williams taught me about stimulus control (though I refused to get rid of the TV in my bedroom), relaxation techniques, bedtime hygiene (keeping my room dark, quiet and cool, for example), cognitive restructuring (changing the way I think about sleep and my issues with it) and sleep restriction – she had me to go bed later than usual to build up my sleep drive and improve my sleep efficiency – the percentage of time I spend in bed actually sleeping instead of staring at my phone watching reels on Instagram or episodes of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
And her recommendations have helped. She told me to keep a consistent sleep window, which I now track using a CBT-I app. She asked that I try to replace nighttime phone use with reading or listening to funny podcasts (try Good Hang with Amy Poehler). And this one really made sense to me – if I’m awake for more than 15 minutes in bed, I’m to get out and go to my “nest,” a calm space (just a chair with a throw blanket) where I can “break the connection between bed and wakefulness.”
A month or so after my last session, I hear Williams’s Australian accent in my head at night reminding me to put my phone down and do my wind-down routine, which includes a hot bath, a two-minute mindfulness session on the Calm app and a podcast. I’m still taking sleeping pills, but my dose has been lowered – a step in the right direction. “Some nights will go better than others,” Williams told me. “The best results usually come from continuing the same core strategies consistently, even when the changes feel small.”
But even though CBT-I has improved my quantity of sleep, I still wonder if I’m getting enough? Studies have long shown the need for 20 to 25 percent of our total slumber to be made up of REM (rapid-eye movement) sleep – which, for those who sleep eight hours, ends up being about an hour and a half to two hours a night. REM sleep contributes to mood regulation, brain development, improved learning and protects against dementia. REM is when your dreams occur and it’s often clustered in the second half of our sleep.
The market to help improve quantity and quality of sleep is a big business. You might have tried common supplements like melatonin (it had a moment in the mid-’90s) or magnesium, which has been super popular for the past few years. If you’re like me – someone who can’t fall asleep or stay asleep (hello, insomnia) – perhaps you’ve taken prescription medication like benzodiazepines and “Z-drugs” (non-benzodiazepine receptor antagonists). Maybe you’ve even tried cannabis – some people swear by it. When it comes down to it, some nights are just going to be better than others in terms of our slumber. Perhaps the best thing we can do is try to stop pursuing perfect sleep because, quite frankly, it’s exhausting.
