Klaudia Mitura:

Hello, happiness seekers. My name is Klaudia. Welcome to the third and final part of the happiness challenge for this month of optimizing our sleep. As a reminder, this month's happiness challenge has been inspired by the founder of The Sleep Scientist, Dr. Sophie Bostock. You can tune in to episode 111 to listen to my fascinating conversation with Sophie.

And for the last three weeks I have been reflecting on my sleep using the CATED scale, C A T E D scale, which assesses five dimensions of sleep that have been consistently associated with health outcomes. These dimensions are satisfaction with the sleep. Are we satisfied with our sleep?

Alertness during waking hours. Do we stay awake all day without dozing or going for a nap? Timing of the sleep. Are we asleep between 2am and 4am? Sleep efficiency, do we spend less than 30 minutes awake at night? And sleep duration, do we sleep between six and eight hours a day?

So the way I have applied this happiness challenge was that once a week I would give myself a score for each category for that week. I would give zero if that never or rarely occurred that week. I would give myself one if it occurred sometimes during that week. And I would give myself two if points if it was usually or always. So the total amount that I could get was zero, which meant, well, I didn't have such a great sleep health that week. And the maximum I could get was 10, which meant that I have a very good sleep health. But as you can predict majority of time, I actually had it really somewhere in between.

I never really actually had 10. Interestingly, I also never had a zero. But generally, I was hanging out around 5, 6. Sometimes I think my best score was around seven. So definitely a few things that I could change or improve in terms of my sleep quality. A few things that I have noticed was that duration of my sleep did not equal alertness during the next day.

So even though I have slept six, seven hours, it did not always result in me being full of energy next day. What was impacting my level of alertness though was sleep efficiency. That is whether I woke up in the middle of the night or not. So simply if I had shorter sleep, but I didn't wake up in the middle of night, that gave me much more energy and happiness next day than if I had the longer sleep, but I woke up in the middle of the night.

It also became quite obvious that I do have a tendency to wake up in the middle of the night, and I'm definitely awake for more than 30 minutes a night, which again, definitely something I can do, think about how I can improve. And the final one, I don't definitely keep my timings of sleep consistent.

So my sleep patterns are definitely shifting depending what's happening during the weekday, but definitely at the weekends I tend to go sleep much later, get up quite later, which kind of explains why I'm a little bit grumpy on Monday morning, because let's be honest, I do struggle to wake up.

Just because I shifted my sleep during a weekend and then I expect my body to wake up very early on Monday for my work. So again, something to definitely think of.

And as much as I found this exercise useful, I actually found it quite stressful in terms of judging my sleep in relation to those components, simply because it almost added additional pressure for my sleep to be perfect in all categories.

And I was very intrigued to see that my experience was nothing new. So the idea that we can be too preoccupied with tracking our sleep, to the point that is actually detrimental for us because we are concentrating more on that score or more on tracking. We check our sleep quality in the middle of the night was actually recently highlighted in the journal of clinical sleep medicine, where researchers came up with a term for it called orthosomnia.

So I guess whatever tracking method, if any you use in relation to your sleep, just be careful, not to get too preoccupied with your ratings. For me personally, it was helpful to remind myself that even if my sleep was not perfect in those dimensions or those categories, my body can definitely set a certain amount of tiredness of sleep deprivation, and I can still have a good day.

So that definitely helped me to relax and more focus on actually letting the body sleep rather than thinking about the quality of my sleep.

So I think going forward, rather than assessing my sleep, I'm going to incorporate three simple solutions that can help me to sleep better. Especially, I'm going to see if those solutions are going to help me in relation to me waking up and being awake for more than 30 minutes a night.

Regular breaks throughout the day. So I've noticed that if I have a much calmer day, if I have mind resting activities, then I'm much better at falling quickly at the end of the day. That's why definitely gratitude, meditation, journaling are so important for me to do in short bursts throughout the day so that when it comes then going to bed, my body and my mind process what has happened.

Relaxing body before the bed. So again, lots of the stress that I have will definitely be stored in my body. And that often wake me up in the middle of the night. So my three favourites before going to bed in terms of bed routine is very calming down yoga flow. Having an evening walk or having a hot bath that definitely help my body to relax more to go to sleep.

And the final one, which again, might be neglected, but definitely can improve our sleep quality, is consistency. When to get out of bed and when to go to bed. So that our internal body clocks can get synchronized. And in relation to that, I changed my Saturday morning routine to kind of almost force myself to wake up at the usual time.

And I've done it by booking a very early morning yoga flow so that I know I need to get up in the morning, start the day on a positive exercise. And that way, I don't oversleep during a weekend, which means that on Monday, I really do struggle to wake up. So I guess the biggest learning for me is that it's not necessarily what happens just before the bed but rather what happens throughout the day that impacts our sleep quality.

For me definitely one thing I can work on is how I can ensure that I can sleep peacefully through entire night. So I do hope that some of these tips will be useful for you, and I hope you have a wonderful sleep going forward.

I also want to mention that there is so many different pieces of our advice out there when it comes to optimizing our sleep.

When I was researching this topic, it's just a huge, huge amount of advice. Soothing smells of lavender, having extra doses of magnesium, like you name it. And I guess it's trying different things, seeing if they have an effect on you, but most importantly trusting your body, what is it that your body and your mind needs to be sleeping well.

I don't think so personally that there is a magic solution for everyone to get a restful night's sleep, but I guess it's finding tools that work for you that can make a real difference in terms of quantity and quality of your sleep. So thank you so much for listening. I do hope that this month's happiness challenge has inspired you to look into your sleep.

Let me know how you feel and share any of your experiences. You can find me on LinkedIn under Klaudia Mitura and also subscribe to my newsletter.

I see you at the next episode. Bye.