Image by Benjamin Balazs from Pixabay
In this Article:
- What is a chronotype or sleep personality?
- How do the Bear, Wolf, Lion, and Dolphin chronotypes differ?
- How knowing your sleep personality improves your sleep quality.
- What is your circadian rhythm and how itcan help you optimize your sleep schedule.
- How can understanding your chronotype help you wake up feeling more refreshed?
How to Optimize Your Sleep Based on Your Sleep Personality
by Philip Carr-Gomm.
Although we popularly talk about larks and owls in relation to our preferences for when we go to sleep and wake up, sleep specialists suggest there may be more than two chronotypes, to use the scientific term for our “sleep personality”, our body’s preferred time for sleeping.
US sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus, for example, talks about four, rather than two, types of sleep personality, which he renames as Bear, Wolf, Lion, and Dolphin types. A quick online quiz he offers will tell you more and suggest which one you might be (ChronoQuiz.com).
We don’t necessarily stay with one chronotype throughout our lives. We might, when we’re very young, be larks and wake up at the crack of dawn, wanting food. And then when we’re teenagers, we may shift to being a different chronotype: We become owls and want to go to bed late and wake up late. And then the rest of our life, we might be, for instance, a bear in Breus’s terminology, which he reckons represents about 55 percent of the population. Bears want to work between nine and five and go to bed around 10 and 11 in the evening.
I once had a client who complained of feeling wretched in the morning. He woke up depressed and found it hard to summon the motivation to get out of bed. He wanted psychotherapy to help him overcome this problem.
We worked out his chronotype, and I suggested he change his lifestyle from trying to be a lark to being true to his type, the owl. Luckily, he was a freelancer and could do this without a problem. The effect was almost immediate.
Identifying your chronotype will help you get a sense of whether you should head for bed early or late, but to get more precise you need to determine your circadian rhythm.
Determining your Circadian Rhythm
Do you experience an afternoon dip in energy? For a lot of people, it’s between 3 and 4pm, and some of us like to take a nap then, but if you’re attentive, you’ll find these dips are occurring cyclically through your day, and night, too.
They’re caused by your biological clock and the circadian rhythm it’s responding to. An adult’s circadian rhythm goes through one complete cycle every 90 or so minutes throughout the day and night. During the night, when you sleep, you go through these 90-minute cycles in a way that takes you through the stages of light and deep sleep, then dream sleep, before repeating again.
During the day, you don’t notice these cycles so much, except perhaps at the afternoon dip, but try keeping a “yawn diary”, just noting whenever you yawn, and you might well find that it’s happening about every 90 minutes. What this means, is that every 45 minutes you’ll either hit a peak or a trough in your energy, and this simple fact will allow you to calculate when it’s best for you to go to sleep.
This explains the phenomenon we’ve all experienced: You start feeling dead tired on the sofa. You realize you’ve got to get to bed. You turn off the TV, potter about in the kitchen, lock up the house, say goodnight to the dog, do your bathroom routine, and get undressed. Then you get into bed, and surprise surprise, you feel wide awake.
What’s happened is that you’ve realized you need to sleep when your alertness is at its lowest, but by the time you’ve lain down, half an hour or so later, you’re moving towards a peak of alertness in your rhythm.
To work out your own particular rhythm, just knowing one or two highs or lows should give you enough information. You tend to wake up naturally at a peak, so you then just calculate the 90-minute phases from then.
Alternatively, you can use the time you feel your energy dipping as your starting point, or track your alertness over several days, noting when you yawn or feel particularly high or low in energy. Once you’ve worked this out, you’ll know when it’s a good time to head for bed and when there’s no point. If at 10pm, you’re at a peak, for example, don’t expect to be able to go to sleep until about 10:45, so start the bedtime routine with enough time so that you’re in bed by say 10:30pm. If you need reminding, set an alarm.
Note: The picture can be a little more complex, since we don’t all have a circadian rhythm of exactly 90 minutes; that’s just the average. The cycles can vary between 80 and 120 minutes, so bear this in mind when you calculate yours.
Ancestral Biphasic, Dual, or Segmented Sleep
Once you’ve worked out the optimal time to start going to bed, this can help enormously in getting you off to sleep fairly quickly, but what if your problem is “sleep maintenance” and you find yourself waking up in the night, unable to get back to sleep?
This is very common, and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this is a completely normal and natural phenomenon. It’s called biphasic, dual, or segmented sleep, and researchers have uncovered historical evidence to suggest that sleeping in two segments with a period of wakefulness in between may well have been the way countless generations before us slept.
In his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the historian Robert Ekirch cites abundant historical evidence that humans previously slept in two separated periods. He found more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern in diaries, court records, medical books, and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.
Moreover, when researchers are taken down into caves or put into situations where they have no indications or knowledge of what time of day it is, with no exposure to natural light, they tend to sleep in two phases: the first for about two hours, followed by about four hours of being awake, and then in their second phase, they sleep for about four to six hours. So if you experience segmented sleep, you don’t have to tell yourself you’re suffering from insomnia. This is simply your sleep pattern.
Use auto-suggestion to tell yourself, It’s easy for me to fall back into sleep when I’m ready. The emphasis is on when you’re ready, because, of course, your experience has shown you that when you’re not ready it’s not easy. The auto-suggestion helps a positive framing of the issue. This then empowers you to do whatever you like during your wakeful phase, whether that means getting up, reading, using the gift of the night’s retreat time for meditation or listening to music, and so on.
The Gift of the Night
Once you know your sleep story and work out your optimal bedtime—remind yourself of this key idea: trusting that the night holds a gift for you.
At the heart of this lies the belief that the issue is not about whether or not you’re sleeping, but about whether or not you’re getting rest and making use of this special time as a retreat, “me time”, during which you can recharge and restore yourself.
Every time you catch a negative thought about not being asleep, you flip it around and tell yourself that this is your time to do whatever you want to do with your consciousness: meditating, listening to podcasts, poetry, music. Lying down, just let those negative thoughts drift away . . .
And as you lie there, you might like to entertain the thought that you are actually already asleep, and that you might be experiencing “sleep state misperception”: this is when you believe you are awake but are actually, by all objective criteria, fast asleep. In other words, your body is asleep, but you are experiencing a state of wakefulness, of self-awareness.
When aroused from deep sleep, 5 percent of people report this experience, even though their body was by all measures soundly asleep. Although this may sound unsettling, those with a spiritual orientation can find this inspiring.
As your body rests, recharges, and repairs, your consciousness is free to meditate or try out some lucid dreaming! Sleep, and the time we spend preparing for it and slipping in and out of it, can become a daily embodied spiritual practice.
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Article Source:
BOOK: The Gift of the Night
The Gift of the Night: A Six-Step Program for Better Sleep
by Philip Carr-Gomm.
A fast and easy-to-follow six-step program to help you sleep better, The Gift of the Night combines knowledge from sleep science and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with techniques drawn from spiritual traditions and insights from the emerging field of psychedelic therapy. This guide presents a myriad of suggestions for creating the best mindset, emotional state, and physical conditions to optimize the environment for sleep, including advice on nutrition and supplements.Based on the success of his sleep clinic, Philip Carr-Gomm offers thirteen natural ways we can drift into a deep and restorative sleep. In addition, a comprehensive sleep troubleshooting guide tackles topics such as sleep phobia, sleep hacking, and lucid dreaming. Helping you get a better night’s rest, this concise and simple guide shows you how to truly benefit from everything the night offers to body and soul.
Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as an Audiobook and as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Philip Carr-Gomm is an author and psychotherapist, trained in psychology, sophrology, and psychosynthesis psycho therapy. The founder of the Sophrology Institute, he also works in the emerging field of psychedelic psychotherapy. Philip runs a sleep clinic that offers online sleep therapy and is the author of more than twenty books.Article Recap:
This article explores the concept of sleep personalities, also known as chronotypes, and explains how they affect our sleep and daily energy levels. The Bear, Wolf, Lion, and Dolphin chronotypes reflect different sleep patterns and preferences. By identifying your chronotype, you can better align your sleep schedule with your natural circadian rhythm, improving rest and overall well-being. The article also discusses segmented sleep, a natural sleep pattern used by our ancestors, and how to embrace it if you experience nighttime wakefulness.
