Motivation and emotion/Book/2024/Sleep onset optimisation

Sleep onset optimisation :
What techniques assist in falling asleep promptly?

Overview

It is 1:00 PM, and the day has finally come to an end. You are mentally and physically exhausted, as you hop into bed, you put your head down on the pillow pull your duck feather duvet to your chin, roll onto your side, and reach for your phone. The only energy you have is to doom scroll on Instagram and see what the rest of the world did today. Half an hour goes by, you set your alarm for 06:30 AM and put your phone down for the night. You find your brain is now racing, thinking about all the tasks you need to complete for tomorrow, you are thinking about several conversations you had today and if you offended anyone. You look at the time…0100AM?! Now you are stressing with a racing heart and brain pumping with anxious thoughts, about trying to fall asleep quickly and calculating how much sleep you can get from now until your alarm goes off.

Sleep deficiency heavily affects the body mentally and physically. Lack of sleep can impair the body to execute daily activities eg. work, school, raising a family and social interactions due to feeling tired, low energy and low mood. Therefore affecting a person's motivation and emotional regulation causing mental health issues such as depression, anxiety and stress. Through psychological science, sleep onset optimisation developed into way to promote techniques tailored to person who is struggling with poor sleep hygiene.

Focus questions: What is sleep? What is sleep onset optimisation? Is there a relationship between motivation and sleep? Is there a relationship between emotion and sleep? What techniques help us fall asleep promptly?

Sleep onset optimisation

What is sleep?

Figure 1. Circadian rhythm

Sleep can look different for every human however the generic definition is a period of time at night when the brain signals the body to lie down and close eyes caused by the circadian clock. The role of the circadian clock (see Figure 1), is to pick up different light cues in the environment throughout twenty-four hours and this is achieved by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) which is located in hypothalamus. The big communicator between the wake and sleep transition is the brain stem sends signals to the muscles to relax which is important so we do not physically act our dreams. While we sleep our beautiful thalamus becomes quiet by allowing us to tune out to the external world which is cool as the thalamus does not stop in the day due to constantly processing information from short to long-term memory. The pineal gland loves to shoot melatonin after the PG has received signals from the SCN which helps us to sleep in the dark.

What is sleep onset optimisation?

Optimisation means to make the most out of a situation. Therefore sleep onset optimisation is the decision to prioritise the opportunity to have the best sleep possible each night.

• What does an optimised sleep look like?

How has sleep optimisation developed throughout history?

• What sleep looked like before the 20th century
• When did the study of sleep arise? 1950s
• Names of the people who invented the study of sleep?
• What does sleep look like from 100 years ago to today?
• Compare and contrast sleep disorders from 2000 to now.

Sleep onset optimisation; importance on motivation and emotion.

The importance of sleep:

• Why is it important to get a good sleep?
• Sleep is essential for good physical and mental health and is a time when the body and mind can rest, recover, and restore energy for the next day. Sleep helps our body to be able to emotionally and metabolically regulate, improve memory and performance, and repair our muscles.

• What happens if we do not get a good sleep? Poor mental and physical health issues

	Poor sleep	Good sleep
Motivation	Decreases	Increases
Emotional regulation	Decreases	Increases

The relationship between sleep and motivation:

• Self determination theory
• Basic physiological needs theory
• Culture and identity
• Sleepiness is a new motivation theory that can help explain behaviour
• University students and achievement motivation

The relationship between sleep and emotion:

• Sleep is an emotional regulator
• Circumplex Model of Affect
• Sleep dependent memory consolidation
• Sleep and dreaming

Techniques to assist in falling asleep promptly:

Before bed:

Relax the mind:

• Stress and emotions need to reflected before bed otherwise the brain process the events of the day through REM causing nightmares and worsen sleep (Vandekerckhove et al., 2018).

Relax the body:

1 Alcohol affects sleep:

	True
	False

2 Blue lights affects sleep:

	True
	False

Conclusion

• The Conclusion is arguably the most important section
• Suggested word count: 150 to 330 words
• It should be possible for someone to only read the Overview and the Conclusion and still get a pretty good idea of the problem and what is known based on psychological science

Suggestions for this section: What is the answer to the sub-title question based on psychological theory and research? What are the answers to the focus questions? What are the practical, take-home messages? (Even for the topic development, have a go at the likely take-home message)

See also

Provide internal (wiki) links to the most relevant Wikiversity pages (esp. related motivation and emotion book chapters) and Wikipedia articles. Use these formats:

• Sleep and emotion (Book chapter, 2010)
• Collaborative authoring using wiki (Wikiversity)
• Self determination theory (Wikipedia)

References

Axelsson, J., Ingre, M., Kecklund, G., Lekander, M., Wright, K. P., & Sundelin, T. (2019). Sleepiness as motivation: A potential mechanism for how sleep deprivation affects behavior. Sleep, 43(6). https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsz291

Loft, M., & Cameron, L. (2014). The importance of sleep: Relationships between sleep quality and work demands, the prioritization of sleep and pre-sleep arousal in day-time employees. Work & Stress, 28(3), 289–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2014.935523

Reid, MS, M. P., & Dautovich, PhD, N. D. (2021). The motivation behind better sleep: Self-determination as a framework for examining sleep outcomes in college students. Journal of American College Health, 71(8), 2538–2549. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2021.1978460

Tsouklidis, N., Tallaj, N., Tallaj, Y., & Heindl, S. E. (2020). Lights out! the body needs sleep: Electronic devices and sleep deficiency. Cureus. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.9292

Vandekerckhove, M., & Wang, Y. (2018b). Emotion, emotion regulation and sleep: An intimate relationship. AIMS Neuroscience, 1(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.3934/neuroscience.2018.1.1

Vyazovskiy, V. (2015). Sleep, recovery, and metaregulation: Explaining the benefits of sleep. Nature and Science of Sleep, 171. https://doi.org/10.2147/nss.s54036

Zisapel, N. (2018). New Perspectives on the role of melatonin in human sleep, circadian rhythms and their regulation. British Journal of Pharmacology, 175(16), 3190–3199. https://doi.org/10.1111/bph.14116

External links

Provide external links to highly relevant resources such as presentations, news articles, and professional sites. Use sentence casing. For example:

• Six top tips for writing a great essay (University of Melbourne)
• The importance of structure (skillsyouneed.com)

Suggestions for this section: Only select links to major external resources about the topic Present in alphabetical order Include the source in parentheses after the link