Sleep
Welcome to my health and wellness journey. I'm working to improve my own health and that of my family. It's not about perfection or quick fixes, it's about understanding what actually matters. Not simply hacks or fad diets, resulting in me returning to my usual bad habits, but changes that stick.
I am always questioning things, and over the years have done lots of research, finding ways that help us to live healthier, happier lives, like reducing added sugar and cutting out trans fats from my diet. However putting changes into practice, putting the research to use, hasn't really happened. Some of it has, but not enough, and I find myself researching endlessly, a bit of an addiction.
So I want to start putting these practical, healthy ways of living into practice, one step at a time, with purpose.
So, step one. I'd been looking into fasting as a way to support autophagy, the body's process for clearing out damaged cells. But the more I read, the more it became clear that autophagy isn't just switched on by fasting, deep sleep and exercise support it too. That's what tipped it for me. If my sleep isn't sorted, I'm undermining the very thing I was trying to fast my way into. So sleep is where I'm starting, because once that's sorted, everything else becomes easier.
Where I'm At With My Sleep
Summer Nights
In summer, I feel like I need less sleep. When it's still light outside at 10pm, it's hard to switch off, I don't really want to sleep yet, and I often get a second wind of energy just as I should be winding down. Then, on the other end, I find it hard to stay asleep once the sun's come up. Thankfully, I do usually manage to sleep until around 6am, if the cat and dog allow it.
Wind-Down Time
It's not that I don't get any me time otherwise, I do. But the wind-down period before sleep is when I want it to still feel like mine, not just a clinical "now do your sleep hygiene routine" block. That's part of why cutting out screens entirely felt hard, giving up something that felt like a small reward at the end of the day, even if it wasn't helping.
YouTube podcasts (with the screen off) have been my go-to, but a lot of them are still mentally engaging, which isn't really what I want right before sleep. I manage to drift off while listening to these videos, but is it a good way to go to sleep, especially if the subject is topical.
Night Terrors
I'll often wake up an hour or two into sleep from a night terror. When people hear "night terrors," they probably picture waking up screaming. Mine are different, more like the dream doesn't fully let go when I wake up. Sometimes I'm convinced the frightening thing from my dream is actually there in the bedroom or somewhere in the house, right in front of me, and I'll wake my husband before realising I was still asleep. Other times I'll wake up certain someone's broken into the house, or that I've forgotten something urgent, and it takes a minute or two to fully separate that from reality.
Antidepressants
Like many people, I've been taking my sertraline before bed, mostly because that's when I reliably remember to take it. But looking into the research, evening dosing might actually be working against me. Sertraline has activating properties that can interfere with sleep if taken in the evening, and it changes sleep architecture directly. One study found it reduces REM sleep and increases deep sleep early in the night, which is exactly the kind of shift that could be tangled up with my night terrors and the low deep sleep numbers my watch has been showing.
GPs and Doing My Own Research
If you're lucky enough to have a GP who has the time and inclination to talk through something like medication timing, it's worth giving them a call. But if your experience of NHS GPs has been anything like mine, quick and stretched, geared toward the most urgent cases rather than the fine details of sleep, you might find it easier to do the groundwork yourself first. I'd still recommend a quick check with a pharmacist or your GP before actually changing when you take anything, just to rule out anything specific to your situation.
Tracking It
I started tracking my sleep with my Apple Watch a while back, and it confirmed what I suspected: I'm not getting much deep sleep.
This is part of why sleep feels different to me now than it did in my 20s and 30s. Sleep architecture naturally shifts with age, less deep sleep, more fragmentation, so there's less room for error than there used to be. And I notice the knock-on effects clearly: when I'm tired, it changes what I eat, I reach for easier, more sugary options rather than making better choices, and it pushes me toward more screen time too, which just feeds the same cycle that caused the poor sleep in the first place. It even changes my morning routine. On a good night's sleep I'll have water first thing and coffee after breakfast, but on a bad night, it's coffee immediately, before I've even properly woken up enough to think about it.
I also notice a seasonal pattern beyond just summer nights. January and February tend to be low points for me, classic SAD territory, and I get a real lift from around April onwards. Turns out there's something to my feeling that summer needs less sleep too, research shows sleep duration does shift slightly with daylight, but it's mostly driven by waking up earlier rather than actually needing less sleep, so the feeling of needing less can be a bit misleading. That's worth remembering now, while it's still light and I feel full of energy, so I don't let a temporary boost quietly build up a sleep debt.
The Research
Screens and Sleep Hygiene
Sleep hygiene advice is everywhere, but the evidence behind it is more nuanced than the usual "no screens" rule suggests. A 2024 National Sleep Foundation consensus statement found panelists did not actually reach consensus on whether screen light itself impairs adult sleep. What did show a clear effect was reducing engagement with interactive content like video games or social media, which led to earlier bedtimes, longer sleep, and better quality, separate from the light question. One study also found reduced melatonin at bedtime after screen use without a blue-light filter, alongside a reduction in deep sleep during the first part of the night. Real-world data backs this up too: screen use before bed is linked to worse outcomes across sleep quality, daytime function, and fatigue.
The Midnight Myth
There's a popular idea that an hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after. It's a myth, there's no biological "midnight switch." What's actually true is that the first few hours after you fall asleep contain the highest proportion of deep sleep, whatever time that happens to be. Since I'm reliably woken by the dog, the cat, or the kids by around 6:30am regardless of what I do, my wake time is basically fixed. That means the only lever I actually have is bedtime. Falling asleep earlier doesn't just mean more total sleep, it means starting that valuable deep-sleep-heavy window earlier too, so it has more chance of completing before something wakes me.
Night Terrors Explained
Night terrors and similar confused wakings typically happen during the transition out of deep sleep, moving from slow-wave sleep into a lighter stage. Rather than shifting smoothly, part of the brain wakes up while another part hasn't caught up, sometimes called a confusional arousal. This is also why timing matters: since deep sleep is concentrated in the first sleep cycles, these transitions tend to happen in the first third to half of the night. In a way, night terrors might be a sign I am getting into deep sleep, just that the transition out of it isn't clean.
Deep Sleep, Ageing and Autophagy
Deep sleep also matters more the older you get. Growth hormone release, tied to physical repair, happens overwhelmingly during slow-wave sleep, and deep sleep is thought to help clear beta-amyloid, a protein linked to Alzheimer's. Poor sleep has been associated with higher amyloid buildup, one more reason deep sleep deserves more attention than it gets.
This is also the piece that connects back to why I started here. Autophagy, the process I'd been trying to trigger through fasting, isn't reserved for fasting windows. It's also linked to deep sleep, alongside exercise and calorie restriction. So poor sleep isn't just tiring, it may be quietly working against the very repair process I was trying to encourage through fasting in the first place.
Eating Before Bed
Eating close to bedtime shows up again and again as a factor in poor sleep. Studies consistently link eating or drinking within an hour or so of bedtime to more awakenings and less efficient sleep, while a gap of around four to six hours between eating and bedtime is associated with better sleep duration and quality. High-fat or high-carb meals eaten late seem to be worse offenders, extending the time it takes to fall asleep, while eating earlier in the evening gives digestion time to settle before the body switches into sleep mode.
The Plan
For one week, I'm trying:
- Moving my sertraline to the morning, with the dose left next to my water so I don't forget
- Swapping YouTube (screen off) for Insight Timer in the evening, keeping the wind-down "me time" but with something calming instead of stimulating
- Getting ready for bed earlier so winding down can start around 10pm
- A consistent bedtime of around 10:30pm, working back from a fixed 6:30am wake time, aiming for 8 hours
- Wearing my Apple Watch to bed to track sleep stages, particularly deep sleep, and charging it earlier in the evening instead of overnight
- Cutting off eating after 8pm to start with, working towards an earlier cutoff over time, since eating close to bedtime is linked to more disrupted sleep
Next Steps
A few other things I want to look into, once I've got a baseline from this first week:
- Whether acid reflux or indigestion could be behind some of my night wakings, and whether something like an indigestion remedy is worth trying
- Whether a warm bath or shower before bed helps me wind down and fall asleep faster
- Magnesium, and whether supplementing could help with sleep quality
I'll dig into the research on these properly before deciding what, if anything, to add to the plan.
Watch This Space
I'll be tracking each night through the week, and I'll be back in a week with an update on how it's gone, along with what I'm looking into next.
