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Dr. James Maas on Power Sleep

October 30th, 2007

Monthly column for www.rasaspa.com written by Anne Marie Cummings.

Power Sleep and How to Enjoy Life to its Fullest

 

“If you can manage to get plenty of deep sleep and meet your total sleep requirement every night, you are likely to see a remarkable improvement in your alertness, energy level, and general health.”

After reading Power Sleep and interviewing Dr. James Maas, I’ve come to realize that I am one of the unfortunate souls his book is aimed at. I, like millions of people around the world, sometimes walk around sleep deprived. How do I know this? Well, quite simply, when I asked Dr. James Maas to define quality sleep, he responded, “Quality sleep is sleep when you’re in a good mood the next day. When you’re full of energy and there isn’t a dip in your alertness. When you feel creative, you make good decisions, the world seems right, and you’re in good, general health. It’s not just what happens in the night, but more importantly, the effect of last night’s sleep on today’s performance.”

Well, most of the time I am creative. Most of the time I do feel full of energy. But there are those days, generally afternoons between the hours of 2 and 4 p.m., when I feel as if I’ve just been run over by a truck. I wonder what’s wrong with me. I am by no means upset or stressed-out, I exercised that morning and ate my high-fiber cereal with fresh fruit and soy milk for breakfast. So what’s the problem? According to Dr. Maas, it’s my sleep patterns. And this is precisely where Dr. Maas’ book, Power Sleep, will educate anyone who reads his best-seller, which has been conveniently translated into 10 languages; sleep problems are a global phenomenon these days.

“Everybody in the world has problems sleeping,” Dr. Maas explains. “But some of the sleepiest people claim they aren’t sleepy. They’re running on adrenaline. Students and executives for example. They are the most sleep deprived. The elderly as well, because of medication they take for their blood pressure. And those working night shifts. Pretty soon, because of our sleep deprivation, we get into accidents and have heart attacks. All these things are linked to lack of sleep. Sleep deprivation is a detriment to performance.”

Dr. Maas is right. Especially for those of us with sleep disorders, who don’t take the serious measures we need to help ourselves. “In the 1970’s there may have been a few articles in the medical literature on sleep,” says Dr. Maas. “Sleep was ignored, even in medical schools. But today, we have at least 17,000 sleep researchers. We even have college courses on sleep. There is a growth in known sleep disorders. There are a total of 89 in fact.”

Of the 89, I know that I have two on occasion: insomnia and restless leg syndrome. I also know that my brother sleepwalks, my father snores, my boyfriend has sleep apnea, a friend of a friend of mine has narcolepsy, and my dog, along with thirty percent of the population, has periodic limb movement disorder. The sad thing is, we don’t really associate our grogginess, our inability to perform well at work, or our lack of communication with our family members to our sleep disorders. Why? “We aren’t educated when it comes to sleep. The only thing we notice is that we feel sleepy” says Dr. Maas.

Unfortunately the remedies most of us choose are the very things that Dr. Maas advices against: more coffee, more cigarettes, more food, another drink, and “driving through” drowsiness on the road so we can hurry home and get to bed. But speeding can cause an accident, and sometimes cost you your life. Dr. Maas eloquently dedicates a chapter in Power Sleep to reducing travel fatigue. He even recommends the purchase of a bio-brite light visor, to help reset your biological clock if you’re one of those who travels from one time zone to another more often than you’d like. “By reading with the visor in place for fifteen to thirty minutes at appropriate times, your biological clock will begin to make the proper adjustment toward your new time schedule, even before you land.”

It’s an unfortunate fact that our society is sleep deprived. “We’re getting less sleep and becoming less healthy. Often, with more pressures, people need more, not less sleep. If you pay attention to your sleep you’ll be so much more effective when you’re awake. People say, ‘I can’t afford to sleep.’ If we operate the body like a machine, we’ll go on only so long before we drop off like flies - and we’ll drop off at the age of forty-six!”

As an ex-workaholic, having lived life in the fast lane, I know exactly what’s preventing people from putting their sleep ahead of their health. As Dr. Maas puts it simply, “We’re expected to do more. Companies are trying to pare down. People have to take up the slack, do the work of additional employees. These aren’t easy financial times. We end up in overdrive and we don’t’ know how to relax. We also use a lot of gadgets that are supposed to save us time, but what happens is that we try to get more work done. When we do have leisure time, do we turn off the lights and go to bed? No, we search the web, and watch late-night TV. There are all sorts of things we do to distract ourselves.”

As a big fan of siestas, I mentioned my tendency to nap to Dr. Maas. According to him, “Only 7% of the population is taking siestas due to globalization. European branches are operating on American hours, so the siesta is getting to be a thing of the past in technologically advanced countries.” I certainly didn’t like hearing this, but there’s still hope. Dr. Maas chimed in with, “However, where life is slower,” as in Ithaca I would imagine, “people are less stressed. They are more alert.” Good thing I left Manhattan.

“I really enjoy taking a brisk jog or walk when I’m feeling sleepy,” Dr. Maas states. “And I don’t drink caffeine after two in the afternoon.”

When I asked Dr. Maas what makes his sleep book special, he stated, “It’s guaranteed to put you to sleep!” He laughed, “There’s a lot of humor in it. It’s written for the lay person.” I’m glad to see he hasn’t lost his sense of humor after all these years of research on a subject so many of us seem to ignore.

Yet how can we? We all sleep. Maybe we won’t ignore our sleep deprivation and what our bodies are trying to tell us if we read some of the startling statistics Dr. Maas has discovered. “Thirty-one percent of all drivers have fallen asleep at the wheel at least once in their lifetime”…In the PBS television documentary Sleep Alert, a Boeing 747 captain noted: “It is not unusual for me to fall asleep in the cockpit, wake up twenty minutes later and find the other two crew members totally asleep”….Medical residents and interns are among the most severely sleep-deprived individuals, many work more than 130 hours per week in shifts of twelve to sixty hours’ duration, and every other night they are on call…An eighteen-year-old woman died after a night of inattentive care by fatigued and inexperienced residents in one of New York’s major teaching hospitals.

As Dr. Maas writes, “We are biologically ill-prepared to function on minimal sleep.” Yet, we humans think we’re superhuman and try to cram everything in. We stay up without realizing that sleep, even though it cuts into the hours we work, will ultimately improve our overall sense of well-being.

So go to bed early for a change. Skip the late night show with David Letterman. Read Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book. Count sheep if you have to. It may be the oldest trick in the book, but even Dr. Maas says it works!

James B. Maas, Ph.D., is professor, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, and past chairman of the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. He is a recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Educator Award. Dr. Maas makes frequent appearances on such programs as NBC Nightly News, ABC’s 20/20, the Today show, and Good Morning America, and has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss his important and practical book, Power Sleep: The Revolutionary Program That Prepares Your Mind for Peak Performance.

 

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