Poor sleep looks exactly like a failing memory, and it is far easier to fix.
I learned that at the pharmacy counter long before I learned it from a book. A man would come in worried sick because he could not hold onto a name, and somewhere in the conversation it would come out that he had not slept a full night in months. We would sort the sleep first. Very often the name came back on its own.
Here is what I mean by sorting. The brain does not rest when you sleep the way a kettle rests when you take it off the stove. In quiet waking, the brain is responsible for 20% of the body’s energy use, so when it finally powers down, the whole house notices. Sleep is when the day gets filed. If the filing clerk only works half a shift, the papers pile up on the desk, and in the morning you cannot find the one you want. That is not a broken desk. That is a short-staffed night.
I am not a sleep doctor. I am a pharmacist who has listened to a great many people describe their nights across a brown paper bag of bottles. But I have sat through enough talks, and read enough, to know the broad shape of a night, and the shape matters. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine divides the non-dreaming part of sleep into three stages: N1, N2, and N3, and that last one is also called delta sleep or slow-wave sleep. Theta waves occur while a person is still awake and carry on into Stage 1 and Stage 2. Delta waves show up in stages 3 and 4, the deepest sleep of the night. A full cycle of NREM and REM takes an average of 90 minutes and runs 4 to 6 times in a good night. The whole period normally proceeds in order: N1, then N2, then N3, back to N2, then REM. Deep sleep is heavier earlier in the night. REM, the dreaming kind, increases in the two cycles just before you wake naturally.
Two things follow from that, and I have seen both at the senior centre on Elm Street. The first is that the last part of the night is not optional. If you cut your sleep short at five in the morning, you are cutting the REM-heavy cycles, and REM is when a good deal of the day’s sorting gets done. The second is that waking in the night is normal, and it gets more normal as the night goes on. One study found 3% awake time in the first ninety-minute cycle, 8% in the second, 10% in the third, 12% in the fourth, and 13 to 14% in the fifth. So if you wake at four and lie there worrying, you are not broken. You are in your fifth cycle. The worry does more damage than the waking.
Now the two things I have actually used, because I was asked and I will answer. I am not a good sleeper. I never have been. Carol calls from Arizona and asks if I am sleeping, the way sisters do, and I tell her the truth, which is that I sleep like a woman who has a paper calendar by the phone and too much on it. So I have tried, over the years, most of the ordinary non-pill approaches, and two of them stuck.
The first is a fixed wake time. Not a fixed bedtime. A fixed wake time. Same hour every morning, weekends included, no matter how the night went. This felt wrong to me for years. I thought the answer to a bad night was sleeping in to pay it back. It is not. The body keeps its own clock, and it is a stubborn one. If a person is shut in a bunker with constant light, the rhythm of body temperature and melatonin keeps going on a period that runs slightly longer than 24 hours. Out in the world, light signals adjust that period downward each day so it lines up with the 24 hours of an Earth day. Morning light is the adjusting hand. A fixed wake time gets you into the light at the same time every day, and the clock sets itself to that, the way you set a kitchen timer. Bedtime follows on its own once the clock trusts you. It took about three weeks before I believed it, and six before I would have sworn to it.
The second is the nap rule, and this one I learned from Bev, who runs the walking group and naps like it is a profession. The optimal nap is around 10 to 20 minutes, because it takes at least 30 minutes to enter slow-wave sleep. If you sleep longer than that, I’d guess you drop into the deep stage and wake up out of it feeling like you have been dragged out of a well. Twenty minutes, no more. Bev sets a timer. I set a timer. My husband says I could fall asleep in a coat closet if the timer was set. He is not entirely wrong. The short nap takes the edge off the afternoon without stealing from the night. A long nap is a loan at bad interest.
Those are the two. Fixed wake time, short timed nap. Neither costs anything. Neither involves a bottle, which is why a pharmacist is allowed to like them. And before you change either one, before you move your alarm or throw out your afternoon rest, go watch the memory slip cause video first, because it lays out what is usually behind the slips and the order to look at things in. Watch it before you touch the alarm clock.
The order matters more than people think. I will tell you what I tell everyone at the brown-bag table: check the cabinet first, then the ears, then the sleep. I never say stop them on your own. I say write them down, take the bag to the pharmacist, and ask which ones touch sleep. Then the sleep itself. If they are not the ordinary kind, better sleep still tells you that sooner, because it clears the fog off the glass so you can see what is actually on the other side. There is a difference between lapses that come with the territory and the other pattern, and a string of good nights is the cheapest way to tell them apart. And if the fog is there in the daytime too, thick and general, that is its own list, and brain fog has its own usual suspects worth walking through before you blame the night.
I did the arithmetic on my own sleep, because I am the kind of person who does arithmetic on envelopes. Here is what it cost me, give or take, and honestly. The fixed wake time: nothing, unless you count the alarm clock I already owned and the lamp I turn on. Call it zero. The morning light: I stand on the back step with my coffee for ten minutes. The coffee I was going to drink anyway. Call it zero again. The nap timer: the kitchen timer I already had for eggs. Zero. The paper I use to track it: the back of the calendar page, free. So the whole experiment, twelve weeks of it, cost me nothing but the discomfort of getting up at the same time on Saturdays, which felt expensive at the time and was not. I have watched those receipts come across the counter for thirty-two years. The free route is also the one that works, which is not a combination you see often.
Friends do ask, usually at the walking group while we are stretching, and I would say this, close to word for word: Stop trying to fix your memory and fix your Tuesday night. Write down how the nights go on the calendar, one line, because what is written down is remembered and what is not written down gets argued about with your own head. At the end of six weeks, look at the page. If the days are sharper, you have your answer and it cost you nothing. If they are not, you have a page of notes to hand to someone who can help, and that page is worth more than anything you could have said from memory. That is the whole method.
A woman named Ruth said to me at the centre last month, I wake up every night at three and I lie there thinking my mind is going. I said, I wake at three too. She said, you do? She said, nobody ever told me that. I said, I am telling you now. Write down when you wake, do not look at the clock twice, and get up at your set time anyway. She came back in six weeks and said the waking had not stopped but the worrying had, and the days felt longer and clearer. That is not a treatment for anything. That is one woman whose nights stopped scaring her.
The piece people resist is the morning. They will accept the nap rule gladly because a nap is a gift. The fixed wake time feels like a punishment, especially after a night that was mostly ceiling. But that is exactly the night it does the work. Mark it on the calendar. I still mark mine.
Why memory slips after sixtyWatch the video: the cause, and what you can do about it.
So before you decide your memory is the problem, sit through the six-week sleep reset video and then give your nights six honest weeks.
The kettle does not boil faster for being watched, and the brain does not file faster for being worried at. Give it the night. Give it the same morning every day. Write it down. Then decide what needs deciding.