SLEEPING PROBLEMS CAN BE AVOIDED: ACCEPTING BEING A SHORT SLEEPER
Extremely subjective attitudes and values are usually used in judging one's own sleep. If one spends New Year's Eve among friends, one may go home at three in the morning in an animated and good mood, have a relaxed sleep, and be slightly fatigued the next day without attaching too much importance to the matter. If, however, one lies in bed until 3:00 a.m. without falling asleep, checking the time as it gets later, tossing back and forth with increasing disquiet, and getting more and more nervous, one is exhausted and desperate rather than animated and in a good mood as on New Year's Eve. And even if one falls asleep shortly after 3:00 a.m., the consciousness of having slept little makes one feel wiped out, tired, dull, and depressed. But in both instances the amount of sleep is the same; in fact, the hour of falling asleep is exactly the same. The only difference is in the evaluation, the initial psychic state, the expectation concerning sleep, and the subjective judgment about the lack of sleep. This negative evaluation of one's own sleep increases still more, as a point of comparison, if one's marital partner is in a deep, quiet sleep. The feeling of having been short-changed is significantly increased—it can even climax in aggression—and leads to further psychological and physical damage.
In order to make a judgment about the relation between the amount of sleep and quality of sleep and to assess its restorative effect, sleep must be understood in the context of its changing phases, its periodicity, and its involvement with man's biological clock.
Although we spend approximately one-third of our lives in a sleeping state, little is known about sleep, because systematic research on the topic has been conducted only for about forty years, which is the length of time instruments have been available for the evaluation of important findings.
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