Simple sleep hack that can make you more alert the next day

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Scientists share a simple sleep trick that can make you more alert the next day

  • Blocking out your phone and street light could make you more alert
  • Sleep scientists found that wearing an eye mask to bed can even improve memory

By Rebecca Whittaker for Mailonline

Updated:

Wearing an eye mask to bed will make you feel more alert the next morning, researchers say.

Simply blocking light, whether from streetlights, electronics or sunlight, will help prevent lightheadedness, according to the scientists who tested the theory.

The study’s author, Viviana Greco, described it as an “effective and inexpensive solution.”

Getting enough sleep is vital to keep our brain and body functioning. But one thing that does interrupt that important sleep is ambient light. This is because the sleep-wake cycle is regulated by daylight and darkness at night. Morning sunlight tells our body to wake up and darkness tells our body to fall asleep.

To investigate whether wearing an eye mask makes a difference, experts at Cardiff University conducted two similar experiments.

The first involved 89 participants between the ages of 18 and 35, who wore eye masks to their sleep every night for a week.

For a second week, they slept without him.

The volunteers were asked to sleep in their own home and stick to their usual bedtime so as not to bias the study.

It was held over the summer because Mrs. Greco and the team ‘I suspected the mask would be more useful when the sun came up early.’

What are circadian rhythms?

Circadian rhythms are 24-hour cycles linked to your body’s internal clock.

These rhythms are found in many different organisms, including flowers, to help them open and close.

Nocturnal animals also use their circadian rhythm to avoid leaving their shelter during the day.

In people, circadian rhythms coordinate the digestive system, regulate hormones, and control sleep-wake cycles.

How does it work?

All 24-hour cycles throughout your body are connected to a master clock in your brain and at different times of the day it sends signals to regulate activity in your body.

During the day, sunlight causes the brain to send alert signals to keep us alert and active.

At night, the brain’s master clock triggers the production of melatonin, a hormone that promotes sleep, and then continues to transmit signals that help us stay asleep at night.

When the body’s circadian rhythm is disrupted, due to jet lag or shift work, the internal clock can have a hard time getting the body to fall asleep, stay asleep, and go to bed.

On the mornings of the sixth and seventh days, the participants were asked to take three different tests to measure their brain power.

Results showed that participants did better on a word pair association task during the week of blinding.

They also had slightly better reaction times, around 10 milliseconds.

However, the masks had no real effect in the third trial, which involved playing a sequence with your hand and pressing keys on a computer keyboard as fast as possible.

In a second experiment, 35 people between the ages of 18 and 35 wore a device that monitored their sleep.

They were also asked to put a light meter on their pillows, to allow Ms. Greco and her team to record the intensity of the light when the participants woke up.

Participants spent two nights in a mask and the other two in a mask that had cutouts so it wouldn’t block light.

However, the sleep diaries did not show differences in the hours of sleep or in self-perceived quality between wearing a mask or not, according to the results published in the journal. Sleep.

Ms. Greco, a PhD student, said PsyPost: ‘Our results speak of better reaction times and better memory performance.

“The implications of our results are significant in many daytime tasks such as driving a car or any educational or cultural context that requires learning.”

The researchers say their findings may be due to higher levels of slow-wave activity in the brain when wearing a mask.

While the team was unable to record slow-wave sleep, it is known to restore the brain’s ability to encode information.

Studies suggest that this stage of sleep, which accounts for up to a fifth of sleep time, restores connections between brain cells that can be overwhelmed while you’re awake.

Experts believe that this process helps facilitate learning.

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