Transcripts

Sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus, author of the book Good Night…

If you are a smoker and you wake up in the middle of the night to smoke - that can be very disruptive to your sleep patterns. Drinking alcohol, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a glass or two of wine with dinner - but if you have three or four glasses of wine with dinner, it can really effect your sleep patterns.

How much sleep do you need?

It used to be the recommendation that everybody needs eight hours - but the fact of the matter is that's not true, that's an average. First of all, everybody needs a different amount. As an example, I'm a six and a half hour guy but my wife is an eight and a half hour girl. Those are the big differences between the two of us and we have to set our schedule accordingly.

And another interesting thing about sleep…

You can catch up on sleep - so if you've lost sleep during the week and you sleep a little bit later on the weekends, you can make up sleep. You can't bank it though, so if you know you're going to be out partying hard on the weekend you can't get an extra hour each night during the week because you're going to be up until five o'clock in the morning on the weekend - sleep just doesn't kind of work that way. But generally speaking, what I tell my patients is you want to keep as regular a sleep schedule as possible.

Tomorrow, an effective way to fall asleep when you're having trouble - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.