Have you ever stayed awake half the night tossing and turning unable to sleep? Sometimes dead tired but too wired to sleep. Oh if we could just turn off our heads we think. Sleeplessness happens to all of us. And counting sheep is so old school. Thanks to social media you can go down a rabbit hole of melatonin gummies, magnesium pills, herbal teas and more. Soon you will be researching box breathing and doing 4-7-8 breathing exercises guaranteed to make you sleep. Sleep coaching is a thing now and ads will pop up promising that after a three month course you too will sleep like a baby.
Sleeplessness is big business it seems given by the number of supplements and mattress and pillow ads we see out there. This is Sandip Roy in India.
But in India it seems I have plenty of company. I am not alone. Every year an annual sleep survey gives us dire news about being sleepless in India. India is apparent the the second most sleep deprived country in the world. 60 percent of Indians routinely getting by on less than 6 hours of sleep. 49% of Indians are struggling to fall asleep at least three times a week
Dr Dr G C Khilnani, is one of India’s most renowned sleep experts. He is the chairman of PSRI Institute of Pulmonary, critical care & Sleep medicine.
GCK1: They are not following the circadian rhythm and everybody has to go to work in the morning, they have to get up. So average time of the human being sleeping all over the world over the last hundred years have come down by 1.5 hours average time.
India has a large young population. And they are all on smartphones because data is cheap.
GCK2: And what are we doing nowadays if we are unable to go to sleep? The first thing you do is you pull out your mobile phone and start looking at messages. Don't we do that? That is the worst thing to do for your sleep.
Our sleep hygiene has gone for a toss.
GCK3: what is sleep hygiene? The sleep hygiene, like any hygiene, has several facets. Number one, that the person sleeping time should be relatively fixed. Suppose I sleep from 11 to 6 or 11 to 7 or whatever. The. Usually an adult requires minimum six hours of sleep. Average 7 to 8 hours is ideal.
And if you think going to bed at 2 and getting up at 9 gives you a good seven hours it doesn't work that way. The detoxification benefits of sleep are linked to our circadian rhythms
GCK4: those people who are railway drivers or those who are doing call centre duties. Those are sleeping for eight hours during day time, but it does not give rise to that health benefit as compared to what you get.
Indians also tend to eat late. And not exercise enough.
GCK5:Speaker3: So the person should finish his dinner at least 2 to 3 hours prior to his bedtime, and preferably the dinner should not be heavy. If you have a butter chicken or chola bhatura just before sleeping, it is very unlikely that you will have a good quality sleep.
Khilnani says Indians need to get their sleep act together and not with sleeping pills because even with a pill you might get quantity but not quality.
But the real problem in a country like India where the pressure to get ahead is intense where industrialist say people should work more days and longer hours is that people just don’t take sleep seriously.
GCK6: Speaker3: I think awareness about benefits of good sleep are not well known, even to educated people. They know that if they don't sleep, they don't feel good during the daytime. They feel sluggish.
But really its far more than that. Sleep apnea is a silent killer.
GCK7: Speaker3: India is capital for diabetes, India is capital for hypertension. Our heart attacks are ten years earlier than Western world. The sleep is also one of the factors which and now we are growing towards obesity also.
It might be time like Japan to have national sleep guidelines.
GCK8: Speaker3: it's also true that there are very few sleep experts in this country. This has not become a important subject in as an undergraduate education also. So this should come and this will come, I think, as the country develops further.
This is Sandip roy in Kolkata for KALW