Top Sleep Myths: The Importance of Knowing and Debunking Them
Author:
Rebecca Robbins, PhD
NYU School of Medicine
Citation:
Robbins R. Top sleep myths: the importance of knowing and debunking them [published online May 9, 2019]. Neurology Consultant.
Drinking alcohol before bed helps you fall asleep. Your brain and body can adapt to less sleep. It is healthy to be able to fall asleep anywhere, anytime. These are just 3 of the 20 most believed myths surrounding sleep that my colleagues and I have identified—and all of them can be debunked.
After reviewing more than 8000 websites, we compiled a list of the myths we thought were most important for clinicians and public health advocates to devote attention to and debunk by providing evidence-based sleep practices to their patients.1
The myths are rated in terms of what we believe to be the most important debunk first. One of the top myths is the belief that adults can get by with 5 or fewer hours of sleep. There are not many people—possibly none—who can truly get by on that little sleep, and if we allow that belief to go unchecked, we limit our potential and our ability for our patients, community, and culture to get good sleep.
Another myth, which probably has the most direct clinical implication of them all, is the belief that snoring is annoying but that it is not necessarily a problem. This is a major issue because not only are sleep disorders common among the general population, but they are also underdiagnosed. For example, we believe that obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is about 30% prevalent among our population but that only approximately 10% of the population has a diagnosis of OSA.
There is disagreement among sleep experts about some of the identified myths, though, including whether more sleep is always better. We have some experts in the sleep field who advocate that more sleep is always better; if you can get 8, 9, or 10 hours, that is great. Then, others in the field advocate for a very narrow duration recommendation—7 to 8 hours, and no more. Our paper1 shed some light on this disagreement, as well as others. We hope to learn more about both sides of the augment with further research.
Additional research on sleep may be needed now more than ever. In these modern times, we have seen a sharp decline in sleep duration. Recently, this trend has appeared to plateau, perhaps because humans simply could not go any further in the direction of sleep deprivation. We were hovering around fewer than the recommended 7 hours for too long, with many Americans depriving their body of the sleep it so desperately needs night after night, so we are hopeful that there might be an uptick in sleep duration.
Discussing Sleep Habits With the Help of Myths
The approach a clinician takes when discussing sleep with patients is key. For example, what if a provider were to tell a patient, “You should start a bedtime routine.” I think the word “should” is problematic in behavior change. However, if the conversation is instead framed in the context of a myth, there is probably more promise in improving patient outcomes. A provider can state, “Did you know, if you are tossing and turning at night, it is best to change the environment by getting out of bed and going into another room?” That is one small, specific change, but pointing out a sleep habit framed by one of our identified myths is less contentious and will hopefully make patients more willing to reflect on their own sleep habits.
Some providers might have patients who present with concerns about their sleep habits after having read about our recently published list of myths1—after all, we think one of the reasons these myths are powerful is because they prompt reflection on individuals’ daily habits. And that is our hope with our paper: cause readers to reflect on their personal habits and consider small changes that they may be able to make. If the provider can be a catalyst for that type of reflection among patients, that is fantastic.
In traditional medical education, little attention is paid to sleep medicine. Some programs provide only 20 minutes of sleep medicine curricula over 4 years of medical school. Sleep is an exciting area in which we are uncovering new insights every day, so we hope this paper has implications for improving physicians’ patient counseling efforts when helping their patients get better sleep.
Rebecca Robbins, PhD, is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Center for Healthful Behavior Change at NYU Langone Health whose research focuses on sleep and its connection between individuals’ success when they are awake.
Reference:
- Robbins R, Grandner MA, Buxton OM, et al. Sleep myths: an expert-led study to identify false beliefs about sleep that impinge upon population sleep health practices [published online April 17, 2019]. Sleep Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleh.2019.02.002.