How to Get Sleep Back on Track After the Holidays

Source: Photo by Ravi Sharma on Unsplash

Key Points: The unstructuredness of the holiday season can throw off sleep schedules. Deliberately restricting time spent in bed—and taking advantage of earlier sunrises—can help reset the body's circadian rhythm.

There are many things to dislike about winter. It’s cold. It’s dark. It makes you crave cookies and keeps you in bed. It can also ruin sleep.

Winter sleep disturbances may be one symptom of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a mood disorder with a seasonal pattern (Sandman et al. 2016). Just like regular insomnia, winter insomnia comes in different forms. Some people have a hard time falling asleep at bedtime. Others wake up too early. In this post, we’ll consider a third pattern: your sleep has “holes” in it.

Perhaps you have no problem going to sleep, but then wake up in the middle of the night or very early in the morning and can’t go back to sleep for one or two hours. If you manage to go back to sleep, you may let yourself sleep in, to compensate for the sleepless hours.

This problem might have developed soon after the Christmas holidays, after you had spent a week or two enjoying luxuriously long sleep-ins. Maybe it was precipitated by something stressful. Maybe you had a bad argument or heard a disturbing piece of corona news.

Why Winter Can Disrupt Your Sleep Routine

To understand what happened and how to fix those “holes” in your nights, we need to rewind back to the day when your holidays started and you no longer needed to wake up early to show up for work.

Late sunrises in December make it easy to sleep in. For most people, the intrinsic sleep-wake cycle is slightly longer than 24 hours (Duffy et al., 2011). Therefore, without any external cues, such as sunlight or the sound of the alarm clock, our wake-up time naturally shifts later every day. After a week of vacation, you might have found yourself waking up an hour, two hours, or maybe even three hours later than you used to on your workdays.

But your bedtime may or may not have shifted later. If you generally feel tired in winter (another symptom of SAD), you might have no problem going to bed early even though you got up late. So your nights just get stretched out. And that is precisely what gets you into trouble and creates those “holes” in your sleep.

To understand this, we can use the "bread-and-butter analogy." Let’s say the time you spend in bed trying to sleep is a piece of bread. And your natural sleep need is a piece of butter. By sleep need, we mean the amount of sleep your body needs to recover fully each night. Sleep need is rather constant and is somewhere between 7 and 9 hours for adults. It can be temporarily increased if you are recovering from illness, stress, or a period of sleep deprivation. But other than that, there are only that many hours you can sleep each day. In other words, the size of your piece of butter stays more or less the same.

Now imagine you take your butter—the sleep need—and spread it over your bread, or time in bed. If the piece of bread is just the right size, the butter will cover it fully. You get a full night’s rest; you sleep well without waking up. But if your piece of bread is too large and you try to spread your butter all over it, the layer of butter will be so thin that you will start seeing the bread through it.

When you stretch your nights out, your sleep becomes "thinner" or more fitful and more prone to disturbances. Then, any disruption, be it stress or occasional noise from the street, will be more likely to wake you up, and once you do, it will be more difficult to fall back asleep.

If you then compensate for the sleepless hours by letting yourself sleep in, it will only exacerbate the dysregulation of your circadian rhythms and stretch your nights even further, making the holes bigger. And once you’ve experienced this sleeplessness, you start to get nervous about not sleeping, which makes falling asleep even more difficult!

How to Reset Your Holiday Sleep Schedule

Remember, it started with your mornings shifting. The way to fix the problem is to address this dysregulation of circadian rhythms. You can do it by creating the conditions for your body to get back in sync with the 24-hour astronomical day. What you need to do is:

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• Limit the time you spend in bed trying to sleep. You need to make that piece of bread smaller so that there is enough butter to cover it. The classical version of Sleep Restriction Therapy, one of the evidence-based methods for the treatment of insomnia (Spielman et al., 1987), will ask you to initially restrict your time in bed to the number of hours you are actually sleeping. But if you are only getting 4-5 hours of sleep a night, this method may seem too drastic. If so, you might want to start with something more acceptable—for example, seven hours—and see if that helps.
• Go to bed at the same time and get up at approximately the same time no matter how well you slept. Initially, you might end up sleeping even less than you are now each night. But it is important to stick with this for some days to give your body a chance to get its rhythms straight again.
• Get exposed to the daylight as soon as you wake up. Luckily, now that the days are getting longer, you can take advantage of the natural light in the morning. Natural light is the most powerful external signal to regulate our body clock. Get outside in the morning, or at least spend time near the window. If you are indoors, make your room as bright as you possibly can. The more daylight you get during the morning and afternoon hours, the deeper your sleep will be.
• Exercise. Make your body tired, just not too late in the evening. For some people, an hour of moderate exercise is what makes the difference between good and bad nights.
• Give yourself permission to be sleepless. When you do wake up in the middle of the night, just accept that that is how things are. Tell yourself it’s OK that you cannot sleep. Your body will be working on fixing itself—you need to relax, step back, and give it the time to do its job.