\n<\/p>\n
In 2018, Hannah Scott, a sleep researcher at Flinders University, waited for a woman to fall asleep.<\/p>\n
This can take time when the subject is connected to equipment measuring brain activity, eye movement, heart rate and muscle activation. But about 30 minutes after the woman closed her eyes, Scott saw the telltale signs of sleep from the electroencephalogram, or EEG: a shift to lower-frequency brainwaves.<\/p>\n
The woman progressed into deep sleep, and \u201cwas there for quite a while\u201d, Scott said. Then, the woman suddenly woke up, saying she had to go to the bathroom. As Scott detached her from the machines, the participant apologized, saying she felt terrible she hadn\u2019t been able to fall asleep yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was absolutely adamant that she hadn\u2019t slept,\u201d Scott said, who had just watched her sleeping.<\/p>\n
When a person is sleeping, but doesn\u2019t know they are, this is called sleep state misperception. If woken up, a person will say they were awake the whole time.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a frequent issue in insomnia, said Matthew Reid, a neuroscientist and sleep researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. An insomniac may say they have barely slept, but when tested in a sleep lab, they might actually be sleeping a normal number of hours per night. This leads to a conundrum: how does someone feel rested when they are sleeping enough \u2013 but just not realizing it?<\/p>\n
This experience, which afflicts a significant number of insomniacs, has had various names: paradoxical insomnia, subjective insomnia, sleep state misperception and, most recently, subjective-objective sleep discrepancy.<\/p>\n
By any name, the phenomenon reveals that we don\u2019t always know when we\u2019re asleep or awake, and that our beliefs about sleep influence how rested we feel. At the same time, researchers are finding that people with paradoxical insomnia may not be entirely wrong; there may be something real that lies between sleeping and wakefulness.<\/p>\n
Paradoxical insomnia is a subcategory of insomnia. People with it report that they only sleep a few hours a night and don\u2019t feel rested. But sleep studies show they are getting more sleep than that \u2013 sometimes even a typical amount.<\/p>\n
People with insomnia seem to suffer from straightforward problems: trouble falling asleep, staying asleep and getting enough sleep to feel rested. Their sleep issues make them tired during the day; they have difficulty concentrating, and feel irritable and grumpy.<\/p>\n
But total sleep time doesn\u2019t always differ by much between healthy sleepers and people with insomnia. On average, according to one meta-analysis, insomniacs sleep just 23 minutes less per night than healthy sleepers. If time asleep isn\u2019t the whole story, what is?<\/p>\n
Of course, some people need more sleep than others. But it turns out some people don\u2019t perceive their sleep accurately. They do not seem to remember that they did sleep. They may sleep a full night, but not feel rested. These studies revealed that insomnia can be a more complex experience than it appears.<\/p>\n
Graphic with three lines of text that say, in bold, \u2018Well Actually\u2019, then \u2018Read more on living a good life in a complex world,\u2019 then a pinkish-lavender pill-shaped button with white letters that say \u2018More from this section\u2019<\/p>\n
In 1959, French doctors first described a patient whose observed sleep time didn\u2019t match up with how many hours she thought she slept. The doctors named the condition fausse insomnie<\/em> or false insomnia, and believed it was caused by her being overly worried about sleep. Since then, many sleep doctors and researchers have noticed that insomniacs\u2019 sleep complaints don\u2019t always align with the amount of sleep they are observed to get.<\/p>\n Researchers don\u2019t have a unified estimate of exactly how prevalent paradoxical insomnia is because it has multiple names. But it\u2019s far from rare, Reid said. By some accounts, about half of people with insomnia sleep less than six hours a night, while the other half sleep more than six hours, an amount comparable to good sleepers\u2019 sleep time.<\/p>\n Many people \u2013 even good sleepers \u2013 may think they\u2019re still awake in the early stages of sleep. But people with paradoxical insomnia are more likely to think they\u2019re awake after the first two hours. They are also more likely to report feeling awake during REM sleep, when almost all good sleepers will report accurately that they were sleeping. In serial awakening studies, people with insomnia who are woken up multiple times throughout the night will report being awake when they had actually been asleep more often than good sleepers.<\/p>\n Thomas Andrillon, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institute, has a hunch that awareness during sleep is more nuanced than previously believed. In experiments about memory and learning during sleep, he would see someone sleep, confirmed by their brain activity in real time. Afterwards, they would insist they hadn\u2019t slept. Andrillon realized he had experienced this himself, and that plenty of others did, too \u2013 such as his students, who would fall asleep in class, but have no idea they had drifted off.<\/p>\n Most people have gone through this, even if they\u2019re not insomniacs. For instance, when I\u2019m trying to sleep before an early morning flight, I usually feel like I haven\u2019t even slept an hour. Yet I can recall a dream about, say, sleeping through my alarm, which tells me otherwise. I\u2019ve sat next to a family member on an overnight flight who peacefully passes out, only to arrive at our destination and complain they didn\u2019t sleep.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Practical advice, expert insights and answers to your questions about how to live a good life<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cYou think you got zero sleep the entire night, and something reminds you that\u2019s objectively not true, like somebody tells you: \u2018Oh, you were snoring,\u2019\u201d Reid said.<\/p>\n Until recently, many researchers thought that people with paradoxical insomnia were incorrectly reporting their own experience. But brain imaging done by Andrillon and his colleagues is suggesting that insomniacs with discrepancies between their sleep and wake times might not be entirely wrong. Instead, they might be noticing a unique altered state of consciousness.<\/p>\n Sleep researchers determine someone is sleeping when they lose awareness of the world around them, and when their brain activity shifts to high-amplitude, low-frequency oscillations. EEG readouts will feature sleep signatures like slow waves and sleep spindles, or specific bursts in activity.<\/p>\n But commonly used observational techniques might miss the nuances of brain activity during the transition into sleep, or the moments between sleep stages, Andrillon said. The technology might not be sensitive enough to capture \u201cwake-like\u201d brain activity that could explain the feeling of being awake while sleeping. Andrillon said that when other researchers have studied deeper areas of the brain, they found signs of arousal, even when people seemed asleep.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that they look like they\u2019re sleeping is true only at a superficial level,\u201d Andrillon said. \u201cWhen you dive a bit more in the details of the brain activity, you see signs of wakefulness that you will typically not see during normal or standard sleep.\u201d Experts are now shifting to the term subjective-objective sleep discrepancy, or SOSD, rather than paradoxical insomnia or sleep state misperception.<\/p>\n In a study from March, in a group of more than 800 people with insomnia, 24% had subjective-objective sleep discrepancies. Andrillon and his colleagues found differences in the physiological profile between the two kinds of insomniacs. People with SOSD didn\u2019t wake up very often, but when they did, their waking state was tainted with signatures of sleep, which could influence their judgment about not sleeping well or not having slept, he said. Conversely, the sleep of insomniacs without SOSD had wake-like features, meaning their sleep was of a lesser quality.<\/p>\n CBT-I, or cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, is a well-researched and effective way to improve sleeping habits. It seems to help people with SOSD, too. In a study from last year, Scott and colleagues found CBT-I had no difference in positive outcomes for people with regular insomnia, compared with those who had SOSD. Other studies have shown that CBT-I can improve issues related to SOSD.<\/p>\n It won\u2019t be useful to become overly worried about whether you\u2019re getting the perfect amount of sleep, Scott said. There is an association between SOSD and anxious or worried thoughts about sleep, so try not to pile on additional worries. \u201cPeople who have [SOSD] tend to have certain thoughts, very often involving rumination about worries of the day, worries of not sleeping, not being able to sleep,\u201d Andrillon said.<\/p>\n Instead, a helpful tool for paradoxical insomnia could be a strategy called paradoxical intention, which encourages poor sleepers to stop trying so hard to sleep.<\/p>\n Previously, people who could not tell they were asleep were perceived to have flawed judgment. Actually, SOSD is a reminder that we don\u2019t know everything about what it means to be asleep, and to know that we have slept. \u201cWe\u2019re going back to it and seeing that it\u2019s actually pretty real,\u201d Andrillon said. \u201cWe have just been overlooking this aspect of sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 2018, Hannah Scott, a sleep researcher at Flinders University, waited for a woman to fall asleep. This can take time when the subject is connected to equipment measuring brain activity, eye movement, heart rate and muscle activation. But about 30 minutes after the woman closed her eyes, Scott saw the telltale signs of sleep<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[4981,18137,16596,15507,15933],"class_list":{"0":"post-31036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-asleep","9":"tag-insomnia","10":"tag-paradoxical","11":"tag-swear","12":"tag-werent"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Who experiences paradoxical insomnia?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Why does paradoxical insomnia occur?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Are there solutions for paradoxical insomnia?<\/strong><\/h2>\n