If you envy people who can climb into bed and drop off to sleep in five minutes or less, you're looking at sleep the wrong way. Those fast sleepers may be severely sleep-deprived and paying the penalty for the "sleep debt" they have accumulated, says William C. Demet, a Stanford University psychiatry professor, and an expert in sleep.
Dr. Demet has devised a simple test to determine where you stand on the sleep debt scale. You'll need a stop watch, a metal plate and a spoon and a bed. Place the metal plate on the floor next to the bed, lie down on a bed, grab the spoon in one had and drop that arm off the bed so the spoon leans over the metal plate. Then, start the stop watch. When you fall asleep, the spoon will fall from your hand and wake you up, at which point you stop the watch.
If it took you one to five minutes to fall asleep, Dement says, you are suffering from extreme exhaustion and you probably need to catch up on 60 hours or more of lost sleep. Five to 10 minutes, he says, means your energy is low during dips in the day, 10 to 15 minutes and you have a manageable amount of sleep debt and more than 15 minutes means you have no sleep debt at all and are very alert.
"It is best to take 10 minutes to fall asleep, because this will mean you are still tired enough to sleep deeply, but will not feel tired during the following day," Dement says. But you don't want to clear off your sleep debt entirely, he adds, "because then it will take you more than 20 minutes to get to sleep, and you may wake up during the night.
