Every morning it’s the same struggle. I half-open my eyes and quickly scan my day’s schedule to see if there is anything in the morning that I can skip and go back to sleep. As with most of us, the answer is usually NO, and I gotta drag my butt out of bed and go to work. (that’s where the 8-minute mornings help)

However, in the darker months it gets so much worse - the thought of getting up and out of my warm blanket becomes unbearable. What’s going on? Am I hibernating?

Shebrew spoke with Dr. Gila Lindsley, and asked her for some tips on surviving the winter.

How much sleep is normal?

GL: The average amount of sleep needed during the grade school through college years is about 10 hours per night. After that, even through much older age, the hypothetical 8 hours of sleep is about the norm for what’s needed. Individuals may vary, however, around these means.

Most importantly, even though 10 hours of sleep per night is optimal through the college years, it is also true that a large number of young people do not actually get this amount of sleep. Much of our younger population is chronically sleep deprived.

It seems like once it’s fall and the days are getting shorter, my energy gets so low. I can’t get out of bed, and seem to want to sleep for days. Why does this happen?

Some people are especially vulnerable to decreasing amounts of sunlight as we move from the summer months into the fall and then into the winter months. They suffer a particular kind of depression referred to as “seasonal depression”. Even more often, this is referred to as SAD, which stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder.

The symptoms of SAD are: needing lots more sleep than during the warm, light months. It’s not unusual to need as much as 16 or even more hours of sleep per day as we approach the winter solstice — the shortest day of the year. In the northern hemisphere, that occurs on around December 21. Going along with this symptom is another having to do with appetite. Most people who suffer from SAD develop intense cravings for carbohydrates such as bread or cake — or even beer or wine. It is almost as if their bodies have decided to hibernate when the farmer’s fields lie fallow; stocking up on the necessary energy foods just to maintain some level of energy to carry them through the few, brief, waking hours.

How can I make getting up easier? It’s so hard to drag myself out of the warm cozy bed!

If what you are dealing with is SAD, what will help the most would be SAD Light Boxes. Light Boxes are considered Durable Medical Devices by insurance companies, most of which will reimburse you for the cost of the light box if you have been given a diagnosis of SAD by a reputable clinician/. Light boxes deliver light whose quality and intensity are a substitute for the sun that you do not get during the cold, dark months. Typically, the lights are used for about a half hour each morning — always at the same time in the morning — until the SAD season is over.

However, a caution: the timing of when you use the lights, and a number of other factors, are best determined by a clinician who has experience treating SAD. Used incorrectly, you may discover that you can’t sleep at night when you’d really like to, or hurt your eyes. The web site for the Society for Light Therapy and Biological Rhythms (www.sltbr.org) has a listing of such experienced clinicians by geographic area.

Another suggestion is to install a programmable thermostat and set it so that your room will be nice and toasty and welcoming for at least the time you expect to be getting up and getting dressed!

My dreams are so intense and involved that I wake up more tired than I was in the evening.

There are three of possibilities:

a. There is extreme emotional upset in your life that is insinuating itself into your dreams. If this is true, treatment by a mental health professional may help.

b. There is something going on IN your sleep that is interfering with the part of sleep where you are dreaming. This part of sleep is called REM sleep, short for Rapid Eye Movement sleep. The leading cause of this kind of intrusion is a sleep disorder called Obstructive Sleep Apnea. What happens is that especially during REM sleep (but it can also occur during other parts of sleep) the airway actually closes up. If the closure is only partial, the result is extremely loud snoring. If the closure is complete, no matter how hard you try to draw in a breath, the obstruction caused by airway closure will not let you do that. The consequence in either case is that your brain wakes you up — usually momentarily. We remember the dreams we wake up from! Even if you don’t recall the perhaps 15-30 seconds of awakening per adverse respiratory event, you will still experience having had lots and lots of dreams, intense and involved, possibly associated with very fast heart beat. The constant fragmentation of your sleep, in this case, is what will have left you feeling more tired when you wake up than when you went to sleep.

c. Chemical agents that disrupt sleep, especially REM sleep. Alcohol is the worst offender. People have different sensitivities to varying amounts of alcohol. However, once their level of sensitivity has been reached, the effect of alcohol can severely compromise REM sleep. This will produce the same results, symptomatically, as would obstructive sleep apnea.

Caffeine is another chemical that can have the same effect. It is NOT the case, with caffeine, that you can drink as much of a caffeinate beverage as you’d like before, say 2 or 3 PM and have a good night of sleep. Caffeine binds to fatty tissue, and the caffeine you’ve ingested early in the day can still be available to your blood stream — and your brain — during your sleeping period. And don’t forget — any of the extra strength pain medications such as Extra Strength Exedrine or Exedrine for Migraines; or Extra Strength Tylenol — these have a very significant caffeine content. Two tablets are about the equivalent of a cup of strong coffee. Finally, a large range of medications (and recreational drugs) can interfere with REM sleep.

Power naps – good or bad?

Good if they are restricted to the length of a true Power Nap: about 10-20 minutes. No more than that. Any more than that and most people will wake up feeling fuzzy and groggy. However, if you need to nap often you might want to take a look at your time management. Make sure that you give yourself enough hours, and that you go to bed around the same time each night. Chronic partial sleep deprivation can impair your performance, leading you to stay up far too late (or wake up far too early) to get your work done. You then end up in a vicious cycle: insufficient sleep leads to poorer ability to carry out your work, and that, in turn, leads you to putting in more hours than you would otherwise have to!

Sometimes I have to stay up very late – working or partying – is there anything I can do to make the next day tolerable?

The best quick answer is:

a. Avoid caffeine at all costs.
b. Avoid anything but a power nap at all costs. That includes avoiding sleeping in more than 1/2 hour beyond when you’d normally wake up. If you sleep in for several hours later, you’ll not only have tremendous difficulty falling asleep THAT night, but you’ll throw your entire sleep-wake timing mechanism off. Better to feel not quite up to par for one day, then for your one night or working or partying late to carry over for many, many days after.
c. Avoid carrying out any activity where you’d endanger yourself if you were to fall asleep unexpectedly (e.g. driving a car).
d. Plan a day that does not require high level concentration or function.
e. The best possible, plan your life so that something like this happens only infrequently.

To best “survive” fall and winter, enjoy some high protein foods, see if you need to get a light box, and plan as many social encounters as possible — don’t isolate, and have fun! And when the sun shines — get as much of it outside as you can.

Dr. Lindsley holds a BA from Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin. She has a private practice called SleepWell, specializing in psychotherapy, and sleep disorders medicine, in Lexington, MA. She teaches psychopharmacology and a course about brains and behavior in the Counseling Psychology Department of Lesley University in Cambridge, MA