Clarissa, Author at The Sleep Consultant

How Long Can You Go Without Sleep? What Happens Hour by Hour

Measurable cognitive impairment begins after just 17–19 hours awake — comparable to legal alcohol intoxication. After 24 hours without sleep, judgment, memory, and coordination are significantly degraded. By 36 hours, physical health markers (inflammation, hormones, blood pressure) are measurably affected. By 48 hours, the brain begins forcing “microsleeps” — involuntary lapses of seconds at a

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What’s the Best Temperature for Sleep? The Science of a Cool Bedroom

The best bedroom temperature for sleep is around 18–19°C (65–67°F) for most adults. This cool range supports the natural drop in core body temperature that initiates and maintains sleep. Individual preferences vary — some people do best slightly cooler (around 16°C/60°F) and others slightly warmer (up to about 20°C/68°F) — but a room that’s too

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What Is Sleep Hygiene? (And Why It’s Not Always Enough)

Sleep hygiene is the set of habits, behaviors, and environmental conditions that support healthy sleep — things like keeping a consistent sleep schedule, a cool and dark bedroom, limiting caffeine and alcohol, reducing evening screen use, and having a wind-down routine. Good sleep hygiene is the foundation of healthy sleep and resolves many mild sleep

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Sleep Debt: Can You Actually Catch Up on Sleep?

Partially, yes — but with important limits. You can recover from a small amount of recent sleep debt by sleeping extra over a few days, and the body does some of this automatically (deeper, more efficient sleep after deprivation). However, a single weekend lie-in does not erase a full week of sleep loss: research shows

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Sleep Cycles and Stages Explained: What Actually Happens When You Sleep

Most people think of sleep as a single state — you’re either asleep or awake, and sleep is just the “off” mode. The reality is far more interesting and useful to understand. Sleep is a highly structured, dynamic process in which your brain moves through distinct stages, each with its own characteristic brain activity, physiology,

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Sleep and Chronic Pain: Breaking the Cycle That Keeps You Awake

Anyone living with chronic pain knows the nighttime version of it intimately. The pain that’s manageable during the day, when distraction and activity occupy the mind, becomes impossible to ignore when you lie down in the dark and quiet. It throbs, aches, or burns its way through your attempts to fall asleep. And when you

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Blue Light and Sleep: How Screens Affect Your Rest (and What Actually Helps)

Blue light has become the most widely blamed villain in modern sleep problems. Phones, tablets, laptops, TVs, LED lighting — the screens and bulbs that fill our evenings emit blue-wavelength light, and we’ve all heard that it’s wrecking our sleep. The blue-light-blocking glasses industry has boomed. Every phone now has a “night mode.” The advice

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Pregnancy and Sleep: Why It Changes Each Trimester and What Helps

Pregnancy creates a cruel paradox: it’s the time when your body most needs rest and recovery, and also the time when sleep becomes hardest to get. The growing demands of building a human, combined with the hormonal upheaval, physical discomfort, and the cascade of changes pregnancy brings, conspire to disrupt sleep in ways most women

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Sleep and Exercise: How Working Out Affects Your Sleep (and the Best Timing)

If exercise were a pill, it would be one of the most prescribed sleep aids in the world. The evidence that physical activity improves sleep is robust and consistent: regular exercisers fall asleep faster, sleep more deeply, wake less during the night, and report better sleep quality than sedentary people. Exercise increases the deep, slow-wave

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CBT-I: The Most Effective Insomnia Treatment Most People Haven’t Tried

Here’s something that surprises most people with chronic insomnia: the most effective treatment isn’t a pill. It’s a structured behavioral program called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, or CBT-I, and the evidence supporting it is strong enough that major medical bodies recommend it as the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia — ahead of sleeping medications.

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Clarissa