Infrared Sauna now available. Book solo or with friends
Infrared Sauna now available. Book solo or with friends
Most people know they should sleep more. What most people do not know is how specifically sleep deprivation is affecting them, or why the problem tends to get worse rather than better once it takes hold. This page covers what the research says, what Dr Kara Martelle sees clinically, and what actually helps.
During sleep, your brain clears waste products that accumulate during the day, including beta-amyloid proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Your muscles repair micro-tears from activity. Your immune system produces cytokines, the proteins it needs to fight infection and inflammation. Your hormonal system resets. None of this happens adequately without sufficient sleep, and none of it can be made up by sleeping longer at the weekend.
Adults generally need seven to nine hours for these processes to complete. The variation within that range is genuine. Some people function well on seven, others need closer to nine. What is not genuine is the widespread belief that you can train yourself to need less. The research on this is consistent: people who chronically undersleep do not adapt. They get worse at judging how impaired they are, which compounds the problem.
Before your first visit: We will send a text link to your new patient forms. Completing them in advance means your appointment time is spent on your health, not paperwork. If you do not receive the forms, call us on (08) 8323 9755.
The health consequences of chronic poor sleep extend well beyond feeling tired. Short sleep duration (consistently fewer than six hours) is independently associated with the following:
The relationship runs both ways. Poor sleep worsens most chronic health conditions, and most chronic health conditions worsen sleep. Breaking the cycle requires addressing both ends of it.
Your nervous system governs both your waking state and your transition into sleep. The autonomic nervous system has two modes: sympathetic (alert, responsive, the fight-or-flight state) and parasympathetic (calm, restorative, the rest-and-digest state). Sleep requires the parasympathetic system to predominate. For many people, particularly those carrying chronic pain, stress, or poor posture, the nervous system is stuck in a low-level sympathetic state that makes genuine rest difficult to reach.
Chiropractic care works with the nervous system through its relationship to the spine. Spinal misalignments (called subluxations) create interference in the nerve pathways running through the vertebral column. This interference can contribute to a nervous system that is running hotter than it should be, less able to downshift into the parasympathetic state that quality sleep requires. Addressing those subluxations removes the physical source of that interference.
This is why patients who come in for back pain or neck pain often report better sleep as an unexpected benefit of their care. The pain relief helps, but the nervous system regulation is the deeper mechanism. Patients managing stress overload syndrome in particular tend to notice the change in sleep quality early in their care, sometimes within the first few weeks.
The physical environment you sleep in directly affects both sleep quality and spinal health. The two most important variables are your mattress and your pillow, and of the two, the pillow is the one most people get wrong.
The job of a pillow is to keep your head and neck in a neutral position relative to your spine. What neutral looks like depends entirely on how you sleep. Back sleepers need less support under the head, specifically a low-profile pillow that keeps the cervical spine in its natural curve. Side sleepers need considerably more height to fill the gap between the shoulder and the ear, otherwise the neck sags laterally for hours at a time and wakes up stiff.
Custom pillow fitting at the clinic: Our clinic offers natural latex pillow fitting as part of our product range. The pillow is custom-fitted to your measurements at the appointment, and the fitting service is included in the purchase price. This is worth doing If you wake up regularly with neck stiffness or headaches, the pillow is often the entire problem. Ask at reception when you next call.
Sleep hygiene advice tends to range from obvious to unhelpful. The habits listed below are the ones with the clearest research backing and the most consistent clinical effect.
Caffeine timing. Caffeine has a half-life of approximately five to six hours, which means that a coffee at 3pm still has half its caffeine active at 8pm or 9pm. Most people underestimate this. The standard advice to avoid caffeine after 2pm is not arbitrary; it reflects the pharmacology. If you are having sleep trouble, moving your last caffeinated drink to before midday is one of the most effective interventions available without any prescription.
Screen light in the evening. The blue-spectrum light emitted by phones, tablets, and computer screens suppresses melatonin production. Melatonin is the hormone that signals to the body that it is time to sleep. Suppressing it for two hours before bed delays your natural sleep onset. Turning off screens an hour before bed is the simple intervention. Using night mode or blue-light filtering is better than nothing but is not equivalent to removing the screen.
Temperature. Your core body temperature needs to drop by one to two degrees Celsius to initiate sleep. A bedroom that is too warm actively inhibits this. The research-supported target for bedroom temperature is 18–20°C. If your bedroom runs warm in summer, this single environmental factor may be explaining more of your sleep difficulty than anything else.
Consistency. Your circadian rhythm is a biological clock. Like any clock, it works best when it runs at consistent times. Going to bed and waking up at the same time every day (including weekends) is the single most impactful habit for sleep quality. The weekend sleep-in feels restorative but actually shifts your clock later, making Monday night harder.
One mechanism worth understanding is the core temperature drop that follows sauna use. After spending 30–45 minutes in the heat, your body actively works to cool down. This post-sauna temperature drop closely mirrors the biological process your body uses to initiate sleep, and there is good evidence that timed sauna use in the late afternoon or early evening can meaningfully improve both sleep onset and sleep depth.
The infrared sauna at McLaren Vale Chiropractic Centre is available at $20 per session and can be booked alongside a chiropractic appointment or on its own. If you are managing poor sleep alongside muscular tension or stress, the combination addresses both the physiological and the nervous-system dimensions simultaneously. See the infrared sauna page for full details.
Sleep is not passive recovery: it is when your brain clears waste products, your immune system activates, and your body repairs itself. Seven to nine hours is not optional for most adults.
