Once you’re past the every three-hour feedings and your baby is sleeping through the night, you may think you’re home-free except for the occasional middle of the night illnesses that require attention.

According to a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology last month, this isn’t the end of your lost sleep chapter in life.  The study gathered data from 833 people and followed them for 19 years.

Here is what they found.  Parents lose 13 minutes of sleep each night for each child under age 2.  For each child between ages 2-5, you lose 9 minutes each night.  If your child is between ages 6 and 18, you only lose 4 minutes each night.

Adult children over 18 didn’t cause sleep loss to parents.  Some would argue with that finding and wonder how this could be the case.  Perhaps whatever problems the 20 year old children experienced, the parents somehow learned to detach themselves enough to still sleep well.

These numbers may seem insignificant.  After all, what is 4 minutes of less sleep.  That’s less than the equivalent of pushing the snooze button on your alarm clock one more time.  If you only have one child over age 6, then you’re losing roughly 20 minutes over a 5-day work week.  Then on the weekend if you sleep in an extra 20 minutes, you’ve caught up for the week.

It becomes more problematic for parents with multiple children.  Suppose you have three kids ages 1, 3 and 5.  According to this study, you’re sleeping 36 minutes less each night.  Thirty six minutes still may not sound excessive.  But to put it in practical terms, imagine if you need to wake at 6am for work–how easy is it for you to wake up 30 minutes earlier?

By the end of the 5-day work week, you now have a sleep deficit of 2 1/2 hours.  It’s considerably harder to make up for 2 1/2 hours of lost sleep on a weekend.  Add a nightmare or stomach flu to the equation and your sleep loss totals can be even greater.

Doubtless, these numbers aren’t going to apply to everyone.  You may have the champion sleeper who is out like a light every night at 7:30pm and rarely gets sick.  But this is probably the atypical situation and unlikely to be the case if you have multiple children.

This is the first study of this kind to quantify sleep loss in parents over a long period of time, and can help you take proactive measures to plan your evening with the goal of going to bed earlier.   If it seems impossible to get into bed 1/2 hour earlier each night, doing so even 15 minutes earlier can make a difference in reducing your sleep debt at the end of the week.

Manufacture your own dark, quiet environment

One thing about college is the fact that you can’t always control your sleeping environment. If you are in a dorm, you may have a noisy roommate who stays up later than you with all of the lights on. There may be light from the hallway and noise from your neighbors that can keep you awake. To get your best sleep, you need your room to be as dark and quiet as possible. Use eye covers, also called sleep masks like those found here. The ideal mask is one that blocks out all of the light and doesn’t allow light to sneak in under the edge of the mask.

As for creating a quiet environment, there is not much you can do to force everyone to be silent. The solution is to use a white noise machine to block the sound of the voices. What is white noise? White noise is a combination of all of the sound frequencies. Because it includes all the frequencies, it masks sounds of a single frequency. It is called white noise because the color white is a combination of all of the colors on the spectrum.

The sound is similar to a whooshing fan and can be helpful for blocking others voices, radios, sirens, etc. I use one in my office for privacy and to block to sound of others in the hallway. You can pick one up on Amazon here.

Fit exercise in your schedule as if it were a class

Physical activity that increases your heart rate for at least twenty to thirty minutes improves the quality of your sleep. What is good quality sleep? It is an adequate amount of deep sleep and dream sleep. If you sleep for 6 hours and you remain in the light stages of sleep for most of it, you will wake feeling tired as if you did not get enough sleep. Exercise has the effect of improving your sleep quality such that you can sleep less (you still need at least six hours) and feel more rested. The usual recommendation for exercise is thirty minutes a day for five days a week.

Limit alcohol especially close to bedtime

Alcohol has the effect of fragmenting your sleep and it degrades the quality of your sleep. It has the opposite effect of exercise.

Maintain a regular sleep schedule

We have an internal body clock that wants to stay on schedule.  If you vary your sleep time by too many hours, you can throw off your rhythm such that it becomes hard to fall asleep when you want.  This doesn’t require you to fall asleep at the same exact time each night, but you should aim to keep the timing within an hour variance.  This includes the weekends.

Limit consumption of sugary foods especially at night

Foods high in carbohydrates and simple sugars burn fast and can cause insulin surges and blood sugar instability.  If your blood sugar drops too low at night, it stimulates the production of cortisol, glucagon and other body chemicals that stimulate the brain into wakefulness.  You can end up waking in the middle of the night hungry or craving a snack to fill the void. Your eating habits during the day affect what happens at night.  If you get into the habit of grazing all day on high-carb foods, your body will be conditioned to expect this even at night and it may not be able to make through an eight hour period without another snack.  Try limiting your food intake to three meals a day with few snacks in between.  If you must snack, try high protein snacks like nuts or whole grain foods.

College doesn’t have to be a time of poor sleep and poor health.  With a few changes, you can sleep better which can help you maximize your potential and more easily manage all your responsibilities and activities.

This article was originally written for The Bedtime Network.

College is a time of freedom, exploration and learning to become an independent adult. For those who attend college away from home, you are now master of your own decisions. You get to decide what you are going to do and when

Most students soon realize that the academic rigor of college is exponentially greater than high school. There is so much to learn and too little time. So how do you to accommodate all of your new responsibilities? Naturally you sleep less.

When you have competing demands like two projects due on one day and multiple quizzes later in the week, perhaps the easiest approach is to focus on one assignment at a time and give that effort 200%. Unfortunately that 200% often means late night studying and pulling all-nighters.

This leads to college students as a whole being extremely sleep deprived. For some, college can be a time of practicing some of the unhealthiest habits that you will experience in your lifetime.

When it comes to the all-nighter, what seems to make sense for cramming in high volumes of information, actually works the opposite in helping your remember your information.

The ability to remember new information, also known as memory consolidation, occurs during sleep. Think of your daytime class attendance as gathering goods that you then dump off at a warehouse at the end of the day. Then when you sleep, the night crew comes in and sorts all of the boxes and data you provided. When you wake in the morning, you have all of your information neatly filed away and organized by the night crew. This organization is critical for you to be able to retrieve information when you need it.

When you decrease the amount of time you sleep, you don’t leave enough time for the night crew (the brain) to file away the information. You then wake only being able to retrieve the data that was processed and the other is still sitting in boxes on the warehouse floor.

Add alcohol to the mix and you really shut down the factory. Since alcohol breaks up your sleep and decreases slow wave sleep, this would be equivalent to the warehouse workers taking too many smoke breaks instead of working. They may be present in the factory and clocking the time, but they are not efficient in their work to file away your data.

So the take away message is sleep is essential for consolidating memories and helping you ace your tests. You also need sleep for better analytic skills in writing papers. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that you are benefitting from pulling all-nighters to finish your work.

Why should that matter? Well think about how much it mattered when you were courting. Now that you tied to one another why should it no longer matter?

I can hear it now “because I’ve more important things to do and that stuff shouldn’t matter.”

Well lack of passion shouldn’t be a deal breaker, but the presence of passion surely can be the icing on the cake that enhances the quality of your life and makes all other hard work worth it.

Here are some tips to rev up the romance in your relationship.

1. Continue “courting.” Know how to play, flirt, use charm, and carve out time to do those things. Commit to consistently spend time together as a couple.

Here are some ideas for “us” time.

2. Know how to communicate. Focus on each other when you’re talking. Use a friendly tone of voice and show special kindness and courtesy when you’re communicating. Which of the following strategies do you utilize when speaking with your mate?

3. Take time to know everything about your mate. Do you know what your partner likes to do?

For example, do you know your partner’s favorite hobbies, authors, sports activities, favorite colors, pet peeves, favorite musicians, and preferred television shows?

4. Be honest about your true feelings. This isn’t a license to blast him with the truth. But emotional dishonesty ruins intimacy.

5. Learn to use body language to demonstrate your feelings to your mate. How you express yourself through body movements is known as “body language.” You can actually demonstrate to your partner how much you love them simply by how you conduct yourself physically.

Here are some gestures you can try to expand your repertoire and promote more physical closeness. Which ones come naturally to you and which ones will be new to you?

6. Lastly, plan special times together. When you make room in your schedules for special activities, it shows how much you mean to each other. Celebrations of milestones and holidays that hold special meaning provide the perfect opportunities to ramp up the romance.

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We consume folate naturally by eating green leafy vegetable and other foods, then the body converts folate to L-methylfolate.  This is the active form that does all the hard work.

Depression results in low levels of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain and antidepressants work to increase these levels.  So it would make sense that increasing these chemical’s pre-construction materials would also be very helpful in treating depression.

This is where L-methylyfolate enters the picture.  Deplin is a oral form of L-methylyfolate that is available by prescription, but is not considered a prescription medication.  Instead it is considered a medical food.

What is medical food?

In 1988, Orphan Drug Amendments was established to define medical food as a food to be consumed under the supervision of a physician for dietary management of a disease or condition.  This is in contrast to dietary supplements, which are intended for those without a specific disease or medical condition.  Prescription drugs on the other hand, are designed to treat or prevent a disease.

Since L-methylyfolate is like a dietary supplement, there are not many side effects or downsides to taking it.  Perhaps the biggest negative would be cost.  If your insurance will not pay for it, it can cost around $100 for a thirty-day supply.   The makers of Deplin recently provided a generic form that is cheaper and your insurance may cover this one.

In any case, if you have not been introduced to Deplin and you struggle with low mood or you notice that your antidepressant sometimes stops working as well,  talk with your doctor about taking L-methylfolate.