I wake up almost every day feeling really tired because I feel like I never get
enough sleep. And chances are you feel like that, too. But in my search for
answers why, I stumbled upon a piece my mom, also a journalist, reported on sleep
exactly 40 years ago. And it led me towards some really surprising and
useful findings. Every night, we all leave our work, our friends, our families, our
loved ones and we enter by ourselves the mysterious world of sleep. Why call
it mysterious? Well, did you know that scientists don't really understand
exactly what sleep is or why we do it. Yet most of us spend about a third of
our lives sleeping. Now after about 25 years of really serious research,
scientists are just beginning to understand and unravel some of the
mysteries. And yet the mystery still remains. Why do we sleep? So, to the world's
first sleep lab we went in search of answers for those of us who can't sleep
and others, like me, who feel like we just don't have time for it, and we did a sleep study.
We don't say, "Well, I'm going to starve myself Monday through Friday
but Saturday through Sunday I'm going to engorge myself and binge." You think
that's an unhealthy way of eating but some of us consider it a healthy way of
sleeping. This is Rafael Pelayo, a professor and doctor at the university,
which is where it all began. Sleep has intrigued humanity from the
beginning of time. The EEG, wires in the head, the use of
them was not until the 1920s, 1930s. It's 1953 when Dr. Kleinman and
Dr. Dement found this link between fast eye movements and dreams. They do often
refer to me as the father of sleep medicine, which I guess I am,
I certainly am. We put electrodes around the eyes and lo and behold we saw these
rapid eye movements and a huge long dream would be reported every 90 minutes
on the average. This is rapid eye movement sleep now. These are the narcoleptic dogs.
Excitement about eating, play, sometimes they just collapsed.
In the 1970s, a first clinic opened that was full-time dedicated to the study of
sleep as a medical specialty, and from here it spread to the entire world.
Sometimes people say that if they sleep longer, they feel worse. It's like
saying I ate food and I got sick. It's something wrong with the quality of your
sleep and that needs to be addressed. The key thing is do you wake up feeling alert?
That's what you really want to know. Sleep is always essential, but it's even
more important now because as society gets older, as it's more 24/7, there's more
demands on us being awake.
The truth is that today we're in the midst of a sleep
deprivation epidemic on a global scale and with really significant consequences.
Sleep problems in the United States are the biggest unmet public health problem.
Well, the first thing that happens from not getting enough sleep is people die
earlier. What most people don't realize is that lost sleep accumulates; we call
this a sleep debt. Ironically, we often sleep less than we should because
there's just so much to do and to take care of, right? But every year we're losing
hundreds of billions of dollars due to a lack of productivity and lack of sleep.
Four years ago, Dr. Pelayo took over Stanford's famous Sleep and Dreams
course, which was taught by Dr. Dement since 1970. I used to do an experiment
where we would make the class extremely dull and nearly every student would fall
asleep. Boredom does not make us sleepy; boredom will unmask your sleepiness.
Sleeping is as important to our health as breathing is. You can go more days
without drinking water than you can without sleep, but this issue of us
staying up late at night is not just because of our tablets, it's been going on for
a long time--it's just been getting worse. And it began with the advent of late
night TV, when our televisions became cheap enough to buy them for our bedrooms, too.
And all of a sudden a whole nation of people started staying up late at night
to watch TV and the hit show was the Tonight Show with Jack Paar. Oops!
Thanks, NBC! And then Johnny Carson succeeded Jack Paar, and Dement was a
guest... Which was, well, thrilling.
My guest is Dr. William Dement, who is considered one of the foremost sleep
researchers in the world today. He asked me the big question: Why do we sleep?
And I had to say we don't yet know the fundamental purpose of
sleep. Hopefully we'll find out in the future. Today, still, we don't know the
fundamental purpose of sleep. The mystery of sleep remains but the
essential questions are still there: how does the brain decide to switch from
dreaming sleep versus non-dreaming sleep? How does it actually restore? How does
the timing work out for this? Why do people die in their sleep? We don't know.
But if anything, the mystery's gotten more interesting. So the tablets and that kind
of thing actually get blamed a lot for what's going on... it's more of an issue of
your attitude toward sleep, you're making sleep important to your life. Some pro
tips from Dr. Pelayo: keep your bedroom cool; block out noise and don't
go to bed hungry; if you wake up and can't fall asleep again, don't get upset.
Be grateful you're alive and well. Also, don't hit the snooze button. The alarm
cuts into REM sleep and a little more light sleep won't do much for you so
just wake up. OK, good morning! So let's talk about how you slept last night.
Now we're in bed and we've turned off the lights. So you're getting drowsy right away, the
brain waves are dropping off, your eyes are now rolling. Awake, completely awake
with your eyes closed, you are pretty much within a minute really kind of
almost-almost asleep. You're out in two minutes. Out.
You're no doubt sleep-deprived, but now this is beautiful sleep close stage one
sleep. This is your first dream. So what's the diagnosis, doctor? No diagnosis,
you're not a patient. Get more sleep and, as you get older, make sure your snoring
doesn't get worse. So the amount of sleep is important, the quality of sleep is
important, and what overarches all of this is your state of mind. Do you look
forward to sleeping? Are you looking forward to waking up? Do you enjoy your
life? Some people can have horrible sleep problems, but their lives are so full,
they kind of power through it. Some people kind of have very mild problems with
their sleep, but they don't enjoy their lives. The way I like to think about this
is, your sleep as a reflection of your life, you life as a reflection of your sleep.
In the 40 years since my mom's report, we've made progress but there's still a
lot to discover. And yet, what ties both generations together is the knowledge
that sleep is essential and we need to get more of it to live well.
Good night, good luck, and sweet dreams!