Have you ever woken up in terror, after having a bad dream in which you killed someone
or EVEN WORSE, got together with your ex?
You wake up, and immediately embark on a frantic google search journey: am I a psychopath, do I
secretly still miss that guy that abused me? Are those just my deepest, unfulfilled wishes?
Sadly, there is no easy answer.
Both Freud’s and Jung’s theories on dreams are difficult to prove or disprove.
So rather than speculate about the meaning of dreams,
what I’d prefer to do in today’s video is to have a look at the science behind sleep.
Hi, I’m Kat, and today I’ll explain why sleep deprivation can (and most likely will) kill you.
Prepare to be shocked. I know I was while reading Matthew Walker’s book.
But before we move on, just a quick shout out and a massive thank you to the sponsor of this video - Eir Health.
I’ll talk about them and their glorious CBD sleep oil a little bit later.
For now, let’s move on and see if I can convince you to go to bed a bit early tonight.
I don't want to start off by scaring you, but I probably will.
Did you know that unhealthy sleep = unhealthy heart. Shorter sleep is associated with a 45%
increased risk of developing and/or dying from coronary heart disease.
One study showed that those sleeping 6 hours or less were 400 to 500 %
more likely to suffer one or more cardiac arrests than those sleeping over 6 hours.
Not enough sleep can also result in an overactive sympathetic nervous system, which pretty much
means that your body is, to some degree in the fight or flight state all the time.
So it kind of is like having low key panic attack, all day long.
Moreover, sleeping less than seven or eight hours a night will increase your probability
of gaining weight, being overweight or obese,
and will sigificantly increase your likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes.
This is because not enough sleep increases the production of the
hunger hormone ghrelin and reduces the production of the satiety hormone leptin.
And, as though that wasn’t enough, when you’re sleep deprived while dieting,
70% of the weight you loose will come from your muscle, NOT fat which is obviously not ideal.
Furthermore, insufficient sleep across the life span now seems to be one of the most significant
lifestyle factors determining whether or not you’ll develop Alzheimers.
Bare with me please, because the list is long. AND it get’s worse.
Not enoguh sleep also affects your reproductive system. Men who sleep 5 to 6 hours a night have
smaller testicles than those who sleep 7 hours or longer. Sleep deprivation will age you by a decade
in terms of testosterone levels and you’ll have a 29% lower sperm count.
29% - that's almost a third.
It affects women too, of course. Sleeping less than 6 hours a night results in a 20%
drop in follicular-releasing hormone in women - a critical element that’s neccesary for conception.
Now, add to this a 33% higher rate of irregular menstrual
cycles in women who don’t get enough sleep. That is how you get the perfect environment for fertility issues.
Now something a bit les dramatic: the less you sleep, the more likely you are to catch a cold.
Aaaaaand back to shocking numbers.
In one study, people were allowed to sleep for 6 hours a night,
for just 1 week. Not 2, 3, 4. Just one week of sleep deprivation. This resulted in the distortion of the activity of 711 genes. The ones that got
turned off are responsible for your immune response. Those that were overexpressed,
or more active - are responsible for the promotion of tumours, chronic inflammation and stress.
While we're on the subject of cancer:
in another study, sleep deprived mice suffered a 200% increase in
the speed and size of cancer grotwth, relative to the well rested group. What’s even worse,
the tumours were far more aggresive and spread to surrounding organs more easily.
I’m afraid there’s more. Shift workers have higher rates of cancer. We now
know that insufficient sleep is linked to bowel, breast and prostate cancer.
In fact, the World Health Organisation has decided to classify
any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen.
And last but not least - according to one study, just 1 night of 4 hours of sleep,
results in 70% reduction of critical cancer fighting immune cells, naturally existing in our bodies.
(MIND. FUCKING. BLOWN).
I know, it’s absolutely insane. Why is no one talking about this. Actually, you being awake right now is causing
low level brain damage, but don't worry about it too much because it is then reversed when you get some good sleep.
To sum up: The shorter you sleep, the shorter you live,
and the quality of that now shorter life is significantly worse.
Now, apart from those strictly physical aspects, sleep, both non-REM and REM, can do wonders for
those slightly less tangible elements. First of all, it works as a memory aid:
both before learning - to prepare your brain for making new memories,
AND after learning, to prevent you from forgetting them.
It’s not just knowledge, though, it’s skills too:
so you’ll learn a new skill much faster when you get proper sleep after a day of practicing.
So let’s say you’re trying to learn how to play the piano or paint or anything that’s got to do
with motor skills. The more good quality sleep you get, the better you’ll become.
We also sleep to forget, so that our brain can delete stored information we no longer need.
AND it get’s even better when you actually DREAM.
Dreaming about traumatic events that have caused us great pain can actually help us
heal and reduce the depression cause by those events. And by suppresing noradrenaline and
providing better REM sleep, you can siginificantly improve symptoms of PTSD,
reducing the amount of daytime flashbacks and nighttime nightmares.
There’s more good stuff coming.
Dreaming also aids creativity and problem solving, becasue - to simplify it, and I’m
really simplifing it here - when we dream, the pre-frontal cortex - that thing in your brain
that’s responsible for rational thinking - IT TURNS OFF. This means that the other parts of
your brain can roam free and come up with things you’d never be able to come up with while awake.
This is also the reason why your dreams are so whacky and rarely make much sense.
Phew, that was a lot of knowledge packed into just a few
minutes. But hopefully you’re still awake and I’ve managed to show you why good sleep is really important.
So you may be wondering now… How many hours do I need? Well, the consensus is that somewhere between
7 and 9 hours a night is optimal. But it’s not just the quantity. It’s also the quality.
You need both non-rem and rem sleep.
Good news is that there are quite a few things you can do to sleep better.
But before we move on, I would like to come back to the sponsor of
this video - EIR HEALTH & introduce you to their absolutely glorious CBD oil.
Inside this glorious sleep elixir, you get full spectrum CBD, A SPECIAL FORMULATION OF
TERPENES TO HELP YOU FALL ASLEEP, you also get LAVENDER EXTRACT and the good
old melatonin, the darkness hormone responsible for regulating the circadian rhythm.
This little bottle is an absolute life saver for me, and... Actually… It’s a life saver quite literally,
because it helps me sleep and as we’ve just learnt, sleep is super important to, well, pretty much stay alive.
You probably all know by now that I’ve been an anxious stressed wreck for the past few months, oh god, probably longer.
And it's really not easy for me to fall asleep.
No matter what I do. And so... Sadly, I self-medicate with alcohol, a little bit more (probably)
than I would've liked and it's clearly and obviously NOT the best long term solution to my problems.
So instead of drinking myself to sleep, I prefer to use the CBD sleep oil, whenever I can.
So anyway, without exaggeration, this is actually one of the most valuable possesions of mine, right now,
So if you want to check it out, you can have a look at all of the link down below.
Now, moving on to all the other good stuff you can do to sleep better:
First of all, try to stay regular and go to sleep roughly around the same time each night.
You can also have a hot bath or a hot shower about two hours before bedtime.
This works best when followed by going to bed in a cool room.
Turning the lights down in the evenings can also work wonders,
so intead of having bright, big lights turned on, go for a nice, dimmed little lamp in the corner.
And last but not least, the infamous blue light, the screens. The one thing that we’ve
all heard of and yet somehow we choose to ignore it every single night.
Did you know that 1 hour of iPad reading DELAYS the release of melatonin by 3
hours. We stay on our phones or laptops till late and then we’re shocked by the
fact that we can’t sleep. So just… Choose a book instead. They never fail to help me fall asleep.
And that’s about it! I would highly highly recommend reading this book. The science behind sleep is
absolutely fascinating, I obviously could not fit everything into this video.
So yeah, well done if you made it till the end, I tried my best to not use my super calm, drowsiness inducing voice today, so yeah, well done if you made it till the end.
Thank you for watching, I hope you sleep well. Bye!