After reading “The Sleep Revolution,” which is all about the importance of a good
night’s sleep…
I found it really hard to... fall asleep.
Before that I didn’t have much difficulty with it, but after being bombarded with endless
statistics and research results illustrating the detriments of inadequate sleep, I became
very anxious about how long I was lying awake in my bed.
"What?
...What the hell?"
When we’re trying to get more out of life, sleep is usually the first thing that gets
cut to make room in our schedules.
Ironically, it can be hard to realize that by cutting back on sleep, we are decreasing
productivity, creativity, concentration, patience, communication skills and a lot of what makes
a good... human.
That’s because less sleep results in a less effective brain and less healthy body.
Pretty much whatever you’re doing, you end up doing it worse.
Of course there are some cases where you have no choice but to stay up late or wake up early.
But I’d like to spend this video looking over why sleep is so important.
By getting a new perspective on sleep, hopefully you’ll enjoy getting more of it rather than
just feeling like you’re wasting 8 hours of your life.
First, let’s take a look at what happens to your mind when you’re not completing
the process of sleep properly.
★. In 1999, two professors at Loughborough University wanted to test how sleep affects
the brain’s ability to react to changing conditions.
They developed a computer game set in the business world, and MBA students had to promote
sales of a virtual product.
Then, halfway through the game, the dynamics of the virtual marketplace suddenly changed.
Now strategies that used to work resulted in terrible sales.
Only students who could quickly change and adapt could survive.
Students were split into two groups, one with restricted sleep and another where they could
sleep as much as they liked.
Most of the students who slept well quickly adapted to the changes and maintained their
sales.
On the other hand, the sleep-deprived students were unable to modify their strategy appropriately
and very quickly became bankrupt.
The conclusion was that without sleep, their brains lost the ability to consider alternative
solutions to problems.
Brain scans have shown that when you’re lacking sleep, the neurons firing in the prefrontal
cortex begin to slow down.
The prefrontal cortex is particularly important for the behaviors that make us... human.
This region is associated with planning, personality expression, decision making, attention control,
reasoning, and problem solving.
When you lack sleep, it’s harder for us to complete a thought or see a problem in
a new way.
In a talk on the role of sleep in learning and creativity, Robert Stickgold discusses
an experiment where subjects were supposed to come up with a string of numbers based
on a different set of numbers they were provided with.
The instructions were complicated, but after several trials everyone got the hang of it
and could slowly but consistently solve the number puzzle.
However, there was a trick to make the process much faster.
The last three numbers in the sequence always ended up being a mirror image of the 3 numbers
before it.
They wanted to see how long it would take people to pick up on the trick.
So, after everyone got a hang of the instructions, they had them wait 12 hours and then try it
again.
But, they were split into three groups: those who learned how to do the puzzle in the morning
and got tested at night, those who learned how to do it at night and then stayed awake
all night before trying in the morning, and those who tried in the morning but had gotten
a good night’s rest.
The first two groups showed about the same chance of discovering the trick in the puzzle.
But with the 3rd group, and again the only difference is that they got to sleep, they
were 2.5 times more likely to gain the insight into the puzzle and catch the trick.
“So you can gain these insights when you didn’t even know there was an insight to
find, just by sleeping on it.
”
Two big things on the sleep to-do list that allow for such insights are memory consolidation
and information processing.
While asleep, your brain looks at the information you picked up throughout the day, prunes out
the useless junk and keeps the things worth remembering.
Of the four stages of sleep, slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement have been shown to
move electrical impulses between the brain stem, hippocampus, thalamus and cortex.
These four areas serve as relay stations for memory formation.
During this process, your brain takes the information in the short term memory and moves
the important bits to long term memory.
In this World Science Festival program, Neurobiology professor Matthew Wilson describes an experiment
designed to gain insight into this information processing step.
They analyzed the brain activity of rats while they were making their way through a maze,
and then compared that to their brain activity while sleeping.
What they saw was that as the rat went into non-REM deep sleep, its brain was lighting
up as if it was actually back in the maze... except it was replaying the information about
10 times faster than normal, and it was playing the events backwards and forwards and skipping
around.
The idea is that during this non-REM deep sleep phase, your brain is quickly reviewing
the information you’ve gained throughout the day and taking notes.
It’s kind of like flipping around in your textbook before you take the test the next
day.
REM sleep however is played out at normal speed.
This is why your dreams, however ridiculous, will follow some sequence of events.
While you dream, your brain is seeing how unrelated pieces of information fit together
and simulating scenarios you might need to be prepared for.
What if my boss turns into the monster from Pan’s Labyrinth, what would I do!?
Because your brain is playing around with information like this, some of our most creative
insights can come to us in the form of dreams.
August Kekulé in 1865 came up with the structure of the Benzene molecule in a dream.
Elias Howe owes the invention of the sewing machine to a dream.
Paul McCartney came up with the melody for Yesterday in a dream, and there’s all kinds
of examples like this.
So insufficient sleep interferes with creativity and memory, but it can also interfere with
your personality and competence in general.
As mentioned earlier, the more “human” part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex
shows less activity when you’re sleep deprived.
The Amygdala on the other hand, shows more activity.
The amygdala is associated with processing emotional information and, as this study has
found, “a lack of sleep inappropriately modulates the human emotional brain response
to negative aversive stimuli.”
Essentially, the less sleep you get, the more likely you are to interpret situations negatively,
overreact to things and be more moody in general.
This can manifest itself as more fights with your spouse as illustrated by this article,
or much more drastic behavior.
In 2009, a band of American soldiers from the 172nd infantry found themselves in court
martial for murdering two men in Baghdad against a superior’s orders.
Their lawyers’ defense was that the soldiers were too sleep deprived to make rational decisions.
David Randall’s book Dreamland discusses how in the early 80’s military studies found
that sleep deprived air force pilots “changed their vocal patterns, no longer enunciating
or speaking loudly enough [to be understood]” by their co pilots.
Maybe that didn’t bother the military that much because in 1996 ”...crew fatigue was
blamed for thirty-two accidents that destroyed American military aircraft, including three
F-14 jetfighters that cost $38 million each.”
The military has spent millions of dollars testing all kinds of methods to keep soldiers
awake longer, but in 2007 they concluded that the only way to recover from lost sleep was
to ...sleep.
Now some of you may say “I’m operating just fine on my 6 hours of sleep a night,
thank you very much” And you could be one of the 5% of the population with the genetic
mutation that lets you get by on only 6 hours of sleep.
But as we discussed earlier, activity in the prefrontal cortex lessens when you lack sleep.
And The prefrontal cortex is the only part of the brain that has the power of self-assessment,
to think about how it is thinking.
So if you’re not getting enough sleep, would your prefrontal cortex properly recognize
that it’s working at sub-optimal capacity?
It’s not only your brain that needs sleep, also on the sleep to do list is tissue repair,
maintenance of metabolic pathways and the balancing of hormones.
Sleep is also very important for your body.
A study at the University of Chicago put participants on a calorie restricted diet and then randomly
assigned them to sleep 5.5 hours or 8.5 hours each night.
Those who slept only 5.5 hours lost 55% less body fat.
Again, they were on the same diets.
The sleep deprived group did lose weight, but they were losing more muscle.
They lost 60% more fat-free mass compared to those who slept well.
They also reported feeling hungrier.
An important factor in this was that the sleep deprived group were shown to have much higher
ghrelin levels.
Ghrelin is a hormone that causes you to retain fat and feel more hungry.
It has been shown that just one night of poor sleep leads to a 15% increase in this “hunger
hormone.”
Now ghrelin isn't the only hormone is disrupted.
Lack of sleep also means lowered levels of the satiety hormone leptin, and less melatonin.
Melatonin has some very powerful anti-aging and anti-cancer properties, and as the Journal
of pineal research found, melatonin increases weight loss by increasing brown adipose tissue.
Brown adipose tissue or BAT Fat actually acts a lot like muscle in that it increases your
metabolic rate and burns white adipose tissue.
Inadequate sleep also increases Cortisol, which has been shown to increase the worst
type of fat -visceral fat, the stuff that surrounds your organs.
Cortisol also encourages your body to break down muscle for fuel through a process called
gluconeogenesis.
So whether you are trying to make some “gains” or just want to lose a bit of fat, your time
in the gym needs to be complemented with proper sleep.
One more key hormone secreted during sleep is Human Growth Factor (HGH), otherwise known
as “the youth hormone”.
As the name suggests, it stimulates growth, cell reproduction and cell regeneration, which
means increased muscle, more fat loss, and other things like improved skin elasticity.
Human growth hormone even plays a role in improving cognitive function and a deficiency
in it has been linked with depression.
It’s important to get enough sleep, but also to get it at the right time.
While it depends on each individual’s circadian rhythm, in general 10PM to 2AM is when your
body secretes the most growth hormone (that is- IF you’re asleep at that time).
The other thing on the sleep to do list is waste cleanup.
Throughout the course of the day, the brain produces a decent amount of waste.
The brain handles this waste cleanup task during sleep via something called the glymphatic
system in which brain cells shrink to allow for cerebrospinal fluid to flood into the
brain and flush out the waste.
One thing that needs to be flushed out is the compound adenosine.
Adenosine is a byproduct of your neurons and other cells when they burn up adenosine triphosphate,
the main molecule that our bodies use to store energy.
As adenosine builds up, you start to slow down and accumulate a “sleep pressure”.
When your adenosine levels reach a certain point, your body sends you signals to go to
sleep.
Caffeine works by bonding to the same receptors as adenosine, tricking the body into thinking
it’s not tired.
While caffeine will wake you up, it will interfere with your sleep cycle if taken too late in
the day.
Cristopher Drake, associate professor of behavioral neurosciences at Wayne State University School
of Medicine led a study that found that taking caffeine even 6 hours before bed can lead
to a measureable objective loss of 1 hour of sleep.
What this means is that it may seem like you got say 7 hours of sleep after having a coffee
mid day, but a sleep monitor would show that you’re not properly dipping into the normal
ranges of REM and deep sleep, leading to an actual sleep total of 6 hours.
For this reason it’s recommended to finish your caffeine at least 8 or more hours before
bedtime.
Like adenosine, Amyloid beta is another waste product that is created in the brain.
Unfortunately, excess amyloid beta is toxic to the brain and Amyloid plaques have been
thoroughly linked to Alzheimer’s disease.
It’s understood that Alzheimer’s patients don’t create more amyloid beta than other
people, but they simply were not clearing it out enough.
Of course other lifestyle factors like diet play a role here, but sleep could be particularly
critical for avoiding neurodegenerative disease.
Artificial intelligence, robots, and all kinds of automation are already replacing jobs nowadays
and the technology is only expected to get better and better.
Machine intelligence may be the last invention humanity will ever need to make, but at least
until that point we need to set ourselves up access our creative insights and take advantage
of the more human faculties of our brains.
As Daniel Pink says in A Whole New Mind, it’s the “creative and emphatic ‘right-brain’
oriented thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who
doesn’t.”
Without enough sleep, our bodies as well as these creative, insightful and emotionally
adept human faculties of our brains suffer.
Now, I'm sure you're thinking "OK, so we should get more quality sleep, but how?" this is
what I'll be talking about next week so make sure to stick around for sleep part 2.