Sleep and Why even God Probably Rested on the 7th Day

Sleep, Rest and Recovery is the third CatholicFIT Principle, and arguably the most important foundational principle of health. If there is one thing you should do immediately if you want to lose weight, increase your energy and build your health from the inside out, rethink and focus on improving your sleep habits.

Below I have high lighted several points from a TED talk I recently watched of Circadian Neuroscientist, Russell Forster about the importance of sleep. He begins the talk (embedded below if you want to watch the 20 minute video) with a few famous quotes, first from Shakespeare’s time, the latter from the 20th century. Note the difference:

“Enjoy the honey heavy dew of slumber” (from Julius Caesar) – William Shakespeare

“Oh sleep, oh gentle sleep, nature’s soft nurse, how thy frightened thee.” – William Shakespeare

“Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together”. – Thomas Dekker

(Now let’s jump forward 400 years.)

“Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days.” – Thomas Edison

“Sleep is for wimps.” – Margaret Thatcher

“Money never sleeps.” – Gordan Gecko

These quotes speak volumes about where we are as a culture and how seemingly under-appreciated (and therefore under practiced) something so vital to our health is. Let’s look at the findings noted in Russell Foster’s TED Talk.

Here are the high lights:

• If you live to 90 years, 32 years of our life, ideally, should be spent sleeping.
• We have used Thomas Edison’s light bulb to invade the dark – and this is where our problems began, or accelerated.
• Some areas of the brain are more active during sleep than during times of being awake.

Three primary theories about why we sleep:

1. Restoration Idea – good evidence to show that we burn up a lot of tissue, energy – during sleep, we recover, heal and restore these resources along with certain metabolic pathways
2. Energy Conservation – poor evidence for this – energy saving for sleeping is about 110 calories a night versus someone who stays up and stands all night instead. This theory is poorly supported.
3. Brain Processing & Memory Consolidation – if after you have tried to learn a task, if you sleep deprive an individual, the ability to learn that task is smashed. Our ability to come up with solutions to complex problems is greatly improved (creative output is enhanced by threefold!) after a good night’s sleep. This goes far beyond simply laying down a memory and recalling. Cool stuff.

About sleep deprivation:

• Teenagers need 9 hours a night – how many teens you know getting this amount of sleep, that is after turning off any electronics around them 30 minutes before going to sleep for 9 hours. No wonder we are falling behind in the world. Teens average about 5 hours a night.
• Average sleep in the 1950’s – 8 hours, in 2013 – 6.5 hours, and 5 hours a night is very common
• Seniors (mature adults) need the same amount of sleep as always – needing less is a myth!
• Shift workers do not get enough, and do not get enough quality sleep because you really cannot get quality sleep during the day.
• The brain in response goes through “micro-sleeps” to attempt to recover.
• 31% of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at some point in their life (check out the picture below to see the result of me dozing off on the way home from work.)
• 100,000 accidents / year car accidents occur due to sleep deprivation

Sleep Deprived? This is what you are experiencing:

• Poor judgment
• Increased impulsiveness
• Poor memory
• Glucose Intolerant (if you get less than 6 hours a sleep at night, you are pre-diabetic and do not process sugar correctly)
• Poor creativity
• (Oh it is sooo much worse than this)
• You crave drugs, caffeine, nicotine, stimulants – then alcohol when you are “tired and wired” trying to sedate yourself to sleep
• Alcohol only sedates you, it does not provide you with sleep as a result, but a biological mimic for sleep, which is sedation – therefore it actually harms some of the neuro-processing (memory consolidation, etc)

Weight Gain, Stress & Sleep

• 5 hours or less of sleep a night – 50% likelihood of being obese. Sleep deprivation gives rise to the hormone that causes you to crave carbohydrates. This obviously leads to weight gain.
• Sustained stress and lack of sleep leads to poor immunity – shift workers have higher rates of cancer.
• Tired people are more stressed – stressed people have more glucose circulating through their system – this leads to Diabetes 2.

Are You Getting Enough Sleep

• Make your bedroom a haven for sleep
• Dark as you can and a little bit cool
• Decrease light everywhere around you within 30 minutes before you go to bed
• Standing in light brushing your teeth right before bed is a bad thing
• Turn off all electronic devices
• LISTEN TO YOUR BODY

Myths

1. Teenagers are lazy – no, they have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and sleep in; this is why there is discussion about starting high school times later in the morning to allow for this natural cycle
2. “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” (No sleep correlation to socioeconomic status;)

Sleep (Sleep Disruption) & Mental Health

• Mental illness and sleep cycles are physically linked within the brain
• The same genes that are linked to sleep are also linked to Schizophrenia

Recommended Reading:

• Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar & Survival

If you want to watch the 21 minute video yourself – here is the original:

About the Speaker – Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist: He studies the sleep cycles of the brain. And he asks: What do we know about sleep? Not a lot, it turns out, for something we do with one-third of our lives. In this talk, Foster shares three popular theories about why we sleep, busts some myths about how much sleep we need at different ages — and hints at some bold new uses of sleep as a predictor of mental health.