The impact of sleep
One of the things I’ve been trying to do in my life is get more sleep.
My assumption is that this is a thing worth pursuing. But, thinking about it, I really don’t know much about why I think that getting more sleep is a good thing or not, other than hearsay and popular media, and we all know that is a knowledge path fraught with old wives’ tales.
Although I notched my 35th wedding anniversary this week and as far as I know my old wife doesn’t have a tail. (Careful with your homophones there kids).
How much sleep do we need? What are the effects of not getting enough sleep? Why do we need sleep anyhow? What does sleep do for us? Can you get too much sleep? Can you go without sleep and then sleep more to catch up?
What does sleep do? Why do we need it?
The truth is the science isn’t super clear on that. They think that sleep is like a maintenance routine. When you sleep your brain consolidates all that information you’ve sucked in during your waking hours and sorts it out. Sort of like running a defrag on your hard drive. And they think there are related physical, hormonal and other maintenance routines running a well.
This makes sense to me as an endurance athlete. I have no proof, but I feel like I perform better both physically and mentally and I recover faster when I get enough sleep. Especially when I’m deep into a training campaign, like I am right now.
They also seem fairly mushy around the question of ‘how much sleep?’ The guidelines are 7-9 hours for normal adults, and maybe more for children under 18 and the elderly. But, it smells like they are curve fitting here to me. We all know those people, like my coach, or Sam Walton, or Tony Robbins who only sleep 3-4 hours a night, (or in Sam’s case slept, because he’s sleeping 24X7 now).
I’m sure you know people who need more than the average and are just miserable trying to get along with the rest of us and society’s sleep expectations. I’m squarely in the 7-9 camp. I’ve tried to get by with less but I can’t function.
As a professional journalist, (hey I got paid for writing once), I can’t write an article about sleep without Opining that modern society is waging war on all of our sleep… Woe are we. Wringing of hands. You can fill in the rest.
What happens if you don’t’ get enough sleep?
Lucky for you I spent a good 15-20 minutes surveying the scientific journals on all these questions, so, yeah, I’m an expert now.
But, more seriously, all of these things have been tested over the years. Sleep studies seem to be the go-to research for many of the promising PhD candidates. It’s an easy experiment to set up. You get a bunch of people. You subject them to various levels of sleep then you test them versus a control and a baseline.
What kind of tests, you may ask? Good question. They have measured the effect of sleep on both physical and cognitive conditions.
For the physical they measure your blood and look for the effect of the sleep deprivation on hormone levels.
For the cognitive they do two types of tests. One is an actual test, like a pop-quiz. They give you things to memorize, wait a few ticks and have you try to recall them. This tests the effect of sleep on memory. They also do a bunch of other decision-making type tests.
In the last few years as technology gets better they can stuff you in the big magnet machine, do an MRI while your doing the cognitive tests and watch which parts of your brain light up.
Which is pretty cool.
I’ll get to some more entertaining anecdotal story telling, but the boring scientific stuff is that sleep deprivation reduces cognitive function. Both for low-level repetitive tasks and more high-level complex tasks. In layman’s terms you don’t think as well when you’re sleep deprived.
Your memory is impacted as well. Sleep deprived humans don’t score as well on that memory/recall test.
The other super interesting MRI results show that the brain activity (and by derivation the brain function) tends to switch from the cortex to the amygdala.
I’m going to stop here and say that “amygdala” is fun to say. Sounds like a good name for a punk-rock band or a dance craze. Amygdala, amygdala, amygdala.
Anyhow… Why do you care? Because, when you’re sleep deprived you rely on your ancient Dinosaur brain and don’t use your big, smart, human brain as much. Take decision making for instance. Your amygdala makes terrible, unthoughtful decisions. It’s like a drunk teenager. When you don’t get enough sleep the parent leave the house and the amygdala has a keg party. That kind of decision.
In practice this leads to making bad lifestyle choices when you’re exhausted. We’ve all been there.
Physically, sleep deprivation seems to juice up your bad hormones and generally mess with your hormonal balance. Your cortisol levels increase, which messes with your insulin resistance. None of that is good for you. It basically mimics the early stages of diabetes.
If that wasn’t bad enough, going back to the poor choices your amygdala is making, sleep deprivation suppresses the production of leptin. Leptin is the fat hormone that signals your brain that you’re full and should stop eating.
Based on these hormonal influences the researchers generally connect chronic sleep deprivation with diabetes and obesity.
Interestingly they found that too much sleep is bad for you too and produces a lot of the same physical and cognitive problems.
Let’s also be clear that these studies tend to be severe in creating sleep deprivation. These researchers are keeping people awake for 48 hours or limiting them to 3 hours a night. We’re not talking about staying up an extra ½ hour to squeeze in one more episode of your favorite Netflix binge.
They also found that certain people, like surgeons, are able to adapt to the common sleep deprivation in their roles and not lose the ability to do their work, like cutting you open for a laparoscopy. I’m not making this up. I’m not sure if up more bothered by the fact that we sleep deprive our doctors routinely or relieved that they figure out how to function with it.
Can you catch up? Can you play the game where you go a couple days without enough sleep then make it up on the weekend by sleeping more? Kind of. It’s not binary. You still get the impact of the sleep deprivation. Sleeping 2 more hours the next day doesn’t wipe that out. But after a couple days your body returns to equilibrium anyhow.
Now let’s do some story telling!
When I was a young professional there were always these success gurus, and they still exist today, that claim sleep is all in your mind. Meaning that you can condition yourself to sleep less and therefor get more done. I’m going to call bullshit on that. Of course, there’s some wiggle room where you can get up earlier or sleep a little less, but you can just will yourself to change the physical set point of your body by 3-4 hours.
The famous story is Arianna Huffington who founded the Huffington post. She bought into the will yourself to sleep less theory during her spectacular company building days. Then one day she was walking down a set of stairs and passed out. Her body just gave up. She smashed her head. And, forgive the phrasing, but she got a wake up call.
I don’t know if that is a cautionary tale or not. She had already built and sold a successful internet publishing company. After she smashed her head, she wrote a book about it and went on the speaking circuit, of course with more rational sleep habits.
And now that I’ve successfully brought you back around to a discussion of Arianna’s tail,( is she an old wife?), I’ll leave you with the thought that sleep seems to be important. I personally am trying to be more respectful of it, but maybe I’m just getting old.
And, remember, ‘spatula’ rhymes with Amygdala if you’re writing a punk rock song.