Good sleep is essential for our well being and is characterized by more than just the number of hours we sleep! Here are the highlights.
Why Care About Sleep (Beyond Recharging).
Why Care About Good Sleep?
Sleep is where it all begins for our body, brain and mind:
Energy renewal for both the brain and the body - rest, repair, recycling, and creation of mitochondria to power our cells.
Mind-state renewal - restoring connections essential to managing our perceptions, impulse control, and mood.
Emotional therapy - working through difficult experiences, restoring equanimity.
Memory management - creating space for new memory capture; organizing and linking new memories with past experiences for learning and problem solving.
Dementia protection - flushing the metabolic waste from our brains.
Immune system restoration - protection against infection, cancers, and chronic conditions.
Blood Sugar and Blood Pressure control.
A negative story is a poor motivator for specific habit change. However, poor sleep actively mounts a campaign against our body and brain which I believe people need to know. The following captures a few high-impact need-to-know risk factors driven by poor sleep.
Hormones signal our brain to keep eating - even when full.
Impulse control mechanisms break down.
Lost therapeutic dream state sleep makes us more vulnerable to depression.
Lost time for memory transfer creates immediate cognition challenges.
Lost time for brain detox increases future risk for Alzheimer's Disease and other dementias.
Lost energy renewal needed to engage with life.
The issues from an occasional poor night of sleep tend to be obvious - impatience, fatigue, memory hiccups, or falling asleep while driving (to name a few). Chronic poor sleep, however, has a stealth effect. It quietly undermines our health, natural self-healing, self-cleaning, and self-regenerating processes obtained with sufficient quality sleep. We don't notice these effects until years later when the symptoms appear.
In recent years, we have learned sleep more about the importance of sleep than ever imagined not long ago. Example:
Alzheimer's Disease. The brain gets detoxified through the recently discovered glymphatic system during our regularly scheduled early hours of deep sleep. This clean up includes flushing out the beta-amyloid and tao protein's associated with Alzheimer's. If we miss these early hours of deep sleep, our brain runs out of time to finish the clean up!
Memory Loss. We need our early deep sleep to transfer new memories into long term storage for integration and meaning-making. This transfer also frees up the short-term memory space for capturing new memories the next day. When we go to bed later than usual, less space is freed up for capturing new memories. When we wake up too early, fewer connections are made for learning and creative problem solving. It's a 5-on-1 fight! Not the best odds.
Heart Attack and Stroke. Poor sleep increases blood pressure and the speed and contraction of the heart while decreasing Heart Rate Variability (HRV) which we do not want to drop. When chronic, poor sleep leads to inflammation which in turn leads to plaque build up in the arteries (atherosclerosis), serious risk factors for heart attack and stroke. Good sleep helps us reduce these risks for cardiovascular disease and stroke events.
Type 2 Diabetes. Good sleep promotes insulin production and sensitivity while mitigating the eating/activity issues mentioned above. It also promotes better blood sugar regulation. Poor sleep triggers insulin resistance, increasing blood glucose levels and Type 2 Diabetes risk alone.
Cancer Risk and Infection Risk. Good sleep restores the immune system, renewing our ability to fight cancer cell growth and infections like COVID, Pneumonia, and the Flu. Poor sleep prevents full restoration of our immune system and has even been shown to reduce the strength of our immune response to a variety of vaccines, including the flu vaccine. (70% reductions in cancer fighting killer cells; up to 50% reductions in flue vaccine antibody responses; Reductions documented for COVID vaccine response but we are still looking for more specifics.)
Depression and Anxiety. Good sleep is our free, private therapist, processing our emotions so we're less easily irritated and less susceptible to depression, anxiety, and reactive behaviors. Poor sleep prevents a good therapy session and can put the brain into a "fear-bias" default mode which leads us to perceive the world as more hostile than reality would justify.
Here is the upside: We know good sleep has the opposite effect!
Arianna Huffington gives women a laugh while sharing yet one more great reason to prioritize sleep in her short Ted Talk How to succeed? Get more sleep.  My Apologies in advance to any men reading this.
What Does as a Good Night's Sleep Look Like?
As defined by Matt Walker, good sleep can be defined by QQRT: Quantity and Quality grounded by regular Routine that is Timed to align with your natural Circadian Schedule. For years we heard talk about getting enough sleep but little about sleep quality, routine, and timing. All are essential to realizing the benefits of sleep.
Quantity (Duration)
7 to 8 hours sleep for most adults (plus a buffer "sleep opportunity "time in bed).
9 hours sleep for some.
Quality
Minimal disruptions (wakeups) during the night. One or two short wakeups a night OK.
Good electrical quality of sleep (Hard to measure outside a lab but we can get clues)
Routine (Regular Schedule)
Getting up and going to bed at the same time, including weekends
Ideally within +/- 20 minutes for bedtime and +/- 20 minutes for wake time
Timing
Alignment with your natural Circadian Chronotype (earlier/later bedtimes for some individuals, earlier/later wakeup time for others).
Make more detail to help inform your sleep pattern priorities. Go to the Sleep Hub.
Wishing you well,
Janice
PS
If you struggle with insomnia, consider talking with your doctor about finding a sleep professional trained in CBT-I (Cognitive Behavior Therapy - Insomnia), the international gold standard recommended as first line of treatment in Canada, the United States, and England.
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