Health problems
Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Mental conditions
Fitting Charlotte Brontë’s prophetic wisdom that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,” sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
What makes you sleepy
The first factor is a signal beamed out from your internal twenty-four-hour clock located deep within your brain. The clock creates a cycling, day-night rhythm that makes you feel tired or alert at regular times of night and day, respectively. The second factor is a chemical substance that builds up in your brain and creates a “sleep pressure.” The longer you’ve been awake, the more that chemical sleep pressure accumulates, and consequentially, the sleepier you feel.
Evidence of circadian rhythm even in plants
Despite being cut off from the influence of light during the day, the plant still behaved as though it were being bathed in sunlight; its leaves were proudly expanded. Then, it retracted its leaves as if on cue at the end of the day, even without the sun’s setting signal, and they stayed collapsed throughout the entire night.
Evidence of circadian rhythm in humans: 24h 15m
Years since Kleitman and Richardson’s seminal experiment, we have now determined that the average duration of a human adult’s endogenous circadian clock runs around twenty-four hours and fifteen minutes in length.
Sunlight is used for syncing the circadian rhythm
It is no coincidence that the brain uses daylight for this resetting purpose. Daylight is the most reliable, repeating signal that we have in our environment.
Function of Melatonin
Melatonin corrals these sleep-generating regions of the brain to the starting line of bedtime. Melatonin simply provides the official instruction to commence the event of sleep, but does not participate in the sleep race itself.
Adjusting jetlags
For every day you are in a different time zone, your suprachiasmatic nucleus can only readjust by about one hour.
Harder to travel eastward
You may have noticed that it feels harder to acclimate to a new time zone when traveling eastward than when flying westward. There are two reasons for this. First, the eastward direction requires that you fall asleep earlier than you would normally, which is a tall biological order for the mind to simply will into action.
2 phases
At that moment Kleitman and Aserinsky realized the profound discovery they had made: humans don’t just sleep, but cycle through two completely different types of sleep. They named these sleep stages based on their defining ocular features: non–rapid eye movement, or NREM, sleep, and rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep.
More NREM in the first phase, then more REM in the second phase
In the first half of the night, the vast majority of our ninety-minute cycles are consumed by deep NREM sleep, and very little REM sleep, as can be seen in cycle 1 of the figure above. But as we transition through into the second half of the night, this seesaw balance shifts, with most of the time dominated by REM sleep, with little, if any, deep NREM sleep.
Sleeping less means, losing most of the REM sleep
Since your brain desires most of its REM sleep in the last part of the night, which is to say the late-morning hours, you will lose 60 to 90 percent of all your REM sleep, even though you are losing 25 percent of your total sleep time.
Reception, reflection and integration
When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities).
All animals sleep
All have bona fide sleep. Ascend the evolutionary ladder further and we find that all types of birds and mammals sleep: from shrews to parrots, kangaroos, polar bears, bats, and, of course, we humans. Sleep is universal. Even invertebrates, such as primordial mollusks and echinoderms, and even very primitive worms, enjoy periods of slumber.
Life came after sleep
What if sleep is so useful—so physiologically beneficial to every aspect of our being—that the real question is: Why did life ever bother to wake up? Considering how biologically damaging the state of wakefulness can often be, that is the true evolutionary puzzle here, not sleep. Adopt this perspective, and we can pose a very different theory: sleep was the first state of life on this planet, and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged.
Starvation makes us sleep less
Starve a fly and it will stay awake longer, demonstrating a pattern of food-seeking behavior. The same is true for humans. Individuals who are deliberately fasting will sleep less as the brain is tricked into thinking that food has suddenly become scarce.
Fire provided the answer to sleep
How did Homo erectus (and by inference, Homo sapiens) survive in the predator- rich ground-sleeping environment, when leopards, hyenas, and saber-toothed tigers (all of which can hunt at night) are on the prowl, and terrestrial bloodsuckers abound? Part of the answer is fire.
Increase in REM sleep
Any Homo erectus capable of accomplishing more efficient sleep would likely have been favored in survival and selection. Evolution saw to it that our ancient form of sleep became somewhat shorter in duration, yet increased in intensity, especially by enriching the amount of REM sleep we packed into the night.
Fetus development has huge NREM and REM sleep
At this stage of in utero development, most of the time is spent in sleep. The twenty-four-hour period contains a mishmash of approximately six hours of NREM sleep, six hours of REM sleep, and twelve hours of an intermediary sleep state that we cannot confidently say is REM or NREM sleep, but certainly is not full wakefulness… In the last week before birth, REM-sleep amount hits a lifetime high of twelve hours a day.
Autism and sleep patterns
Infants and young children who show signs of autism, or who are diagnosed with autism, do not have normal sleep patterns or amounts. The circadian rhythms of autistic children are also weaker than their non-autistic counterparts, showing a flatter profile of melatonin across the twenty-four-hour period rather than a powerful rise in concentration at night and rapid fall throughout the day.
Alcohol and REM sleep during pregnancy
The newborns of heavy-drinking mothers spent far less time in the active state of REM sleep compared with infants of similar age but who were born of mothers who did not drink during pregnancy.
Newborns and REM sleep
Newborns will normally transition straight into REM sleep after a feeding. Many mothers already know this: almost as soon as suckling stops, and sometimes even before, the infant’s eyelids will close, and underneath, the eyes will begin darting left-right, indicating that their baby is now being nourished by REM sleep.
4 years old should have a strong circadian system with biphasic sleep pattern
By four years of age, the circadian rhythm is in dominant command of a child’s sleep behavior, with a lengthy slab of nighttime sleep, usually supplemented by just a single daytime nap. At this stage, the child has transitioned from a polyphasic sleep pattern to a biphasic sleep pattern.
Proportion of REM sleep decreases overtime
other words, the proportion of REM sleep decreases in early childhood while the proportion of NREM sleep actually increases, even though total sleep time decreases.
Late teen sleep stabilization
That balance will finally stabilize to an 80/20 NREM/REM sleep split by the late teen years, and remain so throughout early and mid adulthood.
Psychiatric disorders and childhood
Many of the major psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and ADHD are now considered disorders of abnormal development, since they commonly emerge during childhood and adolescence.
Circadian system of children are earlier
The reason is not simply that children need more sleep than their older siblings or parents, but also that the circadian rhythm of a young child runs on an earlier schedule. Children therefore become sleepy earlier and wake up earlier than their adult parents.
Teenager’s sleep pattern
Sadly, neither society nor our parental attitudes are well designed to appreciate or accept that teenagers need more sleep than adults, and that they are biologically wired to obtain that sleep at a different time from their parents. It’s very understandable for parents to feel frustrated in this way, since they believe that their teenager’s sleep patterns reflect a conscious choice and not a biological edict.
Sleep enhances learning and prevents saturation
Our question was simple: Does the learning capacity of the human brain decline with continued time awake across the day and, if so, can sleep reverse this saturation effect and thus restore learning ability? Those who were awake throughout the day became progressively worse at learning, even though their ability to concentrate remained stable (determined by separate attention and response time tests). In contrast, those who napped did markedly better, and actually improved in their capacity to memorize facts.
Go through stuff you want to improve or solve the problem before sleeping
What if a similar opportunity was possible with sleep and memory? Before going to bed, you would review the learning experiences of the day, selecting only those memories from the menu list that you would like improved. You place your order, then go to sleep, knowing that your order will be served to you overnight. When you wake up in the morning, your brain will have been nourished only by the specific items you ordered from the autobiographical carte du jour.
Memories for both forgetting and remembering can be strengthened
The results were clear. Sleep powerfully, yet very selectively, boosted the retention of those words previously tagged for “remembering,” yet actively avoided the strengthening of those memories tagged for “forgetting.”
Muscle memory is brain memory
Muscle memory is, in fact, brain memory. Training and strengthening muscles can help you better execute a skilled memory routine. But the routine itself—the memory program—resides firmly and exclusively within the brain.
You are NOT a good judge of your performance
When participants were asked about their subjective sense of how impaired they were, they consistently underestimated their degree of performance disability. It was a miserable predictor of how bad their performance actually, objectively was. It is the equivalent of someone
Alzheimer’s disease
More telling, perhaps, is the fact that sleep disturbance precedes the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by several years, suggesting that it may be an early-warning sign of the condition, or even a contributor to it.
How sleep deprivation makes the heart work harder
One night of modest sleep reduction—even just one or two hours—will promptly speed the contracting rate of a person’s heart, hour upon hour, and significantly increase the systolic blood pressure within their vasculature.
Being overweight and hormones
When your sleep becomes short, you will gain weight. Multiple forces conspire to expand your waistline. The first concerns two hormones controlling appetite: leptin and ghrelin. Leptin signals a sense of feeling full. When circulating levels of leptin are high, your appetite is blunted and you don’t feel like eating. Ghrelin, in contrast, triggers a strong sensation of hunger.
Sleep deprivation and infection
There was a clear, linear relationship with infection rate. The less sleep an individual was getting in the week before facing the active common cold virus, the more likely it was that they would be infected and catch a cold.
Dreams are essential
Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear, the brain state called REM sleep and the mental experience that goes along with it, dreaming, are normal biological and psychological processes, and truly essential ones, as we shall learn.
Dreams helps in soothing out our emotions
Is the REM-sleep dreaming state a perfectly designed nocturnal soothing balm — one that removes the emotional sharp edges of our daily lives? It seemed so from everything neurobiology and neurophysiology was telling us (me).
Getting the solution after sleep
The solutions simply “popped out” following awakenings from REM sleep, one subject told me, though at the time, they did not know they had been in REM sleep just prior. Solutions seemed more effortless when the brain was being bathed by the afterglow of dream sleep.
2 challenges in Insomnia
One distinction separates insomnia into two kinds. The first is sleep onset insomnia, which is difficulty falling asleep. The second is sleep maintenance insomnia, or difficulty staying asleep. As the actor and comedian Billy Crystal has said when describing his own battles with insomnia, “I sleep like a baby—I wake up every hour.”
Sleep time vs sleep opportunity
The problem is that some people confuse time slept with sleep opportunity time. We know that many individuals in the modern world only give themselves 5 to 6.5 hours of sleep opportunity, which normally means they will only obtain around 4.5 to 6 hours of actual sleep.
Sleeping more than 9 hours is also bad
Rather, there is an upward hook in death risk once the average sleep amount passes nine hours, resulting in a tilted backward J shape
Sleeping longer when sick
Ergo, the sickest individuals should be sleeping longer to battle back against illness using the suite of health tools sleep has on offer. It is simply that some illnesses, such as cancer, can be too powerful even for the mighty force of sleep to overcome, no matter how much sleep is obtained.
Artificial light during evenings
Artificial evening light, even that of modest strength, or lux, will fool your suprachiasmatic nucleus into believing the sun has not yet set. The brake on melatonin, which should otherwise have been released with the timing of dusk, remains forcefully applied within your brain under duress of electric light.
Alcohol sedates the brain
Alcohol immobilizes that part of our brain first. As a result, we “loosen up,” becoming less controlled and more extroverted. But anatomically targeted brain sedation it still is.
Sleep and sedation are not the same
This is your brain slipping into sedation. Your desire and ability to remain conscious are decreasing, and you can let go of consciousness more easily. I am very deliberately avoiding the term “sleep,” however, because sedation is not sleep.
Natural sleep is not the same as taking prescription sleeping pills
No past or current sleeping medications on the legal (or illegal) market induce natural sleep. Don’t get me wrong—no one would claim that you are awake after taking prescription sleeping pills. But to suggest that you are experiencing natural sleep would be an equally false assertion.
Sleeping pills are dangerous!
He wanted to explore whether there was a relationship between sleeping pill use and altered disease or mortality risk. There was. Time and again, the same message emerged from the analyses: individuals taking sleeping pills were significantly more likely to die across the study periods
Some simple steps to help in sleeping
Glorifying sleep deprivation
We glorify the high-powered executive on email until 1:00 a.m., and then in the office by 5:45 a.m.; we laud the airport “warrior” who has traveled through five different time zones on seven flights over the past eight days.
Punctuality is not productivity
This mentality has persisted, in part, because certain business leaders mistakenly believe that time on-task equates with task completion and productivity. Even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue. It is a misguided fallacy, and an expensive one, too.
Circadian rhythm of teenagers
Previously, we noted that the circadian rhythm of teenagers shifts forward dramatically by one to three hours. So really the question I should ask you, if you are an adult, is this: Could you concentrate and learn anything after having forcefully been woken up at 3:15 a.m., day after day after day?
Schools used to have later start times
century ago, schools in the US started at nine a.m. As a result, 95 percent of all children woke up without an alarm clock. Now, the inverse is true, caused by the incessant marching back of school start times—which are in direct conflict with children’s evolutionarily preprogrammed need to be asleep during these precious, REM-sleep-rich morning hours.