Beauty sleep and more
The area in life where we invest more is Sleep, or at least what should represent the biggest chunk of our time. In this publication, you will find some statistics and graphical representations on the subject. For a person aged 79, he spends about 33 years in bed (of which 26 are sleeping and 7 are trying to fall asleep). Work represents the second area of life to which we devote more time, on average 13 years and 2 months dedicated to it.
This is the first publication on the 8 areas of life that have a direct impact on your health. The first area is Sleep because it’s what we invest the most time in our life, or at least what should represent the biggest chunk of our time.
Sleep 101
Sleep is regulated by the circadian cycle, influenced by internal and external factors (such as exposure to natural or artificial light).
- Non-REM sleep: restorative function
Composed of 3 phases that contain deep sleep and light sleep
→ Helps clear the brain of neurotoxins (these neurotoxins have been linked to Alzheimer’s disease).
→ helps improve learning and retention of new motor skills.
- REM sleep: processes memories and thoughts of the day
→ helps improve learning and retention of new cognitive skills.
“Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.” Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams
- A REM and non-REM cycle lasts about 90 to 120min. The Sleep Cycle application works as an alarm clock that wakes you up at the best time (depending on an interval of 30 minutes chosen by you), being at the end of one of these cycles. This is why it is said that we should sleep in multiples of an hour and a half (7:30 am is about 5 cycles). However, the length of each cycle varies in different people, and even the same person can have different cycle lengths during sleep.
- Sleep is regulated by hormones and by external factors (such as light and others that will also influence the production or not of certain hormones).
For example, coffee wakes us up because it blocks the production of the hormone adenosine, which causes drowsiness and accumulates throughout the day.
What happens if we don’t sleep
Insufficient sleep is associated with a range of negative health and social outcomes, including an adverse performance at school and in the labor market. Reduced sleep duration has been linked to 7 of the 15 leading causes of death in the U.S., including cardiovascular disease, malignant neoplasm, cerebrovascular disease, accidents, diabetes, septicemia, and hypertension. Kochanek et al, 2014
How to turn sleep more efficient
Level 1
- Sleep between 7 and 9 hours. On average, an adult needs 7:30 am to sleep.
- Avoid caffeine in the last 6h-10h before going to sleep, and avoid nicotine. After about 5 hours of drinking coffee, our body still has about 50% of the caffeine ingested. This means that having a coffee at 2pm = 1/2 coffee at 7pm. Caffeine inhibits the production of the hormone adenosine that promotes drowsiness.
- Avoid alcohol at night. Alcohol can help in the early stages of sleep because as it works as a sedative, you can fall asleep faster, but it inhibits the REM phase, creating an imbalance between Non-REM and REM duration. As mentioned above, the REM phase is responsible for the creation of new memories. Therefore, this is the part that is most compromised with alcohol consumption.
- Exercise regularly, but not 3 hours before bedtime.
- Avoid large evening meals. The body cannot be working to digest food and at the same time work to form memories and expel toxins during sleep. Avoid drinking too much fluid during the night so that you don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
Level 2
- Avoid stimuli, 1h before going to sleep (television, cell phones, tablet…). Exposure to light disrupts our hormone production because our eyes send the signal to our body that it is still daylight. Watching a series also keeps your brain working on processing the information in it instead of starting to relax to take care of the functions it should while you sleep.
- Try to sleep at the same time (with a maximum variation of 1 hour). Our body is like a biocomputer, and it adapts to the new internal and external information it receives daily. If we are constantly sleeping at different times, our body will not have time to adapt, creating a misalignment between the external environment and our internal biological clock. It’s like we have to expose our bodies to small levels of jet lag daily.
- No naps in the last 7 hours before bedtime.
Super Level
- Create a sleep hygiene routine. Take time to relax by doing for example yoga, meditation or breathing exercises.
- Take a hot water bath. Our body temperature drops by around 1 °C at night and by taking a hot water bath our body will want to release the extra heat after the shower and will more quickly reach the ideal temperature for sleeping.
- There is no light in the room, a mild temperature (around 17–19 °C), avoid cell phones and TV in the room, and strive for silence.
- Have good sun exposure during the day, and little exposure to light (natural or otherwise) before going to sleep.
- Avoid going to bed when you’re not sleepy. The bedroom should not be used to “gain” sleep, but to sleep or have sex. If we are not sleepy, we should do some activities to relax (meditation, preferably reading a book or with at least light on the tablet if you use the Kindle app).
Final thoughts
It is urgent to break the stigma that sleep is for lazy people. Sleeping is much more than resting! Sleep helps us to have energy for the next day, helps us form memories, helps us to learn and new motor and cognitive skills, decreases the likelihood of cravings for less healthy foods, etc. We are the only living being that purposely deprives itself of sleep. Stopping to reflect on our evolution story, we wouldn’t deprive ourselves of sleep unless we were in danger or lacked food. It’s so obvious to see the connection between not getting a good night’s sleep with cravings for foods high in fat or sugar and being stressed.
Sleep deprivation → Warning sign for danger → Seeking foods that give us energy → searching for foods high in fat and/or sugar
Sleep deprivation → Warning sign for danger → Searching for energy to search for food or run from danger → Increased production of the stress hormone, cortisol
We should start prioritizing a good night’s sleep, gradually starting to apply some of the techniques I mentioned above to continually improve our health.
And why the title “Beauty Sleep”? Because I’ve heard it and said it many times and, in fact, I thought I said it just because not sleeping caused dark circles under the eyes, but as we’ve seen here, it’s not just beauty sleep, but the sleep that brings health.
Coach Corner
How important are you to sleep? Do you feel you have energy after waking up? Do you feel rejuvenated after a night’s sleep, or do you feel like you need to go back to bed and go back to sleep?
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