THE IMPORTANCE OF SLEEP

You are not aware of how important sleep is in your life. If you only read one piece of this whole educational interface, I would want you to read this section. You're sleeping on the effect it has on our everyday movements, thoughts, memory, feeling, and way more. I'll see myself out after that pun usage. Enjoy!

Sleep

One of my personal favorite topics that I think you will fall in love with too. We all love our sleep. After all we do spend about 1/3 of our lives sleeping. Read through this section to make sure you are getting the best sleep possible. If you like what you are reading, I suggest the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD. 2017. It will blow your mind.

Amount of Sleep Needed a Day by Age

The amount of time in bed on your phone or watching tv doesn't count. I am talking about actual sleep.

Newborn 0-3 months: 14-17 hours
Infants 4-12 months: 12-16 hours
Toddlers 1-2 years: 11-14 hours
Preschoolers 3-5 years: 10-13 hours
School age 6-12 years: 9-12 hours
Teens 13-18 years: 8-10 hours
Adults 18-60 years: 7+ hours
Adults 61-64 years: 7-9 hours
Adults 65+ years: 7-8 hours
Less than 6 hours of sleep can impair psychological and physiological functioning!
There is no such thing as "catching up on sleep". Once you sleep less than 7-8 hours, you have lost already. Doesn't matter if you sleep 4 hours one night and then 12 hours the next night. That is not how it works unfortunately.

Physical Benefits of Sleep

How does sleep benefit how you feel and recover?

The 2 main benefits of sleep are cellular restoration and memory consolidation. (In depth reading later on)
Allows our heart to rest.
Cells/tissue to repair.
Preventing illness or recover from illness.
Reduces risk of injury.
Increases attention span.
Promotes growth.
Resets immune system, metabolism, emotional control.

Common Components of Good Sleep Hygiene

Follow these tips to lay down a solid foundation to your sleep/ sleep routine.

Create an appropriate sleep environment: dark, cool, little to no noise.
Avoid alcohol and caffeine before bedtime.
Stay away from electronics an hour before bedtime: blue light devices can affect your circadian rhythm.
Have a wind down routine: reading, showering, meditate.
Don't nap after 3pm and no longer than an hour.
Reduce stressors.
Avoid training too early or too late.
Avoid overtraining.

Sleep Terms to Understand

Some sleep terms to read through and understand.

Sleep Debt: accumulated sleep that is lost each night.
Basal Sleep: amount of sleep we need on a regular basis
REM: Rapid Eye Movement
Hippocampus: diary, keeping track of recent short term memory
Circadian Rhythm: your 24 hour internal body clock that helps determine when you want to be awake and when you want to be asleep.
Hypnogram: sleep graph

Sleep Amongst Athletes

Lack of Sleep Affects an Athletes Performance

Don't let sleep be the thing holding you back from succeeding.

Sleep deprivation reduces the ability to react quickly and think clearly.
Increases irritability and risk for anxiety and depression.
Increases risk of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney disease, and stroke.

Am I Getting Enough Sleep?

Ask yourself these questions.

After waking up in the morning, could you fall back asleep at 10 or 11 am?
Can you function optimally without caffeine before noon?
If you didn't set an alarm clock, would you sleep past that time?
Do you find yourself at your computer screen reading and then rereading the same sentence?
Do you use your phone or watch TV right before you go to bed?
Are you constantly waking up during your sleep time?

When Athletes Do Not Receive Adequate Sleep

What happens if you don't get good quality sleep?

Inhibited ability.
Decreased accuracy.
Quicker exhaustion.
Decreased reaction time.
Risk for injury and risk of illness.
Difficulty learning and decision making.

Short Term Memory Process into Long Term Memory Storage

The key to remembering things is sleep.

Think of each individual slow wave of NREM sleep as a courier, able to carry bits of information between the different brain centers. Best way to think about converting short term memory into long term memory is a file transfer process. The long range brain waves of deep sleep will transport recent experiences from a short-term storage site, to a more permanent, long term location. A region of the brain called the hippocampus helps apprehend these passing experiences and binds their details together. The hippocampus offers a short term information store for accumulating new memories. Think of your hippocampus like a USB memory stick. Exceed its capacity and you run the risk of not being able to add more information or overwriting one memory with another (interference forgetting). During sleep, the file transfer process relays short term memories from the temporary storage depot (stored in hippocampus) into the long term memory vault (cortex).

Stages of Sleep

Stage 1

5% of nights sleep.

Transition period from wakefulness to sleep.

Brain waves start to slow down.

Stage 2

50% of sleep time.

Brain creating sleep spindles (operate like nocturnal soldiers who protect sleep by shielding the brain from external noises) that play a pivotal role in how we process information and store memories. The more sleep spindles an individual has at night, the greater the restoration of overnight learning ability come the next morning.

Stage 3

15-25% of sleep time.

Deepest portion of sleep time.

Body undergoes repair and growth, releasing hormones essential for recovery.

Stage 4

REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep.

Takes place 1-2 hours after initially falling asleep.

Deeper sleep than any non-REM stages.

When dreaming, your brain temporarily paralyzes our muscles.

We obtain much of our REM sleep and lighter NREM sleep late into the night.

Brain waves while dreaming look very similar to our brain waves while awake.

Lets Talk About Melatonin & Caffeine

Discover what Melatonin actually is and learn how bad Caffeine is for your sleep cycle!

Melatonin

What is it and How Does it Work?

It begins when your suprachiasmatic nucleas communicates its repeating signal of night and day to your brain using a circulating messenger called Melatonin. The rise of Melatonin begins after dusk where it is being released into your bloodstream from the pineal gland (area in the back of your brain). Think of Melatonin like a loud bullhorn shouting a message to the brain and body: "It is now dark! It is now dark!" Melatonin helps regulate the timing of when sleep occurs but it has little influence on the generation of sleep itself.

Melatonin

What does Melatonin actually do?

Matthew Walker explains it best in his book, Why We Sleep: Think of sleep like a 100 meter race at the Olympics. Melatonin is the voice of the timing official that says, "Runners, on your mark," and then fires the starting pistol that initiates the race. The timing official (Melatonin) governs when the race (sleep) begins, but does not participate in the race.

Melatonin corrals those sleep generating regions of the brain to the starting line of our bedtime. Melatonin provides the instruction to commence the event of sleep, but does not participate in the sleep race itself.

Once sleep is under way, Melatonin slowly decreases in concentration across the night and into the morning. When sunlight enters the brain by going through our eyes, a brake pedal is applied to the pineal gland, therefore shuts off the release of Melatonin. The absence of Melatonin lets the brain and body know that the finish line of sleep has been reached.

Caffeine

Learn about Adenosine first.

Right when you wake up, a chemical called Adenosine is building up in your brain. It will continue to increase in concentration with every waking minute that passes. High concentrations of Adenosine turn down the "volume" of wake promoting regions in the brain while turning up the sleep inducing regions. You can artificially mute the sleep signal of Adenosine by using a chemical that makes you feel more alert and awake and that is Caffeine.

Caffeine

What happens in the brain?

Caffeine battles with Adenosine for the ability to latch on to receptors in the brain. Once latched on, caffeine blocks and effectively inactivates the receptors, acting as a masking agent. Caffeine blocks the sleepiness signal that is normally communicated to the brain by Adenosine.

"Half life" is used when discussing a drugs efficacy. Caffeine has a half life of 5-7 hours.

Why do you crash on caffeine? The entire time that caffeine is in your system, Adenosine continues to build up. Your brain isn't aware of the continuing build up of sleep-encouraging Adenosine because the giant wall of caffeine you've created is holding it back from your perception. Once your liver dismantles that wall of caffeine, you are smacked with the sleepiness you had experienced hours ago before the coffee PLUS all the extra Adenosine that has accumulated in the hours in between, impatiently waiting for the caffeine to leave. That means once caffeine is decomposed, Adenosine comes rushing back in and levels the receptors. When that happens, you are hit by a forceful Adenosine- trigger urge to sleep- the caffeine crash.