Why Sleep Matters

Good sleep is essential for our well being and is characterized by more than just the number of hours we sleep! Read on to learn...

Why Care About Sleep (Beyond Recharging)

The Four Elements of a Good Night's Sleep - QQRT

---

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, maintaining our empathy.

• 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.

These are just a few of the many superpowers of sleep.

Risk Factors of Poor Sleep - A Few Examples

Most issues from an occasional poor night of sleep can 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 and resilience - our natural self-healing, self-cleaning, and self-regenerating processes. It may be years, even decades, before the cumulative effects are noticed.

Examples of dysregulated processes due to poor sleep include:

• Hormones signaling our brain to keep eating - even when full.

• Impulse control mechanism breakdown, loss of empathy.

• Loss of therapeutic dream state sleep making us more vulnerable to depression.

• Lost time for memory processing creating immediate cognition challenges.

• Lost time for brain detox increasing future cognition challenges (e.g., dementia).

• Lost energy renewal - mental and physical - needed to engage with life.

Specific outcome examples include:

• 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. Our brain runs out of time to finish the clean up when we miss these early hours of deep sleep.

• Memory Challenges. 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 to capture new memories. When we wake up too early, fewer connections are made for learning and creative problem solving.

• Heart Attack and Stroke. Poor sleep increases blood pressure and the speed and contraction of the heart while decreasing Heart Rate Variability (two bio-markers we'd rather avoid). When chronic, poor sleep leads to inflammation which in turn leads to plaque buildup in the arteries (atherosclerosis), these all combine to create serious risk factors for heart attack and stroke. Good sleep helps reduce these risks.

• 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 flu vaccine antibody responses.) 

• Depression and Anxiety. Good REM sleep is our free, private therapy session to process our emotions so we're less easily irritated and less susceptible to depression, anxiety, and reactive behaviors. Losing early morning REM sleep cuts short this therapy session and can put the brain into a "fear-bias" default mode. This fear-bias mode leads to perceiving the world as more hostile than reality justifies.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE
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."

---

The Four Elements of a Good Night's Sleep - QQRT

What do we mean when we say "a good night's sleep"? 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 and minimizing the risks of poor sleep.

Applying my favorite definition from expert Matt Walker, good sleep is Quantity and Quality grounded by regular Routine that is Timed to align with your natural Circadian Schedule: QQRT.

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. A few short wakeups are 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 20-30 minutes for bedtime and 20-30 minutes for wake time

Timing

Alignment with your natural Circadian Chronotype (earlier/later bedtimes for some individuals, earlier/later wakeup time for others)

Next Steps

See potential to up your sleep game? Explore our Sleep Portal for JC's Notes, worksheets, and links to more detail from the experts.

Wishing you well,

Janice

---

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.