What if I told each and every one of you that you have access to something that could improve your heart health, make you happier, and less depressed improve your performance, and maybe even help you lose weight.
sleep superpower and how you can access it.
Sleep is super important for so many different aspects of your quality of life.
the American Academy of sleep medicine and the sleep research society recommend getting seven or more hours of sleep for optimal health.
how many of us can sleep more than seven hours at night.
About sleep how do our bodies know when it's time to sleep. we all of us have an internal clock it's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and it's in the brain this response to the amount of daylight around us to tells us when it's awake time and when it's time to go to sleep this is called the circadian rhythm.
Interestingly everyone's circadian rhythm is not the same so you all know somebody who is a really good early morning person wakes up bright and excited to take on the day and there are other people who would sleep till noon.
We have variations in chronotype so this was actually a survival advantage you can think back to when we didn't have modern-day society and we lived in maybe tribes and didn't have security systems so at that point people had to take turns staying awake throughout the night .
They could oversee and make sure that the tribe was safe and so it made sense that some people
would be better at sleeping later in the morning and some people would be better sleeping
earlier at night and this also tends to switch over a lifetime.
if you all have ever been a teenager or have any teenage children you'll realize that they never want to get out of bed before noon that's because their chronotype is optimized to be waking up in the late
morning in addition to our exposure to light in our chronotype.
There's another chemical that builds up in our brains called adenosine and when you wake up in the morning you've got a clean slate no adenosine and throughout the day adenosine builds up and builds up and as it continues to build up you get more and more sleepy, interestingly caffeine blocks adenosine so that we don't get that fatigue feeling however once the caffeine wears off all the adenosine rushes back causes the caffeine crash so how do you get good quality sleep sure it's the number of hours you sleep but it's also how deeply you sleep meaning how often are you aroused at night and that's something that usually you're not aware of but certain things can affect the quality of sleep so if you have sleep disorders like sleep apnea where you wake up and you find yourself struggling to breathe and fall back asleep or your partner might tell you that or you're having restless leg syndrome or your legs are moving quite a bit.
If you've had a lot of caffeine or alcohol late in the day that can affect the quality of your sleep and interestingly we are the only species that actively tries to limit our sleep every other species goes to sleep at around the same time every day and wakes up around the same time every day so I mentioned that caffeine may disrupt your sleep and you may have difficulty falling asleep i have plenty of times drinking caffeine late in the day particularly when your are working and you would fall asleep quite easily but it does affect the number of awakenings you have and makes your quality of sleep more poor, similarly alcohol will disrupt certain stages of your sleep and make you wake up more frequently throughout the night producing lower quality sleep .so you can see the effects of sleep deprivation if of course you don't sleep for a night or most of the night but it can also build up if you've had multiple nights where you've slept maybe six or less hours and it can cause cumulative effects which can be more difficult to recognize the first way that sleep can affect your quality of life is that it can affect your sleep what we call cognitive function.
It’s the ability to perform tasks or respond to tasks appropriately so when tasks are really easy and repetitive it can just take longer for people to respond but when they become more complex it can really affect your ability to perform optimally.
In fact, in certain small studies they found that even three days of sleeping less than six hours can affect your ability to perform optimally.
Another thing not getting enough sleep can actually affect your mood right so many of us have been slept deprived and we're more irritable more may be depressed or anxious.
If you've got chronic sleep deprivation you're not allowing yourself to sleep enough at night that can become a chronic state of being but if you tend to restore that sleep and get good quality of sleep you will find yourself be happier less irritable and increase your energy.
What we call micro sleeps so if you've ever been in a situation where you've been sleep deprived and driving you may actually remember having microsleeps in your car where you stop at a red light and you fall asleep for a couple of seconds and wake up these are essentially not under your control you can open a window you can blast the music you can do all those things but they're not going to stop that drive of your body needing to sleep and if you're driving when that micro-sleep happens it can really cause a serious car accident.
Sleep deprivation is a cardiovascular risk factor and the reason for this is that when you are in lack of sleep your body revs up your sympathetic nervous system and your sympathetic nervous system is kind of your fight or flight system it's what your body does when it's in a state of stress it needs to run away from like a lion that's chasing you and during this time your heart rate and your blood pressure go up. the study in the UK of 500 000 people who had no history of cardiovascular disease and they looked at people who slept for less than six hours just chronically slept for less than six hours they followed them over seven years and they found that people who slept less had a 20 percent higher risk of a heart attack or a myocardial infarction 20 just from not sleeping enough interestingly sleeping
over nine hours was also a risk factor for having a poor cardiovascular outcome, in another study
looked at 4 000 people who didn't have any heart disease or sleep apnea and they looked at those
who had less than six hours of sleep a night and they used ultrasound to look at a couple of
major
arteries in the body to see if there was plaque buildup or which is what we see in patients who
have heart disease and in fact, those who did sleep less than six hours had a higher burden of what we
called atherosclerotic plaque in their arteries.
Sleep deprivation can put you at higher risk of obesity diabetes or what we call metabolic syndrome when you sleep deprived you are more likely to eat snacks and eat high carbohydrate processed foods rather than eating whole-natural foods.
People who are sleep deprived have higher levels of ghrelin which is a hormone that stimulates appetite and lower levels of leptin which reduces appetite which causes people to have more cravings they've also done some small studies where they've sleep-deprived people and given them free access to food and they found that people who were more sleep deprived tended to eat more high carbohydrate foods about 300 600 calories more than the groups that slept well and lastly sleep can actually affect your immune.
A study shows that people who are sleep deprived have either a less robust response to the vaccination or they're more likely to get the cold when they're exposed to it if they're sleep deprived bottom line of sleep is super important.
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