On:
- Dangers of poor sleep, Alzheimer’s risk, mental health, etc.
- Heart disease, cancer, sexual function, sleep disruption.
- Effects of poor sleep from performance to genetics.
Episode: 48,49,50″
Date: April 2019
Background: Neuroscientist, sleep expert.
Key Subjects:
Part 1
- We need sleep to “clean up”.
- Being awake causes “low level brain damage”.
- Sleep cleans out of bad protein aggregations that build up during the day.
- Four pillars of good sleep:
- Regularity, continuity, quantity and quality.
- Sleep deprivation causes the quickest reduction of health.
- Foundation on which diet, stress and exercise health pillars sit.
- Sleep window determines what part of sleep cycle you get more of.
- Sleep early – more deep; sleep later – more REM.
- Both REM and non-REM sleep stages are vital.
- REM is the most recently evolved stage.
- All animals have non-REM sleep.
- REM is seen only in birds and mammals.
Part 2
- You can’t build up a buffer for sleep.
- Meaning, you don’t store sleep like you store fat.
- Naps may be good.
- 20-90 minutes, don’t wake after 45 minutes (groggy).
- Sympathetic state, insomnia.
- Sleep is a balancing act of of cortisol, adenosine and melatonin cycles (see “Sleep“).
- Insomnia driven by sympathetic state “turned up” too far, cortisol spikes.
- Fix sympathetic state (behavioral solutions) or fix cortisol (supplements).
Part 3
- Lack of sleep triggers many negative processes in the body (see “Sleep“).
- Stress, weight gain, worse diet, less exercise, lower performance, worse decisions, etc.
- Macro (slowly developing diseases, behavior) and micro (cellular pathways and interaction).
- Not helpful:
- Alcohol: fragments sleep, no REM.
- Caffeine: blocks adenosine build-up (see “Sleep“).
- Relevant sleep benchmarks:
- Resting heart rate, HRV, respiratory rate, body temperature.
- Mental health and sleep quality:
- Two way street: mental health drives sleep quality and vice versa.