Our whole lives we hear about how important it is that we get our full eight hours of rest, but the truth is, many of us don’t follow this advice. In an age of long working hours, constant distraction, and the eternal struggle to keep up with family and friends, spending one third of our lives unconscious can feel like a waste of time. However, sacrificing sleep for extra time might be one of the worst things you can do for your health. The benefits of being properly rested far outweigh the benefits of an extra hour or two of wakefulness. We’re here to explore why regularly getting a proper night’s rest is the ultimate life hack.
WHAT COUNTS AS A PROPER NIGHT'S SLEEP?
Before we dive into the benefits of proper sleep, let’s define what counts as proper sleep. A good night’s sleep is built around roughly five complete cycles. Sleep cycles range from about 80-120 minutes each, and consist of four parts: wakefulness, light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. In order for a night’s sleep to be optimal, you need to cycle through each stage repeatedly. These repetitive cycles are critical to your body’s regeneration, healing, and long-term brain health.
Certain sleep disorders like sleep apnea can interrupt this cycle, making your body fail to achieve deep sleep and REM sleep. Sufferers rarely make it past light sleep, so even if they’re in bed for eight or more hours, they won’t feel rested the next day. If you feel like you aren’t suitably rested after eight hours, nutritional intervention may be beneficial.
DETOXIFY YOUR BRAIN
When you do achieve a good night’s rest, the process cleans out your brain. Your brain cells contract slightly, allowing your brain to flush out degenerative toxins like plaque and cellular waste that build up throughout the day. A study was done in which researchers injected dye into the cerebrospinal fluid of rats, then watched brain activity as it progressed throughout the day. They found that the dye flowed quickly during unconscious states but much more slowly during wakefulness. This detoxication is essential in preventing neurodegenerative processes and is especially important in people over the age of 35, who are more susceptible to the harmful effects of toxins.
LEARN AND REMEMBER MORE
This cleansing process is essential for learning, processing, and storing new memories. There are three essential mechanisms to the learning process: acquisition, consolidation, and recall. These terms describe the introduction of new information, the stabilization of new information, and the ability to access that information respectively. Both acquisition and recall take place during wakefulness, but consolidation takes place during sleep. During memory consolidation, your brain strengthens neural connections that are essential to making these memories available for later recall. There is no consensus on why this happens, but many scientists believe the type of brainwaves present during sleep are responsible.
Scientists are currently researching whether different types of learning correspond to consolidation in different stages of sleep. While there is much more research to be done, existing studies have suggested that both declarative memory and procedural memory are consolidated during REM sleep, the deepest stage of the cycle. Declarative memory refers to your ability to remember factual information, for example that Canada is north of the USA or that dogs have fur. Procedural memory refers to your ability to remember how to do something, like driving a car or playing an instrument. Clearly, it is essential that you achieve REM sleep frequently in order to continue to learn and maintain brain health.
COMBAT EXCESSIVE STRESS
Stress is an essential part of life. It helps us avoid dangerous situations and approach important tasks with a necessary sense of urgency. Too much stress, however, can wreak havoc on both your mental health and your productivity. Excessive stress can come from excessive perception of stress itself, a phenomenon known as stress awareness, and stress awareness has been demonstrated to have a close relationship with sleep deprivation.
A 2018 study from South Korea examined the stress awareness of a group of salaried workers who either slept five or less hours per night or got a full night’s sleep. Those that slept less reported a much higher level of stress awareness.
The thyroid and adrenal glands can provide some insight into what’s happening here. These glands are essential in the production of cortisol, a hormone which responds to stress by increasing glucose in the bloodstream and enhancing your brain’s use of glucose. It also limits your brain’s nonessential functions, allowing you to properly focus on the stressful task at hand. When stress is a chronic problem, these glands are unable to maintain sufficient energy production to keep up with the production of cortisol. This causes a chemical imbalance that characterizes “stress burnout” syndrome, when you receive all the unpleasant feelings associated with stress but none of the benefits of your body’s natural response. This may cause you to dwell on aspects of your situation that aren’t helpful in solving the problem.
Some people fall into the trap of getting less sleep in order to have more time to live their busy lives. However, if this deprivation leads to excessive stress, that stress will cut into your precious time regardless. This stress can make it more difficult to sleep, leading to a vicious cycle in which you are continually awake for more hours of your life, but you are far less efficient, rendering the extra time useless. This doesn’t even account for the unpleasant nature of the stress itself. You are far better off getting a full night’s sleep and approaching your daily challenges with a healthy, efficient state of mind.
BOOST YOUR MOOD
Everyone has woken up on the wrong side of the bed, especially after a night spent tossing and turning as you try to sleep. The effects can linger with you all day, leaving you irritable, short-tempered, and more susceptible to harmful stress. If these sleepless nights accumulate, these short-term poor moods can manifest into something more long-term. One study found that roughly three-quarters of depressed patients also had symptoms of insomnia. It also found that hypersomnia was present in 40% of young depressed adults, demonstrating that poor sleep behaviors can work in both directions. This study concluded that the link between depression and insomnia was so fundamental that a diagnosis of depression in an insomniac should be made cautiously.
While these cycles can be difficult to escape, they are certainly worth the effort. Another study showed that a previous day’s bad mood can affect your sleep quality, but quality of sleep has a much stronger effect on the next day’s mood. In other words, if you want to break the cycle, start by improving sleep quality rather than trying to fix your mood.
FINE TUNE YOUR ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE
Whether you are a habitual athlete or not, it’s no secret that physical activity is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. Exercise reduces the risk of many diseases, both physical and mental. It also helps you sleep better. The same process works in reverse. Exercise and sleep work in tandem, promoting healthy habits in one another.
Naturally, the positive benefits of sleep we’ve already mentioned will be helpful during exercise. A better mood might make you more likely to go for a run, which will further improve your mood. If you’re learning a sport, the consolidation of procedural processes like shooting a basketball or hitting a tennis ball will allow you to improve faster. However, there are physical benefits in addition to mental ones.
Studies have shown that better sleep significantly reduces risks of both illness and injury in athletes. Others studied the relationship between sleep quality and muscle growth in athletes, finding that men with sleep durations of less than six hours had less muscle strength than men who slept seven or more hours.
During REM sleep, an important physiological growth hormone is secreted. While your muscles are relaxed, this hormone is able to do its work in building the muscles you worked so hard to gain during the day. Without adequate sleep, muscle building activities can lead to chronic pain due to the inability of growth hormones to work.
THE BOTTOM LINE: GET ENOUGH SLEEP
Next time you’re up late finishing a work project or bingeing a new show, consider that you might be sabotaging your brain’s natural rhythm. After all, even when your time is limited and each hour is precious, sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to dedicate enough of it to one of life’s most precious processes.
If you are doing all the right things, and getting a good night’s sleep continues to be difficult, it may be more than just your bed time that’s impacting your sleep quality. Nutritional imbalances, particularly the magnesium-calcium ratio, can inhibit you from achieving the deep sleep that your body requires for regeneration and healing essential to your long-term health. If you are struggling with your sleep, we recommend testing your cellular nutrient levels with an easy at-home test kit, to support your sleep from the inside.