📖Good sleep, good learning, good life

authors

Wozniak, Piotr

year

2017

url

http://super-memory.com/articles/sleep.htm

Sleep isn’t just a form of rest! Sleep plays a critical physiological function, and is indispensable for your intellectual development! Those who do not respect their sleep are not likely to live to their full mental potential!

Many books on psychiatry and psychology still state that there aren’t any significant side effects to prolonged sleeplessness! This is false! The Guinness Book of Records has since withdrawn its sleep deprivation category due to the involved health risks.

The hippocampus acts as the central switchboard for the brain that can easily store short-term memory patterns. However, these patterns have to be encoded in the neocortex to provide space for coding new short-term memories. This complex process of rebuilding the neural network of the brain takes place during sleep. Unlike rest or conservation of energy, this highest feat of evolutionary neural mathematics requires the brain to be shut off entirely from environmental input (in most animals)! This automatic rewiring is the main reason for which we sleep and why there is no conscious processing involved! During sleep, the brain works as hard as during SAT or GRE exams. It rewires its circuits to make sure that all newly gained knowledge is optimally stored for future use.

Sleep researchers constructed a cruel contraption that would wake up rats as soon as they fell asleep. This contraptions showed that it takes an average of 3 weeks to kill a rat by sleep deprivation (or some 5 months by REM sleep deprivation alone)(Rechtschaffen 1998[7]). Dr Siegel demonstrated brain damage in sleep-deprived rats (Siegel 2003[8]). Due to an increase in the level of glucocorticoids, neurogenesis in some portions of the brain is inhibited by lack of sleep[9]. In short, sleep deprivation is very bad for the health of the brain.

However, we have a rough idea as to the degree of human durability in sleep deprived state due to fact that we can study the effects of sleep disorders. One of them is fatal familial insomnia, in which a mutation causes the affected people to suffer from a progressively worsening insomnia that ends in death within a few months.

Sleep protection

There is a second layer of trouble in sleep deprivation. Due to the importance of sleep, all advanced organisms implement a sleep protection program. This program ensures that sleep deprivation results in unpleasant symptoms. It also produces a remarkably powerful sleep drive that is very hard to overcome. Staying awake becomes unbearable. Closing one’s eyes becomes one of the most soothing things in the universe. Are these symptoms a result of network malfunction? Definitely not. If they were, the drive to sleep might malfunction as well. Moreover, recovery from sleep deprivation would not be as fast, as easy, and as complete! Sleep protection program is there, and it can make the effects of sleep deprivation worse. Like a cytokine storm in an overzealous immune system, sleep protection program can potentially add to the damage caused by the network malfunction in sleep deprivation.

Why do we die without sleep?

It is impossible to quantify the contribution of those three factors to the fatal outcome of prolonged sleep deprivation:

network malfunction, or secondary effects of sleep protection program, or continuous catabolic state.

To get high quality night sleep that maximizes your learning effects your sleep start time should meet these two criteria:

strong homeostatic sleepiness: this usually means going to sleep not earlier than 15-19 hours after awakening from the previous night sleep ascending circadian sleepiness: this means going to sleep at a time of day when you usually experience a rapid increase in drowsiness. Not earlier and not later! Knowing the timing of your circadian rhythm is critical for good night sleep

You should be aware that using the circadian component will only work when all its physiological subcomponents run in sync (as it is the case in free running sleep). People with irregular sleep hours and highly stressful lives may simply be unable to locate the point of ascending circadian sleepiness as this point may not exist!

Most of us are able to entrain this 25 circadian rhythm into a 24-hour cycle by using factors that reset the oscillation. These factors include intense morning light, work, exercise, etc.

entrainment the process in which one’s natural sleep cycle is adapted to fit the 24-hour day with the waking hour early enough for one’s work, school, social life, etc. Entrained sleep is sleep that does not require an alarm clock to “bring it into phase”

Free running sleep is defined by the abstinence from all forms of sleep control such as alarm clocks, sleeping pills, alcohol, caffeine, etc.

In other words, free running sleep occurs when you go to sleep only then when you are truly sleepy (independent of the relationship of this moment to the actual time of day).

If we exclude unhealthy techniques:

It is not possible to fall asleep whenever we wish. It is not possible to wake up whenever we wish. It is not possible to eliminate evening sleepiness.

Free running sleep algorithm

Start with a meticulous log in which you will record the hours in which you go to sleep and wake up in the morning. If you take a nap during the day, put it in the log as well (even if the nap takes as little as 1-3 minutes). The log will help you predict the optimum sleeping hours and improve the quality of sleep. Once your self-research phase is over, you will accumulate sufficient experience to need the log no longer; however, you will need it at the beginning to better understand your rhythms. You can use SleepChart to simplify the logging procedure and help you read your circadian preferences. Go to sleep only then when you are truly tired. You should be able to sense that your sleep latency is likely to be less than 5-10 minutes. If you do not feel confident you will fall asleep within 10-20 minutes, do not go to sleep! If this requires you to stay up until early in the morning, so be it! Be sure nothing disrupts your sleep! Do not use an alarm clock! If possible, sleep without a bed partner (at least in the self-research period). Keep yourself well isolated from sources of noise and from rapid changes in lighting. Avoid stress during the day, esp. in the evening hours. This is particularly important in the self-research period while you are still unsure how your optimum sleep patterns look. Stress hormones have a powerful impact on the timing of sleep. Stressful thoughts are also likely to keep you up at the time when you shall be falling asleep. After a couple of days, try to figure out the length of your circadian cycle. If you arrive at a number that is greater than 24 hours, your free running sleep will result in going to sleep later on each successive day. This will ultimately make you sleep during the day at times. This is why you may need a vacation to give free running sleep an honest test. Days longer than 24 hours are pretty normal, and you can stabilize your pattern with properly timed signals such as light and exercise. This can be very difficult if you are a DSPS type. Once you know how much time you spend awake on average, make a daily calculation of the expected hour at which you will go to sleep (I use the term expected bedtime and expected retirement hour to denote times of going to bed and times of falling asleep, which in free running sleep are almost the same). This calculation will help you predict the sleep onset. On some days you may feel sleepy before the expected bedtime. Do not fight sleepiness, go to sleep even if this falls 2-3 hours before your expected bedtime. Similarly, if you do not feel sleepy at the expected bedtime, stay up, keep busy and go to sleep later, even if this falls 2-4 hours after your expected bedtime.

Cardinal mistakes in free running sleep

do not go to sleep before you are sleepy enough - this may result in falling asleep for 10-30 minutes, and then waking up for 2-4 hours. Ultimately you can experience an artificial shift forward in the entire cycle! unless for natural reasons (no sleepiness), do not go to sleep well after the expected bedtime. This will result in missing the period of maximum circadian sleepiness. Your sleep will be shorter and less refreshing. Your measurements will be less regular and you will find it harder to predict the optimum timing of sleep in following days do not take a nap later than 7-8 hours from waking. Late naps are likely to affect the expected bedtime and disrupt your cycle. If you feel sleepy in the evening, you will have to wait for the moment when you believe you will be able to sleep throughout the night