The Link Between Sleep and Success

There has been prevailing wisdom between sleep and success for many years, but there are many successful people who swear they only need 4 hours a night to function at full capacity. Today we'll look at the link between sleep, health and success and the troubling implications of running a sleep debt.

Many of the tips and facts I'm going to share with you come from Dr. Mathew Walker's book entitled "Why We Sleep." Dr. Walker is an English scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Four Main Biological Drives

There are four main biological drives that we need to fulfill as human beings to continue to function. They are:

1. Eating

2. Drinking

3. Respiration

4. Sleeping

Without any of the four we we not be able to continue to function. While respiration must continue to occur in every conscious or unconscious state, every other biological function and drive must occur during waking consciousness.

Other Biological Drives We Need to Lead Happy and Healthy Lives:

1. Safety, security and shelter

2. Excretion and sexual release

3. The formation of intimate relationships, ingroup dynamics, and friendships

4. Esteem needs of prestige, employment, creation, or accomplishment

You might see that many of these needs follow the pyramid pioneered by psychologist Abraham Maslow. For more, see Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

What's interesting to note is sleep is the only one of these needs that occupies the entire unconscious state. Every other need has to be performed during waking consciousness. Sleep accounts for 1/3 of our lives while every other need has to fit into the other 2/3s. Why?

Every hour you are awake, you are damaging you brain

When you are awake, you are using your brain and body to accomplish you biological imperatives and needs. Because of your personal cycadean rhythm stored in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of your brain, your brain knows how long it should go without sleep before it needs to be repaired. Once you have gone through a full day, and your brain recognizes that it is dark out, melatonin will begin to assemble the biological compounds necessary for you to sleep.

One of these compounds, adenosine begins to build up in your brain, decreasing arousal and causing drowsiness. It creates a "sleep pressure" in your head, which is the feeling of wanting or needing to be carried off to sleep. Sufficient amounts of adenosine will stay in your brain and bloodstream until you wake up in the morning, at such time your brain will flush the compound until it is needed again.

During sleep your brain and body repairs themselves. During REM sleep, your memories are encoded.

There is a direct correlation between not getting adequate amounts of Non-REM sleep, and debilitating diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

“Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system; more than doubles your risk of cancer; disrupts blood-sugar levels, increasing your risk of diabetes; and increases the likelihood of blocked arteries, a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and stroke,” (Dr. Matthew Walker, the Irish Times Newsprint).

There is a direct correlation between getting adequate amounts of REM sleep and diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's.

There have been many people throughout history, successful people, who claim they only have to sleep three or four hours a night. Recent examples include Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Both did not get adequate sleep on a nightly basis, and both suffered from debilitating cases of dementia and Alzheimer's disease late in life.

This is because there is a direct correlation between REM sleep and memory encoding. When you learn something, it is stored in your short term memory. Due to neuroplasticity, repetition allows more synapses to form and create connections between concepts, ideas and thought processes. When you sleep, these connections and memories are encoded into long term memory.

How long does it take? It takes a minimum of three nights for information learned to be successfully transferred into long term memory. That means three nights of consistently long and deep sleep including periods of REM and Non-REM sleep.

Things that Can Disrupt Sleep

1. Alcohol

2. Blue Light

3. Caffeine

Alcohol

Every type of alcohol is a sedative (with the exception of tequila, which is a stimulant.)

Obviously, ingesting a stimulant can cause sleep disruption, but what about sedatives. What about the nightcap?

While drinking before bedtime can make you drowsy, the nighttime state of unconsciousness you enter with alcohol in your system is more akin to a kind of anesthesia, more than it is to true sleep. Your body does not get a chance to repair itself, as it spends its time trying to rid your system of alcohol, and often times is dehydrated by the effort.

What's worse, any information you are trying to encode is distorted during REM sleep. Lessons you learned two days previously will not be encoded as well as they would otherwise ordinarily have been.

If you have drink to extreme excess, no memories in your short term memory bank will make it to long term storage at all. Such a phenomenon is commonly referred to as "blacking out."

When you are hungover, the best things you can do are drink water, rest, and sleep. Because you missed out on a night of restful sleep, your body cannot function until it has recovered what it missed out on the night before.

Blue Light

Like all other mammals, we evolved from oceanic organisms. The ocean filters out most long wave light patterns, like reds and oranges. Only bluish short waves can get through. This is why the water looks blue when you open your eyes under water.

Because our sense of sight has evolved from such conditions, we have been left with a more acute perception of blue, short wave light. Ironically enough, it is exactly this type of light that lighted crystal displays (LCD's) utilize in TV's, smart phones and tablets.

If you ingest blue light from such a device two hours before bed, you are less likely to fall asleep quickly, and to have as restful a night of sleep as you might have otherwise done, leading to a kind of sleep hangover the following morning. Something that is often remedied by caffeine.

Caffeine

Caffeine that is ingested orally travels to our stomach where it is absorbed into our small intestine and carried into the blood stream. Once in the brain, the compound bonds with adenosine receptors. Adenosine, as I'm sure you recall, is the chemical organized by melatonin to create sleep pressure. So what caffeine does is really quite simple. It bonds to our adenosine receptors and doesn't allow adenosine to bond with them.

So while caffeine will fight to keep you awake, adenosine will fight to create sleep pressure, which is why you can still feel exhausted and wired at the same time. There is a potent cocktail of opposing chemicals doing battle for limited receptors in your head.

Ways to Improve Your Sleep

1. Only use yellow or orange light in your room before bed.

2. Wear blue light glasses if reading from an iPad or watching TV in bed.

3. Get up and go to sleep at the same time every night to ensure restful sleep.

4. Cut down on or cut out alcohol except for special occasions.

5. Do not have caffeine after a certain hour. Everyone is different.

6. Wash your face and hands with cool water and keep your sleep space cool. Humans prefer a cool environment to fall asleep in and we are more likely to stay asleep.