Sleep in your hands: Why did we stop getting enough sleep and how to adjust the regime
"We spend much more sleep than we need, forgetting that a sleeping fox does not catch chickens and that it will be possible to sleep off the grave, ”wrote Benjamin Franklin in“ The Almanac of Poor Richard ”, and his opinion is readily shared by many modern startups. Even scientists were joking at one time, as if the only completely understandable sleep function is “sleep treatment”, and in 2006, in a review of sleep studies, neurobiologist Marcos Frank concluded that many of the evidence for the beneficial effects of sleep on the body are “weak or erroneous”.
Several years have passed, and now you rarely hear such skepticism. We spend a third of life in a dream, and it may seem as if it is the most unproductive third of it: instead of creating another web page, planning a long-suffering journey to Koh Samui or, at worst, starting to read a new book, we just lie with our eyes closed and not really aware of ourselves. Although the phenomenon of sleep is still not fully experienced by scientists, they, like ordinary mortals, are unanimous in that healthy sleep greatly improves the quality of life, and its lack makes us the walking dead.
Is it true that we all began to sleep less
We sleep, however, less and less. Dr. Charles Zeisler, specializing in the study of sleep and disorders associated with it, found out that over the past fifty years, the average length of sleep on weekdays has decreased by an hour and a half - from eight and a half to seven, and the figure continues to fall. The data is confirmed by the Sleep Cycle tracker application, which tracks user movements and wakes them up during the fast sleep phase, when it is easiest to wake up. More than two million people aged 18 to 55 years from 47 countries around the world use this application. According to the Sleep Cycle, the average Russian goes to bed at 1:05 and wakes up at 8:06. In the general summary of the average "quality of sleep," Russia was ranked eleventh. The leader is Slovakia, followed by China, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Switzerland, Taiwan, Austria and Ukraine, and the top ten are Germany.
In the era of information, multitasking and transcendental ambitions, when time is running too fast, and you need to catch as much as possible, we finally stopped finding time for a full sleep. But it didn’t start at all with the launch of the first iPhone application and concerns not only adults, but also children. The population as a whole devotes less and less precious hours to sleep, and many of us have suffered from the "wrong" regime since childhood.
Lisa Matrichchiani, a sleep researcher at the University of South Australia, did a great job of collecting data on the duration of sleep in children from 1905 to 2008, and found that every year the children lost a minute to sleep. And Judith Owens, director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at the Boston Children's Hospital, studied the relationship between the start time of school and the state of schoolchildren, and her findings were disappointing. From about the 1960s, schools in the United States and Europe began to shift the start of classes to ever earlier hours, which adversely affected children's health. While most adults need eight hours of sleep, babies need about thirteen, and teenagers need about nine and a half.
The performance of someone who did not sleep a day is equal to the performance of a person with a blood alcohol level of 1
Moreover, Owens argues that adolescents are often "owls" for whom it is not a whim to go to bed and wake up, but a team of "internal hours", that is, a circadian rhythm - a biological process that guides the cycles of sleep and awakening. “It’s not just a matter of losing sleep. It’s a circadian failure,” says Judith Owens. “Children have to wake up when their brain tells them to sleep deeply. Waking a teenager at six in the morning is like an adult at three in the morning.” The effect of such an accumulating lack of sleep in children and adolescents is similar to a constant jetlag, which, moreover, is exacerbated when trying to compensate for the lack of sleep by thorough hibernation on weekends. The executive functions of the brain weaken, and this affects everything from emotional reactions to judgment and decision making. As a result, children become more susceptible to depression and behave impulsively.
Unfortunately, with growing up, the quality of sleep is only getting worse. Josna Adusumilli, a neurologist from Harvard and a doctor treating sleep problems, states that if we get only six hours of sleep each night for twelve days, our cognitive abilities become indistinguishable from those of a person who has not slept for 24 hours in a row, and the same result be observed after six days of four-hour sleep. And the performance of someone who did not sleep a day is equal to the performance of a person with a blood alcohol level of 1. In other words, constantly depriving ourselves of sleep in reasonable, at first glance, limits, in our reactions and behavior, we gradually approach a drunk person.
What keeps us awake
The city falls asleep, the epiphysis wakes up - and it begins to produce melatonin, which informs the brain that it is time to calm down. The body temperature drops, and the limbs become warm, which allows the body's internal clock to synchronize. The pressure goes down, the heart beats slower and slower. Breathing levels out and we sleep peacefully. But what factors influence how quickly and easily this happens (if at all)? Scientists who investigate how we fall asleep take a lot of details into account when collecting statistical data - from age, weight and bad habits to medications taken and individual sleep and wake up schedules. It turns out that part of the responsibility for how easily we fall asleep lies on our genes: it happens that a variety of sleep disorders - from insomnia to the failure of circadian rhythms - are due to genetic predisposition. Often it also turns out that melatonin is not produced by the body in sufficient quantities, or the necessary receptors are missing.
However, genetic predisposition does not explain why many of us unwillingly become night owls. Researchers associate sleep problems with the vicissitudes of the environment and are convinced that a key role in the normalization of circadian rhythms is for good "sleep hygiene." The negative effect on the circadian rhythm of nicotine, caffeine and alcohol is scientifically substantiated, and the closer to going to bed we indulge in bad habits, the more tangible the negative effect. Food also contributes to it: eat too late or too much - and it will be difficult to sleep, go to bed hungry - and sleep will not be easy either.
About 45% of Russians suffer from insomnia from time to time, and 20% cannot cope with it at all.
The most important factor in building a sleep mode is lighting. People have successfully evolved to the point that they have become sensitive to the slightest change in lighting. There are even special photoreceptors in the eyes that react to these changes and to the sequence of the phases of light and darkness, and the key function of these receptors is to regulate circadian rhythms. When we are up to two o'clock in the morning under intense lighting and in addition we are browsing Facebook from all possible devices at the same time, the natural regulation system is quite naturally confused. I must say, the problem is not only in artificial light in general. Every day we are surrounded by more and more radiation from the short-wave spectrum, or the so-called blue radiation, which the circadian system defines as daylight. That is why doctors do not recommend using gadgets before bedtime. Excessive light reduces melatonin formation: the light of the display causes the brain to think that it is now day, and sleep is slipping again.
In addition to domestic lack of sleep, there is also chronic insomnia. About 45% of Russians suffer from insomnia from time to time, and 20% cannot cope with it at all. “Back in the 1980s, only 30% of our compatriots addressed such complaints to doctors,” says Dmitry Kallistov, head of the somnology department at the Center for Rehabilitation of the Presidential Affairs Office. “The increase in the number of people suffering from sleep problems is primarily due to the ever-increasing pace of life. The main cause of sleep disorders in adults is the constant stress at work. " Doctors associate insomnia with depression, an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, motor and cognitive disorders. For scientists, these connections are obvious indicators of how important a full sleep for the well-coordinated work of the heart, stress resistance and, in particular, the maintenance of cognitive abilities.
What does the brain do while we sleep
To prove the beneficial effects of sleep on mental activity, neuroscientists at the University of Tübingen conducted an experiment: they asked a group of people a rather difficult task in mathematics. The subjects did not know that the task had a simple solution, namely, an abstract rule that allows them to cope with the task very quickly. Several experiment participants spontaneously suggested this easy solution the first time. After eight hours, all participants were tested anew, before allowing half of them to sleep, and leaving the other half awake. Less than a quarter of those subjects who were left without sleep managed to offer a simpler and faster solution to the problem, and among those lucky enough to sleep eight hours, the number who gave the correct answer doubled to 60%. The conclusion is simple: when we sleep, our brain digests information, loses various options, learns and extracts meanings. Simply put, in a dream, our brain thinks.
In addition to the functions of memory regulation, problem solving, and information processing by the conscious mind and subconscious dreaming, sleep also helps the brain stay young and healthy, and the mind sharp. Back in 1894, the Russian biochemist and sleep technologist Marya Manaseina published one of the world's first scientific articles on the effects of long-term sleep deprivation. On the basis of the commonly accepted experiments on Manasein puppies, she concluded that the brain suffers most from prolonged insomnia — the number of small hemorrhages and vascular anomalies increases.
Many years later, in 2013, Miken Nedergard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester, published the results of many years of research into sleep mechanisms. With the help of new techniques that allowed penetration into the mechanisms of sleep and the awakening of mice, Nedergard found out that sleep is a kind of technical support system for the brain. When we are awake, brain activity of a different nature leads to the fact that a kind of “construction waste” accumulates in the brain, namely, toxins like beta-amyloid, a protein that is associated with Alzheimer's disease. In turn, others, by their nature, harmless proteins accumulate incorrectly. When we fall asleep, special channels in the brain expand to allow the cerebrospinal fluid to get into them and clear the brain of accumulated toxins.
How to fix a dream
Unstable sleep patterns are a symptom of modernity, and there is nothing particularly criminal about this: we all occasionally donate a couple of hours of sleep for something important, be it a career, a family, friends, or the last season of a favorite TV show. However, regular lack of sleep entails serious consequences, which are much more difficult to control than to warn them. If you haven’t found any global problems with sleep, but you feel that adjusting the regime doesn’t hurt, first of all you should try to get your daily rhythm back to its rightful place. For this, doctors recommend waking up at the same time - then your body itself will tell you when to go to bed. It will help easier to fall asleep regular meals and sports (although it is worth doing without intensive workouts just before bedtime). In the evening, it is important to air the room, as well as use gadgets or install programs that adjust the color balance of the display according to the time of day.
Sleep, caused by sleeping pills, is different from natural sleep and loses it in terms of benefits.
Many people at the first sign of sleep disorders voluntarily resort to sleeping pills. Such drugs can be an effective method, but only if insomnia is diagnosed and the drug is prescribed by doctors. However, according to recent studies, sleeping pills are often not able to offer effective resistance to over-stimulation of the environment. Sleep, caused by sleeping pills, differs from natural sleep and loses it in terms of benefits. Many doctors, in particular Ashley Proctor and Matt Bianchi from the sleep department of the Massachusetts main hospital, argue that the sleeping pills available today do not repeat the natural sleep processes. However, many of them suppress the phases of fast and deep sleep and, probably because, according to Bianchi, "reduce the restorative value of sleep," and some hypnotics even entail the risk of sleepwalking.
In any case, as the doctors note, recently, sleeping pills, as a rule, are not prescribed by the course for more than one week. If the situation with insomnia is prolonged, Dr. Susan Redline, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School, recommends patients for cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as non-therapeutic methods, such as tai chi, yoga and meditation. Many products are good for returning healthy sleep to our lives, because while we are sleeping, the body is doing a serious job - no less important than any of our long-term projects.
Photo: 1, 2, 3, 4 via Shutterstock