The Underrated Importance of Sleep
The message is clear from the science: get your zzzz’s! It impacts just about everything.
Sleep has been a theme I have reported on regularly because of its importance to brain health and functioning. Indeed, it is said that sleep is by the brain, of the brain, and for the brain. It is the consequence of having something that can do something so complex as what our brain does.
Sleep has certainly been underrated — health advice for decades revolved around firstly food, and secondly exercise. Both very important we know, but sleep is the third pillar. Indeed this year there was a position statement from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine saying that sleep is a biological necessity, and insufficient sleep and untreated sleep disorders are detrimental for health, well-being, and public safety. And that is more than true — when we look at the processes that take place in sleep and the dramatic impacts on the brain and body it is easy to see why.
Lack of sleep causes severe mental disruption including hallucinations within 48 hours and can potentially lead to death (but normally doesn’t because the brain finds ways to sleep or shut itself down). Just one night of sleep deprivation causes significant cognitive impairment noted Soomi Lee last year and this becomes increasingly worse with consecutive days.
Brain connectivity studies how how bad this is the diagrams below showing the massive reduction in brain connectivity after a week of sleep restriction:
Decrease in brain connectivity with sleep restriction (35% reduction for a week). From: Farahani, F. V., Fafrowicz, M., Karwowski, W., Douglas, P. K., Domagalik, A., Beldzik, E., et al. (2019). Effects of chronic sleep restriction on the brain functional network, as revealed by graph theory. Front. Neurosci. 13. doi:10.3389/ fnins.2019.01087.
Another study out in 2021 by Cacesse et al. tracked 31'000 student-athletes in US military academies. And it worryingly found that many students are going through life with symptoms that resemble concussion. In fact, they would be classified as having concussion even though they were not recovering from recent concussion. Reasons include lack of sleep, and stress.
You may, however, wonder how well you recover from this sleep deprivation? Is your Sunday morning slee-in enough? Well, this is precisely what researchers, around Jeremi Ochab of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, were interested in: how quickly do people recover from chronic sleep loss.
For this they deprived a group of volunteers (19 in total who completed the study according to protocol) of sleep for 10 days . This was defined by 30% less sleep compared to four normal days — their baseline. This was then followed by 7 days of rest (normal) functioning. All participants went about their life as normal — in naturalist settings — observing human beings in the wild, so to speak.! During this all participants went through a series of tests daily: motor control, EEG measurements of brain waves, and various cognitive tasks. The results?
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