9 Things About Sleep That Will Blow Your Mind

Nine things about sleep that will not only blow your mind but can save your life.

How much sleep?

#1, how much do you need? Right? Very age-old question. Research says 7 to 9 hours, and that’s for adults. So over the age of 25, you need 7 to 9 hours. We’re going to come back [to it].

If you’re less than 25, how much you need? If you sleep less than 6 hours, you will have a shorter life. All causes of mortality, all cause mortality, you hear that a lot in research, all causes of death are influenced by [this factor]. You will more likely die from all causes if you sleep under six hours. So that’s where mortality comes in.

The brain cleansing connection

Why is decreased sleep linked to Alzheimer’s? This one is really interesting because we used to think that the brain didn’t really cleanse itself. We used to think that the number of brain cells you had, you had and there was no changing.

So it turns out that the brain is much more active than we used to know. But one very interesting aspect is that you’ve probably heard of your lymph system, you’ve heard of your lymph glands, you get sick and you get a swelling of your lymph gland in your throat.

Well, there’s a glympse — just put a G in front of lymph — there’s a glymphatics, and not just lymphatic, but glymphatic system, which is a cleansing system in your brain.

That system will cleanse — this is particularly about Alzheimer’s — certain proteins: they’re called beta-amyloid, they’re called TAU proteins. This system cleanses them, but you have to get enough sleep and also be in a deep sleep. If your sleep is fractured, that influences how well this cleansing system occurs.

But they did one night of deprived sleep in individuals and found that their level of these circulating proteins increased just in one night of deprived sleep. So you can imagine a lifetime of sleep [deprivation].

If you’re somebody who’s had poor sleep, your risk of Alzheimer’s goes up. That doesn’t mean you should go, “Wow, I’ve always slept terrible, forget about it.” No. It’s never too late to make impactful changes in your sleep, which will affect your health.

The heart disease connection

How about heart disease? Heart diseases are our #1 killer, so we definitely want to pay attention to anything that’s going to influence that.

Again, the threshold I’m going to keep talking about (because it’s the research) is under six hours of sleep. If you get less than six hours sleep, your risk for cardiovascular disease or heart attack increases 200%. Your risk doubles. Already in America, it’s our #1 killer. We don’t need it to double.

Now, what if you sleep less than six hours? We’re looking at the calcification of your coronary arteries, and this is what leads to stroke, heart attack, sudden death… That risk increases 200 to 300% if you’re not getting enough sleep.

In deep restorative sleep, your vessels relax. We talked about the cleansing in the brain, but your sympathetic nervous system (that has all the adrenaline and pumps the heart hard, and has the vessels working hard) relaxes at night. You’re obviously not asleep and awake at the same time (although some of us are, hence the problem) so, nice, deep unfragmented sleep is the greatest blood pressure medication this one study said that we could have.

The weight gain connection

Moving on. What if you’re trying to lose weight? Well, 7 out of 10 Americans are. So it’s likely I’m talking to many of you right now. If you’re trying to lose weight and you’re actively doing this, you’re cutting calories, you’re increasing exercise, you’re cleaning up your diet… If you get less than six hours of sleep, 70% of the weight you lose will be lean muscle mass versus fat.

So when you’re “underslept”, your body wants to hold onto your fat. It’s kind of a safety net. It knows it’s a source of fuel because you’re not getting restored sleep. So 70% of the weight you’re losing is exactly what you don’t want to lose. It’s lean muscle.

The insatiable appetite connection

Check this one out. We’re up to point #6. Your appetite-regulation hormones. So you have two major hormones that regulate appetite. One is called “leptin”, it’s your satiety hormone. It tells you you’re satisfied. You ate a meal and you’re like, “I’ve had enough”. There’s a little left on your plate, but you don’t mind pushing the plate aside because you’re satisfied, you’re full, you’re happy. Good.

When you get less than six hours of sleep, guess what happens to this hormone? It goes way down. You’re not satisfied, you’re never satisfied, you’re not getting that feedback from the hormone. There’s not enough of it to tell you that you ate enough.

The other major appetite-regulation hormone is called “ghrelin”. Ghrelin is the hormone that tells you “you are hungry”. It’s the hunger hormone. It goes way up when you’re underslept. And it’s just constantly saying, “Hungry, hungry, hungry, hungry”. I know some of you know exactly what that feels like. It’s one of the major things I ask patients. “When you eat, do you feel satisfied?” And plenty of patients are “No, I’m always hungry. It just doesn’t matter what I eat; I mean, finally, mentally I tell myself ‘you’ve eaten enough’.”

But they don’t get that satiation, the leptin hormone. Instead, ghrelin is in full force saying, “hungry, hungry, hungry”. And unfortunately, you’re not even craving good food! You’re craving all the most terrible foods, the ones you shouldn’t eat.

The accident-proneness connection

Point #7 is a little scary. Let’s say you’re going to the emergency room. Our residents (in medical school) and doctors working in the hospital very frequently work a day and a half, two days. Those are their shifts. If your resident has worked more than a 30-hour shift, you are 460% more likely to get an incorrect diagnosis from that resident because he or she is undersleep!

How about elective surgery? I don’t know. Do you call your surgeon the night before and talk about their sleep habits? No… Yet, the situation is pretty gruesome. If your surgeon has slept less than six hours in the 24-hour period prior to your surgery, he or she is 170% more likely to make a major surgical error on your body… like nicking an artery, or damaging an organ!

I just had a patient the other day who was telling me about her surgery and she said, “I came out of anesthesia, and then I met with the doctor and the doctor’s like, ‘I just want to tell you, I nicked a nerve, I never do this’.”

It’d be so interesting to find out if the poor guy was undersleep.

Check this out. Then you’re on the road. Maybe you’re not getting surgery or you’re not in the ER. However, when these doctors who are underslept get in their cars, they’re 168% more likely to cause a car crash. And obviously they’re not crashing (or typically crashing) into another car.

Why don’t doctors know better? They get an hour and a half to two hours of education on sleep in their entire career! I didn’t know it was that bad.

The depression connection

Let’s go to point #8, we’re almost done. As far as psychological psychiatric conditions, in none of those they evaluated did the participants have normal sleep. They couldn’t find a single psychological or psychiatric condition where sleep was normal in the people suffering from it.

Definitely a very strong place to start when someone has anxiety, depression, etc.

What are we doing to our children?

What about kids? Guess what? What percentage of teens get enough sleep? 15%. What’s scary about this is that the brain is being molded up until 25 years of age. And when you’re not getting enough sleep, you’re stunting the growth and the development of the brain.

They did an interesting study in which they pushed back the start time at school. In this town in the US, they had a start time of 7:30 AM. They did an experiment, they changed it to (I think it was) 8:45 AM.

So it was a little bit more than an hour later in the morning. And they found that following years… in other words, it took place for a full year and then they found that in the town, car crashes involving teenagers decreased 70%! Considering car crashes (these are 16 to 18-year olds in this particular study), considering car crashes are really the major source of how our young teens lose their lives, this is really significant.

So how much sleep does your teenager need? The estimate is 8 to 10+ hours, up to 11 hours. It would take some effort obviously to change the start time of your school, I understand that.

What I’ve always told parents and then when I’m working with a child who’s old enough to make those decisions is “Do the experiment on the weekend, and find out how many hours of sleep [your child] needs.

Now, if the kid is really deprived during the week, their body is going to try to make up for some of that “sleep debt” during the weekend. But maybe do it in the summer or when you have some time off on the holidays; and then find out how many hours you need such that you don’t need an alarm.
If you’re setting an alarm for 7:00 AM and you’re always just dragging your kid out of bed and they’re going to bed at, let’s say midnight, so seven hours, we already know that’s not enough. So then they start pushing back the bedtime. You don’t really have control of when school starts, right? (You got to be there [for roll call]).

Maybe, simultaneously, start letting the school system know about some of this education on sleep guidelines.

In the interim though, for your child and their brain development and their safety behind the wheel, say: “This is important, so let’s see… So you normally go to bed at midnight, let’s go to bed at 11. Let’s try that for a few days… Did you wake up before the alarm or no?” “No.” (It was still a hideous time of day to get up). “Okay, good.” Keep pushing it back. And this is for the health of your child and the safety of your child. It’s really worth it.

A last example

Please let me know if you like this information on sleep. There’s a lot more data. Predominantly, this is from Dr. Matthew Walker who wrote the book, “Why We Sleep”. And I think it’s something we underestimate a terrible amount.

In our clinic in Silicon Valley, I frequently spoke with employees of large high-tech companies, where sleep was considered a luxury. If somebody got eight hours… I’d say, “How many hours of sleep do you like to get?” And they’re like (whispering) “I get eight.” They’d kind of whisper, “I get eight hours. It’s a lot. It’s indulgent.” Like if they were cheating somehow.

I’d reply, “No, you minimally want to go for eight.” But they felt like they needed to apologize for that. It’s like, “Oh, my husband just does five to six and he’s fine. It makes me feel lazy”. No, no. It’s going to catch up with your husband (in this example).

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