What's Your Bank Balance?

It's still early in the New Year, those who made resolutions have hopefully survived this long without giving them up.  I am not one to make resolutions, except for that one year where I came up with the most loosely contrived wellness resolution ever -- to do one of the 4 following good things each day a) exercise b) get 8 hours sleep c) remember to moisturize or d) eat some damn vegetables.  I figured that even on the very worst of days I could remember to slap some moisturizer on my face.  As it turns out, I am a flawed creature, and a decade later I am still trying to incorporate this policy consistently in my life, but I have a higher ratio of success now than I did back then.

These days I have having the most success with b) get 8 hours sleep.  In fact, I have discovered that left undisturbed by my nemesis the alarm clock, I can consistently sleep 9 or even 10 hours a day.  This is a phenomenon that has never really had the chance to happen before in my life, so I decided to do a little research on the magic of sleep.

We all know that about 8 hours is recommended, that we rarely get it, and there is REM (rapid eye movement) and non-REM sleep.  But there is a lot more to it.  You have 4-5 approximately 90 minutes cycles of REM/Non-REM sleep with intermittent wakefulness that you might not even know is happening (presuming you are sleeping the proper amount).  REM is the stage where you eyes are rapidly flitting about beneath your eyelids, and the time in which you dream.  It is theorized that REM sleep plays a big role in memory, cognition, and learning.  Newborns spend about 80% of the sleep in REM sleep whereas adults spend 20-25%.  If you don't get enough sleep, the brain will try to make up on the lost REM sleep first.  Interestingly, the brain shuts down a lot of neurotransmitters during REM sleep...your muscles are actually paralyzed in normal REM sleep (creeeeeepy).

How does the whole cycle thing work again?  You start out with a non-REM phase, that gives way to a short REM phase (about 10 minutes), then you go into non-REM again, and then into a longer REM phase....each phase or REM gets longer and the non-REM parts get slower,  One cycle is about 90 minutes.  In the non-REM phase, there are 4 subphases that go from shallow to deep sleep (trick -- set you alarm for a 90 minute interval...it is much easier to wake up when you are not is stage 4 of non-REM sleep where you are dead to the world).  By the time you reach stage 4, your blood pressure and heart rate are down as much as 30%, a lot of bodily functions are in a nice low idle, but tissue regeneration in in full gear.  Hmmm...that's interesting right?

Sometimes we think running on less than optimal sleep (say 8 hrs +/- 1 hr for individual variation) has a cost of simply feeling sluggish.  But it leads to a decrease in learning and problem solving ability...the quintessential exhausted student doing worse on an exam than they would if they didn't stay up all night cramming or stressing about it.  Lack of sleep means missing out on REM time -- memory and other brain functions we kinda take for granted, and non-REM time, missing out on tissue repair and healing.  Kinda big deals.  Plus there is the increased cortisol secretion when sleep deprived and/or stressed, which has the unwelcome side effect of telling the body to increase fat stores right on the waistline.  And decreased immune function -- you are more likely to get sick and more frequently if you are sleep deprived.  The whole thing snowballs because the extra cortisol also causes problems with memory formation and retrieval, further inhibits immune function, decreases bone formation which can lead to osteoporosis, decreases collagen production (making you wrinkly...er), and increased blood pressure among other things.

Can you make up for lost sleep?  Yes and no.  If you miss sleep, you acquire a debt in your sleep bank, and you can actually make up for it on the weekend if you are talking one and two hours.  And you should.  If you have a decade or two of debt to make up for, you may have bankrupted the sleep bank.  You cannot sleep off the extra pounds accumulated by your increased cortisol level, you cannot undo the missed chances for tissue healing and regeneration and sleep up a fix for something that got damaged (ie/ you can't sleep off that wrinkle or sleep away a scar in that muscle that you already tore long ago).  But...you can improve memory, problem solving, and cognition with a good night sleep...and by sleeping or turning in early 1 or 2 hours on the weekend.  You can lower your body's level of the villain cortisol (we do need it for some good things by the way) and prevent a couple of extra pounds and wrinkles from sticking to you like glue this year.  You can let your body maximize healing and cellular regeneration (anti-aging, normal maintenance, stuff you need).

If you are sleep deprived and you have a chance to turn off the alarm clock and life on a vacation and let yourself sleep naturally, you can expect your body to claim 10 hours or more for several nights if making up for a long term deprivation.  There comes a point where it will catch up all that it can, and you will go back to that approximate 8 hours of sleep.  My personal study on this shows it can go on for quite some time if you are trying to make restitution for decades worth of withdrawals from the sleep bank.  If I ever catch up will let you know.  Anyway, the moral of this story is this :

 

Sleep, activity, adventures, work, family, hobbies, are all opposing groups wanting your time...sleep needs 8 hours, work needs 8, that leaves you 8 for everything else.  Someone is going to lose.  It's up to you.  If you can't be good to yourself with sleep, there is always moisturizer, exercise and vegetables right?  Be good to yourselves today, even if just in one small way :)  And don't feel guilty about lazing around in bed this year, you might need it more than you ever knew.