How to Improve Productivity From Sleep?!!
Researchers for a long time were not quite sure why we were sleeping. There are a lot of hypotheses. Some of them are evolutionary: sleep, for example, keeps us out of trouble at night and away from animals waking up and attacking after the sun goes down. Some are physiological: Sleep helps us to save vital resources. And others are anecdotal: parents joke that if sleep did not exist they would go insane because it gives them the required break from their children. But the truth is that when we’re sleeping the brain does a lot of work — even if we’re asleep, this doesn’t mean the brain is “off.” In fact, it‘s extremely “on” in several ways.
The study group RAND has just come out with a 100-page review of how sleep impacts us, and what sleep deprivation can do to us — and to the economy. They believe that from lack of sleep between missed work and bad performance at work. Just the US losses $411 billion annually. Although companies and policy-makers may be interested in the financial ramifications of sleep deprivation, these implications derive from the reality that people are unwell, which illustrates the very real effects of sleep deprivation.
The latest research has set out some of the reasons that we need to sleep, and all of the tasks that the brain seems to perform when we sleep. There’s plenty to find out, but here are a few explanations why the brain needs sleep, and why without it things seem to go downhill.
How Sleep helps your memory solidify
One of the core functions of sleep is that it helps restore long-term memory — it appears to do this not only by enhancing those neuronal connections but also by pulling misplaced ones back. During the day, the brain makes several connections, but not all of them are worth saving; thus, sleep is a time when the brain streamlines the connections it “needs.” Perhaps most people have noticed the phenomenon that sleep helps us recall things we have learned during the day. And these have been checked out by research. Participants had to learn a motor routine in one study (to tap buttons in some order).
The participants did much better when learning the task and remembering the task were separated by a night’s sleep, rather than the same period of time during the waking hours. The hypothesis is that the brain consolidates the memories it needs, but the ones it doesn’t prune back. And research has shown that the brain appears to lose the associations that makeup memories considered unimportant by the brain.
One thing to be mindful of is that sleep also helps to lock down traumatic memories which are likely to play a role in PTSD and depression. A very recent study found that they are less likely to be retained once unpleasant emotional memories are accumulated during sleep time. And that means bad memories are more likely to hang on alongside the good ones, and less likely to be forgotten.
Most Toxins which sometimes caused Alzheimer’s disease are gotten rid of during sleep
One of the most enlightening discoveries of recent years is that the brain filters out contaminants much faster while we’re unconscious than when we’re awake. During sleep, the space between brain cells expands greatly, enabling the clearance of the “gunk” by cerebrospinal fluid. And perhaps most surprising is that much of this gunk is the β-amyloid protein, which is a precursor to plaques in Alzheimer’s disease. These proteins and other toxins tend to accumulate throughout the day and are removed throughout sleep. This is another incredibly good reason to make sure we all get enough sleep.
How Sleep is necessary for cognition
It doesn’t take a study to tell us that a shortage of sleep affects our cognitive ability, but thankfully, there are many. Sleep deprivation can have an effect on anything from perception to treatment to decision making. Sleep deprivation certainly affects one’s multitasking ability. Driving is the most powerful multitasking practice that we do — it needs hands, feet, vision, knowledge of what’s happening. If you are sleep-deprived, the ability to multitask is highly affected. That’s why we’ve had so many car crashes, and of course trains. Drains the executive ability from sleep deprivation.
How your Creativity needs sleep
Sleep appears to beget creativity and it takes away from sleep deprivation. This we know from anecdotes and facts. When people are deprived of sleep, some forms of thinking tend to be more affected than others: For example, divergent thinking — thinking out of the box in different and creative ways seems to be the first thing that goes when you’re sleep-deprived, while convergent thinking being able to find out the right answer, as in standardized testing is intact. One research deprived participants of 32 hours of sleep and put them to the test on different aspects of thought.
On most forms of divergent thought, including fluency, versatility, and originality, people who were sleep-deprived for the 32 hours performed substantially worse. And they appeared to persevere on verbal memory tests: in this case, to constantly come up with the same response, cross it out, and try again, which is a sign that the imaginative mind is not doing so well.
Sleep seems to be promoting innovation on the flipside: one study had participants performing a challenge involving numbers in which they had to find a pattern concealed in the questions. People who got a night’s sleep were much more effective at finding it out than people who were deprived of sleep. And apart from the research, it has been known for several hundred years to experience imaginative insights during sleep, or just as one wakes up from it.
How Depression and Sleep deprivation intertwine
Problems with depression and sleep are closely connected. People with depression also have trouble sleeping, or they can sleep a lot on the flipside. It also seems clear that sleep deprivation will definitely exacerbate it if it doesn’t cause depression. So it’s a little bit like a chicken-or-egg arrangement. Studies also found that people who sleep less than six hours a night or more than eight hours a night are more likely than people in the center to be depressed. And people with insomnia are likely to experience depression and anxiety several more times.
Part of the reason for these associations can come from the fact that in depressed people the part of the brain that regulates circadian rhythm (the normal sleep-wake cycle, and all the body functions that depend on it) is disturbed. Which may clarify part of why issues with depression and sleep go hand in hand.
About Physical health and longevity
While the body does not need to sleep scientifically in the same way as the brain does, there are a variety of physical diseases and disorders which it seems to affect. Recent research presented at the annual conference of the Radiological Society of North America showed that when health professionals (radiologists) earned an average of three hours of sleep over a 24-hour shift their hearts suffered for it. Participants had increases in their heart contractility, blood pressure, heart rate and thyroid hormone levels, and the cortisol stress hormone.
Other studies have linked sleeplessness to overweight and obesity, and impaired regulation of glucose. Lots of studies have associated poor sleep with mortality — but there seems to be a sweet spot where people under the age of six are at higher risk, and those who get nine hours or more a night are at risk.
The causes of sleep deprivation are likely to have to do with the above-mentioned hormone causes, which can increase the risk of heart and diabetes, as well as inflammation, which can itself increase the risk of cancer.
Sleep may feel like an indulgence, particularly when we are busy or stressed; and at these times, it is often the first thing to go. But as the research shows, sleep isn’t a luxury — it’s a requirement, and if it doesn’t have enough, the brain will definitely revolt. Thus it might be time to change our sleep habits and give it a little more focus than it normally gets.
The brain waves produced during deep sleep seem to activate a brain cleaning mechanism that protects it against Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. Electrical signals known as slow waves emerge just before a stream of fluid washes through the brain, possibly eliminating Alzheimer-related toxins, researchers published in the journal Science on Thursday.’
The result could help explain a puzzling connection between sleep and Alzheimer’s, says Laura Lewis, a study author and an assistant professor at Boston University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Brain activity during sleep
Scientists are now studying other lifestyle changes to maintain brain health, such as diet and improvements in exercise. And sleep, he says, should be “big on the list” of steps worth trying. Studies indicate that people with Alzheimer’s often encounter sleep problems. And there is growing evidence that more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s are people with sleep issues.
Earlier animal research has shown that the flow of cerebrospinal fluid increases during sleep and helps carry away waste materials, including Alzheimer’s toxins.
On average, every one of us will sleep 24 years in our lifetime. If you ask me, that’s a pretty long time, which makes it much more important to know exactly how the sleep phenomenon affects us. On average, every one of us will sleep 24 years in our lifetime. If you ask me, that’s a pretty long time, which makes it much more important to know exactly how the sleep phenomenon affects us. And yet, there are so many unanswered questions that form around sleep, and how much we need it. In reality, we have learned much of what we know about sleep in the past 25 years.
One of the biggest problems I’ve noticed is that sleep is such an over-talked topic. We get the general sense that we know something about it: how much we need it, how it affects us, and why it happens when we sleep.
