If you wake up with an alarm clock

This days we are desperately sleep-deprived. Sleep is not an indulgence!

Russell Foster studies sleep and its role in our lives, examining how our perception of light influences our sleep-wake rhythms.

In the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around about 8 hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep 1.5 to 2 hours less every night. (so 6.5 house every night). For teenagers is worse: they need 9 hours for full performance and they are getting 5 hours of sleep. It’s simply not enough.

Our attitudes towards our sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep.

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The idea that sleep is a waste of time is relatively recent. If you look at the early scientific literature – even into the 19th century – people embraced sleep. The turning point came with the invention of the electric light bulb. Thomas Edison said sleep was a criminal waste of time and a throwback to our cave days, and that attitude persists today. As a species, we are incredibly arrogant, but we can’t abandon our embedded biology. Margaret Thatcher famously said sleep is for wimps. She was wrong.

The 24-hour body clock has a profound influence on our sleep pattern, and the thing that I found so absolutely fascinating is that approximately 36% of our behavior is sleep behavior. So, in a single behavior, it is the most important thing that we do. But we think of sleep as an illness that needs a cure, or an unnecessary evil. Actually, it is a fundamental part of our biology.

It’s not rocket science! If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, chances are you are sleep-deprived.

Same goes if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you’re grumpy, if you’re irritable, if you’re told by your work colleagues that you’re looking tired and irritable.

If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up: drugs, stimulents, caffeine, alcohol.

The sleep demands of the aged do not go down. Sleep fragments and becomes less robust but sleep requirements do not go down. If you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted.

Teenagers are not lazy they just have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break.

Tired people are massively stressed. Sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity, throws glucose into the circulation and you can get diabetes 2, it increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure.

If you sleep 5 hours a night you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. Sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone, so they’re more likely to eat carbs – particularly sugars.

The older you get, the more vulnerable you are to the health impacts of sleep deprivation.

Our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. It is been estimated to give us a threefold advantage.

Good sleep increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health.

Tips for going to sleep

Reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. Make your bedroomas dark as you possibly can and slightly cool.
Turn off mobile phones., turn off computers.
Don’t drink to fall asleep. You may take alcohol or sleeping tablets to induce sedation, which doesn’t allow the most important biological process of sleep to take place. Just because you aren’t conscious doesn’t mean you’re getting all the benefits of real sleep.
Light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. So, seek out morning light.

Watch the full TEDTalk

Russel Foster, June 2013, TEDGlobal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWULB9Aoopc

Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise is a myth.

Like this short article summerising the 15 minutes long TEDTalk? Click here to Subscribe to get your daily TEDTalk Summary and impact your daily productivity! — http://bit.ly/dailytedtalk

This article is a summary of Russel Foster’s TEDTalk filmed in June 2013 at TEDGlobal.