Restorative Sleep

A synthesis of the information on SLEEP, with incredible insight from Matthew Walker to help structure this content.

The importance of sleep quality is interwoven with the ability to cognitively be alert, and physically seek a challenge!

Day to Day- repair and repeat, to preserve the consistency of results, as our body is a large orchestra of playing pieces that must stay in a productive order to support our creativity, productivity, efficiency, mood and enthusiasm 

Reference: 

1. Matthew Walker (2017)- 'Why We Sleep'

2. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/

3. https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/good-nights-sleep

Sleep Pillars: Duration, Depth, Continuity and Regularity

Sleep Schedule:

The two governing forces that regulate sleep are the 24-hour Circadian rhythm and sleep pressure signal of Adenosine; they are two distinct and separate systems that are not coupled, but usually aligned

·        Everyone generates a circadian rhythm (circa, meaning 'around', and dian, derivative of diam, meaning 'day'). It controls other rhythmic patterns including timed preference for eating and drinking, mood and emotions, amount of urine produced, core body temperature, metabolic rate, and the release of numerous hormones.

o   The 24 hour biological clock sitting in the middle of your brain is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus

·        The second is sleep pressure. The longer you are awake, the more adenosine will accumulate.

·        Beware: Social Jetlag, and phase shift of travel jetlag

·        During sleep, the signals are blocked by a perceptual barricade set up in a structure called the thalamus. A smooth, oval-shaped object just larger than a lemon. The sleep-wake switch in the hypothalamus releases a neurotransmitter called orexin. Once activated by the switch, the brain stem pushes open the sensory gates of the thalamus, should signals gain privileged passage they are sent up to the cortex at the top of the brain and consciously perceived.

Previous Nights Sleep:

Deep Sleep (NREM)-

Generated at the epicenter (hot spot) right in the middle of the frontal lobes

• The long range brainwaves of deep sleep will move memory packets (file transfer process) from the short-term storage site (hippocampus), which is fragile, to the permanent, long-term storage location (neocortex). While wakefulness is reception to the outside sensor world, NREM slow-wave denotes a state of inward reflection. 
• The more sleep spindles an individual has at night, the greater restoration of overnight learning ability come the next morning. This concentration of NREM sleep spindles is rich in the late morning hours, sandwiched between long periods of REM sleep.
• The brain communicates a calming signal to the fight-or-flight sympathetic branch of the body's nervous system, controlling respiration, immune function, and stress chemicals to blood pressure and heart rate.

Rapid Eye Movement Sleep (REM)-

• Recent MRI scans show individual parts of the brain are 30% more active than when awake. Spikes in the visuospatial region in the back of the brain, enabling complex visual perception, the motor cortex which instigates movement, the hippocampus supporting memories, and the deep emotional centers- amygdala and the cingulate cortex. A stress chemical noradrenaline is shut off, to integrate experiences with stripped emotion for introspective and therapeutic learning.
• Signals of emotions, motivations, and memories (past and present) are played out on the big screens of our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory cortices of the brain- forming integration of insight and problem solving abilities catalogued in your life's autobiography.
• Mere seconds before dreaming and during REM, you are completely paralyzed. There is no tone in the voluntary muscles of your body. This eliminates muscle activity preventing acting out the motor commands in the movement rich experience of the dreams.
• Psychotic, hallucinating, delusional, disoriented, affectively labile, with amnesia- Dreaming!

Deprived Sleep-

Loss of rational control from the prefrontal cortex allows the heightened emotional reactivity from the amygdala, in a fight or flight response. Additionally, the deep emotional centers of the striatum are hyperactive and bathed by dopamine causing impulsivity during rewarding and pleasurable experiences

Daily Exercise: 

·        Impairments in cardiovascular, metabolic, and respiratory capabilities that hamper an unslept body, including faster rates of lactic acid buildup, reductions in blood oxygen saturation, and converse increase in blood carbon dioxide, due in part to a reduction in the amount of air that the lungs can expire. Even the ability of the body to cool itself during physical exertion through sweating is impaired

·        Restoring complex functions of the brain, including learning, memory, emotional stability, complex reasoning, or decision-making. Sleep is an intensely metabolically active state from the brain and body.

Nutrition:

·        The calming of the fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous systems allows the balance and control of the microbiome in the gut. Additionally, the effective cell absorption of glucose when instructed by insulin (from the pancreas) in the blood stream.

·        Controlling appetite: leptin signals a sense of feeling full. Ghrelin, in contrast, triggers a strong sensation of hunger. Inadequate sleep decreased the concentrations of these hormones.

·        Caffeine is the most widely used (and abused) psychoactive stimulant in the world. It is the second most traded commodity on the planet, after oil. By hijacking and occupying the brain receptors, caffeine blocks the sleepiness signal normally communicated to the brain by adenosine, tricking you to feeling alert and awake.

·        Alcohol is a sedative, binding to receptors which prevents neurons from firing their electrical impulses. It takes the liver and kidneys many hours to degrade and excrete the alcohol, even for individuals with fast acting enzymes for ethanol decomposition.

Un-Wind:

·        Instructed by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the rise in melatonin begins soon after dusk synergistically with environmental light and temperature triggers. Melatonin is released into the bloodstream by the pineal gland.

·        An adult's owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics

·        Melatonin secretion rises about 2 hours before bedtime

·        Visible light spectrum-shorter wavelength 380nm cool blue to longer wavelength 700nm warmer red. Light receptors are most sensitive to blue spectrum and communicate to the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Our brain is predominantly devoted to processing visual information, a third overall and exceeds sound, smell, language and movement.

·        To initiate sleep, core temperature needs to drop by 1°C, this is detected by a group of thermo-sensitive cells in the center of the brain within the hypothalamus. Most thermic work is performed by the crisscrossing blood vessels (arteriovenous anastomoses) in the hands, feet, and head.

Overall Health:

Immune System: Lowered natural killer cells circulating the immune system. WHO has classified nighttime shift work as a 'probable carcinogen'

·        Cancers are known to use the inflammation response to their advantage. For example, some cancer cells will lure inflammatory factors into the tumor mass to help initiate the growth of blood vessels that feed it with more nutrients and oxygen. Tumors can also use inflammatory factors to help further damage and mutate the DNA of their cancer cells, increasing the tumor's potency. Inflammatory factors associated with sleep deprivation may also be used to help physically shear some of the tumor from its local moorings, allowing cancer to up-anchor and spread to other territories of the body. It is a state called metastasis, the medical term for the moment when cancer breaches the original tissue boundaries of origin (here, the injection site) and appear in other regions of the body.

Cardiovascular: As the heart beats faster, the volumetric rate of blood pumped through your vascular increases, and with that comes the hypertensive state of your blood pressure. Additionally the consequence of the sustained deluge of cortisol is the constriction of those blood vessels.

·        Growth hormone, a healer of the body is shut off in sleep deprivation, without growth hormone to replenish the lining of the blood vessels, called the endothelium, they will slowly be shorn and stripped of their integrity. The vascular is now systematically more prone to atherosclerosis (arteries furring up).

Diabetes and Weight Gain: Instructed by the hormone insulin, the cells of your body will open special channels on their surface that operate like drains. If the cells stop responding, blood sugar cannot be brought down to safe levels- the body has transitioned to a hyperglycemic state. Should this persist, and the cells remain intolerant to dealing with high levels of glucose, you will transition into pre-diabetic state.

Alzheimer's disease is associated with the buildup of a toxic form of protein called beta-amyloid, which aggregates in sticky clumps, or plaques, within the brain. Amyloid plaques are poisonous to neurons, killing the surrounding brain cells.  

·        Associated with the pulsing rhythm of deep NREM sleep comes a 10-20 fold increase in effluent expulsion from the brain. As a nighttime power cleanse, the purifying work of the glymphatic system is accomplished by cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain. The glial cells of the brain shrink in size by up to 60% during NREM sleep, enlarging the space around the neurons for the cerebrospinal fluid to clean out metabolic refuse. Part of this toxic debris are amyloid protein, tau, and stress molecules produced by neurons from combusting energy and oxygen.

Genetic Structure: Each cell in the body as an inner core, or nucleus. Within that nucleus resides most of our genetic material in the form of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules. DNA molecules form beautiful helical strands. Segments of these spirals provide specific engineering blueprints that instruct your cells to perform particular functions. These distinct segments are called genes. When genes are activated and read by a cell, a biological product is print out, such as the creation of an enzyme that helps with digestion, or a protein that helps strengthen a memory circuit within the brain.  

·        The genes increased in loss of sleep were linked to chronic inflammation, cellular stress, and various factors that cause cardiovascular disease. Among those turned down were genes that help maintain stable metabolism and optimal immune responses. A lack of sleep will cause a drop in high-density lipoproteins (HDL's)- a directional profile that has consistently been linked to cardiovascular disease.  

·        Insufficient sleep attacks the very physical structure of the genetic material. The spiral strands of DNA in the cells float around in the nucleus, but are tightly wound together into structures called chromosomes, rather like weaving individual threads together to make a sturdy shoelace, and the ends protected with a cap or binding tip. For chromosomes, that protective cap is a telomere. If the telomeres at the end of your chromosome become damaged, your DNA spirals become exposed and are now vulnerable genetic code cannot operate properly. 

- Nem

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