Episode 1: Sleep and brain Health

This episode explores what happens in our brains as we sleep. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Have you ever noticed that everything feels harder when you don't sleep well or when you haven't slept well? Sleep isn't just rest. It's actually active brain maintenance. Poor sleep affects memory, mood, focus, emotional control, creativity, and long-term overall health. By the end of this episode, you can understand what the brain does while you sleep and why skipping sleep brings about other mostly negative consequences to our body. My name is Miriam. I'm the host of this uh broadcast on this platform. I welcome you to join me as we break down a few things in regard to sleep. So, what is actually sleep? Sleep, contrary to how it looks or how it seems to be passive, is actually a very active process, and specifically for the brain. It's more passive or rather low minimal energy expenditure state for maybe the muscles and other motor activities, but for the brain this is quite an active process. We have different sleep stages, and all of these stages have contributed differently to the health of the brain. The light sleep, deep sleep, and the REM, the rapid eye movement stage. Meaning missing any of these stages means also missing specific uh brain processes. So in case like the stages follow each other in cycle, like you get from light sleep into deep sleep into our end sleep, that's like how a typical sleep cycle should look like, which repeats itself every other like about half an hour throughout the night. So if for whichever reason you skip any of these stages, the function it's supposed to do in the regeneration of the brain will definitely be missed. So, for instance, during the day the brain collects information, and during sleep, the brain decides what to keep and what to develop. Deep sleep enhances skills and learning, the rapid eye movement sleep connects ideas and creativity, and of course, the light sleep is now the calming down or the not really shutting down, the process through which the body prepares for these stages, and they are still all important because if you don't get to introduce your body into the these other active processes that will come into the night, of course, you will not have a good sleep, and let me say a not so good quality sleep revolves around the body switching off from the light sleep to wake, light sleep to wake throughout the night. So literally you don't get into this regenerative stage of sleep. Think of it like studying without sleep for instance would be like saving a file without clicking save, you know. So probably you've also used the statement let me sleep over it. That actually makes sense, like in in the real sense of the words. Sleeping over something is also giving your brain time to process the information or to consolidate whatever um information the matter could be all about. Sleep also helps in the emotional regulation and in our mental health. The part of brain that is in charge of our the emotional alarm system becomes overactive when you are sleep deprived. The logic center of our brain becomes weaker, and lack of sleep literally has the similar effects as taking of alcohol. If you if you're sleep deprived, your functionality and your ability to react is quite similar to when you've taken alcohol, something alcoholic or an alcoholic beverage, and this leads to irritability, anxiety, or emotional reactions. During sleep, the brain also gets cleaned. This is a much more complicated process just seeing it like that. But due to the low main low energy functions of the body, the brain also it's part of the body, so it gets into uh into its regenerative process by shrinking a bit because it doesn't have to work into maintaining all the other body functions, and this allows the fluid from our spinal cord to go through the brain, clean it in cleaning it up, which is a process that allows also the um toxins that have been produced in the brain due due to its activity throughout to be cleaned out, and these toxins are the ones mostly linked to neurodegenerative diseases, which means long excuse me, which means um long-term effect of poor sleep increases the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases, rather, like the brain just is dirty and the accumulation of these toxins is what now leads to the brain cells time. So lack of sleep also affects how focused we are or how our attention and our reaction type and judgment is. I've already mentioned that it's literally like taking alcohol, the state of a sleep deprivation is very much similar to a state of drunkenness or yeah, intoxication. A common myth on sleep that I would also like to deconstruct here is like catching up on sleep, especially how someone at times life could be catching up with us, you'd be having a busy schedule or things going on that and uh interestingly this sleep is what we mostly sacrifice whenever we have circumstances around our life that probably bring bring us into stressful situations. If you have to an exam, you'll be waking up early or not uh go early to bed because you have to read. If you have maybe some work to catch up on, you'll be probably doing them at night or really early in the morning. So we usually in most cases sacrifice our sleep a lot, and at times with the intention of catching up on the sleep, maybe later on when things get easier. So the thing is, yes, you can sleep more during the time when things get when things even up, but the effect of uh like I've explained, the brain not being able to be regenerated cannot be recovered. The fact that the brain was not able to maybe clean up toxins doesn't mean like now when you sleep more that the brain will do it twice as much as it should have done before, and that's why like some recovery the sleep is possible but not to the full capacity, and chronic sleep loss can cause cumulative brain uh brain effects, which can be hard to repair just by sleeping more. So it's best to have a regular and good quality sleep than the idea of catching up on sleep later on because the the catching up will not repair the damage that would was done like to to full effect. So the occasional long nights, yes, they are good, they'd be feeling restful, but would not be like fully beneficial as a summary. In all our stages in life, we do need the sleep variation varies, like the amount of sleep babies need, and the amount of sleep we need the toddlers, uh, teenage preteen or teens need adults need to eat varies, and it's quite clear like babies need more sleep, they need more, they have more to learn, more for their brain to process. Yeah, they're new to this world, they have to adjust, they have to learn a lot of things walking, talking, recognizing voices, recognizing things around the environment. So it makes sense that they need to sleep more because that's the time their brain processes all this information, and as we grow, you notice that most of the time sleep gets less and less towards adulthood. The average sleep that we need or that is recommended is about seven to nine hours, and sleep is very personal, so some people might say I don't need much sleep, I don't need uh to sleep a lot, but in general, aim at sleeping regularly and at least long enough, not in small batches. By the time the body probably rejects or doesn't allow you to sleep long enough, probably they it could be as a reaction of something, maybe a pattern in the night, or or maybe an environmental factor, but we'll get into that earlier. Also, very useful tip is to have a regular sleep and wake time, like to sleep goes to sleep at the same time and also wake up at the same time every time of the day. This helps in also like the allowing the body and the brain also to go through the processes uninterrupted. If you keep changing the time, the brain gets confused and like with long term. If you couldn't see this probably in it is like shift working, how it is hard to adjust from a night to a day shift, and that so you'd rather maintain a specific pattern rather than jump from one to the other, late night screen or using light, especially actually screen, confuse the brain as well. So the morning light is more helpful or more can be I can say more less damaging than having late night exposure to light, especially from like screen. So in summary, sleep helps us build memory, regulate emotions, clean the brain, improve performance, thinking and creativity. I would like to know some of your sleep habits if you don't mind sharing. What do you consider like a healthy sleep habit, or what do you consider like a sleep habit that you probably already feel that is not healthy you'd you'd want to get rid of or not practice anymore? And some of the things probably like things you have been told or you have adapted over time, theories and myths around sleep. I'd like to hear from you. Share in the comments and yeah, let's let's get to know about yeah from different uh corners how we relate to our sleep. And as a takeaway message on this episode, I'd like to say that aim at optimizing sleep by having a regular regular sleep like time and duration, have them regular because at times things like life having to wake up early, having to go to work or school or whichever other activities, some of the things we have to do in life can be hard to gotten rid of, but with sleep we can optimize it to at least serve us to to be of a good quality. The sleep we get, whichever amount it is, whether we get the nine full night sleep or whether our body gets less, at least we can aim at having it be of the best quality now that we know how that impacts on the brain. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode again. We will be meeting on this platform again, speaking about different things in sleep. So feel free to subscribe so that you get a notification when the next uh video or I mean when the next audio will be uploaded or whenever there'll be something exciting, a partnership or collaboration or interview on this platform with other experts on this field. Have a good day or night and share this information with anybody that it could be of use to and get engaging in their comments. Bye.