Happy Friday friend!

The past three weeks have felt like living in a cloud.

Haven’t been thinking clearly, been quicker to frustration and anxiety.

The amount of dedicated focus I’ve felt able to direct towards physical and cognitive priorities has felt reduced.

A bit of a mess.

Reflecting on it this morning, one thing was clear…that one thing was clear, hmm, that’s new.

Nothing’s felt clear for the past 14 days.

Nice!

We’re getting somewhere.

What’s changed?

Last night I fell asleep within 5-minutes of getting into bed, AND, I didn’t wake up between then and the alarm clock this morning.

7 hours of deep, uninterrupted sleep.

For the past fortnight I’ve been struggling to get to sleep and have been waking up multiple times during the night, mind racing and body agitated, and the impact’s been crazy.

I’ll be honest, writing this was a struggle.

The mind hasn’t been connecting as usual.

We’ve talked before about sleep being the cornerstone of health, performance and resilience, but it comes into sharper focus when you’re in the middle of experiencing such a dearth of it.

The reason sleep is THE thing, is the magnitude of the knock-on health and performance effects on both sides of the coin.

In essence, there’s not much you can do (well) on persistently poor sleep, and there’s not much you can’t do on consistently good sleep.

Let’s break this one down into the what and the how.

What’s the impact of poor sleep?

How best to improve it.

The WHAT

1. Blood sugar disregulation

One of the more insidious aspects of sleep deprivation, even following one poor night of sleep, is the food cravings.

It’s not in your head, it’s very real, and the consequence of a significant drop in blood sugar that’ll have you clamoring for the cookie jar.

That’s not all.

Our body’s response to glucose changes when we’re sleep deprived. Instead of being insulin sensitive (good), whereby the body shuttles glucose from food into muscle tissue, we become insulin resistant (bad), and instead of fueling muscle action and movement, the glucose gets transported into the fat cells and stored.

Not only will we crave more hyper-palatable Frankenfoods, our bodies are worse at using what we consume.

A fast track to pre-diabetes, weight gain and a wonky metabolism.

2. Low mood

As if physiological reasons to overeat weren’t bad enough, low mood and irritability associated with poor sleep won’t help you make the best decisions for your health, or any other area of life.

People suffering with insomnia may have as much as a tenfold higher risk of developing depression than people who sleep well.

The changes noted in neurotransmitter activity in the brain - including reduced serotonin reception - and disrupted hormone release across the HPA axis mirror the equivalent patterns found in depressed patients.

3. Cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s risk

Right at the beginning of a recent episode of The Tim Ferris Show podcast, sleep expert Dr. Matthew Walker bottom-lines the facts around the correlation between persistent poor sleep and cognitive decline, including increased Alzheimer’s risk.

Studies have shown that those with a history of poor sleep over a lifetime are 3.78 times more likely to develop premature onset Alzheimer’s disease.

That’s a tough stat to stomach, but as we know, correlation doesn’t equal causation.

What IS causative of Alzheimer’s disease, is the build up of excess 1) Beta Amyloid protein, and 2) Tau protein in the brain.

Studies have shown that even one shallow or disrupted night’s sleep causes levels of these damaging proteins to rise.

Fret not, one or two bad nights won’t seal the deal, but over time, there’s a dangerous compounding cycle, in that it’s a lack of the deep and restorative REM sleep that causes the problems, and we know from brain imaging that the area of the brain most impacted by Alzheimer’s Disease is that which allows for REM sleep to occur.

A vicious cycle.

In a groundbreaking study, Danish neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester, New York provides what Charles Czeisler, a sleep scientist at Harvard Medical School, Boston, calls the "first direct experimental evidence at the molecular level" for what could be sleep's most basic purpose, clearing the brain of toxic metabolic byproducts.

This deep cleansing system, the Glymphatic System turns on during REM sleep, and washes away Beta Amyloid and Tau proteins.

Deep sleep for a deep clean.

The HOW

Ok, so how to get better sleep, tonight?

1. Exercise

I won’t labor the point. It doesn’t matter what, where, or how.

Committing to daily exercise that raises the heart rate and gets you sweaty for at least 30-minutes will set your rhythms and body temperature on course to power down when it needs to.

We’re made to move, and sitting down for 9 hours a day is going to leave you with a bunch of excess energy from the day’s food intake.

Get moving, a little bit, everyday.

2. Heat before bed

You might have noticed you find it more difficult to sleep in hot climates. The body prefers a cooler core temperature for sleep.

What you might have also noticed is you sleep better following a hot shower.

Surely the two contradict?

Not so.

A warm shower in the evening, while elevating skin temperature, reduces core temperature in the body’s response to short term heat increases.

3. Caffeine timing

We’ve all been there. When there’s no option not to have that 4pm espresso or latte, and 7-hours later, we’re staring at the bedroom ceiling wondering how we got to 33,647 sheep and why they’re running through the fence, not over it.

Caffeine has a quarter-life of around 10 hours, meaning a quarter of the caffeine is still in our system 10 hours after drinking.

While that might not be enough to keep you awake, depending on your caffeine tolerance, it’s enough to prevent dropping into that deep, cleansing REM sleep.

“But what about the dreaded 3pm slump?”

Well, that’s more symptom than cause.

Over reliance on caffeine, and having your first coffee/tea within the first 90-minutes of waking is what causes the PM energy drop.

More caffeine is not the solution.

Waiting longer after waking for your first cup (~90 mins), and having decaf/non-caffeinated tea in the PM, is.

4. Light exposure

Screen exposure within the hour before bed, and the blue and green light from emitted, blocks the production of the hormone melatonin, a compound that’s released from the pineal gland in response to darkness.

Think of melatonin as your body’s dimmer switch, turning your daytime functions down, and your nighttime functions up.

Warning: It can be tempting, if you live in the US at least, to supplement with melatonin if your sleep sucks.

Please try and avoid this.

Most melatonin supplements are WAAAY overdosed, and supplementing will get in the way of your natural production, disrupting natural circadian rhythms and hormone balance.

5. Food and liquid consumption

Short and sweet, as we went over some of this at the end of Five fundamental food hacks for fierce focus and a masterful mind.

Aim to finish you last meal 3 hours before bed, and stop drinking any and all fluids 2 hours before bed.

You’ll feel more comfortable and past the initial phase of digestion, and stand at least a decent chance of avoiding the 2am bathroom break sleep interruption.

If health science has done one thing, it’s provided the biological basis to combat the western narrative of resilience and performance that necessitates physical and psychological self flagellation.

Sleep is at the centre of that.

The hyper-masculine “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” crowd is getting dozy, and not before time.

Until recently, we’ve thought about sleep as a proxy for the quality of our days and weeks. Now we can see, clear as day, that how we treat our nights, while relevant to our success at game-time, has far more impact on our experience across a lifetime.

In love and health.

Alex

Disclaimer: This post is for general information purposes only and is not intended to treat or diagnose any medical or psychological conditions. This information is not intended as a substitute for medical advice and readers should always consult their doctor, physician or registered healthcare practitioner before implementing anything they read in The Edge.