So, I’d prefer to begin with testicles. Guys who sleep for five hours or less each night have considerably smaller testicles than men who sleep for seven hours or more. Furthermore, guys who sleep only four to five hours every night have testosterone levels comparable to those of men ten years their older. In terms of that important part of wellbeing, a lack of sleep will age a guy by a decade. We also detect similar deficits in female reproductive health as a result of sleep deprivation. This is the most exciting news I have for you today. Read – Wake up to new life – powerful motivational speech.
Not only will I tell you about the amazing things that happen when you get enough sleep, but also about the frighteningly horrible things that happen when you don’t, both for your brain and for your body. Let me begin with the brain and its functions of learning and remembering, because we’ve found over the last decade or so that you need sleep after learning to essentially push the save button on those new memories so you don’t forget them.
However, we just learned that sleep is also required prior to learning in order to prepare your brain, much like a dry sponge ready to absorb new knowledge. Without sleep, the brain’s memory circuits get “waterlogged,” so to speak, and you are unable to absorb new memories.
Experiments
So allow me to show you the statistics. We chose to test the premise that pulling an all-nighter was a good idea in this study. So we gathered a group of people and randomly assigned them to one of two experimental groups: sleep and sleep deprivation. Now, the sleep group will get a full eight hours of sleep, but the deprivation group will be kept awake in the laboratory under monitoring. By the way, there are no naps or coffee, so everyone is miserable.
The next day, we’ll put those volunteers inside an MRI scanner and have them try to learn a long list of new information while we take pictures of their brain activity. Then we’ll put them to the exam to evaluate how effective their learning has been. That’s what you’re seeing on the vertical axis. Read – How To Recover From Illness Using Your Own Stem Cells.
When the two groups are compared, there is a 40% impairment in the brain’s ability to generate new memories without sleep. Given what we know about sleep in our educational populations right now, I believe this should be cause for alarm. To put it another way, it’s the difference between a youngster passing an exam and failing badly by 40%. And we’ve gone on to figure out what’s wrong with your brain to cause these kinds of learning difficulties.
The hippocampus is a structure located on both the left and right sides of your brain. And you may think of the hippocampus as your brain’s informational mailbox. It is highly good at receiving fresh memory files and storing them.
And when we looked at this structure in people who had gotten a good night’s sleep, we noticed a lot of beneficial learning-related activity. However, we were unable to detect any meaningful signal in individuals who were sleep-deprived. As a result, it’s as if sleep deprivation has turned off your memory mailbox, and any fresh data that arrives is simply bounced. You couldn’t recollect any recent events.
Is Sleep Important ?
So that’s the worst that might happen if I robbed you of your sleep, but let me return to the control group for a moment. Do you recall those people who slept for an entire eight hours? We may, however, pose a quite different question: What is it about the physiological quality of your sleep that replenishes and improves your memory and learning abilities every day? And by attaching electrodes all over the head, we discovered that there are large, strong brainwaves that occur during the deepest stages of sleep, and that these magnificent bursts of electrical activity known as sleep spindles ride on top of them.
The combined quality of these deep-sleep brainwaves functions as a file-transfer process at night, transporting memories from a short-term susceptible reservoir to a more permanent long-term storage spot inside the brain, safeguarding and keeping them secure. And it’s critical that we understand what happens during sleep to provide these memory improvements, since there are substantial medical and societal repercussions and let me just tell you about one clinical area where we’ve pushed this work, which is the setting of aging and dementia.
Because it’s no secret that our learning and memory capacities begin to diminish and deteriorate as we age. But we’ve also established that a physiological characteristic of aging is a decline in sleep quality, particularly the deep type of sleep I mentioned before. Read – How to your brain invents mind “Self”- Professor Anil Seth’s explanation.
We only released data last year that these two phenomena are not merely co-occurring, but are also highly connected. And it shows that disturbance of deep sleep is an overlooked element that contributes to cognitive decline or memory deterioration in aging, as well as, more recently, Alzheimer’s disease. Now, I realize this is really upsetting news. It’s on its way to you.
It’s heading straight towards you. However, there may be a bright side to this predicament. Unlike many of the other problems linked with aging, such as changes in the physical structure of the brain that is notoriously difficult to cure. However, the fact that sleeps is a missing component in the explanation of aging and Alzheimer’s disease is encouraging because we may be able to do something about it.
By the way, one method we’re taking at my sleep clinic is to avoid utilizing sleeping drugs. They are, however, blunt devices that do not generate realistic sleep. Instead, we’re working on an approach based on this. It is known as direct current brain stimulation. You inject a little amount of electricity into the brain, so minuscule that you won’t notice it, yet it has a measurable effect.
Now, if you apply this stimulation during sleep in young, healthy individuals, as if you’re sort of singing in rhythm with those deep-sleep brainwaves, you can not only magnify the magnitude of those deep-sleep brainwaves, but you can nearly double the amount of memory benefit that you receive from sleep.
The issue now is whether we can convert this similar low-cost, possibly portable technology into elderly folks and those suffering from dementia. Can we reintroduce a healthy level of deep sleep and, as a result, save some of their learning and memory function? That is my true hope right now.
That’s one of our “moonshot” objectives. That is an example of sleep for your brain, but sleep is equally important for your body. We’ve previously discussed sleep deprivation and your reproductive system. Or I could explain you about sleep deprivation and your cardiovascular system in one hour. Because there is a worldwide experiment called daylight saving time that is carried out on 1.6 billion individuals in 70 nations twice a year.
What Happen When We Loss Sleep ?
When we lose one hour of sleep in the spring, we notice a 24-percent increase in heart attacks the next day. When we gain an hour of sleep in the autumn, we notice a 21% reduction in heart attacks. Isn’t it amazing? And you observe the similar pattern in vehicle accidents, road traffic accidents, and even suicide rates. But, as a deeper dig, I’d want to concentrate on this: sleep deprivation and your immune system.
Now I’ll reveal the image’s beautiful blue parts. They are known as natural killer cells, and they may be thought of as your immune system’s secret service agents. They are highly good at detecting and removing hazardous or undesired materials.
In reality, they are eradicating a malignant tumor mass here. So you need a virulent set of immunological assassins on hand at all times, which you won’t have if you don’t get enough sleep. So, in this experiment, you will not be sleep deprived for an entire night; instead, your sleep will be limited to four hours for one night only, and we will analyze the percentage decline in immune cell activity that you experience. And it’s not a small proportion — it’s not even 10% or 20%. The activity of natural killer cells was reduced by 70%. Read – How To Feels To Your Brain During A Migraine.
That’s a serious condition of immune insufficiency, and it’s easy to see why we’re now discovering strong linkages between a lack of sleep and your chance of developing a variety of cancers. Cancer of the intestine, prostate cancer, and breast cancer are now on the list. In fact, the relationship between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that the World Health Organization has designated any type of overnight shift work as a possible carcinogen due to a disturbance in your sleep-wake patterns. You’ve probably heard the ancient adage that you can sleep after you’re dead.
Well, I’m being serious now: it is extremely foolish counsel. We know this from epidemiological research involving millions of people. There’s a basic truth: the less sleep you get, the shorter your life will be. Sleep deprivation predicts all-cause death. And, as if raising your likelihood of developing cancer or Alzheimer’s disease wasn’t enough, we’ve subsequently learned that a lack of sleep can damage the fundamental fabric of biological existence itself, your DNA genetic code.
So in this study, they recruited a group of healthy adults and restricted them to six hours of sleep per night for one week, and then they assessed the change in their gene activity profile in comparison to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hours of sleep each night. There were two significant discoveries. First, a big and important 711 genes’ activity was disrupted due to a lack of sleep. The second finding was that the activity of around half of those genes was boosted. The other half was reduced. Now, those genes that were turned off by a lack of sleep were related with your immune system, so you can observe that immunological insufficiency once more.
Those genes that were truly up regulated or raised as a result of a lack of sleep, on the other hand, were genes linked with tumor promotion, genes related with long-term chronic inflammation inside the body, and genes connected with stress and, as a result, cardiovascular disease. There is absolutely no area of your health that can withdraw at the first indication of sleep deprivation and escape uninjured.
It’s similar to a burst water pipe in your house. Sleep deprivation will pervade every nook and corner of your body, even interfering with the DNA nucleic alphabet, which governs your daily health story. You could be thinking, how can I start sleeping better?” “Can you tell me how you obtain a good night’s sleep? “Aside from avoiding the negative and unpleasant effects of alcohol and coffee on sleep, I have two helpful hints for you: avoid naps during the day if you’re having difficulties sleeping at night.” The first need is consistency.
Regardless of whether it’s a weekday or a weekend, go to bed and wake up at the same time. Regularity is king, and it will anchor your sleep and increase both its amount and quality. The second rule is to keep it cool. Your body needs to reduce its core temperature by around two to three degrees Fahrenheit to begin and subsequently maintain sleep, which is why it is always easier to fall asleep in a place that is too chilly rather than too hot. As a result, strive for a bedroom temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius). Related article – How to use Garcinia Cambogia for Weight Loss.
That will be ideal for the majority of people’s sleep. Finally, take a step back and ask yourself, “What is the mission-critical message here?” Well, I believe it is this: sleep, sadly, is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological requirement. It’s your life support system, and it’s Mother Nature’s finest attempt at immortality yet. And the abolition of sleep in developed nations is having a disastrous effect on our health, wellness, and even the safety and education of our children. It’s a hidden sleep loss epidemic that’s quickly becoming one of the most serious public health issues of the twenty-first century.
I feel it is now time to regain our right to a full night’s sleep, free of humiliation or the awful stereotype of lethargy. And in doing so, we may reclaim the most potent elixir of life, the Swiss Army knife of health. And now that I’ve finished my soapbox tirade, I’ll just say good night, good luck, and above all, good luck. I hope you have a restful night’s sleep. Sleeping with science. Please share this article with others.
Article based on Scientist Matt Walker’s Speech – about Sleep.
HowNHowTo.Com Team
Pictures credit to pixabay.com – pexels.com
Keywords
better sleep, biology, brain, Health, human body, Matt Walker, Medical Research, Medicine, Memory, Mind, neuroscience, Science, Scientist Matt Walker, sleep, TEDTalk, TEDTalks