Thinking is overrated (when it comes to sleep)

Tuesday, 11 January 2011
James McGrath

WE only have a limited amount of time on this earth, and we spend a third of that time asleep. As it turns out though, we should be getting more sleep, not less.

Of course, that’s common knowledge. Getting more sleep tends to rank up there with drinking eight glasses of water per day: something we should do but tend not to. But, a heck of a lot of us are walking around saying we should get more sleep (especially at 7am on a Monday), but are finding it increasingly hard to do so.

The common complaint from those trying to get more sleep because either they battle to doze off or keep on waking up is that they just can’t shut their brain off. So, how do we shut off our brains, and what happens if we can’t?

Paul Taylor from Acumotum body brain and fitness vitality has a keen interest in sleep, and advises sportspeople and corporate executives on the subject.

He says the latest performance data indicates that those who haven’t had enough sleep perform at the same levels in cognitive tasks as someone who’s drunk.

“The alarming thing is people who are sleep deprived actually don’t know that they are performing poorly. They actually think they’ve done as well in their performance as when they’ve been rested,” he told SuperLiving.

Taylor is also a director with the Body-Brain Performance Institute, which uses neuroscience to drive the body’s performance. He says sleep is a vital part of getting all the brain’s neurons and synapses firing at optimum levels.

He says the problem of not being able to “turn the brain off” has no one root cause, but has to do with the release of a few key chemicals, which together with the nervous system can trick your brain into waking up.

“When your brain is aroused, you’re in beta wave activity. The higher the beta wave activity, the higher the arousal or stress. It’s driven by a couple of neuro-transmitters, particularly dopamine and adrenaline. The more dopamine or adrenaline is released, the higher the arousal state,” he said.

“People, whenever they’re thinking about all their work issues, they’re in reasonably high beta waves and they find it hard to get to sleep. I work with a number of corporate companies and that tends to be an issue with these guys, their brain tends to be racing [because they’re under constant stress].”

But why does thinking about work issues or things that happened during the day wake us up? Surely it’s already happened, and doesn’t warrant waking up at 2am to remedy.

Taylor says our brains are driven by more emotion than we’d like to admit.

“What the latest research is saying, is that there’s a strong connection between the frontal and temporal lobes. Deep in the temporal lobes is where your memory is. The latest thinking is that the brain is running through the day’s events and deciding what is important emotionally and what it will store,” he said.

“The brain is replaying the day’s events over again and then saying things like ‘Oh no, we haven’t done that’ or it’s running over something which was pretty stressful for them. So then you get a spike in adrenaline or sometimes cortisol and what that tells the brain is that it shouldn’t be sleeping because something very important’s going on.”

He also said the nervous system had a role to play in people not being able to get to sleep, or waking up at 3am.

He explained that our autonomic nervous system is made up of two key systems which act as balance for the system. These two systems are the sympathetic nervous system, and the parasympathetic nervous system.

“The sympathetic nervous system is associated with arousal and when it’s high it spikes, and the parasympathetic nervous system is what we call the ‘rest and digest’. When your brain is in a relaxed state, it encourages digestion and bodily repair,” he said.

“It’s important to have the balance between the two during the day, but at night you want that parasympathetic nervous system to be switched on.”

So, how do you kick that parasympathetic system into gear, and allow that “rest and digest” to take place? According to Taylor, we’ve just cottoned onto what eastern mystics have known for millennia; that breathing is an important part of physical wellbeing.

“What we now know, is that on every single breath, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system is active. So when you breathe in, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in and your heart rate speeds up momentarily. When you breathe out, your parasympathetic nervous system kicks and your heart rate slows down,” he said.

“That … reduces blood pressure and makes the parasympathetic nervous system kick in. If you do a couple of minutes of deep breathing with the breath out longer than the breath in, you go into parasympathetic dominance.

“During the day it’s a very useful tool because it does give your brain a bit of a break but at night it’s very useful because what research has shown is that the parasympathetic nervous system can aid in getting to the alpha brain wave state a lot more quickly.”

Could it be as simple as breathing exercises? Taylor has a couple of nifty tricks to help you get to sleep and stay asleep just in case the breathing doesn’t work.

What he advises sleep-deprived executives to do is to write down everything they did that day just before going to sleep. The reason for this is two-fold.

Firstly, the brain doesn’t have to run through the events of the day, and hence doesn’t have to wake you up because the brain has already gone through that process. Secondly, it creates a routine.

Taylor says that when you create a routine right before going to sleep, even if it’s completely mundane, it sends a signal to the brain that you’re about to sleep and it can kick you into the alpha state quicker than normal.

So what else can help you sleep peacefully? Everybody seems to have their own theories. For example, some people say working out before bed will have you too energised to sleep while others say that an intense workout will trigger your body’s need for rest. So, where does the truth lie?

According to Taylor, it’s all about the intensity.

“If you do an intense workout before bed, within an hour or an hour and a half of going to bed, what that’s going to do is drive up the adrenaline and cortisol which is going to keep you awake. If it’s two hours before bed, then that’s ideal because it gives time for the adrenaline to wear off,” he said.

“Doing a few push ups, probably isn’t going to have the same effect as the intense workout. It will just drain off a little bit of energy and encourage breathing. Going for a walk would be appropriate within an hour of going to bed because it’s not that high-intensity workout.”
He also confirmed the obvious in that having a lot of caffeine during the day probably isn’t going to be good for your sleep cycle, but added that different people have different caffeine metabolisms.

For example, those with a slower caffeine metabolism take longer to break down the caffeine, which means they shouldn’t drink coffee within eight hours of sleeping.

As a baseline, Taylor recommends people stop drinking coffee at about 4pm, as coffee has a half-life of six hours. He added that if people have multiple coffees throughout the day, they should stop sooner due to the build-up of caffeine.

Books

What about reading a book or watching TV to get to sleep?

“A book tends to be relaxing. You don’t want to be reading a book that gets you really aroused, [but] generally a novel or something really mind-numbing is a good move. For some people it works extremely well, but it’s not something which will work for everybody as it can stimulate thinking,” he said.

“Some people are into watching TV as they drift off to sleep, and the habitual behaviour … almost Pavlovian conditioning, can override the audio-visual stimulation but we do know that because of the flickering lights, TV does stimulate the brain but not in a particularly good way,”

He also said the number one tip for restful sleep is to make the bedroom a sanctuary. That means no laptops, blackberries or TVs. When the bedroom is free from distraction, it sends a signal to the brain that the room is a place for sleep, and helps the brain recognise that.

He also added that checking the time if you wake up during the night, is possibly the worst thing you can do to get back to sleep.

“One tip that is really quite useful for people who are waking up in the middle of the night is to turn your clock away. The first thing people tend to do when they wake up is to look at the clock,” Taylor said.

“That’s generally not a great idea, because if you see it’s 4am and you’re due to wake up at 6, the brain starts to ruminate about how you don’t have so much sleep left and that starts the brain waves up again, even subconsciously. Then you have to start to whole process of falling asleep again, right from the alpha waves.”

So, the next time you’re having trouble sleeping, the answer could lie in 3000-year-old breathing exercises, or simply turning your clock around. The brain is a clever, clever organ, but sometimes the best solutions are the overwhelmingly simple ones.

JOHN LEVINE:

The Academy recommends John Levine’s music which can change the brain wave pattern from Beta to Alpha and is a wonderful help to get to sleep.