Why sleeping is the most important thing you'll do this semester
By Danny Lennon
6
Image courtesy of imagerymajestic,/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Do you want to operate at your peak mental functionality?
Do you want your physical performance to reach its optimal level?
And do you want to just feel AWESOME every day, all day?
Of course you do! So what’s the secret?
You might expect that I, as a nutrition and sports performance nerd, would say it’s all about eating healthily or training properly. But it turns out that there is one thing that I believe trumps even those two cornerstones of health when it comes to achieving optimum cognitive and physical performance…
SLEEP!
What Inadequate Sleep Is Doing To You
1)Fat Gain
A study published this year by researchers from the University of Colorado examined the effect of insufficient sleep on energy balance and weight gain. The study looked at 16 adults over 2 weeks and measured the effect of 5 days of insufficient sleep. What they found is that despite the poor sleep causing them to burn slightly more calories, they would eat more calories also.
Not only did the increased intake offset the increased calorie “burning”, it greatly surpassed it, leading to the participants in the study putting on an average of almost 2 pounds. Certainly not a huge immediate increase, but bear in mind this is due merely to 5 days insufficient sleep. Think of how many of us have chronically insufficient sleep patterns and you begin to see how this can become a massive problem in the long-term.
So why might this be happening? Well, the human body is designed to help us get through life by adapting itself when presented with an obstacle. So let’s think about this in the context of sleep. Lack of sleep is going to result in a
reduced feeling of wakefulness(energy levels),
you know that horrible, sluggish feeling you get
when you haven’t slept enough. So in order to try to make up
for this our body
will try to
increase our
wakefulness by
some other
means. And how
else can we
increase
wakefulness?
Eat. More. Food.
study was
published in July
of this year
examining the
same thing,
This time 225
healthy people
were examined
for 18 days. It was found that those who spent only four hours in bed (4 a.m. to 8 a.m.) for 5 consecutive nights gained more weight than those who were in bed for 10 hours each night (10 p.m. to 8 a.m.). The late bedtime for the first group also gives the opportunity for late-night snacking. Increased calorie intake due to poor sleep is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to piling on the fat. Research has shown that sleep deprivation plays a major role in inflammation and autoimmunity, it messes with your hormones and your ability to tolerate carbohydrates. All these things have an extremely significant impact upon body composition and fat gain.
2)Decreased Mental Performance & Productivity
Sleep deprivation has been found to reduce your alertness, while quality sleep improves memory function. But it seems that simple tasks like rule-based reasoning, decision making and planning tasks are relatively unaffected by sleep loss. However, the more creative, divergent and innovative aspects of cognition do appear to be negatively affected by lack of sleep. So whether you are working on a presentation for college, have a deadline looming for an important project at work, or are an innovative entrepreneur looking to maximise your productivity, you NEED quality sleep.
3)Poor Athletic Performance
The concept of sleep being important for performance is not all that of a new one. We train hard so we need to get proper rest in order to recover for the next session right? Well yes, of course that’s true. But it turns out that sleep can have a much more direct impact on our performance.
Researchers at Stanford University studied the effect of sleep on five of the members of the college’s swimming teams. For the first two weeks of the study, the athletes kept up their usual sleeping patterns. For the next 6-7 weeks, they extended their sleep to 10 hours per night. What happened to their performance? The extended sleeping pattern allowed athletes to: swim a 15-metre sprint 0.51 seconds faster, react 0.15 seconds quicker off the blocks, improve turn time by 0.10 seconds and increase kick strokes by 5.0 kicks. That is a HUGE improvement in performance simply by getting better sleep.
Learn more HERE
How Much Sleep Do I Need?
In terms of how long we need to sleep for, this is going to vary from person to person. We all have to wake up feeling refreshed, WITHOUT the need of an alarm to wake. This will generally be a good indicator.
Three Ways To Improve Your Sleep
1)Limit artificial light at night
Over the course of our evolution as humans, we evolved to sleep as it became dark. This is where the hormone melatonin comes in. Less light (more accurately less blue light) means more melatonin, means time to sleep. However, in the modern world houses are artificially lit up until whatever hour we choose. Many of us stay up late looking at laptop screens or the television. Looking at an iPhone screen in bed or even the LEDs of the alarm clock can mean more light exposure. This all plays havoc with our genetically-programed sleep patterns. So, best bet is to try block out all artificial light in your room at night, try to limit your time on the laptop before bed and generally be aware of excessive blue light in the evenings.
(Note: one cool tip I have for those of you who do use a laptop in the evening is going and downloading this free program which blocks out the blue light from your screen at night. It’s great.)