What happens when we do or don’t sleep?

Sleep for me has always come easy or that's what I tell myself and others. The joke about being able to sleep anywhere has served me well while traveling for work and especially when having kids. I used to sleep on the hour-long bus ride from my childhood home in Brookfield, Wisconsin to my college campus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. One time, I woke up with the guy next to me leaning against my shoulder, drool dripping out of his mouth. Wasn’t a pass, just another sleep-deprived college student.

As I read Peter Attia’s book Outlive, one of my favorite lines about sleep was a discussion he was having with a Navy Seal physician. Attia was arguing that five to six hours of sleep a night was sufficient and what a waste of time sleep was considering all that could be done instead. His Navy Seal doctor friend interjected - “if sleep is so unimportant, why hasn’t evolution gotten rid of it?” Since then Attia isn’t an advocate for the medical school sleep-deprived gauntlet. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a sleep-deprived surgeon working on me, or any of my friends or family.

When I was pregnant with our first daughter, I used to steal a nap at lunchtime. I’d slip into the backseat of our blue Honda Accord and cover myself with my full length down jacket I brought from Wisconsin. One time, I dozed off hearing muffled voices as people came and went out to lunch. I worked hard to keep my naps a secret. Didn’t want the other programmers giving me a hard time.

After awhile, not fully awake, voices got louder. From under my cozy make-shift blanket I heard a door handle rattle. Adrenaline spiked. My mouth tasted like metal. My heart rate jumped.

Some engineer friends saw I’d left my headlights on and wanted to turn them off. I waited for the voices to fade before stretching my arm from under my cocoon to turn the lights off and go back to sleep for another 15 minutes.

What exactly happens while we sleep? Why is it so important for our physical and mental health? How can we make the most our of the hours we do sleep and learn to befriend the night shift of our subconscious?

When I started researching sleep, I had no idea I’d learn so much.

how is sleep the Swiss-army knife of health?

We may feel like nothing eventful occurs when we sleep, except maybe we remember a dream now and again, but so much more transpires when the night shift shows up in our bodies and brains.

Sleep is the “Swiss-army knife of health, it’s your superpower” according to Dr. Matthew Walker. He’s a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley where his laboratory studies sleep. Mother Nature hasn’t evolved it out over millions of years, so there must be something worth investigating.

There are two types of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM). Attia describes the descent into sleep as riding down to the ocean floor in a submersible vessel where light doesn’t reach.

Healthy sleep is broken down into 90-minute cycles. We slip into REM, down the four levels of NREM sleep, back up into REM again, and repeat a handful more times during the night. Each cycle spending a longer amount of time in REM. I was relieved to know it’s natural to wake up at these cycle changes before descending again. This may be evolution’s way of making sure we’re safe. Mother Nature’s life support system. When we’re young we turn over. As we age, we get up to go to the bathroom.

Back in high school I used to put on my alarm clock for 4am before I had to grab-and-go get up. As in grab your breakfast and books and go to the bus stop or carpool with an upper classman who drove a classic VW Bug. During the Wisconsin winters, we had to scrape the ice off the windshield because it took too long for the defroster to heat up and clear the frost away.

Why did I put my alarm on at 4am? Remember the last time you woke up thinking it was a weekday and you realized it was the weekend? That moment of pure bliss at being able to go back to sleep? The opposite of an adrenaline kick. I loved that feeling. So I recreated those moments whenever I’d been studying late at night and knew it would be hard to get up in the morning. My personal warped sense of reverse psychology. Sounds like I should have set it for 90 minutes instead of two hours.

You might have heard the term circadian rhythms or had conversations about whether you’re a morning person or a night person. In “What We Can Learn from an Insomniac Fish” in Nautilus Magazine, Katherine Harmon Courage explains how those circadian rhythms are organized by external cues known as zeitgebers (“time-givers”). A zeitgeber is a powerful whisper to go to sleep—and nature’s alarm clock—time to wake up.

We’re all born with our own unique circadian rhythms, as determined by our chronotypes, your natural biological preference to be awake and be asleep at a certain time. If interested in learning your, try this test. There are apparently three flavors: morning lark, night owl, or somewhere in-between. There’s a biological aspect as well as a genetic basis, and there are consequences if you are forced to sleep when Mother Nature has a different plan. Turns out I’m a hybrid. I used to be a night owl, but now I lean towards morning lark.

When people have problems sleeping (sometimes including myself) many of us try with different techniques: alcohol, THC, sleep aids like melatonin or magnesium supplements, or sleeping pills. Research shows most of these actually make insomnia worse because they interfere with sleep in three ways: 1) they sedate the brain, rather than generating a natural sleep, 2) they increase the frequency of nighttime awakenings and make it harder to go back to sleep, and 3) they inhibit REM sleep.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the American College of Physicians (ACP) now states the first line treatment for insomnia should be the non-drug approach called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTi) or with a trained clinician for several weeks to change your habits, behaviors, mental beliefs, and stress around sleep. Many studies have shown that CBTi is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term yet has no negative side effects. Unlike sleeping pills, its benefits can last for many years after stopping work with a therapist.

sleep benefit #1: body repair

From an evolutionary perspective, sleep is non-negotiable. Turns out that when we sleep, lots happens in our bodies and brains. And when you don’t, well … it doesn’t happen.

October 29th is World Stroke Day. I’m reminded about all the healing during my stroke recovery and the importance of sleep back then. I’d listen to A Symphony of Brainwaves by Andrew Weil, MD, My sister introduced me to while I was in the hospital. I’d listen to the piece over and over in my brightly lit room, where I spent most of my time. One day, I took a walk with my husband, sister, and primary doctor to go see my MRI scans. I remember hesitating at my room threshold. I noticed for the first time, one of those international signs of a stick figure with the words risk of falling. My heart sank. I’m not that person.

The effort it took to walk down the hall winded me, but I didn’t want to show it, so I tried small talk. But back then the words were still slow in getting from my brain to my lips, especially with the extra level of difficulty of walking at the same time.

Letting the classical and toning music help rewire my brain felt like a super drug. Instead of me willing my brain to get better, knowing my brain knew what to do if I got out of the way and let it do its magic, was a pivotal juncture for me. As was going into labor and learning my body knew what to do as women have been doing for millennia. It’s humbling to witness being part of an evolutionary instinct. Maybe the same applied to my brain healing after my strokes, with a little help of music and toning to stimulate my brain’s seemingly special powers.

Once we slip into sleep, a growth hormone is released (and not just in kids), required for tissue repair, healing, and rejuvenating our bodies. For each of us, when we go to sleep, our night shift comes on duty.

At night, I imagine my body project-managing subsystems. They stand at alert, ready to go through their punch lists, like pre-flight checklists: metabolism, insulin levels, blood pressure, cortisol, etc. They check what needs attending to while my conscious brain signs off for the day. I now view sleep as a natural blood pressure medicine. And even now, I still play Symphony of Brainwaves to give my brain/body a healing boost, like the time they were working together to rewire my brain after the blockage in my carotid artery was cleared.

sleep benefit #2: dreaming for mental health

Over the past 20 years with the help of brain-imaging machines, a new scientific view of REM sleep has helped our understanding around dreaming.

When our brains switch from deep NREM sleep to REM, Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines show our brain’s activity erupting. The areas of our brain that reflect movement, emotions, past memories, people, and experiences become very active, while our prefrontal cortex, our logic center, becomes noticeably deactivated. That’s why our dreams seem so whacky. Our logic controller is out on a required break.

Have you ever heard the term dolphin-brain? The first time I did we were vacationing in Maui with the girls and there was a mama and baby dolphin in a private pool below our rooms. The dolphin expert explained that they swim in circles at night because only half of their brain is awake to protect their young.

As a new parent, I definitely felt like I was operating with a dolphin-brain from lack of sleep. I didn’t realize there are other times we humans experience unihemispheric sleep, where one hemisphere of the brain is awake, while the other sleeps.

The last time it happened was on a recent road trip to the Midwest for a celebration of life in Madison. In an unfamiliar location (like the four different hotel rooms we stayed in) humans keep one of their hemispheres on guard, that may contribute to the feeling of malaise during travel people feel. The best advice is to sync up with the local time, get into some sunlight first thing in the morning and switch your devices to local time. If necessary, nap only for a a short period of time, or you’ll postpone switching into the new time zone.

Scientists have discovered that dreams are not simply an extraneous by-product of REM sleep. Dreams function as emotional therapy. When we create an emotional memory, at the time of the experience, we release a visceral reaction that wraps itself around the memory with red flags “THIS IS IMPORTANT!”

Dr. Walker and his team discovered that it’s not time that heals all wounds. Instead, it is sleep, that helps the brain divorce the emotion from the memory, what he calls a form of “overnight therapy.” And we need to dream these events to benefit from these “emotional windshield wipers.”

We’re never told to, “stay awake on a problem.” Instead, we’re told to 'sleep on it'. Apparently that concept seems to exist in most languages.

sleep benefit #3: dreaming for creativity

A very different function of REM dreaming involves what Dr. Walker refers to as informational alchemy, where we build new connections. When we wake in the morning we have a web of associations that may help in solving problems. A fun piece of trivia is how Sir Paul McCartney’s origin story for the songs “Yesterday” and “Let It Be,” both came to McCartney in his dreams.

At the celebration of life in Madison, a friend asked for the title of my memoir and I didn’t want to provide the subtitle because I was still working out the themes. This was the year of the orphan as a dear friend since college lost his father and I lost my mother last February. Echoes of her death joined the pot luck of meals and memories of our parents, how our siblings and kids were doing, mixed in with college relationship memories and walks down memory lane on campus on a blustery night. My subconscious took the bait and worked out an insightful answer after the nostalgia and memory soup generated into a fertile compost.

Do you remember a time when you woke up after a good night’s sleep or a nap and had an aha moment? If you want more of those, pepper your subconscious by asking a question before you drift off to sleep.

sleep benefit #4: improved memory & cognition

More and more research shows the importance of sleep on cataloguing and preserving our memories, especially as we age. Sleep is vital for consolidating memories and facilitating learning. It helps the brain process and organize information, which is essential for retaining knowledge and expanding skills.

Alzheimer’s has gotten a lot of press lately and research shows improvement in the quality of our sleep can help deter or prevent the cruel disease. A very small portion of the population carries the disease in their genes, which means we can take action ourselves to keep Alzheimer’s at bay. One way is by getting better sleep.

I imagine my second shift team pattern-matching and organizing my experiences from during the day and putting the memories into the right buckets. Like in Harry Potter during the hat sorting ceremony. But instead of: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff, we have sensory, short-term, working, and long-term memory buckets.

how can we learn to befriend the night shift of our subconscious?

Getting enough quality and quantity of sleep is essential for a healthy and productive life. Body healing and mental-health windshield-wipering, memory organizing and creative problem-solving — all done in the quiet of the night. But how to make the most of of the time we do sleep?

With sleep, waking up in the middle of the night feels like being on a hike in the forest, like Angel’s Rest here in Oregon. When you reach an open air point on one of the switch backs, you are rewarded by a clear expansive view of the gorge between Oregon and Washington. The striking difference between the forested foothills and the white capped Columbia river below on a crisp fall day, a cool breeze on your cheeks, takes your breath away.

You have moments to linger, appreciate the warm sun before going back to the hike, before going back to sleep. A periscope into the open air exposed, temporarily. Whatever dream thoughts were playing on your mind’s stage on intermission and repeated aloud in the hopes of remembering the following morning.

During the night if I wake up between my 90 minute cycles with whispers of an idea, I try the mnemonic tip of creating vivid images. Sometimes I have a small notebook and pen by my bedside and write word breadcrumbs in the dark, hoping I can read enough of my writing to recreate the emotion on the page the next day.

Back in the early aughts, the morphing corporate culture having painfully mastered the whole manufacturing off-shore to reduce costs gauntlet, extended the off-shore concept to software engineers at my company. Not only were they cheaper in Malaysia, but having more design centers in Germany, Montreal, Boston, and the west coast meant 24-hour development. Literally. As one crew would finish for the day, they’d check-in their code with commentary and the night shift for the US picked up. Then come morning, engineers halfway across the world would check their work in too, passing it off to the US day shift.

Sometimes, when my night shift comes on duty, my day shift mucks up their sorting and provides nighttime commentary distracting them. So everything, old memories, snippets from events from the day, creative projects, are spread all over the place. Like papers blown by the wind, they flutter and settle on the ground. Wide-eyed, disembodied night shifters caught mid-shift with scowls on their faces.

A good night’s sleep feels scrumptious. Like a satisfying skin softening warm bath. I wake up refreshed, knowing my brain has done all its healing and sorting, and maybe an insight into some creative problem-solving too. With sleep, the night shift taps out and the morning daytime gang is all refreshed and ready to go.

When we have too little sleep sleep, something doesn’t get done: body repair or organizing memories or missing a chance to solving a problem. We miss an opportunity for our second shift powers to do their evolutionary magic.

How’s your sleep? How are you using your superpowers?

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