Sleeping and stress.
Intro.
I’ll start with a couple quotes from Robert Sapolky’s book “Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers”:
“So why care if sleep deprivation is a stressor? It’s obvious. We’re accustomed to all sorts of amenities in our modern lives: overnight deliveries of packages, advice nurses who can be called at two in the morning, round-the-clock technical support staff. Therefore, people are required to work under conditions of sleep deprivation. We’re not a nocturnal species and if a person works at night or works swing shifts, regardless of how many total hours of sleep she’s getting, it’s going against her biological nature. People who work those sorts of hours tend to overactivate the stress-response, and there’s little habituation that goes on. Given that an overactive stress-response makes every page of this book relevant, it is not surprising that night work or shift work increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal disorders, immune suppression, and fertility problems.” -Robert Sapolsky.
Some might think, why would sleeping less lead to these diseases?
“Not getting enough sleep is a stressor; being stressed makes it harder to sleep. Yup, we’ve got a dread vicious cycle on our hands.” -Robert Sapolsky.
Not sleeping enough is a “stressor” and when this happens chronically, by empirical experience anyone can know it’s easier to get sick because defenses are lower than they should. Being chronically stressed is an awful thing, and simply by not sleeping enough a couple weeks, you can begin to be chronically stressed. Chronic stress can get people sick (with cardiovascular disease for example), and it can easily worsen any kind of disease or chronic pain.
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Average sleep time.
Today we have a worldwide average of 6.8 hours of daily sleep, in 1910 according to Robert Sapolsky people used to sleep an average of 9 hours in the US. Many people argue against this kind of facts by saying things like “I feel more tired when I sleep over 8 hours”, but that doesn’t mean that getting 9 hours of sleep is bad, ideally we need to sleep an amount of time thinking about sleep cycles, we all sleep in 90 minute sleep cycles, so ideally one should sleep 7:30 hours (5 cycles), or 9 hours (6 cycles), that's the reason 8 hours is a great amount of time to sleep, we have those extra 30 minutes for falling asleep or wake up in the night to pee.
When we sleep less than we need, our body releases things like glucocorticoids, cortisol, and epinephrine which temporarily makes us feel more active, but, it's detrimental overtime.
*Here’s it’s important to note that many of these arguments that say that sleeping more (8 or 9 hours) is bad for you are based in ideology and not in facts, these kind of ideologies usually say you should work harder and sleep less because sleeping is a waste of time.
This is just an example I gave, people can usually rest well by sleeping from 7 to 9 hours a night (if it's a high quality sleep without waking up for long periods of time at night). Usually, short naps can be helpful for people who sleep less (as long as naps are not impacting negatively your night sleep, naps can affect the night sleep of some people a lot).
Many people (and by this I mean, most people I know) are used to feeling bad every day. This is no joke, and this is probably one of the most important posts I’ll write. I’ve heard people talking about sleep and saying things like “Getting more than 6 hours of sleep is greedy”, or things like “At best I get 7 hours of sleep daily”. Arnold Schwarzenegger who has a massive influence in pop culture was once giving a talk about being more productive and said something like “well, sleep faster” (a very stupid thing to say, no offense).
What I mean when I say a bunch of people are used to feel bad every day, it's because they sleep less than 7 hours daily, they have baggy eyes, they have a bad mood, they’re depressed, they lack energy, problems with memory, or weight gain and associated issues.
Another way to notice you're not sleeping enough is when your brain doesn’t work well in the morning and starts working better later in the day or at night. The reason this happens is because you didn’t sleep enough and you don’t have stored energy for your brain to use, not until later that your body compensates the lack of sleep.
Another important thing. There’s no such thing as a nocturnal person (this is proven and known), some people believe this because they are not sleeping well at night, and feel like crap when they wake up, then feel better later when their body sort of compensates and stores energy for the lack of sleep.
Me personally, I feel all the above mentioned when I don’t sleep well (baggy eyes, bad mood, hunger, etc.), I can notice it right away when I slept well and when I didn’t. Problem with most people, they’re used to feel like crap daily and have a big bias because of this nowadays dumb ideologies that say sleeping less is best because you can get more things done.
Sometimes sleeping problems happen because some people work 10+ hours daily, there’s just not enough time to get a good night sleep. In some cases, it's way too hard to do something about this problem, but I’m sure whoever reads this post can actually do something to improve their sleep.
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Some causes.
-Working too much.
-Hanging out with other people often until late hours.
-An addiction to using social media and cellphones intermittently during the whole day.
-Browsing/ watching stuff on the computer too much, playing too many video games.
-Exercising daily for hours (too much exercise can lead to chronic stress).
-Trying to get too many things done such as studying a master’s degree while working full time.
-Doing too many activities daily such as reading, watching TV shows, movies, staying up to date with whatever is going on with news, entertainment, with pop culture, etc. doing many things causes a burnout that causes stress and affects sleep.
“These worries about sleep deprivation are relevant to even those whose 9-to-5 job is 9-to-5 during daylight hours. We have an unprecedented number of ways to make us sleep deprived, beginning with something as simple as indoor lighting. In 1910, the average American slept nine hours a night, disturbed only by the occasional Model T backfiring. We now average 7.5 and declining. When there’s the lure of 24-hour-a-day fun, activities, and entertainment or, for the workaholic, the knowledge that somewhere, in some time zone, someone else is working while you indulge yourself in sleep, that pull of “just a few more minutes,” of pushing yourself, becomes irresistible. And damaging.” – Robert Sapolsky.
Robert wrote “7.5 and declining” in 2004, now in 2022 it’s below 7 hours for adults and perhaps still declining.
Overall, we can say that that many people want to get too many things done and end up sleeping less hours as a result.
Another huge thing from our era related to this is the tendency for everything to have become immediate, most things last less than they used to, it’s easy to realize how a lot of products now aren’t made to last as they used to 20 years ago (with a few exceptions). You can see everywhere training programs that promise to get you ripped in 3 months, diets to lose a ton of weight in 1 month (stuff that won’t work in the long run). The fact you can simply search anything on your cellphone and you’ll get a response and tutorial, which is an amazing thing, but the worldwide tendency to make things instant, to learn and forget things instantly, it also ends up in you “sleeping faster”.
We have created an instant need for things which results in products that won’t last long such as clothes or technology like cellphones or tablets that will be outdated in 3-4 years from now. I used to have comic books in an app named “ComiXology” and guess what, I can’t update my tablet anymore, can’t read the comics I had purchased anymore (the damned thing isn’t available for Windows). There is a planned obsolescence in way too many products now, some brands of footwear used in different industries that used to last 10+ years are now lasting 1 to 2 years at best.
I just mentioned a few examples about this nowadays tendency, this might sound like it’s not related at all to sleep, but the tendency to make everything faster has a huge impact on us without most people ever realizing it. If there's a huge tendency for everything to become more immediate, sleep has to become more immediate.
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More causes.
-Addiction to drugs (alcohol is a very addictive and dangerous drug). Whether or not people want to accept that alcohol or other drug addictions are bad for sleep is their problem, but drinking often is extremely bad for the overall health, sleep isn't as recovering as it could when there's alcohol in the system, the usual sleep cycles are interrupted.
-Caffeine is also a problem when talking a lot or consuming it less than 8 or 10 hours before sleeping. Sometimes it creates a vicious cycle of drinking a buttload of coffee to wake up, sleeping less and feeling tired in the morning, then drinking too much coffee again.
-Other stress related problems like psychological stress (I’ll try to write about this later) will affect sleep. This stress tends to be found a lot in people who work over 8 hours from Monday to Friday, even the usual 8 hour shift can be very stressing in some contexts for some people.
-The lack of physical activity and of spending time in the sun, or getting sunlight even if it's indirectly, it will help, more so if it's in the morning.
-Not having a regular sleep schedule and a routine that helps sleep. Sleeping isn't a switch, we need to ease into it and remove any sort of lights to prepare for sleeping (light from any source will prevent our body to produce melatonin).
--Suggestions here are to read from a book or a screen without light directly hitting your eyes, an electronic reader, to listen to a podcast, to meditate, avoid looking at your cellphone, TV, or any bright light before you sleep.
-Eating too much, or too little at night. A bunch of people have probably experienced this, it’s an awful idea to eat a lot before sleeping, can’t sleep well, bunch of strange dreams and restless sleep. Also getting hungry in the middle of the night will mess with the quality of your sleep.
-Having a terrible diet, the stomach and intestines have a big effect on what goes on in the rest of the body. Try to improve your diet, this will improve your sleep.
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Some possible solutions.
I’ll start by saying 3 things:
-If you don’t try to solve your sleeping problems in a progressive and regular/ consistent manner, you won’t ever solve anything at all.
-For people still believing that sleeping 6 hours is okay, they're wrong. Science has proven long ago that's not enough.
-For people who simply don’t make enough money and have 2 jobs or a 12+ hours job and kids, sadly we can’t do much in that scenario, but even so, some of the information in the post could be useful.
Here's a list of recommendations to sleep better, don’t try them all at once, start with 1 or 2:
-Have what Robert Sapolsky calls “outlets for frustration”, these are hobbies (exercise included), things you can do to focus on and forget about other troubles, it can be almost anything, not having any kind of hobby or activity outside work leads to think about work more and get stressed (browsing social media for hours is not an outlet for frustration, it’s just another addiction that causes more stress).
-Exercise often, get some sun. Exercising can mean taking a 20-30-minute walk, you don’t need to spend hours at the gym (this goes specially for people sitting on their butts all day). Taking a walk helps calm the mind and have more energy for the rest of the day.
-Have a regular sleep schedule (also try not to sleep way too late on weekends).
-Turn off or at least set your phone in silence (NOT vibration mode) at the very least 20 minutes before sleep. Having the phone on at night is proven to cause bad sleep, even if it doesn’t ring at all, in the back of your head you know it can ring anytime and this affects sleep. Reading some messages at night could also get you stressed, it’s better to leave some conversations for tomorrow morning.
-Stop drinking ridiculously big amounts of coffee, and don’t drink it after 2 pm. This includes other substances like energetic drinks.
-Stop trying to get so many things done that will mess your sleep. At certain time of day just stop, take a few minutes to relax and go to bed.
-Meditating helps having a calmer mind for many people (it can be 10 minutes daily, perhaps before going to bed).
-Be more honest with yourself, don’t try to pretend so much and worry about what other people think about you. You might think this is not related to sleep, but it is if you’re investing time into it.
-Beware of addictions, not only to drugs, being addicted to things such as exercise or even to things like fasting can make you loose sleep because you’re just thinking about waking up and doing that. Try not to make such things a priority in life. Even if they are a priority to an athlete for example, think about it as your job and try to get a different hobby that will get you distracted from that. If you’re not a professional athlete, you can think of exercise as your hobby, but not as the most important thing to do because it will make you lose sleep over it.
-Try to think differently about your job or even change jobs. If it’s just a job where you work 8-9 hours daily, try not to think of it as something you hate and must do. Just go and do it without getting too distracted with your phone (using social media during work only increases stress). Leave work and do something else immediately, stop thinking about it. For me it works to exercise right after because I’m sitting during all the shift, if you have a more physical job, perhaps you can read or do whatever else like watching a TV show. I would avoid social media entirely right after work because by the time you think “oh I should do something productive” you’ll have spent 30 minutes or more looking at your cellphone and wasting a lot of time in nothing, on top of that, you'll feel even more tired.
--If you need a break after work, take a 20-minute nap if necessary, but do something else right after, taking a long nap will most likely ruin your night's sleep, that said, some people can nap for 90 minutes and sleep just fine at night, but it's not the case for most people.
-Trying to have at least a partially good diet most of the time is helpful. Don't ever eat too much for supper.
I could continue with the list, but that’s already too much, overall, in my blog I’ve posted information that sort of goes together with this knowledge.
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How to achieve sleeping well?
Everything you do, be extremely progressive and extremely patient. For example, if you’re sleeping at 12:00 to 2:00 am every night and your target is to sleep at 11, start by trying to sleep every night at 12:00, and to do at least 2 things that will help you sleep better (such as exercising and removing all lights 15 minutes before you sleep). After you can sleep at 12:00 every night, start trying 11:45, then 11:30, then 11:15, and so on.
In my case, when I try to get too many things done during the day, I end up with a lot of brain activity and can’t sleep until late, I also wake up at night a lot. What I do is limit the stuff I do during the day and stop everything before sleeping (at 9:45 pm or so). Playing video games at night is a very bad idea for me, if I stop playing at 9:30 for example, I know it will affect my sleep. I need to stop doing that at 9 pm and then do an activity that is less stimulating for me like reading, listening to a podcast, meditating, or preparing lunch for the next day. I also need to gently move my cat outside of my room and close the door so she won’t wake me up at random hours at night, don't let your pets interrupt your sleep, many people let their pets wake them up at random hours, find a way to stop this.
Try to be aware and learn more about yourself, watch yourself for a few days, notice what messes with your sleep, take note, and change your habits. Try to avoid lying to yourself and avoid to convince yourself about ideas that are just hurting your sleep and quality of life.
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Conclusion.
I didn’t cover all there is to say like the different types of sleep or stages, but the post is long enough already.
“The elevated glucocorticoid levels during sleep deprivation play a role in breaking down some of the stored forms of energy in the brain. This, along with many of the glucocorticoid effects on memory, could have something to do with why learning and memory are so lousy when you’re sleep-deprived. That’s something we all learned when doing an all-nighter and discovering the next morning during the final exam that we can barely recall what month it was, let alone any of the factoids.” -Robert Sapolsky.
I wrote another post with more information about sleep:
Quick update about blog. It’s been a bit complicated to find time and energy to write posts recently. It’s likely I’ll be writing less post
