The Trouble with Snooze Buttons (and with Modern Sleep) : The New Yorker

Fortunately, the effects of sleep inertia and social jetlag seem to be reversible. When Wright asked a group of young adults to embark on a weeklong camping trip, he discovered a striking pattern: before the week was out, the negative sleep patterns that he'd previously observed disappeared. In the days leading up to the trip, he had noted that the subjects' bodies would begin releasing the sleep hormone melatonin about two hours prior to sleep, around 10:30 P.M. A decrease in the hormone, on the other hand, took place after wake-up, around 8 A.M. After the camping trip, those patterns had changed significantly. Now the melatonin levels increased around sunset—and decreased just after sunrise, an average of fifty minutes before wake-up time. In other words, not only did the time outside, in the absence of artificial light and alarm clocks, make it easier for people to fall asleep, it made it easier for them to wake up: the subjects' sleep rhythms would start preparing for wake-up just after sunrise, so that by the time they got up, they were far more awake than they would have otherwise been. The sleep inertia was largely gone.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/science-of-sleep-trouble-with-snooze-buttons.html

BBC News - How much can an extra hour's sleep change you?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24444634

This is a great read, telling all about why you will remember more of your life if you sleep, how you will function better if you sleep, and even a bit about how sleep affects fat gain/loss.

The bigger challenge - how to make time for sleep and how to optimize the sleep you get.  My best tactic is the afternoon nap, which seems to "make hay" in terms of how much total sleep I need to feel my best.  The nap has to be short to work - over 45 minutes makes it worse, and I try to make it 15 minutes or less.  It feels awesome!

I noticed a long time ago that I gained body fat when I was chronically sleep deprived - now they are starting to see why that happened.  Insulin resistance goes up when you under sleep - and nobody wants that.  There's a chicken/egg issue with sleep and fat loss, too - a low quality, high carb diet leading to blood sugar dis-regulation will disrupt sleep, and the resulting sleep dis-regulation will make you insulin resistant and carb hungry.  I lived a long period of my life like that and it wasn't pretty.

If you want health and pleasure, more sleep is the cheapest ticket to get there.

Good Sleep, Good Performance, Good Health

The Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers spent the summer tearing through sleep studies-some of them commissioned by the U.S. military-looking for ways they might help their players improve their performance by sleeping more like teenagers. "We've looked at quite a few of them," said San Francisco coach Jim Harbaugh.

And after sleep specialists visited the Jets earlier this year, linebacker Bryan Thomas said the team has made an extreme effort to make sure everyone is sleeping properly. This includes pre-setting all temperatures in the team hotel rooms to the sleep-therapy recommended 68 degrees and recommending players sleep in pitch-black rooms.

Baltimore head coach John Harbaugh, Jim's brother, has begun to take measures to combat jetlag on long trips: Before the Ravens fly west to play San Diego on Nov. 25, their plan is to stay at home but simply start practices and meetings later until they are operating on West Coast-time while in Baltimore.  

Of the four Pacific-time teams, three of them lost more than 75% of the time over the past decade when playing 1 p.m. games on the East Coast.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578117112742606502.html?mod=e2tw

Physical performance is mental performance is emotional performance.  They are all powered by the same fuels and the same physiology and each affects the other.  What you eat affects how you sleep, and how you sleep affects what hormones your body makes, and what hormones your body makes has an effect on what your body does with what you eat.

This is a sad reality for a fitness coach, because if theres one thing that's harder for folks to fix than their eating habits, it's their sleeping habits.

Paleolithic Sleep?

Yes, even that has a paleolithic model.  BLUF:  Sleep when the sun's down, and since NO ONE does that any more, at least sleep nine hours per night.  But I can't even fit that in most days, so ... what to do?

Nap, baby, or as we called it when underway on one of our nation's big grey fighting ships, "entering the horizontal time accelerator."

I've heard many a rumor about napping, such as "don't nap more than 45 minutes in order to avoid trouble waking up again."  I follow that one when I nap.  But I just read a short piece in the Costco Connection (June 2011, p. 67) which points to taking slightly longer naps to get a specific effect.

Naps lasting 30 to 60 minutes trigger slow wave sleep that helps brains recall information already stored there.  "To avoid sleep inertia, try to nap at least 50 minutes," says Mednick (author of "Take a Nap!  Change Your Life!), "It's good to sleep beyond the slow wave sleep, so you get past it and can wake up more easily."


Tim Ferriss, of Four Hour Body fame, included a chart that shows how you can 'buy back' decreased night time sleep through various nap strategies - including polyphasic sleep, by which you can sleep for 2 hours per day but feel well rested and still be mentally sharp.  The nugget for me was that my cat naps are not just a bandaid for not getting enough sleep, they may actually help meet my need for sleep.

One thing I've noticed by my own accidental experiments is that if I sleep more, my body stores less body fat.  The science, such as it is, supports that observation, due to the decreased disfunction of cortisol as sleep levels reach the best levels - and probably for other reasons too.  No doubt, sleep has a profound impact on many aspects of our health, as has been passionately articulated in "Lights Out."

I don't have any grandiose plans for how to design my life around a paleolithic caliber 11 hours of sleep daily - yet.  But I do follow a fairly paleolithic approach to sleep in that if I get sleepy, I work in a nap.  I set an alarm to keep them short enough, and whether or not they work like Mednick describes or not, and I thoroughly enjoy them.

Sleep, Seasonal Hormonal Varation, Genetic Adaptation

During sleep, you make another hormone called prolactin, When the nights are long, as in winter, your prolactin has come down by the time you wake up. But in the summer, when the nights are short, prolactin spills over into the daytime. This is a key point when considering WHY we overeat (specifically carbohydrates).
When prolactin spills over into the daytime, it suppresses a hormone called leptin. Leptin is your body’s fat monitor. [T]o make it simple, leptin goes to the brain and pushes the OFF button on your Neuropeptide Y (NPY). When NPY is turned on, you crave carbohydrates. This is why your ancestors loaded up on fruit and carbs as much as they could during the spring and summer. They were driven to do it by NPY! Why? Because the short nights gave them “prolactin spillover”, thus suppressing leptin, and leaving carb-craving NPY cranked up.
Of course, all of this “carbing-up” made them insulin resistant, which was actually a good thing back then. [Seasonal] insulin resistance and the fat it stores isn’t really a problem when your life depends on it.
Let’s fast-forward to the early 20th century and the invention of the light bulb. Now, with the flip of a switch (or the clap of our hands) we can manipulate the seasons. Long days. Short nights. Year round.
http://undergroundwellness.com/lights-out-is-lack-of-sleep-making-you-fat/

If you read the rest of this post from Sean at UW, you could just about skip the very tough to read but fascinating "Lights Out".  The short version?  If you think agriculture changed things 10,000 years ago (imagine your hunger gatherer ancestors getting six inches shorter and losing their teeth whilst getting fat and sick), and if you think the advent of the industrialized food chain changed things (imagine mass produced vegetable based "franken oils" followed up by reutilization of soy waste as "soy products", and shudder), you should also be concerned with what the advent of Thomas Edison's revolutionizing invention did also.  Yes, completely changing the sleep cycles of entire populations in very short order probably has had an impact!

Sleep and Weight Loss Ties

I've always noticed that my body fat rose and fell as my sleep went from poor to good - IOW, poor sleep, not enough sleep, more fat accumulation.  Only recently have I sorted out how much darkness adds to sleep quality.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/204236.php

"Researchers from Israel and the USA believe they have found evidence that demonstrates a link between obesity and metabolic disorders and exposure to LAN (light at night) in animal studies. In an article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences they found that mice exposed to dim light during their sleeping hours for a period of eight weeks had a 50% higher weight gain compared to mice that slept in the dark. Even reducing their food intake and making them do more exercise did not bring their weight down to that of the other mice that slept in the dark, unless they made sure the availability of food matched a mouse's natural eating times.

"The 24-hour rhythm that regulates the state of our internal energy levels and metabolism is controlled by an internal biological clock that works in parallel with and responds to light information, the authors wrote. Our internal body clock("circadian clock") prepares us for predictable events, such as the availability of food and sleep. When the function of this clock is disturbed, our bodies experience a disruption in our metabolism and body-rhythms (circadian cycle).

"The investigators assessed the effects of LAN on the BMI (body mass index) of male mice to see whether there might be a casual relationship between exposure to light during the night and obesity."

"They found that mice exposed to light at night had considerably higher BMIs and lower glucose tolerance compared to mice kept in a normal day/night cycle (dark at night). The difference in BMI persisted even after their calorie intakes and total daily physical activity were altered."