prof. neuroscience Matt Walker at the University of California, Berkeley, author of the book "Why do we sleep?" He gives us some tips on how to sleep better, as well as some bad things that happen if we don't sleep enough.
How do alcohol and marijuana affect sleep?
Many things that people use to help them sleep better actually harm sleep. Two good examples are probably alcohol and marijuana. Many people will drink a glass in the evening, thinking that the drink will help them fall asleep more easily, but this is actually not true. Alcohol belongs to the group of opiates that we call sedatives - but sedation is not sleep. When you drink in the evening, you actually just 'knock out' the cortex and go into a state of stupor - you don't fall into a natural sleep. There are two more problems with alcohol and I'm sorry to tell you.
First: alcohol will 'contaminate' your sleep, so you will wake up often during the night. When you wake up in the morning, you won't feel rested, you won't be fresh. The problem and danger is that many people do not remember that they often woke up during the night due to the use of alcohol - they do not realize that it is alcohol that disturbs their sleep. They cannot add two plus two.
One last thing related to alcohol: it blocks your REM phase, i.e. deep sleep. The REM stage is necessary for a whole range of functions, including emotional and mental health. Alcohol will actually remove or significantly reduce that necessary REM-phase. How necessary is this stage? Shocking studies were done in the 80s of the last century, which showed that if you deprive rats of this REM-phase of sleep, they will die almost as quickly as if you completely deprive them of food. Deep sleep is so necessary, and you block it with alcohol.
What about marijuana? Unfortunately, the news is not good there either. Many people will use marijuana to relax and relieve anxiety before sleep. At first glance, marijuana really seems to increase the speed with which you fall asleep, but unfortunately, just like alcohol - with a slightly different biological mechanism - it also blocks the REM phase. If you don't get enough REM sleep, you can become more anxious and depressed, so people turn to more marijuana to treat the symptoms that marijuana causes. The advice is: don't take marijuana as a sleep aid. One of the common aspects of marijuana is CBD oil - it is the non-psychoactive component of marijuana. THC is the psychoactive component of marijuana. The CBD oil used is a cannabinoid. No detailed studies have been done, but what we see in the limited data is that CBD, i.e. the non-psychoactive part of marijuana, does not seem to affect sleep. It's probably too early to draw a definitive conclusion, but so far it appears to be the case with CBD.
If you didn't sleep, can you make up for it?
What happens if you were up all night, or you slept too little, went to bed too late and had to wake up early? Can missed sleep be compensated? Unfortunately, that is one of the myths. Sleep is not like a bank, in the sense that you cannot accumulate debt that you will pay off later. I will give you evidence to explain it. If I were to deprive a person of sleep, for example if we deprived that person of 8 hours of sleep and then allowed him to sleep as much as he wanted, wouldn't he recover during the second or third night.... Yes, we notice that he sleeps longer, trying to make up for lost time. But will it bring back those 8 missed hours? The answer is: it will not make up for what was missed. If we continue to measure, we will see that a person never makes up for missed sleep. You cannot accumulate debt and later 'pay it off'. Many of us do this: we sleep short during the week, then oversleep at the weekend - we call it social 'jet-lag' - I sometimes say: sleep bulimia. We alternately 'exaggerate' and 'purify'.
A recent study looked at the risk of mortality due to short sleep. The first thing they found was shocking: people who sleep 5 hours a night are 65% more likely to die at any time - that's a 65% increase in risk of death! Another group of people, who sleep a short time, 5 to 6 hours a day during the week, but sleep a little longer on the weekends, can reduce part of the risk of mortality. But there is a danger here: we know how social jet-lag, i.e. sleeping long on the weekend and sleeping short during the week, is associated with, not necessarily a shorter life, but a far less healthy life. You are more susceptible to diabetes, obesity, poor cardiovascular health and its outcomes.
Let's look at the study: even though some people tried to make up for the sleep they missed during the week, they were twice as likely to report poor health compared to people who did what we generally recommend, which is to consistently (ie consistently and regularly) sleep 7 to 9 hours each days during the week and on weekends. Therefore, it is recommended that you sleep consistently, regardless of whether it is a weekend or a weekday - be consistent! Unfortunately, sleep is not like credit, it is not as you would like.
Should you use a snooze alarm clock?
I repeat, regularity is crucial: going to sleep at the same time and waking up at the same time. The use of alarm clocks can help with this - I use the plural on purpose: alarm clocks. I don't mean the multiple activation of the bell in the morning, but we have to use the alarm to go to rest. Think about the time when you need to go to bed after your 8 hours of sleep. Set the alarm 15 minutes before, it's just a call, like a call to the last round - now it's time to start getting ready for bed. In the last hour before bedtime, you can brush your teeth, put on your pajamas and do all those things that take an extra 15 to 20 minutes - so do them on time. But what about snoozing the alarm clock in the morning? That's probably not a good idea, because we have the data I commented on in the book. If we look at the cardiovascular response to an alarm, it is a stressful event for your cardiovascular system. We notice a sudden increase in heart rate, stress hormones rise. It's okay to use the alarm clock once to wake you up, but you shouldn't use snooze, because in that case you repeatedly attack your cardiovascular system. You might be thinking, "I use it about 3 or 4 times, how bad can it be?" That one day might not be so bad, but if you do it every day, every week, every month, for years, decades, throughout your life, you can only imagine what kind of effort it is for the cardiovascular system, to which people are exposed. So you use an alarm clock, that's fine, but try to get up right away and have a successful day.
