We spend a third of our lives asleep. Given this, it may seem surprising that we know so little about it. It is only in the last twenty years that scientific discoveries have been made that show the multitude of health benefits of a good night’s sleep.
THE BENEFITS
Sleep enriches a diversity of brain functions, including our ability to learn, memorise and make logical decisions and choices. It supports our psychological health and stabilises our emotions, allowing us to confront the social and psychological challenges of our daily lives. Even dreaming, a notoriously difficult area to study scientifically, could be seen as a therapy to deal with painful memories and a space in which the brain merges past and present knowledge, inspiring creativity.
READING MATERIAL
Two recent books have brought the science of sleep to readers in an accessible and entertaining way. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley in California, guides us through the latest scientific discoveries and offers advice on how to approach sleep. The biologist and science journalist Henry Nicholls’ Sleepyhead begins as a personal look at the sleep disorder narcolepsy, which the author himself suffers from. The book then branches out to examine a whole range of common disorders, from insomnia to sleep apnea, sleepwalking to night terrors.
BRAINWASHED
While both books are scientific rather than self-help, they offer personal advice on how to improve sleep hygiene. One contentious subject is the widespread use of sleep aids, such as sleeping pills or health apps. Walker warns that sleeping pills do not provoke natural sleep and provide none of sleep’s benefits, bringing instead, he believes, a whole host of other dangers from addiction to dangerous daytime drowsiness, and even overdose. Nicholls points out that apps that claim to track sleep patterns can do no such thing!
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud’s most significant work was published in 1899. It posited that all dreams are a form of ‘wish-fulfillment’ and can be interpreted and understood. Freud believed that the obscurity of dreams derived from the fact that there was a censor in the mind that protected the dreamer from his or her own desires, or else the shock would wake them up. Freud claimed to have the decryption key that could reveal the unconscious desires of his wealthy Viennese patients. Unfortunately, there is no way of proving Freud’s theory scientifically. Using his key can only offer a generalised interpretation of a dream that is so non-specific it could be easily adapted to anyone’s life.
A WAKE-UP CALL
When he was twenty-one years old, biology graduate Henry Nicholls discovered that he had narcolepsy, a disorder commonly believed to be an excess of sleep. Now an established science journalist, he embarked on a study of the condition for his book Sleepyhead. His investigations, he told Speak Up, were to prove life-changing. Not only did Nicholls unveil some of the mysteries of narcolepsy, with its myriad of symptoms, but he also discovered it had close connections to a whole range of other sleeping disorders. Speak Up met with Nicholls. We began by asking him just how problematic poor sleep was.
Henry Nicholls (English accent): The way we sleep as a society now, constantly on that borderline of sleep deprivation... you [we] increase the risk of everything that can go wrong with the body. The science quite clearly shows that the human brain has evolved to need between six and nine hours. If you habitually get less than six hours sleep you put yourself at high risk of everything that can go wrong with the body. Sleep deprivation results in a higher risk of obesity; type 2 diabetes; hypertension; cardiovascular disease; stroke; cancer... It results in an earlier death.
THE BIG ISSUES
Poor sleep, however, is incredibly common. Nicholls listed some of the most pressing problems that people have.
Henry Nicholls: The most common is insomnia. Probably one in ten people at any one time suffer from chronic insomnia, sleep apnea now very common — this is where you stop breathing in the night, and it absolutely needs to be treated because it’s dangerous. Restless legs syndrome, this is a profoundly ugly, insidious disorder in which just at the time in the evening when you’re ready for bed you have this horrific sensation in your limbs — usually legs — that can only be abated by moving. Sleepwalking, sleep talking, some of these parasomnias, that are a state where there are aspects of wakefulness and sleep at the same time. Even snoring I consider a sleep disorder. It does disrupt the structure of sleep and therefore the quality of sleep of the snorer but obviously also any bed partner.
NARCOLEPSY
Nicholls suffers from narcolepsy, a genetic condition that is triggered by an autoimmune response to an illness, resulting in the loss of about 30,000 cells in the brain. We asked him about the condition.
Henry Nicholls: We now know that narcolepsy is a form of insomnia. People with narcolepsy sleep very badly, but incredibly fractured through the night. The main symptom is excessive daytime sleepiness, but this is the least interesting thing about narcolepsy. There’s very often something called cataplexy, where an emotion will cause you to fall over or collapse. You have sleep paralysis, where you wake up, you can’t move... It’s terrifying: you have a hallucination that there’s someone in your room...
THE TRUTH ABOUT TABLETS
While there may be a genetic component to many sleep disorders, Nicholls believes that there are other triggers and stresses that we can control, from limiting our coffee and alcohol intake, to controlling our screen use in the evenings.
Henry Nicholls: Natural light is very important and the particular wavelengths that reach the eyeball at dawn and dusk are very powerful. So the brain is essentially hypersensitive to those ‘blues’ because they’re perfect cues for when the sun has come up and goes down. Showing the brain blue [artificial] lights after the sun has gone down is a confusing signal. We have never had a generation growing up with their face in devices like mobile phones and iPads like the current generation of children. The science shows children are finding it harder to get to sleep. The impact of that sleep deprivation on the developing brain could be quite profound.