An average human being sleeps about 1/3rd of their life, does it mean that you have to sleep all the 262800 hours to live about a 90 years? Are you a sleep deprived or facing a lack of quality sleep in your lifestyle, and searching for a solution to fix your sleep and wake up energised, well guess what, you have landed in the right page.

Walk with me through this very simple yet highly effective post backed up with science to understand the concept of sleep and strategies to get better sleep.

Sleep is one of the most basis necessities to a normal human being next to water and food. Studies have identified that a huge percentage of people have been deprived of sleep which has lead to degradation of the physical and mental health and also linked to cause of un-productivity and even death in the long term. Some of the effects of sleep deprivation ranges from high blood pressure, depression, diabetes to even stroke, kidney and heart diseases.

The story starts about 5 to 7 million years ago, when mutations are taking their shape as homo sapiens. The evolutionary process throughout these years took place though phases of survival of the fittest, proliferation, invention, discoveries, exploration and so on. But the most important thing that made humans function apart from food and water is sleep.

Sleep is also an elixir of life, which plays an role in problem-solving skills, enhanced memory. Sufficient and quality sleep has the potential to improve precision in motor skills, speed of reaction, and the development of muscle strength.

Our body is accustomed to a cycle, where we tend to sleep due to the time of regular sleep or due to the environmental cues such as brightness, darkness etc. Apart from this, our body automatically releases a hormone called melatonin which basically prepares us for sleep, this typically happens during the evening of the day and it increases and puts us to sleep when the lights in the environment are dim or off. And during the time of awakening the level of melatonin drops and cortisol increases.

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One factor that is often overlooked is the importance of sleep cycles. Primarily we go through two phases of sleep, which are:

1. Rapid eye moment (REM) – further classified into 2 phases
2. Non Rapid eye moment (NREM)- further classified into 3 stages.

The initial half of the sleep is where the NREM stage occurs, and this is where heartbeat slows, brain activity slows and muscles relax, body temperature drops, the repair and growth of tissue takes pace, regeneration of cell occurs and immune system strengthens. During the next stage, which is REM, as the names suggests the eye movements become rapid and brain activity increases, and phenomenon of dreaming starts to occur.

Image Credits: flintrehab

We usually go through 4-5 cycles in a typical night sleep, where each cycle lies in the range of 1 and half to 2 hours. Breaking this cycle is one of the factors which makes you feel tired, exhausted, or curate the desire to sleep more after you wake up. And this is where the notion of 8-7 hours of sleep comes in.

People having sleep in the range of 5-7 hours are also doing good and there are extreme cases where some people go with 3-4 hours of sleep. I am not suggesting you to take those regimes, rather what I am trying to emphasise is that establishing a routine is very important. Some of the widely known and proven techniques are:

1. Sleeping and waking in a fixed time for all days in a week.
2. Having your dinner prior to a couple of hours before sleep.
3. Not exposing yourself blue light before bedtime.
4. Avoiding caffeine intake after 4 pm.
5. Exercising before sleep.

These tiny factors can bring drastic improvements in your sleep and makes you wake up refreshed.

As humans we have the tendency of questioning and reasoning, so let’s not take these suggestions blindly. In the rest of the post, I’ll try to explain the science and logic between each of them in the most simplest form, in order for you to easily capitalise from these concepts.

There is something called the glymphatic system in our brain, which is the waste clearance network that helps facilitate the proper cognitive functions in the brain and puts down the risks of getting exposed to neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, which is characterised by the accumulation of proteins in the brain, which mostly happens due to disturbed, or inadequate sleep.

_{Image Credits: Academy of Lymphatic Studies}

So, that’s where the name Glymphatic is derived from, it s a recently discovered macroscopic waste clearance system, which facilitates the efficient removal of soluble proteins and metabolites(a by-product of metabolism) from the central nervous system(CNS).

_{Image Credits: eihmd}

The glymphatic system’s role involves exchanging cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)[plays a role of communication in CNS] and tiny blood vessels with interstitial fluid (a fluid surrounding the brain cells), aiding in delivering oxygen and nutrients to cells while eliminating waste products from them.

The glymphatic system comes to play, during the stage 3 of the NREM, where the process of repair and growth of tissue takes pace, regeneration of cell occurs and immune system strengthens. This is also the stage where the rate of heartbeat and breathing is completely slow and the fluids from the CNS flows back into the brain, enabling glymphatic flow, leading to metabolic waste clearance.

The brain goes through a state of slow oscillatory neuronal activity, which facilitates the psychological restoration of brain and blood oxygen.

A few steps to improve glymphatic system are to have a proper intake of omega 3 fatty acids (example- fish, ground flaxseed and walnuts) (studies have proven that additional supplements for omega 3 through tablets are effective ,given that the intake is within the prescribed limits), sleeping on the right side ( it is found that more Cerebrospinal fluid is cleared through scientific research), avoiding chronic stress.

Having late night dinners and going to sleep just after you ate, can lead to gastrointestinal problems, weight gain, and disturbed sleep. This primarily happens due to a lack of proper digestion, because when you sleep, the melatonin levels are high and the body slows down, so the body doesn’t give enough energy to digest the food in the gut and this can lead to a disturbed sleep and cause problems like acidity, bloating and constipation.

Any colour in the spectrum is not good for fostering sleep, as the light enables the retina to capture the input and translate it into images in the brain. Especially blue light, which is the light that sun produces, or even it can be artificially produced through gadgets like smartphone, can be inhibit a disturbed sleep, as it blocks the production of melatonin, which is highly essential for us to go into sleep. This can lead to difficulties in getting a restful night’s sleep, affecting your overall sleep pattern and potentially causing sleep disturbances or insomnia.

To improve sleep quality, it’s recommended to limit blue light exposure, especially before bedtime by using devices with blue light filters or avoiding screens altogether an hour or two before sleep.

Who doesn’t like coffee, and especially the blend of ground coffee beans pulled out into an expresso and coupled with steamed milk producing an amazing cup of cappuccino or a cafe latte , you would have already got the amazing sensation of drinking a coffee by now.

But having caffeine intake at all the times in a day is not completely recommended. One of the primitive reasons why we consume caffeine apart from its taste, is due to a simple neuroscientific explanation. When we are awake, a neurochemical called adenosine (primarily responsible for inducing sleep) is gradually produced in our brain as the day commences, higher amounts of adenosine leads to more tiredness and lack of productiveness, so caffeine basically replaces these adenosine in your brain and removes the effect of tiredness and tricks your mind to be very active, with which you feel energetic.

The effects of caffeine also has its roots in release of adrenalin (the flight and frieght hormone) and also dopamine, which ultimately makes you feel energetic and happy. The average consumption of a cup of coffee will have its mentioned effects for about 10 to 12 hours, and then it diminishes and the adenosine kicks in, thereby making you go for another shot of caffeine.

This is good solution for your day’s energy, but you have to consider two points before you consume caffeine, one is avoiding overconsumption, with more caffeine, new adenosine receptors get formed, equating to the need of more caffeine, the effects of too much of caffeine can have lethal effects, consuming about few cups of caffeine each having an average concentration of 150 mg/kg is totally fine, but having the intake upto your entire weight, can be an overdose, but it is just practically impossible to drink that much of coffee.

The bottomline is that, caffeine can promotes wakefulness by blocking adenosine, so leveraging it to boost your productivity and giving your taste buds a good time is absolutely fine under proper consumption limits. and avoiding it at least 8 hours before bedtime will lead to a good night’s sleep.

This is actually a controversial topic, because there was a dichotomy of results from the supporting and opposing researches, many studies came out with a conclusion that exercising before sleep fostered good benefits for the overall sleep and health, and almost an equal number of studies have observed that workouts turns out to be egregious.

The studies which have found that workouts lead to a better sleep, observed that,

1. it helped in reducing the production of cortisol(stress hormone) during high-stress situations.
   
2. enhanced slow-wave sleep (which occurs during the NREM stage 3), which is crucial for muscle recovery and proper functioning of the glymphatic system and memory consolidation and structuring in general.
   
3. People with chronic insomnia were able to overcome their sleep problems effectively with consistent moderate-intensity workouts during the evening.

On the other side of the picture, we have studies that disagree that workouts lead to exhaustiveness, higher production of adrenalin and even spike your levels of cortisol, exposure to light during exercise leading to in-efficient production of melatonin, all of which together leads to a disturbed sleep.

Both the sides have good supporting evidence for their observations and scientifically it makes sense, so which side to choose? As I have mentioned in the first, “there is no one size that fits all”.

There are a lot of other factors to consider from an individualistic perspective, before we jump into a conclusion, the diet, intensity of workout, interval between the workout, dinner and the sleep, environmental cues such as room temperature, brightness of light, external noises, etc combined together makes a person have a comfortable or disturbed sleep.

And even the mindset of the person during the exercise has a significant impact in their sleep. If they believe that the workout will help them sleep good and give peace of mind and good health, then the subconscious mind will definetly leverage it to make your mind and body perform according to your belief systems. On the other hand if the person thinks that the workout is exhausting and will disturb their sleep, then definetly it will make their sleep bad. Again, a person is what they think right?

Building a routine according to your lifestyle and requirements, whether it is diet, or exercise routine is absolutely essential to have a good night’s sleep, so acquire the useful strategies and science behind the research instead of blindly following them.

That’s a wrap, I hope you learned some insightful concepts and found this post useful, if yes, do share it with people who you think will benefit from this post. I’d really like to hear your outcome of sleep after following these 5 simple steps, so feel free to drop your thoughts in the comment section below.

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