Your brain and the power of sleep.
[Music]
the greatest
gift you can give yourself
so simple so powerful
asleep the closer researchers look
at sleep the more they realize how
important it is
i want you to realize there are no
shortcuts to sleep
we need our seven to nine hours every
night
if we don’t get it we may not have
everything going according to plan
we need both quantity and quality of
sleep
if we don’t get enough sleep and we need
to have it good enough
and when we do our brain is energized
we are cognitively ready for the day
we can do anything our brain is healthy
our body is repaired we’re ready to run
jump and dance
when we have fantastic great sleep
we are undaunted by our challenges
and when we go to sleep
our brain it goes into a different mode
and something remarkable happens
the cleaners move in they’re coming to
get rid of all those
toxins that have built up in our brain
throughout the day
and here they get washed out with the
cerebral spinal
fluid in wave patterns
and as we know with cleaning
if we haven’t got enough time to do all
the cleaning
the little bits of dirt get left behind
and in this case
toxins they hang around the brain
and then they cluster together and they
become
hard and they stay there they found that
with alzheimer’s patients
they had clusters of these toxins not
getting enough sleep
increases the risk of your getting
alzheimer’s
our brain cycles through different
stages
as we go through we go from we start off
with
wakefulness into stage one two three
which is deep
sleep and then we go all the way back up
into rem sleep
which is rapid eye movement sleep when
most of our dreaming takes place
and our eyes flutter behind our lids as
we dream
each cycle lasts about 90 minutes
and we need five cycles you can do the
maths
when we are in deep sleep
our heart rate slows down our blood
pressure drops
we produce a human growth hormone that
helps repair our bones
and our tissues so we don’t wake up with
aches and pains
and this is fantastic when we’ve had a
really hard physical day or a mega gym
workout
and even more than this really exciting
is our immune system gets a boost pure
and that means we don’t catch those
little cold
sniffles sore throats coughs because of
the deep
sleep and the deep sleep
also helps us embed new learning
so if you’re studying for an exam
deep learning should be your deep sleep
sorry should be your
best friend
and then we move into rem sleep the
rapid eye movement sleep where we do
most of our dreaming
and while we dream this is when we have
our mental recovery
our psychological repair
and because of that it means our mental
well-being
is fantastic dream sleep
is important without enough of dream
sleep
we are we may be lacking in our mental
health
so what i want to understand is that we
still cycle as i said
and they last about 90 minutes but the
ratio between deep sleep and rem sleep
varies greatly when we first go to sleep
our deep sleep dominates so we get that
physical repair first up
and as we get closer to the morning for
waking up
we get more of the dream sleep the rem
sleep
so if you cut your sleep short
and you don’t have those full five
cycles what may happen
is when you wake up in the morning
thinking is a little difficult
you may feel a bit blurry and trying to
solve problems could be
pretty difficult so
when we have sleep i think there’s like
is magic in the numbers for sleep
the rule of thumb for calculating sleep
is to divide
it by two every two hours we’re awake
we need one hour of sleep easy
now when we’ve been awake for about 16
hours we step into our fatigue zone
this means we should be going to sleep
so let’s go for this
16 hours awake you divide by two
16 divided by two eight hours of sleep
this is where it’s fantastic in terms of
16 hours away
8 hours of sleep 24 hours you’ve got to
admit that’s magic
it fits so beautifully together
so when we look at sleep we should be
looking at how we
um wake up when we wake up so
we wake up and we’ve been awake for too
long we realize that 16 hours a week we
step into our fatigue zone
the center for sleep research discovered
that if you’ve been awake
for more than 17 hours it’s the
equivalent
of having a blood alcohol content level
of 0.05
if we have a blood alcohol content level
of
0.05 we are over the legal limit for
driving
and yet we would drive over the wake
from this limit
when we drive over the wakefulness limit
we are severely compromised with our
driving skills
i’ve got a question to ask you
let’s say you nominate me as your
designated driver because we’re going to
go party
is it okay if i have one glass of wine
well if i’ve been awake for more than 17
hours i’ve just increased the chance of
having an accident exponentially
next time you nominate somebody to be
the driver
check how long they’ve been awake it
could make all the difference
what’s even more scary is that when we
look at sleep
we have sleep debt
the sleep we owe ourselves
what does that mean let’s say for
example
if you’re a you need to sleep for eight
hours
and instead you sleep for only six
you’re two hours short of sleep
we all agree on the math what that means
is when i wake up as it’s if i’ve been
awake for
for four hours already
so we know that at 16 hours
approximately we step into our fatigue
zone
let’s say we wake up at 6 00 a.m in the
morning
by 6 p.m in the aft the evening we’ve
been awake for 12 hours
plus the four hours of wakefulness we’ve
already got in our tank
makes us 16 hours awake do we go to bed
do we go to sleep and sleep the extra
hours
so we go out and by 8 o’clock at night
you are well over the wakefulness limit
and then perhaps you could have a micro
sleep
a micro sleep is when your brain puts
you to sleep
when you become totally unaware of
what’s going on
why do we micro sleep because we sleep
deprived
and when we’re driving we could be
severely compromised
i want to emphasize this i really do
because when we look at sleep your brain
will decide whether absolutely must
producely you can choose
to not drink and dehydrate yourself to
death
you can choose to not eat and starve
yourself to death
you cannot choose to not sleep
your brain will put you to sleep when
your brain thinks
this is my moment and it’s not going to
say
are you at home watching telly
some research was done by dr evan carter
and she took fit healthy young men
and she allowed them to sleep for four
hours
for six nights a very short space of
time
and in that very short space of time
the response to insulin dropped and the
ability to do
to process sugar decreased
they were well on their way to getting
type 2 diabetes
they needed to sleep their way out of
this problem
what they’ve also found is that when
we’ve got two hormones in our system
one’s ghrelin and one’s leptin
ghrelin tells us when we’re hungry and
leptin tells us when we fall
dr vancourta discovered that when you
are sleep deprived ghrelin increases
and leptin decreases what does that mean
well brellan goes you’re hungry you’re
hungry
you’re hungry and you eat
and leptin
leptin is not there and we’re well on
our way into the fast ride
to obesity
i hope you really understand from all of
this the elixir
that sleep is for good living
and when you think about what can i do
for myself how can i ensure that i have
fantastic
sleep we need good sleep hygiene
what is sleep hygiene basically it’s
sleep routine
it’s around about 30 to 60 minutes
before you need to go to sleep
you need to start going into the relax
mode
now when i say relaxation social media
is not on the list
we can sit quietly and read maybe listen
to music
maybe watch tv but no
binge watching at night
i want you to also think that out your
room your bedroom should be cool and
dark
and if you’re using an air conditioner
realize that air conditioning is
really dehydrating so putting a little
bowl of water
in your room to help rehydrate the
atmosphere
can make a great difference to the
quality
of your sleep
also i know some people use apps they
could be the sound of rain
or fans or waves whatever it is if that
helps you sleep
i’d recommend it totally use them
the most important thing with um sleep
routine and sleep hygiene is this
that it’s the same again and again and
again
your brain loves routine
the more you can make it the same the
more powerful that psychological trigger
is
to taking you off into wonderful sleep
i really do want you to go out and have
a good time
you just need to go home and sleep well
as i said there are no shortcuts to
sleep
you shortcut sleep you shortcut your
health
and when we have the right quantity and
quality of sleep you
are always going to have peak
performance
thank you
[Music]
you