iteles
commented
7 years ago Watched until 22m22, ironically during a bout of insomnia.
Made notes:
- A third of Britons suffer from insomnia (either trouble falling asleep or waking up in the middle of the night and finding it hard to go back to sleep)
- Easy way to find out if you're sleep deprived is to go to bed in the middle of the afternoon - if it takes you 15 minutes or more to fall asleep, you're ok, 10 minutes and you're sleep deprived and under 5 minutes you have severe sleep deprivation
- We should sleep in 90 minute cycles, 5 or 6 throughout the night, each culminating in a short period of REM sleep which is when we dream
- You go through various stages in these 90 minutes (see 07h55 for graphic): 10 minutes of drifting in and out of consciousness, another 20 where your brain waves slow, then into deep sleep and back to slow brain waves before a short period of R.E.M.
- During deep sleep (from about 30 minutes of sleep onwards) is when we lay down memories and scientists also think that this is when the brain detoxes and cleanses
- Genetics can be partly to 'blame', scientists can now run tests to identify genetic markers for whether you're a morning person or a night person, whether you need more or less sleep than average, increased tendency for insomnia, efficiency of sleep and sensitivity to caffeine
- Caffeine contributes to insomnia but alcohol contributes to port sleep quality and relaxes your throat muscles, increasing your tendency to snore
- There are some very big studies that have now associated sleeping too little (or too much) with type 2 diabetes and obesity - when you're sleep deprived your body produces more of the hormones that make you hungry and less of the ones that keep you full
- In particular, high cravings for sugar and carbohydrates are common, but even if you resist temptation, shorter sleep raises glucose levels in the blood
- Your gut bacteria controls how efficient your gut is at extracting energy from food - when you're sleep deprived, there is now research that suggests that your gut bacteria extracts more calories from your food intake
- Sleeping pills are addictive and you build a tolerance to them so over time you need more and more to get the same quality of sleep - you need to find the underlying cause
- The eyes detect the dawn-dusk cycle and set your internal body clock
- If you mess with the hypothalamus' setting of the internal clock, all of your individual organs and systems are thrown out of whack, keeping their own time.
- Tips for good sleep hygiene: remove all screens and technology from the bedroom, keep it declittered, turn your clock away so you don't obsess over the time and use your bedroom only for sleeping.
- If you are feeling tired but have to stay awake (to drive for example), experiments have shown that having an espresso or cup of black coffee immediately followed by a nap (which is possible because the caffeine takes a little while to reach your brain), this is much more effective than having either a cup of coffee or a nap by themselves
- 4 experiments were attempted by subjects on the program, the one that reported the best results was taking prebiotics just before bedtime and there was moderate improvement after a few days with the other 3: taking a bath and then stepping out into a cooled room, mindfulness practice and eating 2 kiwis an hour before bed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08q8p13
Watching this program now.