Sleep: The Best Recovery Method To Optimize Performance
In a world where social media sells us the “best recovery device on the market,” we often forget about the most important - sleep. Of course, the Theraguns, Normatec, foam rollers, float tanks, and cryochambers are all great options, but none of these scratch the surface of recovery benefits offered to us for free through sleep. During sleep, our brain is processing thousands of neural connections. There has been a much needed shift in the social and cultural outlook on sleep. Even a decade ago, we were all stuck in the “work more, sleep less” mentality. Anyone going to bed at a decent hour or sleeping past sunrise was scrutinized by other productive members of our “go-getter” society. Fortunately, there has been a shift toward making sleep the new cultural trend, and the marketing campaigns are cashing in. From Oura Rings to the Sleep Number bed and thousands of sleep tracking apps available for our smart devices, tracking sleep quality is becoming the new craze. Thankfully, this new trendy marketing campaign really is in our very best interest. Lately I’ve been reading a book called “Why We Sleep” by Dr Matthew Walker. Today, I’m going to share with you some of the fascinating insights into what happens when we sleep that I’ve learned from this book.
Why am i tired
Two factors give us that feeling of “it’s time to go to bed.” Number one, we all have an internal clock called the circadian rhythm. It turns out that the circadian rhythm is independent from sunlight exposure. An experiment was done during which some researchers spent a considerably large amount days in a cave with no exposure to the sun. The circadian rhythm kept these researches on a 24-hour clock that only differed by about 15 minutes from the actual 24-hour day. Number two, there is a neurotransmitter called adenosine. As this builds in the brain throughout the day, it binds to receptors making us feel tired. The more adenosine that builds up, the more tired we feel, creating what we perceive as “sleep pressure.” Once the sleep pressure builds to a certain level, we feel tired and fall asleep. Once asleep, the adenosine is released from the receptors, and the process restarts when we wake the next day. What happens when you don’t sleep enough? You’re brain does not have enough time to release the adenosine. This starts what we call “sleep debt.” You wake up still feeling tired. For those of you nap takers, napping releases the adenosine. Nap too much, and you run the risk of not having enough adenosine built up to create enough sleep pressure to fall asleep at a normal time tonight; however, if you take only a brief nap, you can help relieve some of that sleep pressure to allow you to get through the rest of your day.
Caffeine
Caffeine binds to the adenosine receptors, preventing adenosine binding and thus reducing the build up of sleep pressure. It takes 5-7 hours of for just 50% of the caffeine to let go of these receptors. Meanwhile the adenosine continues to build up throughout that time. When the caffeine finally lets go of the receptors, we get hit with a massive binding of the accumulated adenosine - thus termed “the caffeine crash.” As we age, the ability for our receptors to let go of the caffeine is weakened, and thus it takes considerably longer for this unbinding to happen. This explains why younger aged individuals can consume caffeine later in the day and still manage to get a full nights sleep while older individuals may be more sensitive to caffeine.
Should School really start at 8am?
As a parent, it might be easy to perceive your teenager as making poor decisions for staying up so late or consider them lazy for sleeping in to late mid-morning hours; however, this dramatic shift in sleep behavior is actually a natural process in the brain during these developmental years. A young child experiences a desire to sleep early in the evening; however, by the teenage years, the same child may find it impossible to fall asleep any time earlier than 11pm. This is because the chemical processes involved in making us tired do not occur until a late hour in this decade of the lifespan. Concurrently, this means the desire to wake up does not occur until sometime mid-morning. We wonder why high schoolers might be falling asleep in the morning classes. These social norms of school hours place our students in a vicious cycle causing them to wake up much earlier than their brain is signaling. By cutting their sleep short, we place them in a cycle of over tiredness, lack of sleep, and chronic fatigue thus perpetuating the cycle. After the mid-20’s, our brain shifts back a few hours, allowing middle aged adults to fall asleep at a “normal” time and thus allowing for a better 8am-5pm work day.
Next week we will discuss how these changes in the brain effect the more mature decades of life, and how we all have natural variations in our sleep patterns.
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References:
Walker, M. (2018). Why we sleep. Penguin Books.
Disclaimer: This SciSport blog post is a summary of an article printed in an academic research journal. The purpose of this blog post is to provide readers with academic and educational content in an easy-to-understand format. We take no credit for the material and knowledge presented, and we encourage readers to take a look at the original source provided in the References section.
