Join us for our January Hibernation Challenge where we will focus on sleep. You can focus on other healthy lifestyle habits as well, such as your nutrition and moving your body, but sleep is where we will spend our energy this month. Yes, we can also think of sleep as a recovery tool from exercise (or stress), but it goes far beyond that. If you are someone that struggles with sleep like some of us at Resilient Body do, or you are looking for an edge that doesn’t involve throwing money at supplements or slamming energy drinks and coffee into the wee hours, then sleep is where it is at. Honestly, it’s where it’s at even if you do enjoy your coffee and other ergogenics. In fact, it’s literally essential to not just recovering from your workouts but making sure you can continue to do those things physiologically that make you a human.

This challenge will run for the month of January and you can take it beyond as we at RB hope you will.  It is a perfect time with the longer nights, less sunlight, and cooler weather to cozy up in bed and take advantage.  Indeed, the winter does impact sleep due to the above factors and sometimes in ways we do not realize.

Sleeping is a very basic and essential activity; a literal must do for us all like breathing and eating; and the benefits of adjusting yours towards the proper amount and quality can be an absolute game changer!  The same will be discussed for the other two just mentioned but in upcoming months when we focus on nutrition and respiration/breath, as they are related to this topic.

Quick personal anecdote- Sleep is something near and dear to me, not just because I literally require it as a human (and most creatures in the animal kingdom do it in some form, by the way); but because it has been a huge struggle for me!  I cannot tell you how many nights I have spent either partially not breathing (hypopnea), messing up my sleep quality with caffeine or alcohol (yes- even 1 drink can do this for more than one consecutive night), crunching an injured shoulder to wake up numb or in pain, or getting sucked into devices or thought late into the evening.  My mind races at night.  The engine overheats really.  I have done several sleep studies and numerous experiments with sleep basics, techniques and even products geared toward enhancing sleep to find what works the best for me.  Thankfully, I got some answers, but some were not exactly what I was hoping for… This brings us to chronotypes.

CHRONOTYPES?

Some answers to the late bedtime vs. early lay in chronotypes.  Think “night owls” vs “morning larks”, and those in between.  As Matthew Walker details in his book Why We Sleep, roughly 30% of the population are your morning “lark” types (with a slight skew toward females), roughly 30% are “night owls”, and the remaining 40% are somewhere in between.  The good news is that some of this can be tweaked… a BIT as the bad news is that you are what you are.  Essentially your chronotype is genetic and the genes that dictate it are known.  Some of the items that can help enhance your sleep on the list provided do imply that you can shift your bedtime a little, but for your chronotype, it will likely only budge by less than 1hr.  To be clear, just because you may be genetically inclined to be a “night owl”, does not automatically mean anything bad (other than that society may reward the “early bird”), since you can still do things to get better sleep.  Negative consequences arise when trying to fight your chronotype thereby not sleeping enough as a consequence.  This can lead to poor cardiometabolic outcomes, higher c-reactive protein (think inflammation), hemoglobin A1c (think poor blood glucose control and diabetes), higher propensity for obesity, shorter telomeres (think decreased longevity), etc.  So, yes- getting enough sleep in accordance with your chronotype is pretty important.

WHY DO WE SLEEP, HOW, AND WHAT HAPPENS TO MAKE IT SO?

The above info is not meant to scare you, but sleep is extremely important.  There are a multitude of reasons for why we sleep that go far beyond the scope of this article and challenge.

Two processes control sleep/wake cycles and those are your sleep/wake homeostasis and circadian biological clock.  The first is controlled by “sleep pressure” that builds as you are awake.  The second causes the ebb and flow of wakefulness through the day and night.  This internal clock is controlled by an area of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) which is in the hypothalamus (a linkage center in the brain that controls many things).  The SCN is fed information about light and dark from your eyes and then releases or triggers the release of wake or sleep chemicals.  Pretty cool stuff.

We sleep as we develop to build our brains infrastructure with REM (rapid eye movement) sleep helping to build and strengthen synapses (amongst other similar effects throughout the body).  Babies sleep A LOT!  As we move past 2.5 years it appears that this shifts from building to maintenance.  We need sleep to repair and clear out harmful debris that are biproducts of being human and using our brains and bodies.  As this shift occurs in aging, a decrease in REM sleep is seen…significantly.  About 50% of newborns’ sleep time is spent in REM, 25% by age 10, and if you are 50 and above it’s about 15%.

Sleep serves other purposes too, but first THE SLEEP CYCLE…

Every 90 minutes we go through a sleep cycle. It starts with NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep which has 3 stages, then moves into REM sleep; and that repeats roughly every 90minutes.  Do that for 8 hours (give or take based on life stage and circumstance).

What is NREM sleep you ask? Basically, it is the deeper “quiescent” period of your sleep cycle with little to no eye movement that is divided into stages as well including “deep” delta wave sleep.  It possibly sees more parasympathetic activity.

Well then what is REM sleep?  REM sleep occurs toward the end of the 90-minute cycle and is where there is rapid movement of the eyes and low muscle tone, where we tend to have more vivid dreams. Likely most learning and memory consolidation occurs here (though also likely occurs in NREM). Another interesting tidbit is that our body can also be literally paralyzed during this stage (fun fact, barring a sleep disorder).  

Interestingly, the balance between NREM and REM sleep changes as the night’s sleep progresses, with the first half of the night having more NREM rich sleep; and the second half having very little if any NREM, and mostly REM rich.

But if I am an owl then won’t I miss out on NREM sleep?!  The short answer is no, because as an owl (just as a lark), your circadian rhythm is shifted as such.  You can take a sigh of relief now and we can get back to focusing on what you can do for better sleep. Now, at long last this brings us to the most important piece which is what can you do personally to improve your sleep regardless of your chronotype, age, schedule, etc.

COOL SLEEP FACTS, BUT HOW CAN I IMPROVE MY SLEEP?

At Resilient Body we love to nerd out and we love the science, but at the end of the day the most important thing is that this knowledge you have can be put to actual use. WE WANT TO DO THINGS TO MAKE OUR LIVES BETTER WITH THIS KNOWLEDGE, not just talk about it.

So what’s next?

First, take some time to assess your sleep during the first week of the challenge as you try out your ONE thing to practice for better sleep daily.  You may even know what an area for improvement is already.  Journal: use a wearable piece of tech to bed that helps you track; look at subjective measurements of how you are before bed, during sleep, and the next day. Other things to look at:

·         Brain fog or forgetfulness

·         Mood lability

·         Depression

·         Low energy and/or workouts feel tougher than usual

·         Using caffeine to get through the day and alcohol to get to bed

·         Getting sick often

·         Feeling hungrier and/or cravings

·         Feeling more stressed

·         Overriding natural bedtime

·         Sleep is disrupted

·         Wake up feeling tired

·         Lingering in bed

·         Electronic screen use late at night

·         Waking up hot

·         Waking up to noise or lights

·         MANY more…

After you take note, see what daily practice below might help you the most.  Most importantly, can you do this one thing each day to start for the first week?  That should be a resounding 8, 9, or 10 out of 10 Y-E-S!  Anything less and it will not happen in our experience.  Remember, the purpose of this challenge is practical, as in you need to practice it.  Practice makes permanent!

HIBERNATION CHALLENGE

For the month of January (and beyond), DO SOMETHING to better your sleep.  Below is a checklist of items you can try to help improve your sleep. Print it out and put it in your room or on your fridge.  Screenshot it and put it on a device.  Again, try to start with 1 (ONE) for the first week of the challenge.  Yes- We know you may want to try several or all, but our experiences show that folks don’t do well with trying 5 things at once.  You will not end up doing them all (or perhaps any #overwhelm).

Start with the one thing you know you can do each night the first week and then build on that for week 2, 3, and so on if it is easy.  Trust us, you have this week and many more ahead to put this all into practice and we will be looking to do this with other healthy lifestyle habits as well. Stay tuned!

If you want to learn more about sleep in a very comprehensive manner, we highly recommend Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep and the others referenced below.  These may give you some further insight…and maybe even some bedtime reading material for this month-long challenge, wink wink.

 

References:

-Terman, L. M. (1925). Genetic studies of genius: Volume I. Mental and physical traits of a thousand gifted children. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

-“Unraveling Why We Sleep: Quantitative Analysis Reveals Abrupt Transition from Neural Reorganization to Repair in Early Development” by Junyu Cao, Alexander B. Herman, Geoffrey B. West, Gina Poe and Van M. Savage, 18 September 2020, Science Advances.

-Walker, Matthew. 2018. Why We Sleep. Harlow, England: Penguin Books.

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