Simple Huge Health Changes – Part 1: Sleep

My dog knows sleep is good!

Sleep is Important?

I am going to die. I let this sink in. Healthy habits can be hard, and so maybe life is too short to waste time on them, right? Living a Paleo lifestyle is a hard adjustment for some. How about right now, we focus on a SIMPLE and EASY way to improve your health A LOT? This is something that doesn’t require panting, calorie-counting, menus, or any other big effort. Sleep is a cornerstone of good health. This is the power of sleep.

To maximize the experience that is life, wouldn’t we want to be awake and experiencing it as much as possible? One of my early bosses was fond of lecturing “six hours of sleep is all any of us need.” At one point, I may have even believed this.

How often have we heard that we need eight hours of sleep every night? It turns out, there are a large number of reasons to get enough sleep. Sleep is one of the most important aspects of a healthy, and possibly long life. Importantly, this is a simple and pain-free way to improve your health. If you believe this and do your best to prioritize 8 hours each night, you may want to stop reading now. You are one of the few. Otherwise, let’s explore a little further.

Paleo Sleep

Before the Thomas Edison gave us the light bulb, people generally slept when it was dark. Our night vision isn’t all that red hot. At night our paleo ancestors were at a distinct disadvantage to the critters that liked to eat us. This was a big part of why it was better for us to sleep when it was dark. This is how we evolved, and how our bodies adapted.

If this was true, on average we may have been sleeping more than eight hours per day. Granted, climate control and feather beds weren’t all that common two million years ago. Our paleo ancestors probably had fitful sleep and for most of that time just slept on the ground. More on that another day.

Our Brains Need Sleep

I watched a TED talk on the brain (TED, 2014). Fascinating and entertaining stuff. This is a 12-minute video that will do more to explain why you need the sleep than I could possibly cover here. Suffice to say, the ONLY opportunity your brain has to remove waste is while you sleep.

Just like any part of your body, your brain needs this waste removal. This is how your brain defends itself against degeneration. Chronic lack of sleep is linked to a greater or lesser degree to so many diseases, especially Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and MS. Acute lack of sleep, also known as sleep deprivation, dramatically reduces brain function in the short term. This is a dangerous situation. The long-term health of your brain requires consistent and sufficient daily sleep!

We Need Sleep

Not to beat a dead (TED) horse, but another TED Talk provides further insight. Sleep is a time for our body to slide gently out of glycogen metabolism and drift gently and lightly into ketosis. When we sleep, we obviously are fasting. Hormones are regulated, tissues are repaired, and our brains are maintained.

How much sleep do we need? It varies, but for most of us, the old rule of thumb of eight hours isn’t wrong. Younger people need more, older need less, but eight hours is a pretty central number. Seven is a minimum for just about anyone, and probably not a good average. The point is, there is a minimum amount of sleep we need to provide for our health. Hint: it isn’t six hours!

Power Naps?

I remember my thermodynamics professor telling us that we are at our smartest shortly after waking and this steadily drifts downward until the end of the day; however, he showed us that a simple 30-minute mid-day nap could recapture a significant amount of our beginning alertness and cognition. Cool. I’ve always believed that getting a mid-day nap helps. Most cultures have instilled the mid-day nap as a de-facto practice (think, siesta).

Some years ago I read Tim Ferriss’ book, The Four-Hour Body, in which he reduxes studies that show a single 30 minute nap can reduce total required daily sleep time needed. He takes it to the extreme of 30-minute sleeps every three hours over a 24 hour period, to bring about the bare minimum sleep requirement. Not sure about that, but the power nap definitely helps. I can see where maybe seven hours of sleep plus a regular power nap might steal back a half hour of awake time. I take it a different way. The nap is a bit of insurance, and if you can sneak it in every day, I think it is a very good way to boost your productivity and happiness.

Note: research shows that naps in excess of 30 minutes will cause some sluggishness and drowsiness when you awake. Even 10-minute naps can help, so keep it between 10 and 30 minutes.

Simple Way to Improve Life

Hopefully you believe that getting a proper amount of good quality sleep is a profound and simple step to improve your health. For me, just realizing that my brain needs the rejuvenation, knowing that might ensure long-term mental health, I’m sold. Watch the TED Talk. I hope it scares you just a little…it did me.

Trusting to that, eight hours of sleep represents one third of the day. That means that roughly one third of your life is spent sleeping. If you take this seriously, put another way, one third of your life can be just as good as it is for Bill Gates, Elan Musk, or Warren Buffet! I’m not joking. If you get better sleep than Bill Gates, one third of your life is literally better than one third of his. We can talk about the other two-thirds another day…focus…squirrel!

The Foundation – Your Bed

So with this in mind, what would you say if I were to pose this: your bed is the most important consumer purchase in your life. It isn’t your car and it may not even be your home. It sure as hell isn’t your latest toy. Your bed is the fundamental center of 33 percent of your life. Why would you skimp on a bed? The bed does more than facilitate sleep. It can also harm or improve your posture and joints. Your bed improves or harms your life, simply.

Still thinking that $400 bed is good enough? For some folks, it actually might be just fine. Some even can show that sleeping on the floor is better for them. For others, it may be what is significantly limiting your health and/or happiness. Right now. The point is to put the decision front-and-center. Following this line of thinking, my wife and I searched for a good bed to improve both our sleep and our spines.

Some Ideas

We researched enough to be pretty sure we wanted a TempurPedic bed, but we were confused by the choices. We laid down on dozens of these suckers over several months, and could not agree on what we liked. I thought I liked firm beds. She liked softer ones. We were at an impasse.

Finally, we stumbled into a store in Boise, Idaho, that had some computerized air-mattress system hooked to a computer. We ran through the program and the computer told us we should be side-sleepers. It printed out a dozen or so mattresses for us to review. Five or six box springs, a few air-type mattresses, and three TempurPedics. To my chagrin, the TempurPedics were mostly the softer variety my wife preferred. Anyway, long story short, the darned computer was right. We bought the mattress we thought was best from the three it gave us, and our lives INSTANTLY got a lot better. I’m talking a LOT better.

First, I was now only turning over a few times on an average night. Sometimes not at all! We were both sleeping more deeply and in longer stretches and getting to sleep sooner. Importantly, we learned to be side sleepers. This helped with both of our spines, while dramatically improving our sleep. We were getting more out of seven hours on our new bed than trying to be nine hours in our old box springs. I can’t over-state how profoundly this mattress improved our day-to-day lives.

Sleep Difficulties

I know, for many folks, this discussion seems academic. For them, sleep comes hard. I don’t have a lot to offer on this in such a short article. For me, having the perfect bed made a huge difference in both how quickly I was falling asleep and how little I woke or tossed in the night. I’ve also found that I cannot sleep easily or well if I’ve eaten much (especially starch or sugar) or had more than one serving of alcohol within a couple hours of bedtime.

Recently, I’ve used a small meditation exercise I read about. I start by focusing on my individual breaths, feeling them go in and come out. If I lose focus on this, I switch to thinking about a color (grey). Usually, if I focus on the breaths and that color grey, I’m asleep within five minutes. If I lose focus (and start daydreaming about outdoor adventures usually), I start over. There are books on getting to sleep. Read them! Watch TED Talks. Listen to PodCasts. The point is, if you don’t make this important to you in every way, you can’t fix it.

Conclusion

Quality and adequate sleep is core to your physical and mental well-being. Sleep should be something you can easily focus upon. Don’t skimp. Don’t laugh it off. Quitting drinking or smoking is hard. Developing a good Paleo menu and sticking to it can be hard. Getting enough sleep should not be. Because it is something you do every day, and because it is so critical, sleep must be the centerpiece of your good health.

If you are having difficulty with sleep, then at least take the time to change that. Getting to better health is hard. Getting better sleep is the fundamental step toward better health. Focus on this, and get it right. Once you do, you are working from a foundation for health. It may be a new bed, better pre-bedtime habits, or just opting to sleep a little longer. Just give sleep its due. (Coming Soon – Part 3:) Part 2: Movement here.