TGG021: Don't Sleep On Sleep
Because let's face it: we're all exhausted
Hi there, and welcome new subscribers to Tha Good Grind — where I share the best in health & wellness that others have figured out.
You might have noticed I took a brief hiatus from TGG. When I began the newsletter, I promised myself I would stop if there came a time when I no longer enjoyed it. While that wasn’t exactly the case, I did take the last few months off to honor my mental space and direct my energy elsewhere. I’m excited to be back doing what I love: sharing knowledge with you all. I say this as a reminder to audit your life and stop (or pause) that which no longer serves you. You can’t pour from an empty cup; protect your beautiful mind and body by listening to what they're saying.
FOCUS OF THE WEEK: Sleep
During quarantine I have become fascinated, obsessed even, with our inner animals. I think about a passage from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens:
“There were humans long before there was history. Animals much like modern humans first appeared about 2.5 million years ago. But for countless generations they did not stand out from the myriad other organisms with which they shared their habitats….These archaic humans loved, played, formed close friendships and competed for status and power, but so did chimpanzees, baboons, and elephants. There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans themselves had any inkling their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write history books. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.”
I love this passage because it reminds me of my smallness and how much there is to learn from other animals. As humans regress in many ways, allowing the planet to burn and entire communities to starve, now might be a good time to study our animal brothers and return to the basic lessons of life they can offer.
Everybody sleeps
It’s wild how ubiquitous sleep is. Every creature on the planet sleeps! “Even worms, scientists have found, get shut-eye, despite having no eyes to shut. Prod a sleeping worm and it will not wriggle,” Stuart McGurk writes in this excellent piece for GQ. Some animals even wake up from hibernation to get some shut eye. Sleep bonds all beings, big and small. Why? What’s so special about sleep that no living being can go without it? I dove into the topic. What I discovered is alarming: sleep is the foundation for all health. And humans are not getting enough of it.
The history of zzz’s
This whole sleeping in one eight-hour block thing is relatively new. Our circadian rhythms, or natural sleep cycles, actually have two sleep periods built in: one in the evening, the other after lunch. Hence why the idea of trying to get through an afternoon Zoom meeting without a second cup of coffee is about as appealing as stepping on rusty nails. To explain these two sleep cycles, look to your ancestors. Early afternoon was usually too hot to hunt. The Romans agreed, hence where we get “siestas.”
Those who walked this earth before us can also explain why some folks are morning people and others are night owls. If you’re interested in the breakdown: 40% of the population are morning birds, 30% are night owls, and the rest fall somewhere in between. Evolutionarily it made sense for people to sleep in shifts, taking turns protecting one another from predators and other dangers. Fast forward to modern day: companies like Zapier whose employees communicate asynchronously, that is, without the barrier of being “present,” could actually have a major advantage. Without realizing it, traditional companies that still enforce early start times are punishing the roughly one-third of their employees who are night owls, leaving them underslept and overtired.
Let’s unpack underslept
Take the red flag analogy. You’re sitting in the park on a socially distant first date (I know — drinks in the park, so original!) and the person you’re with is going on and on about their ex. Option one: You focus on their intelligence and nice smile, ignoring the billboard-sized red flag flagrantly waving in your face. Option two: You finish your hard kombucha and never see the person again because their emotional baggage is not your problem. You know which is the healthy option, yet you continue going on more dates until one red flag becomes ten and you’re sitting there wondering how you allowed someone to waste so many hours of your life.
Tiredness is similar. You wake up sluggish after four or five hours of sleep. Instead of acknowledging the tiredness and honoring your body’s needs, you pour a glass of cold brew and promise yourself you’ll get to bed earlier the following night. Like Groundhog Day, that same scenario plays out every day until a week (or maybe even months) have passed and you can’t recall your last good night’s sleep. You know you need more sleep yet you continue denying yourself.
And when we ignore our internal red flags..?
The damage is profound. “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours so demolishes your immune system that it doubles your risk of cancer,” writes McGurk. It also “increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming brittle and blocked, leading to cardiovascular disease, strokes, and congestive heart failure.” Yeah, yikes. Have I mentioned that men who get five hours of sleep have much smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more?
Weight is also at the mercy of our restedness. According to sleep expert Dr. Guy Meadows, cravings for junk food increase 45% for the underslept. Making a bad thing worse, insufficient sleep swells the appetite hormone and suppresses the satisfaction hormone, meaning we don’t know when to stop eating. There’s a reason those breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks that have been sitting out for god only knows how long look particularly appealing after pulling an all-nighter.
Next up: emotions. Lack of sleep rattles your emotions like the Pixar animated short “Bao.” YOU try watching it and not turning into a puddle. As Matt Walker, the charismatic brain scientist and author of Why We Sleep, explains, the amygdala plays a primary role in generating strong emotions. When we are sleep deprived, that region becomes hyperactive (read: 60% more responsive). Your foot is slammed on the emotional gas pedal. Waking up on the wrong side of the bed really is a thing. On the other hand, when you get a full night’s rest, your stresses from the day are replayed during REM (rapid eye movement) cycles. Only this time, your stress hormones are switched Off. That means when you’re going through hard times, every day you get a full night’s rest will make things feel a little less hard.
Then there’s dementia. As Walker explains in his fantastic 2019 TED Talk, the disruption of deep sleep is “an underappreciated factor that is contributing to cognitive decline or memory decline in aging, and most recently we've discovered, in Alzheimer's disease as well.” Margaret Thatcher boasted about sleeping just four hours each night. She later died with dementia.
Cool kids snooze
On the topic of boasting about how little sleep you get, stop that. It’s like boasting about how many tequila shots you can take. There’s a reason the World Health Organization has classified nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen. There’s a reason we see a 24% increase in heart attacks the day after daylight savings, when we lose just one hour of sleep. For the record, we see a 21% reduction in heart attacks when we gain an hour back later in the year. Maybe you truly think you’re in the camp that can function optimally with just a few hours of sleep. I will tell you the same thing I told a guy last week when he said he didn’t fit into any of the love language buckets: you’re not special.
McGurk breaks it down: “In 2009 scientists located a rare genetic mutation – carried by around one to three percent of the population – that saw some people sleep less than six hours a night with no adverse affects whatsoever...Most startling, though, researchers later found that of every 100 people who claimed to get by just fine on less than six hours, only five carried the mutation and actually did.” Science shows it is highly unlikely that you are someone who can get by fine on just a few hours of sleep. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society found most adults function best with seven to nine hours of sleep. Regularly falling below seven hours makes you impaired. Regularly falling below six hours puts you at much higher risk of developing serious health problems.
The last bit of gloom and doom is on the topic of learning and creating new memories. Walker tells us, “Sleep may actually be your secret memory weapon.” You need sleep before learning to prep your brain (like a dry sponge ready to soak in new info), and you need sleep after learning to click Save on those new memories. Your brain is at a 40% memory-forming deficit without sleep. The hippocampus, which is like the Gmail inbox of your brain, bounces new memories when you are sleep deprived. Remember my recent issue about unlocking creativity? Sleep helps with that, too. Here’s why: sleep interconnects new memories together, shifting around your mind-wide web of associations. It’s why you can wake up with an entirely new solution to an issue. Guess my mom was on to something when she’d tell me to “sleep on” a tough problem.
But the benefits of GOOD sleep..
This isn’t the Rotten Tomatoes reviews for The Nutcracker in 3D; there’s plenty of good to be talked about when talking about sleep. The urgency of quality slumber first hit me when I listened to Tim Ferriss interview LeBron James and his trainer Mike Mancias. In discussing LeBron’s recovery regimen, the word “sleep” came up 20 times. Mancias and LeBron are obsessed with sleep. Here you’ve got one of the best athletes of all time, who can afford every recovery gadget and technique under the sun, and his primary tool for recovery is something free and accessible to everyone: sleep. Dr. Meadows goes so far as to proclaim sleep is “the most powerful performance enhancer known to humankind.”
The big question: how do I sleep better?
America is one big sleep deprivation experiment and a slew of people and companies are capitalizing on our tiredness. Unless you live in a cave, you are bombarded with products promising you better rest. According to Infinium Global Research, the sleep aids industry is worth $114.15B. If you’re part of that industry, please share the wealth and Venmo @KatieVigilante. You’ve got sleep clinics and sleep retreats, white noise and pink noise, mats and rings, smart pajamas and sleep podcasts. Don’t forget weighted blankets. Writes McGurk, “It’s the same science, everyone in the weighted-blanket business will tell you, behind why you swaddle a baby. It’s like being held tightly. Only now the target market had changed: it was anxious millennials who required swaddling to sleep.”
As with most big health questions like “What should I eat,” the solution to sleeping better is fairly simple. For starters, tire yourself out. I attribute my good sleep in part to my physical activity. I exercise hard five to six days a week, use a standing desk, take walking meetings when possible, and enjoy getting together with friends to rollerblade or play tennis. Why? Because I am honored to inhabit my body and will forever covet my home. Think back to animals. Your dog sprints around, tiring himself out so much so that he passes out in exhaustion the minute he gets home. Be like a dog. Lead an active life that leaves you tired come day’s end.
Avoid booze, caffeine, and napping. Booze is in fact a sedative, but sedation is not the same as sleep. It ignites fight or flight, fragmenting your sleep and frequently waking you throughout the night. As for caffeine? You may hate me for telling you this, but as Walker explains, caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours. For anyone who isn’t a middle school science teacher, that means five to six hours after drinking coffee, 50% of it is still circulating through your body. If you love your almond milk latte, drink it early and in moderation. As for naps, they can be highly beneficial in certain instances. But if you’re struggling to sleep at night, try limiting them.
Focus on consistency. Go to sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time (yes, even on weekends). This will anchor your sleep and improve the quality of your sleep. Opt for a cool environment; Walker notes 65 Fahrenheit or 18 Celsius is optimal. The reason being, your core temperature must drop a few degrees for you to fall asleep and stay asleep. Use screens judiciously. At nighttime when your retinas begin taking in less light, your body assumes it’s time for sleep and begins producing melatonin. Staring at screens before bed? Your body will stop producing melatonin. Since researching melatonin production, I have tossed my melatonin gummies in the trash and cut screens out 40 minutes before bed, ending my day with a novel instead. Finally, commit to yourself. There isn’t a single aspect of your health untouched by sleep. Covet your health. Protect your temple.
You can train for hours every day and eat the cleanest plant and animal diet, but skimp on sleep and your health will suffer. I write to you from my apartment in San Francisco, the windows next to me sealed shut to prevent wildfire smoke from entering. There is so little within our control right now; religiously obsess over that which you can influence. Start each day on a well-rested note. You might just wake up a little more hopeful than before.
Tha Good Good
Where I share dope things I've been into since my last newsletter
note: no paid recommendations, just stuff I like
post — Trigger warning for anyone whose $5.04 oat milk lattes literally give you life: this post from Nat Eliason may hit you like a bag of bricks. Take the line, "Putting 12oz of Oatly into your latte and adjusting for the higher GI of maltose means adding almost a tablespoon of table sugar to your drink. Put a tablespoon of sugar next to your coffee next time you have a chance and seriously consider if that’s a decision that’s 'made for humans.'" I've shared this post with countless lactose intolerant or health-conscious friends. Total eye opener.
book — Oh baby do I have the book for you. Finally read Glennon Doyle's Untamed cover to cover and wow is it good. So good that I chose it as my book group's next read. Glennon Doyle's words will liberate you.
shorts — Unless Harry and Megan invite me for brunch at their new California abode, you'd be hard-pressed to find me wearing anything other than Alo's biker shorts these days. They've got the maternity-level waistband stretch you need after overdoing it on the pad thai, without sacrificing any of the style.
guide — If you're like most, you look forward to job interviews like parents of young children look forward to an additional eight months of quarantine. My friend and LinkedIn colleague Craig Barry spends evenings helping people land jobs they previously considered out of reach. Huge kudos to Craig on launching Mastering the Modern Interview, a guide which encompasses everything Craig has learned about the job search process and offers actionable strategies for today's interview climate. He is generously offering subscribers of Tha Good Grind 60% off. Use code "thagoodgrind" to turn interviews into your arena.
playlist — My friend Michelle has blessed us with the summer playlist we didn't know we needed. Don't worry, Heat Waves is on it. Life tip: if you regularly bring your neighbors enough slices of almond butter banana bread, they won't complain when you blast Glass Animals 24/7.
Hungry for more?
Watch Matt Walker make the case for sleep.
Read how the founder of Kettle & Fire tinkered to optimize his sleep.
Take time for you before bed with a sex-positive company.