Neuro Athletics #20
The hours spent sleeping are critical for your brain
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Hi, Neuro Athletes!
Here is your Sunday newsletter – a collection of the latest scientific research about brain performance, sleep physiology and lifestyle along with my latest interviews and tips for performing at your peak.
Read on to learn more about;
Why we sleep
Three processes that take place during sleep
Coming up this week in Tuesday’s newsletter;
Paid subscribers will get their report and member Q&A video on the third Tuesday of the month at 11:17am ET.
The report will be a deep dive on Omega-3. We will look at comprehensive notes on how to measure your omega-3 index, what measurements to aim for, which companies source the best EPA and DHA and more.
My personal lipid profile- what lipid panels should you get, how often and why?
A Good Day Always Starts the Night Before.
Quality sleep is essential to our physical and mental well-being. But what exactly is high-quality sleep? Tracking and measuring sleep is fun and somewhat essential if you want to have the highest quality of sleep possible but why is it so crucial to optimise this aspect of our lives?
Modern day technology such as the Oura ring, WHOOP and the Eight Sleep mattress is giving rise to more data than we could have ever imagined. Data on how well we slept, what our resting heart rate was and how many tosses and turns we did.
This has been an absolute game changer for myself and for my athletes and clients as I am able to really understand how well they slept and what is preventing them from sleep better.
While there’s no doubt that sleep is necessary, there’s still a lot about it that befuddles sleep experts. “Despite years of scientific research and studies, we still don’t completely understand why we need to sleep,” says says Dr. Leila Kheirandish-Gozal, a sleep research and professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. “We also still don’t know why we dream.”
What experts do know is that sleep is a surprisingly active and fertile time for the brain. Sleep seems to play a crucial role in helping your brain sort, process, store, and make use of the stuff you encounter during your waking hours.
Let’s dig into science a little by looking at three processes that happen during sleep.
1. Memory consolidation
2. Hormonal changes
3. Waste product removal and cell repair
Memory processing
During sleep, memory and learning is processed, and processing of information occurs. There are broadly two types of memories – procedural and emotional. Procedural or declarative memory, is generally processed during NREM sleep, while emotional memory is processed during REM sleep. One feature of sleep is that the frontal lobe is inactive. The frontal lobe is typically used to regulate our thoughts, and fulfil societal expectations of correct behaviour. In sleep, with this being inactive, thoughts can vary widely from those considered acceptable during wakefulness. This has benefits of problem solving and coming up with creative and novel ideas.
Immunity
Sleep is involved in immune function. There is a circadian variation in circulating lymphocyte counts, lymphoid organs, and immune cells in healthy humans. The exact link between sleep and immunity is complex. However, there are many examples of poor sleep affecting immunity. Shift workers have been found to have higher levels of systemic inflammatory markers. There are several studies in which short sleep duration is linked to higher viral infection rates and lower efficacy of vaccinations.
Waste Removal
Like all other systems in the body that use fuel and need to eliminate waste, the brain is no different. Glymphatic clearance is a process in which, during sleep, the brain reduces in size by a small amount, making room for an increase in cerebral spinal fluid which washes over the brain surface, collecting waste (beta-amyloid proteins), to flush these from the brain and eliminate them. A current theory is that a buildup of these proteins can contribute to Alzheimers disease.
The importance of sleep is by now irrefutable — the onus is on education policy, practice, and research to adapt. We cannot keep pretending that we have a magic pill that will replace this human necessity.
We must relearn how to train, track and measure our sleep performance so we can increase our health and well-being.
Thursday Thread Q&A 🧵
On Thursdays we host a live thread and pose a question/ topic around human performance where I actively engage and answer questions. This weeks thread was titles: “How do you maintain attention and focus”
Here are some community member answers 👇
You can check the entire thread and view the questions and answers here
Improve Your Fitness Through Sleep
Eight Sleep is the premier sleep fitness company that powers human performance through optimal sleep.
They use an advanced temperature-controlled system that adjusts throughout the night. It analyzes your personalized sleep stages, biometrics, and bedroom temperature, reacting intelligently to create the optimal sleeping environment.
The result?
Since getting my Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover a few months ago, not only do I fall asleep faster, I actually get high-quality sleep, so I wake up feeling well-rested and energized.
Simply put, it’s been a game-changer.
If you want to join me and thousands of pro athletes, CEOs, and other high performers that are dedicated to improving their sleep fitness, you should get an Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover too.
Trust me; you won’t regret it :)
You make me want to sleep for a living! hahaha
I am currently using the Oura ring. Is there a difference between the Oura and the Eight Sleep mattress?