The importance of sleep lies in the physiological changes that allow for repair, clean-up, and solidifying memory networks. Sleep is like a ‘road closure’ needed to fix worn-out roads. If sleep doesn’t happen, memories don’t fully form, neural repair doesn’t happen, and brain garbage from the day doesn’t get taken out.
As a result, the brain has more trouble maintaining and activating neural networks important in ‘executive cognition’: juggling lots of bits of information at once, coming up with plans, and filtering out unnecessary detail and thoughts.
We underestimate the amount of information there is in the world. Our brain’s task is, yes, to take in information. However, the tricky part is filtering information, and then grouping information in a way that allows for the perfect intersection between speed and complexity of response.
An important aspect of this is being able to select information to suppress and to remember that suppression. It’s like noise-canceling headphones that remember to: suppress certain frequencies, at certain times, in certain contexts, and from certain directions, for almost immediate filtering and a seamless experience.
Like learning to tune out regular, repetitive noises. Let’s call this filtering process ‘habituation’.
Inefficient sleep disallows habituation.
Because of its sheer amount, unhabituated data is more likely to trigger mood and physiological reactions. Part of living life is that it offers us exposure to things we learn to tune out so we can operate with clarity. Consider that clarity means the erasure of background noise, not necessarily the clarity of the foreground. Similarly, mood states can more easily precipitate thoughts that haven’t been habituated to, leading to a ‘runaway’ cycle.
By reducing background noise, we are able to increase the ‘volume’ of novel or relevant information. When we don’t get enough sleep, we lose the ability to ‘habituate’ unnecessary information, and are inundated with ‘everything is important’ perceptual data. As a result, we can’t maintain focused attention on relevant data maintaining a state of stress or fear.
Vitamins, nutrients, neurotransmitters, hormones, and psychological medications don’t work without working neurons. If you have a sleep debt, medications and healthy activities won’t work as effectively as you think.
Sleep deprivation is routinely labeled as attention deficit disorder. People are then given prescription medications to manage ADHD, but it is a destined-to-fail attempt to mask sleep deprivation.
These medications work temporarily to offset sleep deprivation side effects, then they stop working. People often think that they can just increase their medication dosages to get the desired effect, but in the context of sleep deprivation, it won’t matter and will make things worse.
Sleep is an antidepressant, it is a mood stabilizer, it is a concentration enhancer, and it is an anti-anxiety medication.
Even if there is no snoring, you may still have obstructive symptoms disallowing you from ever getting “good enough sleep”. The most important and difficult part of sleep is getting air into your lungs while your body is paralyzed.
If you have even a little trouble breathing air, your body will leave a deeper sleep state and enter into a lighter sleep state in order to provide increased muscle tone to breathe air. This often happens even if you aren’t not snoring and unaware of being awake.
Although you can finally get airflow moving while you’re unconscious and sleeping, you cannot achieve a deeper and restorative state of sleep. The effect of hundreds of nights of less deep sleep is a silent damager. The first symptom we may see from sleep deprivation is less sharp thinking, even if you aren’t feeling sleepy.
Cognitive deficiency is usually the first thing affected by a body-wide issue – often well before we see it on bloodwork.
Jaw clenching and neck tension are often attributed to ‘just stress’. However, they can occur from the head and neck maintaining tension throughout sleep, desperately trying to keep your airway open.
All this extra muscle support leads to more energy exerted during a time when we are supposed to be sleeping. The higher the amount of energy we have to exert during sleep, the less healthy sleep depth we can achieve.
Common causes of sleep obstruction also include allergies which can cause some swelling (Which is normal in chronic Inflammatory responses) in the upper respiratory tract. This swelling increases airway resistance by a factor of 4 for each unit the airway diameter is reduced from inflammatory swelling.
Even if you don’t have significant allergies, a saline spray or Neti pot should likely be routine. People don’t often think about how bacteria, viruses, and other allergens routinely mix between the mouth and the nasal cavity. Try breathing in your mouth and out your nose to get a sense of this. Because of this, people may suffer from chronic bad breath despite having good oral hygiene.
As with brushing and flossing, there should be no reason for the nasal cavity to be left out.
Decreased airway diameter can lead to a fourfold increase in airway resistance. Microbes and allergens are often taken in when breathing through the mouth and exhaling through the nose and vice versa.
Sleep debt is cumulative. Let’s call it a 2 week rolling average. Meaning, that if you’re getting 6 hours of sleep nightly, and you need 8 hours – consider yourself as having a 28-hour sleep debt (14 days times 2 hours). Meaning even if you had 8 hours of sleep the night before, you’ve barely made a dent in your sleep debt. You need 8 consistent hours nightly for at least 2 weeks, if not several, to get back on track. Note that not all people need 8 hours. Some more, some less, depending on sleep efficiency and other metabolic needs.
It is likely not natural to sleep on a completely flat surface and those who preceded us prefer to sleep on gentle slopes. If you’re interested in this, google “primates sleeping”, and look at the images. They’re mostly sleeping on head-raising slopes.
Let’s briefly make sense of this by going a little deeper
The pharynx is the area of the head and neck where our esophagus, oral cavity, nasal cavity, eustachian tubes (ears) and upper and lower respiratory tract, and ear canals meet.
Let’s consider that the pharynx looks a bit like the heart, with chambers and valves. The chambers merely function to create pressure at the right time, and the valves are there to ‘preserve the pressure’ for air, fluids, and solids to efficiently go from one chamber to the next. The valve allows the preceding chamber to get ready for the next bolus.
In this case, the heart sees blood coming into one end of the chamber and out the other end. There are valves that disallow blood from returning to the area it had been.
The pharynx is similar. This simple drawing is essentially the pharyngeal chamber, with inlets and outlets covered by valves to maintain pressure gradients.
The interesting thing about the pharynx is that it can help not only with creating pressure but also reducing pressure, depending on whether we are inhaling or exhaling air.
Sleeping on a flat surface can lead to the lower part of our body pushing on the respiratory tract causing increased work of breathing, as well as pharyngeal bending. This can also be prone to ‘swelling’ just from the head being ‘low’ in comparison to the rest of the body causing fluid retention, which causes swelling and thus airway resistance.
In order to offset trouble breathing, the diaphragm and rib cage have to expand and generate more vacuum for air to inflow.
This causes a chain reaction:
The diaphragm, due to the high vacuum needed to be generated in the pharynx, can lead to worsening obstruction by causing airway collapse, like sucking too hard on a straw. This reduces airflow, but also, increases turbulence. Turbulence means that all air isn’t flowing in one direction. There is air also flowing in the reverse direction, interfering with the incoming air, and worsening the inflow.
Gastroesophageal reflux disease (by essentially pulling through the esophagus stomach contents or merely pulling up on the esophagus), tinnitus (ear ringing) by pulling on part of the eustachian tube (As well as jaw clenching), etc. De-oxygenation during sleep causes a heightened sympathetic response.
We recommend sleeping on an incline, ideally a gentle slope, whenever possible. One issue with raising just the head part of the mattress is that it increases the risk of uncomfortable positions when side-sleeping. A gentle slope can be achieved multiple ways such as getting special bed frames, putting pillows, or even an inflatable wedge under the mattress. We are not recommending the following product, a bed incline, however, we are including a link to give you an example of something we recommend:
Some people may find the 7-inch incline too steep, so the 5-inch may be good if you’re not sure.
Propping pillows is likely not enough since it can cause the body to bend in particular ways that can lead to sleep disruption or disuse of the homemade ramp.
Finally, for your viewing pleasure, We may have outsmarted ourselves as humans by being able to build flat bedding. Google ‘primates sleeping’, click on pictures, and see how often they’re sleeping on slopes.
