Sleep and Memory

Don’t sleep too long
As I really like to sleep long, I was curious if there is too much sleep as well. Actually there is! If you’ll sleep at least one hour more than normal during a longer period, you will sleep poorly and wake up often. And for a good sleep it’s important to sleep trought the night.
Eventually you can say the lack of sleep can more than double the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, but that too much sleep can also double the risk of death.
[Jane E. Ferrie, Martin J. Shipley, Francesco P. Cappuccio, Eric Brunner, Michelle A. Miller, Meena Kumari, and Michael G. Marmot: "Researchers say lack of sleep doubles risk of death… but so can too much sleep. A prospective study of change in sleep duration; associations with mortality in the Whitehall II cohort." In: SLEEP Journal.]

About sleeping and learning
As I’m a student who needs to learn a lot – at least some days before the exams ☺ I’m aware, that a good sleep is very helpfull for your memory and concentration. Because you’re processing the events of the day while sleeping you also process new knowledge. It’s important to sleep otherwise you won’t be able to memorize what you learned – so think about that, if you’re planning to do a overnight-learning-session before your next exams!
You can imagine the importance when you remember how bad your cognition is, when you tried to memorize something at a moment you were really tired. No way, you have to read the paragraph again and again and again...
(To read on you can have a look at the study, that showed, that working memory was affected by sleep deprivation and had dropped to 38% in comparison to the control group: Turner, T.H., Drummond, S.P.A., Salamat, J.S., & Brown, G.G. (2007). Effects of 42 hr sleep deprivation on component processes of verbal working memory. In: Neuropsychology, 21, 787-795)

Fall asleep
So if you have a hard time to fall asleep you can try some of my favourite „tips“ ☺
First one, the oldie: chocolate. A little bit of sugar eases me and hightens my mood, with that it’s easier to sleep. It hasn’t to be chocolate, any other sweet or milk with honey etc. will do just as well. But as the sugar doesn’t last long, it should really be right before you go to bed.
The same with my next suggestion: coffee. Normally it is know for getting us awake, but if you lay down after it you will easily fall asleep – try it, it works ☺
The next on isn’t a regular tipp, but a fact. Be active during the day, then you’re really tired enough. To say, don’t be lazy, walk short distances instead of taking the jeepney, try to fullfill your day not only with work, but lunch with friends etc.

Let's sleep

My Sleep
Here in the Philippines I can’t explain my sleep very well. I wake up early due to the sun that enters my room after five o’clock and sometimes due to noise outside. But I can’t say, if I’m sleepy in the morning. (Maybe that’s why a lot of Filipinos take a siesta if they can – just in case they are sleepy or because they woke up so early.)
As the sun enhances the production of serotonin, which improves your mood, it’s likely that you’re not feeling sleepy. Additionally hot and cold or in my case just cold showers expels fatigue.

Trivia
I collected some interesting stuff about sleeping:

• You can’t catch up sleep.
• And you can’t sleep in advance – you can't store recovery.
• Good sleepers are happier. That’s why sleeping disorders can cause depressions, as well as depressions can cause sleeping disorders.
• Sleep before midnight is not better than afterwards, it’s more important, that your sleep is deep enough (which is mostly in the first five hours).
• People naturally feel most sleepy (have the greatest "drive for sleep") at two times of the day about 12 hours apart – so the post-lunch-dip mostly refers more to your biological clock than to your full stomach.
• Even protozoons have their circadian rhythm.
• Referring to the circadian rhythm our working abilities start at 9 a.m. (that's why some scientist all over the world suggest to start school at that time).
  
• If you’re a shiftworker you can’t just shift your night. Sleep that starts in the morning will be shorter and disturbed because it’s a time where the body wants to be active. So a longer period of shiftwork will affect your health badly. (Maybe we should suggest that the government prohibits shiftwork ;))
• Sex could support a good sleep, but until now it was just proved with bunnies.
• Alcohol can be relaxing, but it should be just a little. Because alcohol depresses the REM-phases and the body will try to catch up that causes a shallow and disturbed sleep in the second half of the night.
• Hence people who drink a lot of alkohol are one of the poorest sleepers. They wake up often, have problems to fall asleep, sweat a lot, have a dry mouth and snore hard (because alcohol weakens the muscles).
• Sleepwalking concerns most of the time children and is a genetic hereditary.
• Some people need up to one week to recover from a jetlag that causes problems to fall asleep and stay sleeping, sleepiness during daytime, problems with their metabolism, bad temper and problems with their concentration.
• It’s easier to adjust to a timeshift, if you’re travelling to the west and get some extra hours than to the east where you loose some.

What's it all about

I like to sleep, that’s why I opened this blog. I would even say sleeping is my hobby and is one of my very important needs. I’m always looking for good food and for enough sleep. As for daytime I’m a very active person, I don’t like to be tired at all.
In addition I’m notorious for falling asleep wherever I want or I can’t stay awake any longer. Even at places where most of the people can’t sleep like airplanes, cars that are going on rough roads, while sitting in a chair or lying on the floor, it’s no problem for me to fall asleep. If my body needs a rest, I wilingly give in. Even if that means, one moment I’m talking to a friend, the other moment I’m up and away ☺

For the beginning, I think I should talk about the sleeping basics:

Why do you need to sleep
Sleep is not a waste of time, it’s your deserved break. At the same time your body is not resting - it regenerats itself. On the one hand the metabolism will slow down, but on the other hand hormons are building muscles and strengthen bones, the immunsystem is regaining strength and the brain is processing the stimuli of the day.
You can experience that a regular sleep is even more important than eating and drinking. Even one sleepless night exhausts us, a longer period without sleep will affect our body and mind tremendously. In the mid 1960s a student stayed awake for 11 days in a sleeping labor. At the end he suffered from severe hallucinations.
The National Sleep Foundation in the United States says that seven to nine hours of sleep for an adult is optimal and that sufficient sleep benefits alertness, memory, problem solving, and overall health, as well as reducing the risk of accidents.
["Let Sleep Work for You" provided by the National Sleep Foundation"]
Additonally Professor Francesco Cappuccio said, "Short sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension, and Type 2 diabetes, sometimes leading to mortality; but in contrast to the short sleep-mortality association, it appears that no potential mechanisms by which long sleep could be associated with increased mortality have yet been investigated. Some candidate causes for this include depression, low socioeconomic status, and cancer-related fatigue. …In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is optimal for health, and a sustained reduction may predispose to ill health."
["Researchers say lack of sleep doubles risk of death… but so can too much sleep".
Jane E. Ferrie at al. "A prospective study of change in sleep duration; associations with mortality in the Whitehall II cohort." SLEEP Journal.]
Furthermore wound healing is affected by sleep. A study by Gumustekin et al. in 2004 shows sleep deprivation hindering the healing of burns on rats.
[Gumustekin, K. at al. (2004). "Effects of sleep deprivation, nicotine, and selenium on wound healing in rats" (Abstract). Int J Neurosci 2004;114(11): 1433-42.]

What happens when we’re sleeping?
Around every 90 minutes REM(Rapid Eye Movement)- or dreaming phases and phases of deep sleep (this phases are most important for your recovery) take turn. During the night the phases of deep sleep will decrease, the ones of dreaming will increase. If you don’t get enough phases of deep sleep your body will take what it needs during the next night.
Additionally we’ll wake up up to 30 times a night, but just for a short time which we don’t recognize. But if this wake phases exceed three minutes it could be hard to sleep again.
Seven and a half hour is the magic time for a healthy and long life, but there are people who’re allready feel rested after five hours. So sleep-scientists just refer to the feeling during the day, if you feel fresh and rested, you had enough sleep.
(If you want to read on you can visit Wikipedia or the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM))

Sleep debt
But today a lot of people don’t have a healthy sleep. We’re not physically working like our ancestors, hence we have enough energy to stay awake. And there is so much to do during the night, finishing the left overs of work, going to clubs, surfing through the internet, goingt to the late-night-show of the cinema - information overload and short nights result in poor sleep and fatigue all the time.
The scientist will talk about a chronical sleeping disorder if someone's sleeping too short and poorly (at least for four weeks) that he can’t be capable anymore. Insomnia leads to chronical stress which can affects the immunsystem but can also lead to cardiovascular disease. Moreover people who suffer sleeping disorders are anxious that they can’t fall asleep anymore, this stress prevent them from sleeping. So it’s not enough to take sleeping pills but to care for your mind as well.