Biohacks for sleep and the facts if you don’t

Ask any doctor or health specialist and they will tell you sleep is likely to be the most important thing you can do to improve both your overall health and your immune system. So much research has been done based around sleep in recent years that it is, without doubt, the fastest hack to giving your body the best fighting chance of achieving your goals.

Of course, we are all experts when it comes to sleep and the reason why it is most often just played down as something we can catch up with the next day or even the next.

Fast facts

Not eating at least a few hours before you are due to sleep is now shown to be optimal and sleeping around 11pm or just before is a best practice. If your last meal is between 8pm – 9pm in the evening and your first meal is say 8am -9am, that is a 12-hour fasting window for our bodies to recover.

This is likely the fastest ways to achieve multiple benefits with minimal effort:

• Increase in cognition performance
• Increase in memory performance
• Overall energy and productivity gains
• Improvement in immune function and T cell production
• Easier weight management
• Hormone balancing including better glucose metabolism in the brain
• More control over emotions and feelings of anxiety

Technicalities

Glymphatic system

With the discovery of the ‘Glymphatic system’, the brain needs plenty of time to clear various toxins and compounds. If they are not cleared they can slowly build-up, and form the beginnings of long term damage, even leading to Alzheimer’s.

Clearing glucose from the brain is part of helping this system become optimal, apart from the usual amyloid plaques that are often associated with dementia, it is rapidly becoming recognised that the brain can develop insulin resistance on its own. So eating sugary processed foods, just as we are about to sleep could be leading to long term damage.

Immune system

Without good quality sleeping habits, is the time most of us will endure colds and flu. Our immune systems are shown to be severely hampered in the reproduction of immune cells relating to fighting disease and viruses. Our immune system literally relies on not only the quantity and quality but the timing is also critical. Many viruses are known to lie dormant and the term low immune system, couldn’t be closer to the truth, being the result of impaired sleeping patterns.

Sleep is a big part of your low hanging toolbox fruit. It can be a quick win to putting yourself in control. Remember, everything we do can be ‘the weakest link’. There is no point doing the best you can, eating and exercising ‘properly’ and then destroying your bodies main defence and repair systems and then asking why something is not working.

Sleep deprivation

Poor quality and a general lack of sleep can have severe consequences. Areas of the brain like the amygdala which control emotions and behaviour become more excited in comparison to areas of the brain that become severely impacted and literally shut down, frontal and parietal lobes are in charge of decision making, problem-solving and memory and the result is an inability to make rational decisions and often a time when you will be extremely irritable and argumentative.

Neurodegeneration

Glial cells known as astrocytes are also known to be impacted during sleep deprivation and over long periods can cause long term damage. The microglial cells have the job of clearing damaged cells and pruning synapses, it is now thought that during sleep deprivations these cells become overly excited and prune a little more than they should and are now part of Alzheimer’s studies.

Neuroplasticity

Our saving grace is that the brain does have an enormous amount of resilience and ability to repair and rewire itself when given the right conditions, which includes good quality sleep and nutrition. So now is the right time to reverse those adverse effects you may have endured.