Don't Sleep On the Value of Sleep
It’s 6:30 am and your alarm goes off. You hit the snooze button in the hope that another 15 minutes of sleep will be your saviour and snap you out of your exhausted state. Does this sound familiar? In a busy world where there never seem to be enough hours in the day, we often choose sleep, or more specifically skimping on sleep, as our silver bullet to do more. Why is sleep so important that we spend close to a third of our lives in this state?
This is a topic I have always been interested in and what ultimately drew me to Dr. Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. In his book, Why We Sleep and podcast series, The Matt Walker Podcast, he examines the impact of sleep on human health, disease and well-being. Here are some of my takeaways:
Sleep, Memory and Learning
Our culture seems to think pulling an all-nighter is a badge of honour, and our students will often stay up into the wee hours of the night preparing for that big assessment the next day. The key piece we are missing, however, is that sleep is where our brain takes in new information, codes it, integrates it with our prior knowledge, and moves it from our short to long-term memory. When we cut down on sleep, we are decreasing our ability to recall all that information we stayed up late trying to remember.
Physical and Mental Health
We know how recharged and refreshed we feel when we’ve had that proper eight or nine-hour sleep. We wake up positive and ready to conquer the day. Yet time and time again, we ignore this and watch one more episode or doom scroll for another hour on our phones. What we sacrifice when we do this is our body boosting our immune system and repairing cell and muscle tissue, both of which happen during the deep stages of our sleep cycle. Sleep is also pivotal in regulating our emotions and enhancing our mental health. Proper rest helps both our impulse control and risk tolerance, as well as allowing our brain to process negative experiences.
Social Jet Lag
This was a new term for me, but it makes a lot of sense when thinking about how teenagers (and perhaps many adults) change sleep patterns when switching from weekday to weekend. When travelling, many of us have heard that for every hour we change in time zone, it takes about a day for our body to adjust. Social jet lag highlights that many teens go to bed three or four hours later on weekends. They spend Friday and Saturday staying up late and sleeping in as if they jetted off to California for the weekend. Consequently, they spend the next few weekdays trying to readjust their bodies to school life just in time to do it all over again the following weekend.
As we shift into 2025 and are still clinging to optimistic resolutions, perhaps it is time to put sleep at the top of our priority list. Be boring in 2025. Go to bed early, stick to a consistent sleep schedule, and stop bringing your phone with you to bed!
