You need sleep BEFORE and AFTER learning in order to effectively store what you learned. A lack of sleep actually creates learning disabilities of roughly 40% related to the Hippocampus operating efficiently. It blocks the ability to commit new experiences to memory.

A physiological symptom of aging is that your sleep gets worse. There is evidence that the disruption of deep sleep is connected to memory decline, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia.

In regards to sleep and immunity, natural killer cells that attack tumors are reduced by 70% when you only get 4 hours of sleep the night before. Short sleep is now linked to cancer of the bowl, prostate, and breast.

The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life.

Even your genes suffer from not getting enough sleep.

Tips

• Regularity - get into a regular sleep routine.
  
• Keep it cool (around 65 degrees F) - your body needs to drop its core tempurature by 2 to 3 degrees F for optimal sleep.
  

• One night of not sleeping well causes mild insulin resistance.
  
• Lack of sleep messes with hormone production and regulation of appetite. It actually decreases our willpower over food choices.
  
• A third of Americans get less than 6 hours of sleep and roughly maybe 3% of the population has a gene that can allow them to operate effectively on that little of sleep. Most people need 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep. For daylight savings, when we loose an hour of sleep heart attacks go up over 20% the next day. When we gain an hour of sleep the exact opposite happens with the rate dropping over 20%. Only one hour has that big of an impact.

Sleep is important to allow The Glymphatic System to fully work to clear our brains of waste on a daily basis. “Besides waste elimination, the glymphatic system also facilitates brain-wide distribution of several compounds, including glucose, lipids, amino acids, growth factors, and neuromodulators. Intriguingly, the glymphatic system function mainly during sleep and is largely disengaged during wakefulness.”¹

Prioritize de-stressing through meditation, etc. Learning how to “unplug” as they say in The Matrix :) Exercising is another way that is extremely helpful to reduce stress that lasts for hours.

Four areas that are affected:

1. Melatonin suppressed.
2. HGH production suppressed.
3. Leptin gets suppressed (you’ll want to eat more and eat unhealthy things).
   
4. Cortisol rises (gluconeogenesis - causes muscle to be broken down for energy.)

People who get more sleep burn more fat. Melatonin production helps mobilize brown adipose tissue (BAT), which helps burn fat. However:

When scientists conduct tests to compare melatonin as a “sleeping pill” to a placebo (sugar pill) most studies show no benefit of melatonin. - National Sleep Foundation

REMEMBER: you need sleep AND DARKNESS for the release of melatonin! “In addition to sunlight, artificial indoor lighting can be bright enough to prevent the release of melatonin.”

Exercise in the morning has been shown to improve sleep cycles and lower blood pressure more than later times in the day. Utilizing quick workouts, like Tabata training is enough to make an improvement in sleep.

BLUE LIGHT EXPOSURE suppresses melatonin. You have to get off your phone! Every hour you spend on your phone, computer, or TV at night suppresses melatonin for 30 minutes. You will not go through your sleep cycles efficiently. Make a screen curfew :) Realize that most of us are addicted to our devices, because of dopamine; it’s a real thing to be concerned about. It drives us to seek, grow, and discover. Social media is perfect to manipulate this to drive a desire to find something new for a little dopamine hit.

Turn down your thermostat to between 62 to 68 degrees. Temperature is also a potential cause of insomnia, because there seems to be a link between body temperature being too high and trouble sleeping.

Overall, create an evening ritual. Similarly, recognize the benefits of having a morning ritual too. Most successful people have a good morning ritual.

References

1. The Glymphatic System: A Beginner’s Guide
   

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