There’s no disguising it…this blog is about the benefits of good sleep. Unless you’ve been living the life of a hermit, you’ll know it’s good for you. And 50 years of sleep science research has produced oodles of evidence to prove it, with findings that can make you sit back and think hard about our snooze.

The study of snooze

I’m no sleep scientist but I like to keep an eye on what’s happening with the study of snooze. Sleep science is a relatively new branch of science that took off from 1952, after the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Until then the brain was thought to be inactive during sleep, operating at a slow idle, but the observation of REM sleep showed that it most certainly was not! In the decades since, researchers have been able to chart the contours of human sleep and develop an understanding of how different stages of sleep matter to human development, growth, and functioning.

For instance, slow wave sleep (Stages 3 and 4) seems to play a role in the growth and repair of body tissue, whilst REM sleep plays a role in the growth and maintenance of brain circuitry. In addition, REM sleep seems to help with the consolidation of learning and the processing of memories.

Ever wondered why we keep being told to get 7-to-8 hours of sleep a night? If so, knowing a little about sleep stages can help you make sense of it. Basically, our sleep cycles are roughly 90 minutes in duration.

So, the longer we sleep, the more cycles we complete and the more time we spend in the different stages. This gives the body the best chance of repairing body tissue, maintaining brain circuits, embedding learning and memories, and so forth. Basically, getting ‘sufficient’ sleep makes us better in more ways than we can fathom, or easily notice. And this is where our attitudes to sleep become important.

Consider, for a moment, Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement that ‘sleep is for wimps’. Based on what sleep science has been telling us, that statement is a bit of a nonsense. It would be more accurate to say a lack of sleep can make us wimps!

zzzz…stand aside, the brain is being cleaned!

In 2020, an interesting article was published by a Dutch-American research team. In it the authors reviewed evidence indicating that sleep plays a role in the regular cleaning of the brain.

How? Via a fluid transport system – called the glymphatic system – that is activated during sleep and continuously cycles cerebrospinal fluid in and out of the brain, picking up waste products as it goes. Huh…waste products? What waste products?? The brain is an energy hungry organ that, despite its small size, burns ~20% of the energy used by the body. This creates a lot of metabolic waste that tends to clump together into plaques if not cleared.

Given these plaques have been linked to conditions like Alzheimer’s Disease, good sleep habits appear to be vital for healthy ageing.

This does make you wonder. With no wish to speak ill of the dead, I can’t help but think that Baroness Thatcher’s tragic slide into cognitive decline at the end of her life may have been connected to her attitudes towards sleep, her devaluing of it, and her tendency to not get enough of it.

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