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Sleep

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 16/11/18 18:00
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Before I start on the discussions in these pages about the benefits of sleep and the major disadvantages of neglecting sleep, it’s important that anyone reading this notes that I am far from getting this right and may be getting it much more wrong than everyone else.

This new and reinvigorated area has been sparked by Matthew Walker’s book ‘Why we sleep’

The books I read and the material I listen to come against some sort of structure as I try to pick up information in different areas in a structured fashion.

Sleep investigation has been on the list for a long while and it finally came to the top.

Sleep and I have a long history of discussion and investigation!

I have long been an advocate (although a poorly practising one) of power naps which I started to adopt more than 16 years ago when my eldest daughter was born.

I have long had insight into how terrible my sleep is when I have even the smallest amount of alcohol. This in fact was a standing joke amongst my friends when I was at University and just after then when we used to go away for weekends where they were able to observe me thrashing about at night in a phase they like to call ‘parasomnia’

In 2003 I had a significant health scare which led me to reassess my lifestyle again and following on from that, and in the intervening 15 years, my sleep has improved enormously.

The problem for me at the moment is not quality of sleep at all, it’s volume of sleep.

Alison and I live a ridiculously crazy lifestyle where we cannot seem to get into bed at any time before 11:30pm and often later. If I am to do any exercise on a work day then I have to be out of bed before 6:30am and now you see the problem…

Walker will explain in his book (and you should let him explain to you) the devastating effect of repeatedly getting less than 8 hours sleep.

Here is a short list of the conditions that have been scientifically proven to be significantly increased in risk for those regularly achieving less than 8 hours sleep:

  1. Many types of Cancer
  2. Heart attacks
  3. Dementia
  4. Diabetes
  5. Alzheimer’s

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg because the restorative benefits of sleep, after 25 years of intensive research and over 17,000 peer reviewed journal articles, are quite extraordinary.

It seems that we are developing a society that is addicted to corn syrup and who tells itself a story that the less you sleep the more successful you are.

We stare at electrical devices as we eat our carbohydrates at times when we should actually be asleep and then wonder why the rates of depression are at unprecedented levels.

The link to Matthew Walker’s book is hereI would recommend the audio book which is narrated by John Sackville.

Let me leave you with one interesting story from the book…

Around the year 2000 in Greece, the economy was changing within inclusion in EU and those in positions of authority trying to push things forward to make a more ‘efficient country’

Greece was a country committed to a biphasic sleep pattern where many, many of its inhabitants would sleep during the day and the culture was adjusted for that purpose.

This was seen by economists and the ‘people in the know’ as being enormously inefficient and lazy and there was a systematic move to change Greece to become a more modern society like the one we have (ha ha)

In the midst of this a team of sleep researchers from Harvard University decided to go and assess the impact that this would have on the population and were able to study a huge group of people (tens of thousands) in a systematic way to watch the health effects.

Many things happened in the aftermath of this and none of them good (apart from the fact that for a short while more people in Greece got more money) As a single metric of the detrimental effect of this change in society the researchers found that the incidence of myocardial infarction (heart attacks) increased by 40% in studied individuals who gave up the biphasic sleep pattern.

In working males, this number was 60%

I’ll leave you with that thought because you might be reading this in the evening. You shouldn’t be on your phone or any other electrical device within two hours of going to bed.

You shouldn’t consume alcohol before going to sleep and you should be rigidly setting yourself up for 8 hours of sleep a night.

That’s not if you value money over health, but if it’s the other way around it’s certainly worth a look isn’t it?

 

Blog Post Number: 1827

 

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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