Sleep

I’m sure you have all heard about the importance of getting somewhere between seven to nine hours of sleep a night to be at your best. So why should you put down your phone and turn off the TV? Simply, this is the lowest hanging fruit and easiest way for most of us to get fitter, stronger, leaner, and healthier.

There was a time a few years ago when not getting enough sleep became a bragging right. “Dude, I only sleep 5 hours a night! I’ll sleep when I am dead.” Seriously?

A quick Internet search about the health benefits of sleep will throw up many results, there may be a few that could surprise you. In short the list of good stuff that happens to your body when you get enough sleep looks like this:

• Improves your mood
• Helps you have a healthy heart
• Regulates your blood sugar which protects against health problems like diabetes
• Improves your mental function which allows you to think more clearly and perform better at work or even being drowsy at the wheel (which causes thousands of accidents each year)
• Restores your immune system, which means you get sick less often
• Reduces your stress levels, which means you might even get along better with people
• Improves your athletic performance, whether that is in the gym or just being able to perform daily tasks
• Allows your body to maintain a healthy weight, which in itself helps prevent many nasties.

That’s a pretty awesome list, which we can go into in more detail, but is there any need? It kind of speaks for itself. Who wouldn’t want all of those things?

And on the flip side, not getting enough sleep has been shown to have some serious effects. For example, did you know that staying awake for nineteen hours has the same effect on your brain as being legally drunk. But you don’t have to stay awake for that length of time to have cognitive impairment. Research has shown that getting six hours sleep for ten consecutive days makes that impairment worse than being drunk.

In a 2010 study that tested subjects over just fourteen days, a group of people who slept eight and a half hours a night lost more fat (55%) than the group that slept a mere five and a half hours a night. Additionally, the group that slept less lost significantly more muscle (60%) than the group that got the full eight and a half hours. And all this happened in just two weeks! Both groups ate roughly the same amount of calories per day. This is just another reason why the body composition calculation is more complicated and nuanced than just “calories in versus calories out.”

And that’s not the only study. Chronic sleep deprivation has been shown in numerous studies to cause the stress hormone cortisol to increase while causing testosterone, IGF-1 (a hormone that manages the effects of growth hormone in your body), and growth hormone secretion to decrease. So putting all that together, it appears a lack of sleep prompts the loss of muscle mass, decreases your recoverability, and increases fat mass.

Have you noticed that when you get a rubbish night’s sleep you tend to eat more the next day? It’s not in your mind. Bad sleep can be the catalyst for not eating as healthily as possible.

A meta-analysis published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that when people don’t get enough sleep, they eat around 385 more calories the following day. This is called “partial sleep deprivation.” It means that you slept, but only about four or five total hours.

What’s going on here? There are a few theories as to why this happens:

• Partial sleep deprivation results in greater activation of areas in the brain associated with reward – fattening foods in this case.
• Disruption of the internal body clock affecting your regulation of leptin (the satiety hormone) and ghrelin (the hunger hormone).
• Lack of sleep gives you ‘the munchies’ similar to marijuana, in that sleep restriction boosts a signal that may increase the hedonic aspect of food intake, the pleasure and satisfaction gained from eating. It seems to augment the endocannabinoid system, the same system targeted by the active ingredient of marijuana, to enhance the desire for food intake.

Interestingly, most of the subjects in the studies didn’t go for carbs as you’d expect, but more dietary fats. They also consumed less protein when sleep deprived. So having less sleep will probably impact your eating habits.

Although the researchers in the above meta-analysis didn’t mention it, other studies have concluded that when healthy young men sleep five hours or less per night for a week, their testosterone levels take a dive.

Generally that means less muscle, less energy and more body fat over time. Five hours of sleep per night decreased subjects’ testosterone levels by 10 to 15 percent in one study, and these guys were in their early 20’s. Imagine how lack of sleep impacts testosterone levels in older people (and yes testosterone is important for women too, even during menopause and beyond)?

But sometimes it can be hard to get enough sleep.

Getting the mind and body to relax at night can be a problem. Make sure your circadian rhythm, which is established via dark and light, is functioning normally. When it’s dark, your body releases more melatonin which prompts your body to sleep. When it’s light, it reduces melatonin output and increases appropriate amounts of more excitatory hormones.

The light you expose yourself to can upset the release of natural melatonin by the body, and delay your restful state for sleep. Reduce TV, laptop, and mobile phone use in the evenings (unless you’re up late reading my newsletters!) and open up the curtains so that your body is awakened by natural light each morning. Morning daylight exposure will help get your circadian rhythm back in order.

If sleep evades you, and you have trouble turning your brain off at night, and the whole slowly-get-fat thing doesn’t sound fun, then along with the usual “put down your damn devices and sleep in a cool room” advice, maybe consider supplementing with ZMA: a natural mineral supplement made up of zinc, magnesium aspartate, and vitamin B6. Zinc supports your immune system and muscles. Magnesium plays a role in metabolism and muscle health and helps manage sleep. B6 may boost energy.

Now switch off the device you are reading this on and get some sleep!