When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
“O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse” - William Shakespear, Henry IV
We spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping.
I’m in my mid-thirties, so that means I have spent over a decade of my life in slumber. Imagine going for a nap after the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa and only waking up now. Everyday things like iPads and Instagram (both conceived in 2010) have existed for as long a time as I have spent sleeping. What a crazy thought.
The topic of sleep has been trending for a while. As the benefits of sleep are becoming more well known, global Google searches for “sleep” have steadily risen in the last 15 years:
Its popularity has been spurred on by the likes of sleep evangelist Ariana Huffington and her story of breaking her cheekbone after fainting from exhaustion, and Matthew Walker, the English professor of neuroscience and psychology who wrote the 2017 bestseller, Why We Sleep.
There is a causal link between sleep deprivation and maladies like depression, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s. The emerging consensus around sleep is essentially that it is the most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day and that the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.
I used to be a horrible sleeper. Without a sleeping pill, tortuous hours of gazing at the ceiling before finally falling asleep haunted my bedtime. But slowly, I resolved my unhealthy sleep habits and got myself into a position where, finally, I could fall asleep naturally and sleep like a baby.
But then, my wife and I had a baby a few months ago.
Let me tell you, I soon realised that the term “sleeping like a baby” is used far too loosely. It’s an utter fallacy. Newborn babies are awful sleepers. This obviously makes the parents of newborn babies awful sleepers too.
Teen pop megastar Billie Eilish made a clean sweep of the Grammys in 2020 with her album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? I’ll admit, the teenybopper’s music is one of my guilty pleasures. But I digress. My reason for mentioning the singer is that I find the album’s title thought-provoking and catchy. What happens when we sleep? What exactly has been happening for over a decade of my life?
Each night we flip between two types of sleep, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM (NREM) sleep. REM is where most dreams occur, named after the fluttering eye movements of your eyelids during this stage of sleep. There are four stages of NREM sleep that are differentiated based on the brain activity during each stage. Stage 1 is the lightest, and stage 4 is the deepest.
Each evening, we go through 4 - 5 “sleep cycles” that consist of a combination of the various stages of sleep. The ratio of NREM to REM differs in each cycle, with the bulk of REM sleep occurring during the second part of the night. So if you average eight hours of sleep a night, waking up two hours earlier than usual (i.e. a 25% reduction in sleep) can translate to a 50% reduction in REM sleep. And all stages of sleep are critical, each performing a function for the brain and body.
Below is an example of an adult sleep cycle. Sleep patterns like this vary from person to person, influenced by factors like age, gender, average hours of sleep per night, bedtime, and stimulants like caffeine and alcohol.
When it comes to sleep, there are many more areas like naps, sleep pressure, chronotypes and circadian rhythms to explore. Considering its importance to our health and the sheer amount of time we dedicate to this mysterious activity, you can expect more on the topic of sleep in future editions.
Happy Friday, and remember to get a good amount of shut-eye this weekend.
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