How sleep deprived are you really?
Like REALLY really…
Just the occasional night?
Well, you might be actually better for that.
Couple of nights in a row? Yeah, less so…
Constantly struggling for sleep and using coffee and sugar to prop you up?...
Well, the good news there is I wouldn’t be recommending any exercise for you there. Not much anyway… Which for anyone who’s met me probably sounds weird, like maybe I’ve had a few nights of sleep deprivation myself. Not true!!! But I promise I’ll explain in annoyingly painstaking detail, which will totally make being sleep deprived even more fun.
Upside: it may put you to sleep, so there’s a win.
So, start at the start. Good a place as any I guess.
Sleeps kind of a big deal. Not many things are a bigger deal, but then we get into things like oxygen and heart beats, so that conversations not really worth it just now.
Anyway, as I was saying, big deal.
Huge amounts of your physiological and neural function depend quite heavily on the restorative sleep. Brain cleaning, memory regulation and consolidation, neurogenesis and neural pruning, hormone management and neurotransmitter uptake. All the good stuff.
What’s weird is, sometimes having one night of not that, is good for you. I’ve banged on about this stuff called hormesis before, which is a fancy word for stress, that challenges you to respond accordingly.
And a little sleep deprivation can do this very thing. Make the body and mind sharpen its ideas up and get on with things, properly. A little bit of acute, short term, tough but not brutal, stress can compel the body to adapt and become more efficient on a metabolic and cellular level. Autophagy, energy usage and the occasionally awesome value cortisol start to happen here.
I could go into how seriously epic those things are regarding your awesomeness, but I feel like I’ve done them to death before. Read the back log, you lazy peons! (Yes, I know. If you’re sleep deprived, I’ve just made your life harder. Sorry Tim, come back to that another day and just back me in with what I’m saying for the time being).
But, as I’m sure you’ve heard, good stress can become bad stress without much effort. Rude…
Which is where a couple of days of sleep deprivation start to count. You (that is, your meat popsicle/body and its seat of control/brain) don’t like THAT much unrecovered stress and starts trying to fix the problem… Namely, with food.
“I feel shit, Me....”
“You know what sorts that out, each and every time, without fail, Other Me? Energy! The cheaper and nastier, the better. Have at it, you deserve to feel better.”
“Thanks Me. This definitely won’t come back to haunt me, no repercussions at all.”
Essentially, your body has equated sleep deprivation with an external threat that cant be seen or heard… yet… and decides to stock up on supplies to keep the ready for action ball rolling for today and tomorrow.
Look. Food will make you feel better. BUT, it’s a dopamine hit. We all know sugary shit doesn’t actually make your system of human feel better, but it does make the brain where you process sensation feel better. And frankly, that’s good enough when the brain is sleep deprived and downregulates long term planning and just makes it all about survival and feeling better. No necessarily good, just better. In the moment. Because, as we both know, Sharon, that sugar crash is coming, and so is the high possibility of some subconscious manifesting-as-a-deeper-negative-feeling-state shame attached to it… And that’s nothing but laughs and high fives, right?...
Am I being grim enough yet? I hope you didn’t say no, because more is coming. Sorry in advance.
What else do people tend to use in a fatigued state?
Correct Mary. You have been paying attention. Its meth. But also, even more common than that, caffeine.
How many cups of coffee do people have when they feel tired, or “need” the pick me up?
Do you have any idea of how long that stuff keeps your neural physiology wired for, even if the conscious mental effect has seemingly worn off ages ago?
A LONG time. The half-life of caffeine is just under 6 hours.
What’s caffeine half-life you ask? That’s the point where its still in your system, but is only half as effective. If you have a cup of coffee at around 3 in the afternoon, that stuff is still rattling around in your brain and only becomes half as potent at 9pm…
And that’s just half as effective. Add a few cups from earlier in the day? Messy.
How easy is it to sleep when you’re inadvertently buzzing? And before I get much further ahead of myself, no Lesley, unconsciousness isn’t the same as sleep. But that is also, definitely another post topic.
You know how I said before that sleep does cool stuff, two things being brain cleaning and hormone regulation? Well, if you can’t sleep properly, you cant wash all that old caffeine out of your brain properly. Which means you wake up feeling gritty. That feeling? Yeah, that’s got nothing to do with your body, and everything to do with how your whiney brain feels. Its dirty. DIRTY!!! Because you drank stuff that meant it couldn’t go deep enough into sleep to wash itself properly. (It’s called the glymphatic system, and that is also another post. But suffice to say, it is a really REALLY smart system of being alive.)
And that hormone regulation stuff? If you keep this cycle rolling, sleep dep, sugar and caffeine, you can eventually become insulin resistant. Because the constant cycle of refined sugars means the body gets more energy than it needs, so insulin receptors on your cells lock the door and don’t even look out of the eyehole to see who’s there, and that energy has nowhere to go. Which is shitty. And can lead to (and effectively is) type 2 diabetes and all its various slippery slopes. Which is extra shitty.
Am I grim enough now?...
Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some very cool things caffeine does, that don’t just make you suck. Its got cool things in it called polyphenols (actually, that’s more from coffee and tea rather than caffeine) that contribute to longevity and autophagy and gut health.
It also acts as an ergogenic aid (which is more fancy talk for “train harder juice, bro”). But, as I mentioned earlier, exercise is a stress. Yes, a good stress, but it adds to the pre-existing sleep deprived stress, and that kinds of outweighs its ability to improve on that super fun insulin resistance I pleasantly mentioned earlier.
But, really, you just need to be careful in what circumstances you dump this sleep deprivation fixing stuff on your system.
So, without wanting to stress you out further, get some sleep. Your systems will thank you for it.
And if you miss out on some, just remember, meth and its lesser cousins, sugar and caffeine, will only fix so much.
Sleep on it, because making decisions based on a lack of sleep can lead to calls that lead to less sleep. And, suddenly, meth seems like less and less of a bad idea. I’ve heard otherwise.
Be kind, be smart, be your best you. No bar fights.
“Stress and sleep deprivation had a funny way of liberating the mind from previously held truisms, replacing them with a more compliant desperation.” David Z. Hirsch
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