How Good Is Your Sleep, Really?

This is Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, Director of Columbia University’s Center of Excellence for Sleep and Circadian Research.

The focus of Dr. St-Onge’s research is the study of the impact of lifestyle, especially sleep and diet, on cardio-metabolic risk factors.

She conducts clinical research combining her expertise on sleep, nutrition, and energy regulation.

What kind of things do her studies look at?

Her work focuses on questions about…

• The role of circadian rhythms (including sleep duration and timing)
• Meal timing and eating patterns

…and their impact on cardio-metabolic risk.

What does she want us to know?

First things first, when not to worry:

❝Getting a bad night’s sleep once in a while isn’t anything to worry about. That’s what we would describe as transient insomnia. Chronic insomnia occurs when you spend three months or more without regular sleep, and that is when I would start to be concerned.❞

But… as prevention is (as ever) better than cure, she also advises that we do pay attention to our sleep! And, as for how to do that…

The Six Dimensions of Sleep

One useful definition of overall sleep health is the RU-Sated framework, which assesses six key dimensions of sleep that have been consistently associated with better health outcomes. These are:

• regularity
• satisfaction with sleep
• alertness during waking hours
• timing of sleep
• efficiency of sleep
• duration of sleep

You’ll notice that some of these things you can only really know if you use a sleep-monitoring app. She does recommend the use of those, and so do we!

We reviewed and compared some of the most popular sleep-monitoring apps! You can check them out here: Time For Some Pillow Talk

You also might like…

We’re not all the same with regard to when is the best time for us to sleep, so:

Use This Sleep Cycle Calculator To Figure Out the Optimal Time for You To Go to Bed and Wake Up

AROUND THE WEB

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What’s happening in the health world…

• Aspirin may make your breathing worse
• Taking naps for more than 30 minutes may raise your metabolic disease risk
• How to ease back into exercise after surgery
• Study provides evidence that breathing exercises may reduce your Alzheimer’s risk
• No one in movies knows how to swallow a pill

More to come tomorrow!

The Stroke Of Insight That Nobody Wants

This is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a neuroanatomist, who, at the age of 37 (when she was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School), had what she refers to as her “stroke of insight”.

That is to say, she had a massive stroke, and after a major brain surgery to remove a clot the size of a golf ball, she spent the next 8 years re-learning to do everything.

Whereas previously she’d been busy mapping the brain to determine how cells communicate with each other, now she was busy mapping whether socks or shoes should go on first. Needless to say, she got an insight into neuroplasticity that few people would hope for.

What does she want us to know?

Dr. Taylor (now once again a successful scientist, lecturer, and author) advocates for “whole brain living”, which involves not taking parts of our brain for granted.

About those parts…

Dr. Taylor wants us to pay attention to all the parts regardless of size, ranging from the two hemispheres, all the way down to the billions of brain cells, and yet even further, to the “trillions of molecular geniuses”—because each brain cell is itself reliant on countless molecules of the many neurochemicals that make up our brain.

For a quick refresher on some of the key players in that latter category, see our Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet 😎

When it comes to the hemispheres, there has historically been a popular belief that these re divided into:

• The right brain: emotional, imaginative, creative, fluid feeling
• The left brain: intellectual, analytical, calculating, crystal thinking

…which is not true, anatomically speaking, because there are cells on both sides doing their part of both of these broad categories of brain processes.

However, Dr. Taylor found, while one hemisphere of her brain was much more damaged than the other, that nevertheless she could recover some functions more quickly than others, which, once she was able to resume her career, inspired her model of four distinct ways of cogitating that can be switched-between and played with or against each other:

Meet The Four Characters Inside Your Brain

Why this matters

As she was re-learning everything, the way forward was not quick or easy, and she also didn’t know where she was going, because for obvious reasons, she couldn’t remember, much less plan.

Looking backwards after her eventual full recovery, she noted a lot of things that she needed during that recovery, some of which she got and some of which she didn’t.

Most notably for her, she needed the right kind of support that would allow all four of the above “characters” as she puts it, to thrive and grow. And, when we say “grow” here we mean that literally, because of growing new brain cells to replace the lost ones (as well as the simple ongoing process of slowly replacing brain cells).

For more on growing new brain cells, by the way, see:

How To Grow New Brain Cells (At Any Age)

In order to achieve this in all of the required brain areas (i.e., and all of the required brain functions), she also wants us to know… drumroll please…

When to STFU

Specifically, the ability to silence parts of our brain that while useful in general, aren’t necessarily being useful right now. Since it’s very difficult to actively achieve a negative when it comes to brain-stuff (don’t think of an elephant), this means scheduling time for other parts of our brain to be louder. And that includes:

• scheduling time to feel (emotionally)
• scheduling time to feel (gut feelings)
• scheduling time to feel (kinesthetically)

…amongst others.

Note: those three are presented in that order, from least basic to most basic. And why? Because, clever beings that we are, we typically start from a position that’s not remotely basic, such as “overthinking”, for example. So, there’s a wind-down through thinking just the right amount, thinking through simpler concepts, feeling, noticing one’s feelings, noticing noticing one’s feelings, all the way down to what, kinesthetically, are we actually physically feeling.

❝It is interesting to note that although our limbic system fucntions throughout our lifetime, it does not mature. As a result, when our emotional “buttons” are pushed, we retain the ability to react to incoming stimulation as though we were a two-year-old, even when we are adults.❞

~ Dr. Jill Taylor

Of course, sometimes the above is not useful, which is why the ability to switch between brain modes is a very important and useful skill to develop.

And how do we do that? By practising. Which is something that it’s necessary to take up consciously, and pursue consistently. When children are at school, there are (hopefully, ideally) curricula set out to ensure they engage and train all parts of their brain. As adults, this does not tend to get the same amount of focus.

“Children’s brains are still developing”—indeed, and so are adult brains:

The Brain As A Work-In-Progress

Dr. Taylor had the uncommon experience of having to, in many ways, neurologically speaking, redo childhood. And having had a second run at it, she developed an appreciation of the process that most of us didn’t necessarily get when doing childhood just the once.

In other words: take the time to feel stuff; take the time to quiet down your chatty mind, take the time engage your senses, and take it seriously! Really notice, as though for the first time, what the texture of your carpet is like. Really notice, as though for the first time, what it feels like to swallow some water. Really notice, as though for the first time, what it feels like to experience joy—or sadness, or comfort, or anger, or peace. Exercise your imagination. Make some art (it doesn’t have to win awards; it just has to light up your brain!). Make music (again, it’s about wiring your brain in your body, not about outdoing Mozart in composition and/or performance). Make changes! Make your brain work in the ways it’s not in the habit of doing.

If you need a little help switching off parts of your brain that are being too active, so that you can better exercise other parts of your brain that might otherwise have been neglected, you might want to try:

The Off-Button For Your Brain

Enjoy!