Why 7 Hours Sleep Is Not Enough
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How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?
This is Dr. Matthew Walker. He’s a neuroscientist and sleep specialist, and is the Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology. He’s also the author of the international bestseller “Why We Sleep”.
What does he want us to know?
Sleep deprivation is more serious than many people think it is. After about 16 hours without sleep, the brain begins to fail, and needs more than 7 hours of sleep to “reset” cognitive performance.
Note: note “seven or more”, but “more than seven”.
After ten days with only 7 hours sleep (per day), Dr. Walker points out, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for 24 hours.
Here’s the study that sparked a lot of Dr. Walker’s work:
Importantly, in Dr. Walker’s own words:
❝Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping❞
~ Dr. Matthew Walker
See also: Why You Probably Need More Sleep
Furthermore: the sleep-deprived mind is unaware of how sleep-deprived it is.
You know how a drunk person thinks they can drive safely? It’s like that.
You do not know how sleep-deprived you are, when you are sleep-deprived!
For example:
❝(60.7%) did not signal sleepiness before a sleep fragment occurred in at least one of the four MWT trials❞
Source: Sleepiness is not always perceived before falling asleep in healthy, sleep-deprived subjects
Sleep efficiency matters
With regard to the 7–9 hours band for optimal health, Dr. Walker points out that the sleep we’re getting is not always the sleep we think we’re getting:
❝Assuming you have a healthy sleep efficiency (85%), to sleep 9 hours in terms of duration (i.e. to be a long-sleeper), you would need to be consistently in bed for 10 hours and 36 minutes a night. ❞
~ Dr. Matthew Walker
At the bottom end of that, by the way, doing the same math: to get only the insufficient 7 hours sleep discussed earlier, a with a healthy 85% sleep efficiency, you’d need to be in bed for 8 hours and 14 minutes per night.
The unfortunate implication of this: if you are consistently in bed for 8 hours and 14 minutes (or under) per night, you are not getting enough sleep.
“But what if my sleep efficiency is higher than 85%?”
It shouldn’t be.If your sleep efficiency is higher than 85%, you are sleep-deprived and your body is having to enforce things.
Want to know what your sleep efficiency is?
We recommend knowing this, by the way, so you might want to check out:
Head-To-Head Comparison of Google and Apple’s Top Sleep-Monitoring Apps
(they will monitor your sleep and tell you your sleep efficiency, amongst other things)
Want to know more?
You might like his book:
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
…and/or his podcast:
…and for those who like videos, here’s his (very informative) TED talk:
Prefer text? Click here to read the transcript
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later
Enjoy!
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Healthy Harissa Falafel Patties
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You can make these as regular falafel balls if you prefer, but patties are quicker and easier to cook, and are great for popping in a pitta.
You will need
For the falafels:
- 1 can chickpeas, drained, keep the chickpea water (aquafaba)
- 1 red onion, roughly chopped
- 2 tbsp chickpea flour (also called gram flour or garbanzo bean flour)
- 1 bunch parsley
- 1 tbsp harissa paste
- Extra virgin olive oil for frying
For the harissa sauce:
- ½ cup crème fraîche or plant-based equivalent (you can use our Plant-Based Healthy Cream Cheese recipe and add the juice of 1 lemon)*
- 1 tbsp harissa paste (or adjust this quantity per your heat preference)
*if doing this, rather than waste the zest of the lemon, you can add the zest to the falafels if you like, but it’s by no means necessary, just an option
For serving:
- Wholegrain pitta or other flatbread (you can use our Healthy Homemade Flatbreads recipe)
- Salad (your preference; we recommend some salad leaves, sliced tomato, sliced cucumber, maybe some sliced onion, that sort of thing)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Blend the chickpeas, 1 oz of the aquafaba, the onion, the parsley, and the harissa paste, until smooth. Then add in the chickpea flour until you get a thick batter. If you overdo it with the chickpea flour, add a little more of the aquafaba to equalize. Refrigerate the mixture for at least 30 minutes.
2) Heat some oil in a skillet, and spoon the falafel mixture into the pan to make the patties, cooking on both sides (you can use a spatula to gently turn them), and set them aside.
3) Mix the harissa sauce ingredients in a small bowl.
4) Assemble; best served warm, but enjoy it however you like!
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in more of what we have going on today:
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
- Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
- Hero Homemade Hummus ← another great option
Take care!
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Anti-Inflammatory Khichri & Tadka
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
This is halfway between a daal and a risotto; it’s delicious and it’s full of protein, fiber, heathy fats, and flavors. And those flavors? Mostly from health-giving phytochemicals of one kind of another.
You will need
For the khichri:
- 1 oz chana dal
- 1 oz red lentils
- 1 oz brown lentils
- 1 oz quinoa
- 4 oz wholegrain basmati rice
- 1 tbsp chia seeds
- 1 tsp ground turmeric
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
For the tadka:
- 2 tbsp avocado oil (or other oil suitable for high temperatures—so, not olive oil on this occasion!)
- ¼ bulb garlic, thinly sliced
- 1 fresh red chili (adjust per heat preferences)
- 1 fresh green chili (adjust per heat preferences)
- 1 tsp cumin seeds
- 6 curry leaves
- 12 twists of freshly ground black pepper
To serve:
- Optional: flatbreads or poppadoms
- Optional: lemon wedges or lime wedges
- Optional: chopped cilantro or parsley
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Simmer the khichri ingredients in 5 cups of water, stirring occasionally if necessary, until it has a risotto-like consistency; this will probably take about 30–40 minutes. This time can be greatly reduced by using a pressure cooker, but obviously you won’t be able to check or stir, so do that only if you know what you’re doing cooking those grains and pseudograins in there, and what settings/timings to use for your specific device.
2) Make the tadka when the khichri is nearly ready, by heating the 2 tbsp of avocado oil in a skillet until very hot but not smoking, Add the rest of the ingredients from the tadka section, and cook until the garlic is nice and golden.
3) Pour the tadka over the khichri to serve, with any of the optional accompaniments we mentioned.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
- The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- Why Curcumin (Turmeric) Is Worth Its Weight In Gold
- If You’re Not Taking Chia, You’re Missing Out
Take care!
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Hate Sit-Ups? Try This 10-Minute Standing Abs Routine!
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Abdominal muscles are important to many people for aesthetics; they also fulfil the important role of keeping your innards in, as well as being a critical part of core stability (and you cannot have a truly healthy back without healthy abs on the other side). However, not everyone loves sit-ups and their many variations, so here’s an all-standing workout instead:
On your feet!
The exercise are as follows:
- High knees: engage core to work abs; do slow for low impact. Great for speeding up the metabolism. Jog during rest to keep moving.
- Extend & twist: raise arms high, drive them down while raising one leg into a twist. No rest, switch sides immediately.
- Extend & vertical crunch: extend leg back, drive knee forward into a crunch. Swap sides with no breaks.
- Oblique jacks: jump or slow version; targeting the obliques.
- Front toe-touch: engage core for effectiveness.
- Crossover toe-touch: no break; move into this directly from the front toe-touch.
- Wood chop: lift arms up, twist, chop down. Great for obliques. No rest between sides.
- Heisman: step side to side, bringing your other knee up towards the opposite side. Focus on core engagement rather than speed.
- Side leg raise & side bent: raise leg to side with slight bend; works obliques. No rest between sides.
That’s it!
For a visual demonstration, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Is A Visible Six-Pack Obtainable Regardless Of Genetic Predisposition?
Take care!
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Fitness Freedom for Seniors – by Jackie Jacobs
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Exercise books often assume that either we are training for the Olympics, and most likely also that we are 20 years old. This one doesn’t.
Instead, we see a well-researched, well-organized, clearly-illustrated fitness plan with age in mind. Author Jackie Jacobs offers tips and advice for all levels, and a progressive week-by-week plan of 15-minute sessions. This way, we’re neither overdoing it nor slacking off; it’s a perfect balance.
The exercises are aimed at “all areas”, that is to say, improving cardiovascular fitness, balance, flexibility, and strength. It also gives some supplementary advice with regard to diet and suchlike, but the workouts are the real meat of the book.
Bottom line: if you’d like a robust, science-based exercise regime that’s tailored to seniors, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out Fitness Freedom for Seniors, and get yours!
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The Better Brain – by Dr. Bonnie Kaplan and Dr. Julia Rucklidge
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We’ve reviewed books about eating for brain health before, but this is the first time we’ve reviewed one written by clinical psychologists.
What does that change? Well, it means it less focus on, say, reducing beta amyloid plaques, and more on mental health—which often has a more immediate impact in our life.
In the category of criticisms, the authors do seem to have a bit of a double-standard. For example, they criticise psychiatrists prescribing drugs that have only undergone 12-week clinical trials, but they cite a single case-study of a 10-year-old boy as evidence for a multivitamin treating his psychosis when antipsychotics didn’t work.
However, the authors’ actual dietary advice is nonetheless very respectable. Whole foods, nutrients taken in synergistic stacks, cut the sugar, etc.
Bottom line: if you’d like to learn about the impact good nutrition can have on the brain’s health, ranging from diet itself to dietary supplements, this book presents many avenues to explore.
Click here to check out “The Better Brain”, and eat for the good health of yours!
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The Cough Doctor
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The Cough Doctor
This is Dr. Peter Small, who worked in epidemiology since the beginning of HIV epidemic. He became a pioneer in the field of molecular epidemiology. As such, his work was a guiding beacon for the public health response to the resurgence of tuberculosis. He’s travelled the world spending years in various institutions studying all manner of respiratory illnesses…. These have ranged from tuberculosis to pneumonia to lung cancer and (back to epidemiology) Covid-19.
He’s now the Chief Medical Officer at…
Hyfe
Hyfe, a medical AI company, was founded in 2020. Its objective: to build acoustic tools for respiratory diagnostics and monitoring.
In other words: it records coughs and collects data about coughing.
❝It’s ironic how much people focus on counting steps while ignoring cough, which is far more consequential. Hyfe is a science-driven company with the technology to make cough count. Particularly now, with increased awareness of cough and the rapid growth of digital health driven by Covid-19, this technology can improve the lives of patients, the care provided by doctors, and the efficiency of health systems.❞
~ Dr. Peter Small, CMO, Hyfe
How does it do it?
Hyfe’s AI monitors the number of times a person coughs and the sound of the cough through any smartphone or other smart device.
This data collected over time provides increasingly more reliable information than a single visit to the doctor! By constantly listening and analyzing, it can detect patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.
How big is this “big data” effort?
Hyfe maintains the largest cough dataset in the world. This means it can compare the sound of a patient’s cough with more than 400 million cough-like sounds from 83 countries across all continents.
The human brain doesn’t handle big numbers well. So, just to illustrate: if the average cough is 1 second long, that means it’d take more than 12 years to listen to them all.
Hyfe, meanwhile, can:
- listen to many things simultaneously
- index them all against user and location,
- use its ever-growing neural net to detect and illustrate patterns.
It’s so attentive, that it can learn to distinguish between different people’s coughs in the same household.
❝Companies like Google Health see even basic information such as getting an accurate count of the number of times a person coughs a day as a useful resource, and part of a larger need to collect and chronicle more health information to refine the way doctors diagnose disease and manage treatments in the future.❞
What are the public health implications?
The most obvious application is to note when there’s a spike in coughing, and see how such spikes grow and spread (if they do), to inform of contagion risks.
Another is to cross-reference it with data about local environmental allergens. Knowing how things like pollution and even pollen affect individuals differently could be helpful in identifying (and managing) chronic conditions like asthma.
What are the private health implications?
❝It’s going to transform the whole clinical approach for this common and chronic symptom. Patients will come in, have the data on how much they are coughing, and the physician can suggest a treatment based on that information to see if it makes the coughs better❞
~ Dr. Peter Small
Dr. Small’s colleague Dr. Cai, speaking for Google Health on this project, sees even more utility for diagnostics:
❝When I was in medical school, never ever did they teach us that we could listen to somebody cough and identify whether that person has TB (tuberculosis), COPD, or a tumor. But I keep seeing more and more studies of people coughing into a microphone, and an algorithm can detect whether somebody has TB with 95% specificity and sensitivity, or if someone has pneumonia or an exacerbation of COPD❞
~ Dr. Lawrence Cai
And the privacy implications?
Perhaps you don’t quite fancy the idea of not being able to cough without Google knowing about it. Hyfe’s software is currently opt-in, but…
If you cough near someone else’s Hyfe app, their app will recognize you’re not the app’s user, and start building a profile for you. Of course, that won’t be linked to your name, email address, or other IDs, as it would if you were the app’s user.
Hyfe will ask to connect to your social media, to collect more information about you and your friends.
Whether you’d like to try this or perhaps you’re just curious to learn more about this fascinating project, you can check out:
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