So on the flight back from Los Angeles to Brisbane, I watched a whole bunch of shows available via the in-flight entertainment system- amongst them I watched the movie Julie/ Julia (a good movie about this girl who decides to undertake the mission of cooking all of Julia Child’s recipes from her Joy of Cooking book + her rise to fame by writing a food blog!) and this documentary called “Awake is the New Sleep” and “Planet Insomnia”. So like a good nerd, while watching this documentary , I took notes on 2 puke bags (double sided too! so I had to rip open the puke bag – I’m pretty sure I got some weird stares). Anyways, here are some notes that I took from both documentaries that I felt were pretty cool/ important/ eye-opening:

- Apparently you need 8 hours of sleep a night- 3 hours for shallow sleep, 3 hours for deep sleep (needed to revitalize the body) and 2 hours for dream sleep (needed to recharge the mind)

But we get 90 minutes less sleep than our ancestors and as a result, we carry a SLEEP DEBT that we pay the price for it

How vital is dreaming?

- Harvard Medical School research has found that during dreaming, our brain plays through the learning sequence and this is the time where the brain consolidates memory

- With sleep deprivation you get, cognitive slowing, attention lapses which is then followed by microsleep (where brain grabs quick naps without your knowledge)

- after 16hours of not sleeping, you get impairment similar to someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.08%! (HEY, who needs alcohol when you can just hallucinate and feel drunk by just not sleeping?!?!)

- After 5 days of 3 hours of sleep a day, your REM mechanism is activated while you are awake and you also get hallucinations

- Also, you start to lose the ability to regulate your temperature (you get very cold, and in fact, this phenomenon is seen when your body is under extreme stress)

There is a new technology called the OptaAlert that uses the fact that when drowsy, your eyelid blinks 3 times slower, helps detect if you are in fact fatigued

How does the mind suffer from lack of sleep?

- you have this unpredictability – where you get induced parasomnia and also experience something called a “reverie” whereby random thoughts intrude into another to give mental disorientation

In fact, there is also a connection between lack of sleep and mood- in children, the risk of depression is linked to sleep deprivation

How about sleep loss and your immune system?

Sleep loss is related to a decrease in immune system response

How about sleep loss and risk of diabetes?

When you simulate an older person’s sleep (whereby you don’t get deep sleep, so only shallow sleep), it was found that you increase risk of diabetes b y 50%

sleep deprivation = stress = inhibits pancreas from releasing insulin

How about sleep loss and weight gain?

Your hypothalamus is deaf in sleep deprived individuals (lateral and ventral hypothalamus as I learned before in a physiology course) and you get excessive hunger and weight gain! (So all of that jet lag explains why on the plane my body is confused as to when to eat/ how much to eat/ if I’m full or not…Cool!)

- In fact, in the individual part of the documentary’s study, in just 1 week of sleep deprivation, he had lowered his insulin production to 1/2 of what it was, his leptin levels (signals of satiety) dropped by 50% and his C-reactive proteins had dropped significantly as well…WOW i totally was unaware that sleep deprivation had such a large impact on our body’s physiology!

There is essentially NO CHEMICAL SUBSTITUTE FOR SLEEP!

Many people have forgotten what it feels like to be fully awake!

Sleep is essentially a pillar of health too!

Alright, as for the documentary “Planet Insomnia”, this is what I’ve gathered:

- Insomnia: defined as the inability to fall/ remain asleep

- It is actually the world’s most common medical disorder (I always wonder about the accuracy of these sorts of statements- “world’s most common”- so the next time in class this ever comes up, I’m going to mention this answer and see if it’s the right answer or not)

- There was an interesting case whereby a sleeping pill triggered this lady to break and enter without her knowledge…now that’s pretty bizarre! (I know for sure I’d stay from those pills…not that I do take any…but for future purposes I meant)

What happens to make you fall asleep?

Melatonin switches on the sleep switch and the thinking brain is turned off – so in those individuals with chronic insomnia, they have to exhaust their thinking brain so that it eventually turns off! So there is some logic as to “tiring” yourself out before you sleep. I suppose then thinking exercises would exhaust your brain more than just physical exercises then? Alright, I’m severely jet lagged now, WHERE’S BOGGLE?!? (Yeah, I don’t do well with riddles)

What about sleeping patterns and growing adolescents?

In developing teens, you see a delayed phase insomnia where their sleep cycle is altered to be later than usual due to growth hormones coursing through them. So teens essentially don’t get enough sleep and this has been linked to depression and suicide (I say this is good reason to start classes later…like NOT 8am…reason: well, you don’t want kids killing themselves now would you teach?)

Other things can disrupt this sleep cycle rhythm as well, irregular bed time & jet lag that causes circadian rhythm insomnia that is apparently very common the trucking industry.

Apparently, shift work is the biggest disruption of body cycles (funny how my mom had mentioned this to me before because I had told her that I loved emergency medicine and would LOVE to work in the ER as a career…and I’m starting to see her points through these scientifically-based documentaries…now I’m starting to wonder how she knows about so much of these things!) and individuals doing shift work suffers insomnia 3 times more than normal folks (now that ER career doesn’t sound AS appealing now…)

How can you treat insomnia?

Changing patients’ perspectives on sleep- insomniacs think that they are not asleep when they are- when an experiment was conducted whereby individuals were woken up in different time periods and asked how long they thought they were asleep, they said none when in fact they had been sleeping for a period of time!

Behavioural therapy- this usually works for adults- like getting them to do yoga (or anything that really brings their anxiety level down a notch because stress makes you release cortisol and cortisol in turn inhibits melatonin that is needed to get you to sleep!)

Bright light therapy- exposure to light of a certain wavelength(because only a particular wavelength of light that resets our biological clock) to reset clock to appropriate times

In fact, there is a portable device now that you can use to reset your circadian rhythm that can cure shift work induced insomnia (so does that mean that shift work isn’t AS bad then? I’m going to delve deeper into this and find out for sure then!)

How does Ambien work?

- It turns on receptors in the sleep switch!

What’s the relationship between caffeine and insomnia?

Apparently, caffeine can trigger insomnia (uh oh, this is news to those who love coffee…)

And that’s it! So I think I’m going to try to sleep for a full 8 hours and see how much more awake I will be. Will I feel 10 times more epically awesome? Will the fully awake me give our more hugs? Will I sing more? Tis to be discovered in 8 hours! Until then, good night and sleep tight!