Let's Find Out - The Science of Sleep | ASMR

Episode Date: August 29, 2019

Let's find out what we know about sleep and why we'd die without it. Thanks for watching. #ASMR #sleep #relaxing

caught me looking at Wakan Wagnol's Encyclopedia, volume 21 to be specific. I'm interested in sleep. If you can't tell about my channel, I'm fascinated by this thing that we do eight hours a day. Yet we're not really quite there for it. At least we can't remember much of it. Even the dreams and the imagery that we associate with sleep. Often slip away from us. like sand through our fingers in the morning.

We spend almost a third of our lives sleeping. You know, if you're 90 years old, that's almost 30 years sleeping. It's a critical function of our human lives. And, of course, many other animals do as well. But, you know, like maybe sex, eating, drinking, breathing, working out. It can be enjoyable. We can, of course, have too much or too little.

But it's interesting that we... Well, there's a lot of interesting things about it, but it's interesting that we can enjoy it, yet it's necessary. And I kind of want to explore that a little more today. So we're going to be looking at sleep through the lens of course of ASMR, but first let's find out what we knew at least in 1979 about sleep.

This short article here opens up with a definition of sleep. It's a recurrent physiological state of humans and other animals, mostly vertebrates, characterized by the loss of consciousness and a very marked slowing of various functions of the mind and body. Periods of sleep are necessary for the preservation of all life and during such periods the body apparently recuperates from the effect of waking activity and then it goes on to many many theories that have been advanced to explain the physiological causes of sleep. One theory proposes that sleep is caused by the accumulation of what are commonly called fatigue toxins in the body.

It's almost like poisonous substances, like that we expel during respiration. While we breathe, we're expelling cellular decay or byproducts, I guess, and that to our body are toxic. These poisonous substances produce a feeling of great tiredness, in the individual. Experimental evidence from the study of Siamese twins, however, suggests that the explanation cannot

be so simple. Another theory proposes that sleep is regulated by a sleep center. A particular area of our brain, they propose that it's the hypothalamus and they even say experimental

evidence indicates that this center is together with another one that's slightly forward in the brain may be important regulators of transitions between sleep and wakefulness so little is known however about the actual process that activates in these centers several important body changes occur during sleep and this is actually really interesting to me this um the you know i guess the healing effects of sleep um again like like nutrition we know it's valuable we know that you need to consume the proper amount of macros and you know minerals and other things to sustain your body's cell growth and decay and uh consuming nutrients and breaking those down to release energy.

And like nutrition being physically useful, but also physically pleasurable, it's interesting that sleep, we all know it can be really pleasurable to find yourself and arrive at a deep, deep state of relaxation where your muscles are loose, all tension dissipates, and your mind is at rest as well. we have to imagine and of course we've through research found out that it's very useful and in fact essential and it rewards us with

a sensation of if not explicit pleasure certainly a sense of comfort and satisfaction which is why I think the ASMR experience is so deeply linked with sleep Anyways, those are side effects that our body rewards us with If we give it the proper amount of rest and time to recuperate Let's see several of these You know body changes

That occur during sleep One of the most typical is a diminution of respiration So the rate of breathing is slow And breathing is shallower And during wakefulness, circulatory activity is lessened, and the heartbeat is markedly slowed as well. Your body's going into a state of hibernation, essentially a short-term hibernation. Other changes include the lowering of the body temperature, relaxation of both the striated, involuntary skeletal muscles, and the smooth involuntary visceral muscles. and the alternations of patterns of electrical activity in the brain

although muscles are relaxed during sleep they are not all relaxed at the same time and a certain amount of activity and movement actually occurs those studies have shown that the average sleeper changes his position about once every 17 minutes 17 minutes so we're not as sedentary while we sleep is you know we could imagine um

and you know that the body is you know doing something that's required because we we just get a general sense um very intuitive very impactful uh effects when we don't sleep and we lack

sleep so one of the things we can definitely point to is uh that we notice is a sleep cycle and there's a lot to say about that actually so had an interesting I guess these things are called Prezine they're kind of like a slightly more advanced PowerPoint presentation by Maggie Kozlinski called sleep and dreams PowerPoint I just like it because hopefully I'll edit it in to the video just because it's got a very interesting visual element to it. So sleep cycles, it's your internal 24-hour sleep cycle or biological clock, in other words, also known as circadian rhythm. It regulates processes in the brain

that respond to how long you've been awake and regulate the changes between light and dark. it very synced up with the daylight cycle, Earth's rotation. Your body responds to the loss of daylight by producing melatonin, which makes you sleepy, which would explain the effects, and I use one every night when I go to bed. The dimming app where it warms the hue of your screen on your face. phone. Because, you know, I definitely notice my body stays more alert. My mind is a lot more distracted, a lot more just wakeful, I guess. When I, when I leave the regular hue of my screen, make it too blue, it definitely keeps me up. And so naturally, as you might imagine,

the release, with the release of melatonin at night to make you sleepy, um, there's, inhibitory structure or circuit, I guess, in your brain that is going to make you stay wakeful and not feel sleepy during the day during the waking hours for the most part, except when you nap, I guess. Scientific studies on sleep have shown that sleep stage at, that the sleep stage at awakening is an important factor in amplifying sleep inertia. Alarm clocks are used for sleep stage monitoring and EEGs or electroencephalographs are used to wake people up light sleep.

When sleep stage inertia is, sleep inertia rather. And that is sleep inertia, psychological state of impaired cognitive and sensory motor performance that is present immediately after waking. Okay, that makes sense. It's the continuation of sleep effects. of sleep effects like drowsiness, disorientation, and decline in motor dexterity, can give your body time to relax and recover from daily aches and pains. Recently, studies have found that sleep has an effect on our ability to learn, even.

Studies have also found that synapses in our brain grow and use up more energy when we learn new things. I love the correlation between physical and physical. mental exertion and recovery because I know for a fact that you know whenever you're physically exhausted after working out or doing some hard labor you always feel you might feel a little sore I guess if you're out of shape but um in phases in my life where I've been in shape I notice that you feel you feel really really good you feel like sleep was well-earned, but also more effective almost, if you exhausted yourself more thoroughly the day before. So that's just an interesting, I guess I'm making a correlation between that and the mental exertion

when you're pushing your mental capacity to the limit. It, it isn't noticeable that, you know, I've become more familiar with a topic that I've been reading the day before. or even, you know, multiple days before if I've been working on it. After a good night's sleep, I feel more competent, more, like I've retained more of the information and I'm able to more readily access the information as well. So that's just an interesting, again, one of the many helpful, very, you know, useful aspects of sleep. So it's just really cool to know that, you know, sleep is, it's this enjoyable thing, but it's also a powerful regulator of your growth mentally and physically.

What does sleep provide us with? Three-dimensional sort of schematic of the brain. I believe the hypothalamus is one of these, maybe that guy right there. What does lack of sleep get us? When you lack sleep, it affects your judgment, your coordination, and your reaction time. So your ability to manipulate thoughts in your head to make proper judgments, obviously manipulate your appendages, to control things and move your own body in the world or prevent your body from bumping into things,

and reaction time to align with the correlation, or the coordination, rather. So even if you're able to see something coming, you're going to have a slower reaction time to be able to avoid all the things out there in the world trying to kill us. In fact, sleep deprivation can affect you as much as being drunk. That is true. So here we go into the stages of sleep. Hopefully here we can learn a little bit more about the brain. We can get a little bit more explicit information about exactly what's going on.

during sleep while we're often our dreamland recorded brain waves it says have helped in the study of different stages of sleep there are four main stages of sleep that occur and each stage lasts lasts about 90 to 110 minutes each stage may have a distinct psychological function at first when you fall asleep your brain waves slow down then they get slower and slower in the second and third stages as you become more relaxed so these levels we're working down down down into the deepest most relaxed most motionless unperturbed state of rest and so we're in the third stage you can imagine that's maybe three begins it at the onset of it

it is about three hours after you've gone asleep and as you go through it you become even less aware of the world outside and I know this because I go to sleep usually a couple hours after my girlfriend she wakes up pretty early

and if I come to bed within two to three hours of her going to sleep, she usually wakes up. She'll wake up and check her phone, make sure it's not 6 a.m. If I go to bed three to four hours after she's gone to bed, rarely do I actually see her wake up. She kind of rustles around when I hop in the bed, but it's just interesting that your body does slowly sink

into these states of unconscious. and the actual muscles and the physical elements of our body trail along and follow that pattern as well as well the fourth stage is the deepest stage known as rapid eye movement r em sleep most people in this stage dream most people only remember dreams that occur closely toward the morning when they're about to wake up just well just because you can't remember a dream doesn't mean you've never had one some people believe that they simply don't remember the dream when in reality they just um or they believe that they don't dream when they just don't remember it and you can imagine that if we did if we were able to retain the dreams vividly enough in memory as a waking memory of an actual event there might be a little cross-threading going on there there there might be some um significant negative mental effects of forgetting forgetting which is dream and which was reality you know and indistinguishing a little meddling a kind of a vague vague intermingling if it they start to be

far back enough in your life that might cause some definitely anxiety definitely unrest and unease and a little bit of uncertainty about what's dream and what's reality because i know i've definitely woken up um and it's definitely when i'm it seems to correlate with my my most vivid dreams that you wake up almost unsure, especially if they're not as much of a character characterization, especially when they're more realistic. Sometimes you wake up and there's up to 30 seconds where you're genuinely sitting there wondering whether something just happened or whether it was just a dream. So evolutionarily speaking, you know, long-term effects, I'm sure it was detrimental to your cognitive mental clarity during your wakeful state to be too inundated and overwhelmed with two vivid memories from your dreams.

You can imagine how that might have gotten in the way of, you know, actually planning and going about your, the struggle of trying to survive in the wild back then. So to explore rapid eye movement a little more, the fourth stage of sleep, it's indicated by the back and forth movement of the eyes rapidly, of course. You can know if you have a dog, you can often see them do this right before they're about to move, you know, their paws or start to whimper,

depending on what they're dreaming of. about. After 10 minutes of REM sleep, the sleep cycle repeats three to four times. So I've heard, let's see if they go into dreams. During REM, not only do your eyes move around quickly under your eyelids, but your heart rate actually increases and all your automatic body processes speed up as well, as well. REM sleep sleep. I keep doing that. Leaving the mouse on there. REM sleep also alternates with non-R-E-M sleep

during which your body functions slow down and you get your deepest sleep. You can see how a person has several dreams in one night if they go through multiple REM cycles. During the REM phase, we experienced something referred to as muscle etonia, which basically means that our arms and legs become paralyzed and this prevents us it prevents us from again evolutionarily if we're thinking about things that would have been

most productively successful getting up and running off a cliff to your death because you were dreaming it wouldn't be too productive or uh successful in life. It wouldn't be a successful pattern to inherit from your parents. And of course, sleep is not a human thing exclusively. So that would have, the paralyization aspect of that would have developed millions and millions of years back. Geological time. And it's kind of, I remember I actually used to stop, or I used to.

to sleep on my stomach all the time and I stopped doing that for for a while now I'm really like extra cautious when I do because I remember I was in that stage one night and I think my head was just maybe I had a congested nose and because my whole body was paralyzed and I desperately wanted to move but my body was not responding and that was kind of a it was certainly a lot had a lasting effect on me in the sense that I don't do it again. Definitely modified my behavior during sleep. REM helps us renew and restore our energy. Dreams work on our brains to segregate information.

So they do, we are talking about dreams here. And it's a way to analyze and file away the data that we, absorbed during conscious waking hours and to me that's it's so interesting you know our brain always say this but it's it's one of the coolest things I've learned about the human body and really about the universe in general in science and it's really a common thread across all domains of human activity that interests me like psychology you know hard science like physics and chemistry and um you know more speculative things religion and philosophy it's the human brain is the most complex thing that we know about

it's the most complex single entity you know we could take sets of humans i guess and say it's That's more complex than an individual human, but nonetheless, um, yeah, our brains are unfathomably complex. It's just, I don't know, it's one of those things that just, when you take a step back and really consider, you know, we have, if you have, I don't know, a collection of cables or books and whatever, just that just that small number of items, that you're trying to uniquely arrange in a unique order. As many unique orders as you can, it's going to be a pretty large number. And take our brains that have hundreds of billions of neurons that interconnect ways that we have some idea of,

but we don't know the extent to which A, they connect and B, the actual pathways that the electrical activity takes as it's propagating throughout the brain to, I guess, form our thoughts and deeper things than just instantaneous thoughts. You know, memories, notions, intuitions, more fundamentally deeper in the brain drives. that we have. So the brain is, it just really, when you step back, it does, it just fills me with wonder. It really does. It's like, and I think it's ridiculously encouraging to think about how complex we are in it. That's you, you know, that's you and I. That's indicative of the limits of our abilities. and it's impressive to think about you know what the upper limit of our potentials might actually be and so dreams are a very regulatory phenomena and they help us make sense of the world that we

observe they help us organize like it said organize our thoughts and they one theory is is that dreams are kind of your way is, your brain's way of exploring the mental landscape with increasingly new additions from your daily conscious experiences. And when you have especially impactful events happen to you, of course your brain's going to hang on and it's going to try to during sleep cross correlate that experience with previous experiences and that's why you might have you know your childhood memory intermingled with a memory from last week and um that's not to say in their superficial significance is it's um it's it's i think in insightful to consider that your dreams are your brain's way of almost like a

programming sandbox where you get to play around with ideas without actually you know it's the way of thinking um we get to explore thought patterns and without actually acting on them and it's certainly in my life you know i've had very impactful dreams whether they're incredibly you know depressing if something bad happens to someone close to me in my dream or or um horrific if i'm find myself in a terrifying situation and a nightmare, it's impactful in a very useful way, I think, because it, it again, it lets me understand myself a little bit more, recognizing that, recognizing how I might act, how I might respond mentally, emotionally, in a given situation, you know, so if I...

I enjoy taking that perspective on my dreams. And I have a lot to learn. I don't know much about it. But I really latched on to that idea. I think it was maybe Carl Jung's idea of dreams. At least just one component of his idea about that. That dreams are kind of, they seem so random. You know, they have this very random.

element to them and it's kind of our brain's way of uh and that's also kind of weird to think about your brain is both you and something distinct from you it's like i'm me right now but also my brain kind of does something autonomously when the conscious me that i'm i think is speaking right now is resting, you know, so it's like you're you and you're the person that is within the environment that your brain creates in those dream landscapes. So it's, uh, it's kind of wonderful, it's magical almost, and that, you know, our brain's really on our side. It's just trying to make sense of the world and trying to connect ideas. and um yeah occasionally we wake up with profound senses of meaning and you know significance in our dreams that oh wow that was really helpful you know that was a really insightful thing that happened to me maybe it points you towards and experiences that might give your life more meaning if you have

experience the loss of a loved one in the dream maybe that that's your brain's way of telling you that that person means a little more than you recognized consciously so yeah dreams are amazing and I'd definitely be interested in talking about them more in the future and then this person ends with a little a very small dream interpretation says I had a dream, Paula and I got in the trouble for driving from the elementary school to the high school when we were supposed to walk, some authority figure, Mrs. Milan, caught us behind boxes, caught us hiding behind boxes, and started screaming at us. We didn't come out and she called the cops and then we ran away. And her analysis is that being chased is a common thing.

theme in dreams you know it's one of the most primordial things fight or flight can relate to things that pertain to anxiety and emotions of inferiority from you know experiences in life so while we might not have gotten into the deepest scientific research about sleep we we can come away from this knowing that both the quantity and quality of sleep is definitely significant. You need, I would recommend eight hours. I mean, some people, some very successful people, Schwarzenegger, Elon Musk, Trump, I think they all get less than six hours of sleep in night. Um, I know me personally, I'm cognitively, and maybe it's just because I'm not adapted to less than eight, but after, when I get eight hours of sleep, I am the most,

cognitively acute and alert I wake up feeling most refreshed after having that much sleep. A night of uninterrupted sleep leaves both our bodies and our minds rejuvenated for the next day. If sleep is cut short we're really doing our body and our mind the disservice. The body won't have time to complete all its phases needed for muscle memory consolidation and the release of hormones that regulate growth and appetite as well and you can imagine i mean it's not a stretch to assume the body is a functional uh especially working on a circadian rhythm a 24-hour-ish cycle diminishing the quality of activity in one area of that cycle is going to propagate negative repercussions down the line and so it's going to make you

it's going to offset your appetite it's going to deregulate your your bodies um energy levels uh your alertness um your judgment you're probably going to be more likely to uh do things that are negative for your health it's um concentration decision making being fully engaged in the moment you you're certainly not your optimal consciousness when you don't have sufficient sleep so just remember that pay attention to your your body when it tells you you need to sleep and do your yourself a favor and get on a regular sleep schedule get on a regular daily routine actually for that matter something that's something i've been working on myself i don't want to sound like a hypocrite i've

noticed the benefits of being more routinized and being um more rigid with my schedule i love this ex-marine he's just a badass jaco willink he has a great podcast i think just called the jaco podcast in you know blunt um spartan marine aesthetic as you would imagine they would have it's he he is a i think he has a book called this too but his general philosophy is discipline equals freedom and i like it's catchy because it doesn't make sense at first but the idea behind it is that you allow yourself more free time by being more discipline disciplined to efficiently take care of the chores and the daily responsibilities that you have to take care of. And, you know, by adhering to a routine, you don't have to waste time or mental effort.

Mental energy is deciding what to eat, how to cook it, what to wear, when to be somewhere, when to leave the house. you know what to do before you leave the house how to get yourself ready for bed all these things add up to you know a mental deficit at the end of the day and it's really a detriment to yourself and you're really you're fighting against yourself you're going against the grain when you try to when you don't have a routine and aren't disciplined it's um i'm slowly yeah too slowly but eventually I'm getting around to figuring out that it's so beneficial it's extremely healthy to to live the most productive efficient life that you possibly can because your body rewards you with less anxiety it knows what you're going to be doing you can segregate and a lot yourself a couple hours

at the end of the day, we're in the morning, whenever, and when you're most alert to, you know, tackle the things that you have a passion for. And it's something certainly I would highly recommend. So sleep is key to ending and starting, of course, your waking activities. A couple facts as I'll let you go and relax or drift off to sleep. If it takes you less than five minutes to follow sleep at night, you're probably sleep deprived.

I know that doesn't make sense, but you should ideally take 10 to 15 minutes once your head hits that pillow to really wind down and sink. into the state of unconsciousness we call sleep. Any less than that, you're probably not getting enough sleep then. It's to be expected that you're going to be tired. Tiredness happens twice a day, as you would imagine on a rhythmic, cyclical existence. 2 a.m. and 2 p.m., for people, the people who rise with the sun, I guess, are the peak lethargy times of peak lethargy

during the day that's why you're going to be much less alert after lunch I personally just don't eat as big I wait till evening to eat my big meals because after I eat a big meal I know either way even if I just woke up I wouldn't want to sit down and be a little bit um sedentary for a little bit um again going back to not having a good schedule

the monday morning social jet lags uh caused by weekend warrior mentality switching up your schedule just to you know suck a couple extra hours out of your weekend it really kicks you in the ass uh by disrupting your regulatory systems like sleep they're not used to staying up to lade or on monday morning getting up that early again so you don't want to jolt yourself out of a routine you want to try as consistently as possible to maintain that routine at least if you want to unless you're willing to pay the price of you know an unregulated cycle which might be more anxiety, more, uh, perhaps mental, um, maybe less emotional stability overall.

Stress, physical or mental illness, living or sleeping arrangements, family history, shift work, working late into the night, long hours, diet, and exercise habits can all cause insomnia. All right guys, this is probably a really good time for me to let you guys go. It's just starting raining it outside and maybe I'll let that play out

for a little bit. I hope you guys were able to learn something and if you guys get plenty of sleep tonight. Thanks for watching and as always thank you guys enormously for all the support and kind words you always shower me with. It's an

absolute honor to be able to spread ideas, I think, like TED talks, I guess, worth sharing. I hope you guys got something out of this. I'll see you next time. Thanks.