Discovering the brain’s nightly “rinse cycle”
directorsblog.nih.gov
directorsblog.nih.gov
Joke's on you, I already feel dead from not sleeping :(
I also don't identify with that statement at all. As someone who doesn't sleep enough, I'd rather quality over quantity - less hours awake but make them more enjoyable.
It is so easy to get stuck in a rut where you barely have the energy to execute your daily loop of necessities and end up making no progress towards longer term goals.
In Australia, stores are typically still open 9am-5pm which is a relic of a time when housewives dropped the kids off and went shopping. Now that many of us have jobs this should be the first and easiest thing to change. Even 10am-6pm would be a massive improvement for both the workers and customers.
This is IMO stupid, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the society should be run in mandatory shifts. I can't understand why the market won't fix that itself? Why leave all that money on the table? There is huge demand for services open outside regular office working hours. For instance, personally, I chose dentists by their opening hours - most of the money I spent on dental was with a place where I could come at 8pm. In pre-Internet banking era, I would've picked the bank that had branches open past 5pm, if any existed. I don't shop at places open 9-5, because I only have time earlier than that, or later than that. Etc.
</rant>
They are more interested in making LED signs showing temperature and how to squize more money from customers. I call this "PRL" mentality, they want to get money directly, not indirectly by making themselves better for clients. They don't care about clients, because their performance is measured with money and opening for more hours will cost money in short term.
You can’t change one gear in a complex society without having to also adjust many other variables each with it’s own cascading effect
Secondly, if you account for "productivity" hours instead of "waking" hours. You spend more of your "productive" capable hours in your life working, by a large margin.
Or maybe I was just born with a lazy brain /shrug.
Assuming 8 hours a day you're spending 1/3 of your work week with these people. It doesn't have to be a social bonanza every day but if you dislike making smalltalk with these people, or are actively disdainful of their chatting and web surfing then maybe you should change jobs. Cuz it sounds like you're spending a lot of time around people you straight up don't like.
It can of course go higher when you have a specific goal and you're running on adrenaline or are truly enraptured by what you are working on. But a typical 8 hour day is often packed with chitchat, meetings, administrative busywork and so on to help pad out those hours.
I did work one place that stressed to us to allocate no more than 5.5 hours of work-work a day when estimating jobs due to the above, and it seemed roughly accurate.
Sometimes I get more done in 15mins of my personal projects before work than a day of work, due to meetings or being blocked. Companies are usually not nearly as efficient as they could be.
I think 90% of work gets done in the first four hours for me.
Maybe it's because it'd mean that pretty much every medical doctor would themselves be technically (or not-so-technically) considered mentally-ill?
(Gosh, imagine a world where all the doctors got treatment for their floating guilt, and then suddenly woke up to their severe overwork, and so did a 180 on their previous push to the medical-bar to lower acceptance to increase wages, instead pushing to increase acceptance and lower wages in an attempt to increase the number of doctors a hospital can employ on a given budget, and therefore decrease hours worked per doctor?)
In your example puritanical work ethic + (irrational imo) guilt = you exceed your contractual requirements to deliver work to your employer.
Keep the work ethic but take the guilt out and perhaps instead you’d meet but not exceed your contractual obligations to your employer, and then organise the rest of your time around industriously working on something else that you’re personally passionate about.
The second example could be unhealthy depending on how you approached it, but I wouldn’t say that it necessarily is, and I would say that it’s a big improvement over the first example.
Japanese salarymen are the pathological example of this but I'm sure it manifests everywhere.
In some hostile work environments like banking this is everywhere. Don't leave before your manager, eat lunch at your desk, look busy and stay in the office as long as you can
I have seen more focus on getting people busy than actual productivity. The video games industry is a good example where the lack of planning and quite often personal maturity of the company leadership cause crunch time and a lack of personal well-being.
> Mind & Body, one system.
Exactly this. If , e.g., we run our planes like we run our bodies, they will just fall from the skies.
I recognize the need to sleep, but I personally just wished we could develop a way to keep going with your day without sleeping. If that were physically possible, I’d just meditate some few hours daily instead of sleeping 7-8 hours.
I recently watched an episode of "Nova" on the subject of sleep (Mysteries of Sleep), very convincing , even to some toddlers fussy about the sleep as usual :)
I recognize the need to eat, detoxicate and reproduce, but wish we could develop a way to keep sleeping while doing it :)
If. But it's not. Sleep is not an 'include' but a 'require' statement.
I haven't tried it, but it does seem it is physically possible to sleep much less than 7-8 hours per 24 hour cycle.
It really is crazy how much some cultures (including mine) neglect it.
I love to sleep and always have, but I've been shamed for it (in the weird way that is North Americans do that sometimes) and felt like I needed to optimise my schedule or sleep less or whatever. It's all crazy. Just sleep! It's nice, it's free, soak it up.
Unless of course you can't. Man, I feel for people with insomnia.
I asked if anything could be done other than eye drops which was about 5 seconds of relief but starting to irritate the skin around my eye due to the chemicals.
Optometrist said a full night of sleep. Nothing else will fix it. And he was right.
I recently had a lot of trouble sleeping due to stress and found a solution whereby I began listening to old TV shows while I sleep with earphones in bed.
It was miraculous. But one odd side effect is that I don't really dream anymore - at least not in the same way. Since the shows are playing, it's almost like they are dreaming for me.
If the phone stops playing the shows for some reason, I'll have dreams again - and often wake up due to some annoying thoughts about work.
I haven't noticed any negative effects. Certainly there was a massive positive benefit of just being able to sleep when I couldn't before.
... but these sorts of things should be avenues of research.
I’d be cautious about doing what you’re doing long term. I think you’d be better off learning to let go of stressful thoughts before bed, and to make your bedroom a very calm, peaceful, non work related place where all you do is rest and relax. Watching old tv shows before bed, or while on a timer that will turn off when you’re asleep, sounds like a good way to get you relaxed, but I don’t think it’s great to have that type of stimulation continue during sleep.
I’ve done the same thing you’re describing during high stress periods with podcasts, and while it’s better than letting worries keep you up, I find myself feeling more “shallow” and less insightful/less rested if they stay on throughout the night. When I allow myself to relax and drift off without distraction, I find myself feeling much more “full” and “together” in the mornings, particularly if I take the time to go over and record my dreams.
It has been about 6 months of doing this all night, every night. So far, I feel myself.
The key is to use old familiar programs. Things you can visualize even though you're just listening to them. It's that familiarity that allows your brain to have a sense of comfort, while not really being stimulated.
In any case, the experiment continues...
That way you can get more REM sleep, while still not waking up due to lack of background noise.
Having done several years of experimenting on myself, I've come to the conclusion that our sleep needs vary greatly from day to day, circumstance to circumstance, and to sleep the same schedule every day is forcing one's body into a square bowl.
For example, if I am coming down with flu or cold, I may want to sleep as much as 24 hours in a day, maybe 16 if I feel a need to get things done. This allows my body to spend all its energy on mobilizing the immune system, and allows me for a quicker recovery.
If the weather is rainy or gray, I may want to sleep more.
If I'm doing something exciting, like attending a festival or conference, coding, or traveling, I may not want to sleep at all, or get by on a few several-hour naps.
Having adopted a flexible sleeping unschedule, I feel much better than I used to on the office cycle.
Umm--- pre-industrial society everything stopped when it went dark. Humans have very poor night vision, we can't function in the dark and so basically everyone went to sleep when the sun went down.
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shi...
If I was CEO, I would absolutely organized working hours around sleep.
Edit: Might be hard with a schedule like mine though https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESVjUr2UUAAFf_p?format=jpg&name=...
Morning people: 7:30-3:30
Night owls: 10:30-6:30
In between: standard 9-5
Only 4 hours worth of meetings allowed per day, 11-3. Bonus side effect of limiting useless meetings and helping morning and night folks avoid heavy traffic.
I know one relative who I'm pretty certain died in her sleep because of unresolved sleep apnea.
When you stop breathing while sleeping, your body adjusts by taking you out of deep sleep towards wakefulness, while your blood pressure rises towards 300. When you finally take a breath -- if the high blood pressure didn't set off a heart attack or stroke -- your restful sleep is ruined.
Sleep anpea also causes other problems. when your throat closes and you try to breath, it's likely you will suck stomach acid out of your stomach into your throat and possibly lungs.
If you snore (not a requirement), wake up during the night with heartburn, or die of a heart attack or stroke in your sleep, you should investigate a cpap.
Also, my insurance is awful so they won't send me to specialist to get a proper CPAP. And I have high-blood pressure, tachycardia, depression, anxiety, and sleep like sh!t.
Anyhow before I whine anymore about personal problems, how's your day?
You might want to try a "boil and bite" mouthguard to see if that helps with your sleep apena instead of cpap.
If you decide to go back to a cpap, try a "nasal pillows" mask. Also the cpap devices have gotten much more sophisticated.
Its counterpart:
"Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed." (Arthur Schopenhauer )
Could this be why God's first act of creation was creating light and separating day from night?
I can’t help but wonder if it’s related to this rinse system in some way. Luckily it has improved a ton over the years but a bent neck still triggers it and I never found out why
I'm not a doctor, just had a close family member with a malformation there which was corrected with surgery. You should really see a specialist!
The issue they had is known as a Chiari Malformation.
https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Educat...
Obviously this is purely anecdotal and not scientific at all, but it's fun to speculate. I like concepts that are intuitive, and this one seems pretty intuitive to me.
Both my neck and visual system got thrown off by it it turns out. I went to someone who does therapy for that, and with work on my neck + eye tracking the symptoms went away. Mental fatigue was a big symptom.
However, I did not have fatigue due to a particular angle, so that sounds different. But, I suspect you might have the issues I had as an additional factor.
It seems that this second half-life must be the difference for people who have more trouble sleeping long after caffeine intake. I wonder if this implies that their bodies have different maximum attainable amounts for the proper enzyme. I'm curious if anyone knows more detail about how the interplay between enzymatic saturation and genetics / gene expression works here.
Further, Pollan's interview suggested that even if I could sleep, caffeine was interfering with "deep wave sleep" - so I gave it a shot. I consider myself lucky that none of the headaches or [extra] irritability kicked in, so there's that.
So, while you might sleep all night. It's low quality sleep.
I think the awake/alert factor I get from having my morning coffee at this point is a learned response, not a chemical one; a decaf coffee is just as good at perking me up in the morning as a non-decaf. If it weren't for the headache spikes hurled straight through my brain by satan himself I wouldn't even bother.
Edit: That's not true, I actually do love the taste and ritual of making coffee too; it's a whole thing to me. It's like a Japanese tea ceremony, but with coffee.
But sometimes, when no one is looking? I make a third cup.
Here is the link to that interview for anyone interested: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/02/10/8033940...
But the best sleep by far has been the last month, when I've reduce alcohol to 0 for 6 nights a week, just once on the weekend.
Using AutoSleep on Apple Watch you can see the insane differences. My deep sleep is often over 2 hours, which is when I literally feel like my brain has been rinsed. Got 4 hours of deep sleep last night which is a bit high.
When tracking on nights after alcohol, deep sleep is often just 15-30 minutes. Focus is all out of whack the next day after alcohol too.
Interestingly, if drinking during the day and I stop drinking alcohol by like 5pm (day drinking) such as on the weekend, the impact is not nearly as bad.
With SleepCycle I only used it 10% of the days because I had to consciously choose to turn it on!
https://mdedge-files-live.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/files/s...
There's also some recent papers on how the glymphatic system differs in people with iNPH
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/10/2691/4085293
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6124518/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6609364/
I suspect some of what we see as singular disorders (Alzheimers, etc...) now will eventually be seen as sets of other distinct disorders.
On the other hand, nighttime affords this naturally, though modern society arguably blurrs the utility and safety aspect of nighttime.
Counterexample is some marine mammals, like dolphins and seals, which can shutdown half of their brain for sleep, while the other one is active for safety reasons.
My guess: trying to flush the brain garbage while the brain is conscious would damage it, or interfere with conscious thought in a way that's worse than being asleep.
Oops, I guess the article or researchers missed the prior work on this subject... here's a TED Talk from 6 years ago about this exact mechanism (much more informative than the article): https://youtu.be/b8uvrdBrdR4
Gotta say though, I'm ecstatic more research is being done in this area and I wholeheartedly support their efforts!
> By studying 11 people as they slept, Lewis and her team identified three parts to the rinse cycle. First, there is electrical activity that’s definitive of slow wave sleep. Then neurons “go quiet” as Lewis puts it, blood volume within the brain decreases, and cerebral spinal fluid flows upwards. This flow happens about every 20 seconds during slow wave sleep, according to the study.
https://www.inverse.com/article/60583-sleep-rinse-cycle-alzh...
https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-...
For those watching, there's also discussion of Walker's (alleged) response at Gelman's blog: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/12/26/whassup-wi...
I also do time restricted feeding and skip breakfast. If I load up on carbs (particularly crappy ones) the day before, I feel hunger much more the next morning than if I ate clean during my feeding window.
The body is a complex machine.
I do notice that I need substantially less sleep when fasting. Sometimes I only sleep 4 hours a night when fasting.
it just permeates through every surface.. you literally go nuts after a few nights. I finally had to move to lovely Patagonia.
If sleep is something chemical it may be easier to improve than if it was something psychological/neurological.
I envy those who can actually pull this out due to some genes. Lucky bastards...
It's crazy that we only recently discovered such a critical and [physically] widespread biological component. Makes me wonder what other "obvious" things we've yet to stumble upon.
You're going to give up years of your life and work your ass off tirelessly toward the PhD that is necessary to open other doors. Do you bet it all on a far-out idea that might not pan out? You don't want to get too conservative, but you don't want to go wild either.
Then the same thing repeats when you're working on research or directing research. You need to get grant money. You need to publish.
You want to advance yourself within the field, and the way to do that is with either one amazing breakthrough or (more likely) a string of solid, significant work.
And once you've built a reputation, which is important, you can lose it all by venturing too far out.
Thus, while it's not necessarily that people are closed-minded, there are incentives for most people to take a middle road, which means a lot more evolutionary progress than revolutionary progress.
Compared to tech, though, there is a broad consensus that we have a very large Rumsfeld problem: we know that we don't know what we don't know.
Come play in a wet lab for 5 years and see how you feel.
See what happened with Alzheimers, where as specific theory that is probably wrong dominated for years and received most funding, sending a cure back years as well.
https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte...
yeah, it's not easy.
Also dead bodies (easier to study and dissect) are very different from live bodies (you can get a quick look during surgery, but that's nothing like detailed dissection).
If you're the kind of person who enjoyed physics, you'll probably like it. And it will teach you why there are some many unknowns.
Life is complicated, and studying the essence of it is difficult.