Sleep Pressure

My stumbling shuffling half run barely kept my feet under me. Leaning forward, arms flailing as sharp spinifex belted my shins sending painful signals to my brain. It was about 2 am on a moonlit night deep in the Pilbara on a survival course and I had fallen asleep and run off the track we were walking along. Yep, I’d gone to sleep not only standing up, but walking on a rough 2 rut track in the middle of nowhere. I found it hard to believe at the time, but I’ve seen it happen a couple of times since to different people.

I’ve recently been reading an excellent book “Why we sleep” by sleep researcher Matthew Walker. Experiences like mine while walking come down to something called sleep pressure. When we are underslept our body makes it harder for us to stay awake. For years I’ve been interested in optimising human ability and longevity. One of the most consistent recommendations I’ve heard from experts over the last decade is that optimising sleep is the most powerful variable. So much so that interventions in diet, exercise, brain training and more can be rendered ineffective if sleep is insufficient. Walker's book explains why. Sleep fundamentally affects every single system in the body and brain.

He gives compelling evidence for our current ‘lack of sleep’ epidemic, and some useful suggestions for remedying it. A significant insight is that we are unable to judge our own impaired state when underslept. And not just after one or two long nights pushing to meet a deadline, or having fun, but chronically if we are getting less than 7 hours and preferably more (That's sleep too, not time in bed). We can convince ourselves we don’t need as much sleep as that, because from the inside, the deprivation is not noticeable until you are nodding off in your equivalent of a dusty Pilbara track.

Well worth a read.