012 - The importance of sleep

Sleep is important for our bodies because it allows us to repair and remove waste. When we are awake, our bodies accumulate damage and waste, and sleep is necessary to clean up and restore order. There are two options for cleaning up: either have a long period of deep sleep or take mini-breaks throughout the day. Not getting enough sleep or depriving ourselves of sleep can lead to mental and physical fatigue, as well as other issues like irritability, lack of concentration, weight gain, and burnout. It is important to prioritize downtime and relaxation to improve sleep quality. Welcome back to the Burnt Out Podcast. In this conversation, I speak with Mother Nature about the importance of sleep. Over the past years, sleep has been thought of as a bit of an unavoidable inconvenience. Jon Bon Jovi even wrote a famous song in their 1992 album called I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, which pretty much summed up the attitude at the time towards sleep, and maybe that lack of sleep explained my fashion choices too. However, Mother Nature designed some form of sleep into every living organism, so I'm guessing she might have something different to say about the subject. So, without further ado, here's my uninterrupted conversation with Mother Nature about the importance of sleep. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me about sleep today, Mother Nature. You're welcome. So, as always, I'm going to start by defining sleep. Why did you choose to make us close down once a day for many hours? The challenge I had when creating organisms was that you burn energy to live, and burning energy creates both damage and waste. So sleep is just something I had to develop to deal with repair and waste removal. So you're saying that sleep is a time for us to clean up after a day's work and get things back in order, like cleaning the kitchen after cooking a meal? Absolutely. One of the laws of nature that your scientists discovered is the law of entropy. Everything moves from order into disorder over time. Nothing, if left alone, becomes more organised. If we don't deal with the disorder, it only continues to get worse, never better. So I'll always need to vacuum the floors, then? That's entropy for you. Right, got it. So how does this relate specifically to the need for sleep? How do we deal with these metaphorical crumbs that we're leaving on the floor? When each of the cells in your body burns energy, it creates some chemical waste products and also damages many of the cells themselves. These waste chemicals and damaged cells are found throughout your brain and body. And the longer you are awake, the more the damage and waste builds up. So you're saying that we're conforming to the laws of entropy, then? We're getting more disordered as the day goes on? Exactly. Importantly, though, when you're active during the day, it's very difficult to also clean up at the same time, especially in the brain. There needs to be some kind of rest period to allow your repair and removal systems to tidy up. We could use your kitchen analogy as an example. Suppose you're cooking and you know you need to finish with a clean kitchen. There are two ways you can do this. Option one, you can do all the cooking in one go and then at some point after take time out to thoroughly clean the kitchen. Option two, you could stop periodically during the cooking process to tidy up as you go. You'll likely still need to do a deeper clean at the end, though. It just won't be quite as intense a clean up as the first option. I've built both options into the nature of recovery for living organisms like you. So you're saying that when I'm active, I'm making a mess of myself. And to tidy up, repair and remove the waste from my body and brain, I have to choose either stop and do a mini clean up, like take some downtime, then finish the job with a good sleep later. Or I could push through the day and do it all in one go at bedtime. But there'll be more pressure on the quality of my sleep if I do it that way. You've got it. So what if I refuse both options? Then you'll simply continue into disorder. When people deprive themselves of sleep, they start to decay into mental and physical fatigue, then eventually mental disorder and hallucinations, etc. Eventually, you won't even be able to avoid sleep. You'll start taking mini naps a few seconds to a few minutes at a time, eventually just falling asleep wherever you are. Even if you're standing or driving, this can have some very nasty consequences. So I don't recommend it. Okay, but I could probably get away with at least a shortcut in my sleep, couldn't I? Yes, you can, for a while. Remember the law of entropy. If we don't tidy up, we are descending into disorder. You either accumulate disorder quickly when refusing to sleep, or slowly when not getting enough sleep. Either way, it accumulates. The latter just shows the effects in less obvious forms than issues like hallucinations. It'll be more along the lines of irritability, lack of concentration, weight gain, reduced fitness, or burnout, for example. That makes a lot of sense. I've never really tried going without sleep for very long. I've definitely seen those slow accumulation effects in myself on many occasions. I've even experienced those mini-naps you've spoken about, just from the accumulation of poor sleep over a number of weeks. You know, accumulating a lack of sleep can almost be worse, because it's usually part of a deeper pattern of behaviour that we need to break. Very much so. It's easy to say sleep more, but often difficult to achieve. Yeah, especially when your night's interrupted by young children, pain, or insomnia. Yes, I agree. So do you have any words of wisdom on this issue? It's important to remember our second option. Take mini-breaks throughout the day so that there's less pressure on sleep. This is why I gave you the ability to recover in small bouts. Prioritising downtime is an effective way to improve your overall recovery and take the pressure off night-time sleep a little. Oh yeah, it's easy to forget that one. Learning to take time for yourself and relax every day is an important skill to master. I've noticed doing so actually improves my ability to sleep better too. Very much so. I designed Daytime Rest for exactly that reason. Just look at any other animal, like a dog for example. They'll happily work all day if you ask them to. But the moment they get an opportunity, they'll be fast asleep by your feet taking it easy, no matter what time of day it is. I'd love to dig deeper into this downtime conversation, but I think let's save that for another time. For now, could I just summarise what I've learnt from you today about sleep? Sure. Let's see what you have today. Being awake and active, both mentally and physically, creates a mess of waste products and damage to ourselves. The law of entropy says that we can only descend into more mess, instead of the other way round. So we have to put energy in to tidy up if we want to remain healthy. Fortunately for us, the energy that we need to put in takes very little effort at all on our part. We just need to sleep. Sleep is what gives us the opportunity to repair our body and mind, and remove the waste chemicals that build up. Without it, our natural clean-up systems simply can't keep up with demand. We have two options available to us to effectively clean up. Option 1. Go hard all day and get a long bout of deep restful sleep, to give enough opportunity to do a thorough clean-up and repair. Option 2. Use opportunities for downtime during the day to do mini clean-ups, taking the pressure off the night-time sleep processes. Especially useful if you have an environment where you can't sleep that well at night. Mother Nature gives us these two options to help us for whatever situation that we're in. So I hope that sums that one up Mother Nature. Is there anything more that you'd like to sound the subject of sleep before we close this one up? I think you summed that up nicely. Maybe I'd just like to say that putting pressure on yourself to sleep better or get enough sleep can be counterproductive. Sleep, and downtime for that matter, is about relaxation. If you put pressure on yourself, sleep can become difficult. So rather than to force yourself to meet someone else's standards, it's better to just allow yourself to improve your sleep quality just a little bit and build on any successes that you have. Well Chris, just look around you at nature. Nothing is in a rush or trying to be what it is not. That's very true Mother Nature. Thank you as always for your sage advice. I've learnt some great lessons today about the importance of sleep, so thank you. I very much look forward to our next conversation. You are very welcome. Thank you for listening today. I hope you took away from the conversation that there's a fundamental law of nature that governs sleep. We call that law Entropy. And as with any law of nature, we can't escape it, no matter how good the coffee is. Entropy states that things always descend into disorder, and that includes your body too. In the same way that we need to put energy in to clean up our home, we have to commit energy to cleaning up our body. Fortunately, that energy is just about committing to giving ourselves downtime and sleep. We'll talk more about downtime and getting deeper into ways to promote better sleep in later conversations, but for now, I hope this has left you with some food for thought. If you'd like to explore your own health and wellbeing further, then please come over to burnt-out.me. Over there you'll find a small but growing community of people that have been feeling burnt out by modern living and want to return to health and vibrancy again. I've curated a set of resources there to help you rebalance your physical and mental energy. We also have a Q&A forum where you can post your health questions, which will be answered by a fully trained wellness coach. And finally, we run regular community coaching live events where you can just come along, listen to the coaching advice, or share your own wisdom and feel part of a community of amazing people that are trying to live a more vibrant life. burnt-out.me is a completely free and very welcoming online community. It's a philanthropic social initiative aimed at bringing health resources and coaching to everyone. You can learn more about what we're doing over at burnt-out.me forward slash mission. And obviously all the links can be found in the show notes below. I hope to see you there. Thank you for listening, and remember, health emerges quite naturally when you allow Mother Nature to guide you.