Health Update: Putting To Rest Why You Aren’t Getting The Sleep You Need – What Experts Say

Getting enough sleep is very influential for our overall health and wellbeing in many different areas. Sleep affects everything from mental health and cognitive functioning to cardiovascular and endocrine health. On this episode of The Wellness Conversation, Richard Ko, DO, Pulmonary Disease, breaks down misconceptions, explains common sleep disruptors and explores the importance of getting enough sleep to maintain your health.  

“A common misconception is that sleep is a very passive process. That you are unconscious, and nothing is going on. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you’re sleeping, your body is recovering,” Dr. Ko said [03:24-03:34]. 

Sleep affects everything in your body and when you don’t receive enough sleep, your health can suffer. A big factor that disrupts sleep for many individuals is screen time. Dr. Ko explains that anytime you look at a screen, you get a dopamine rush that makes you want to continue scrolling. 

The blue light that comes from your phone also tricks your brain into thinking that it’s not time to sleep, which can also cause insomnia. This is connected to the type of content that you consume before bed, as it can also keep you up longer due to the increased surge of dopamine in your brain.  

“It’s part of this reward circuit in your brain, and when you’re looking at a screen, you’re getting this feedback mechanism that it’s something you want to keep doing. The moment you put the screen down, the dopamine drops and you want to pick it right back up. Dopamine is a wake promoting neurotransmitter, so it causes you to stay awake,” Dr. Ko said [05:37-05:54].  

When you’re not getting enough sleep each night, it can lead to sleep deprivation. Dr. Ko explains that when you’re deprived of sleep, you can have microsleeps throughout the day. This happens when your brain partially goes to sleep for a few seconds at a time, which may not seem influential, but when you’re doing an important task such as driving a car, these few seconds can really matter.  

“It certainly can be a major cause of accidents. It affects your cognition with executive functioning, meaning that you think you’re fully awake and you’re making a decision, but it’s a bad decision because you’re not well rested,” Dr. Ko said [07:11-07:25].  

When receiving a healthy night of sleep, you will pass through four stages. In the first stage of sleep, your body is transitioning between wakefulness and sleep for a short period of time leading up to the second stage. The second stage of sleep is also considered light sleep, but the body begins to slow down more. By the third stage of sleep, you have entered a deep sleep where your body feels more restored, and growth hormones are released. The fourth stage or REM sleep is where most dreams happen, and emotions are processed.    

“It’s been proposed that REM sleep is where we take information from your RAM memory, you know the memory on your computer screen, and you download it into your hard drive. This is where you engrain learning, and so if you truncate sleep, one of the first things to go is learning tasks,” Dr. Ko said [12:28-12:48].  

To learn more about how sleep affects your health, listen to the full episode here.