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What if you could make your sleep more efficient?
As a sleep scientist, this is the question that has captivated me for the past 10 years.
Because while the light bulb and technology have brought about a world of 24-hour work and productivity, it has come at the cost of our naturally occurring circadian rhythm and our body's need for sleep.
The circadian rhythm dictates our energy level throughout the day, and only recently we've been conducting a global experiment on this rhythm, which is putting our sleep health and ultimately our life quality in jeopardy.
Because of this, we aren't getting the sleep we need, with the average American sleeping a whole hour less than they did in the 1940s.
For some reason, we decided to wear it as a badge of honor that we can get by on not enough sleep.
This all adds up to a real health crisis.
Most of us know that poor sleep is linked to diseases like Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease,
stroke and diabetes.
And if you go untreated with a sleep disorder like sleep apnea, you're more likely to get many of these illnesses.
But did you know about sleep's impact on your mental states?
Poor sleep makes us make risky, rash decisions and is a drain on our capacity for empathy.
When sleep deprivation literally makes us more sensitive to our own pain, it's not so surprising that we have a hard time relating to others and just generally being a good and healthy person when we're sleep-deprived.
Scientists are now starting to understand how not only the quantity but also the quality of sleep impacts our health and well-being.
My research focuses on what many scientists believe is the most regenerative stage of sleep:
deep sleep.
We now know that generally speaking, there are three stages of sleep: light sleep, rapid eye movement or REM and deep sleep.
We measure these stages by connecting electrodes to the scalp, chin and chest. In light sleep and REM, our brain waves are very similar to our brain waves in waking life.
But our brain waves in deep sleep have these long-burst brain waves that are very different from our waking life brain waves.
These long-burst brain waves are called delta waves.
When we don't get the deep sleep we need, it inhibits our ability to learn and for our cells and bodies to recover.
Deep sleep is how we convert all those interactions that we make during the day into our long-term memory and personalities.
As we get older, we're more likely to lose these regenerative delta waves.
So in way, deep sleep and delta waves are actually a marker for biological youth. that is until I met Dr. Dmitry Gerashchenko from Harvard Medical School.
Dmitry told me about a new finding in the literature, where a lab out of Germany showed that if you could play certain sounds at the right time in people's sleep, you could actually make sleep deeper and more efficient.
And what's more, is that this lab showed that you actually could improve next-day memory performance with this sound.
We learned that we could accurately track sleep without hooking people up to electrodes and make people sleep deeper.
We're continuing to develop the right sound environment and sleep habitat to improve people's sleep health.
Our sleep isn't as regenerative as it could be, but maybe one day soon, we could wear a small device and get more out of our sleep.
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