We spend a lot of time trying to live healthy, active lives while we’re awake, but it turns out that the time we spend sleeping is also crucially important for our health! It is during sleep that important biological activities like memory consolidation and metabolic regulation occur.
In fact, sleep — both the quality and quantity we get — has a huge effect on our brain health in particular. According to the American Brain Foundation, poor sleep is correlated to a slate of neurological diseases, including stroke, cognitive aging, dementia, and Parkinson’s. Mood disorders like depression, bipolar disorder, and seasonal affective disorder are also linked to poor sleep.
🧠 How does sleep affect our brain health?
While some of the mechanisms by which sleep affects our bodies and brains are still a mystery, we do understand many parts of it.
The glymphatic system is a biological system which helps clear toxins from the brain. While we sleep, glymphatic activity dramatically increases, allowing our brains to flush out large molecules that build up between our neurons. Thus, getting quality sleep helps protect us from neurodegenerative brain diseases by ensuring our glymphatic processes can run as they should.
The circadian rhythm, a 24-hour biological rhythm that regulates cycles of alertness and sleepiness, helps our bodies optimize energy usage during the day and helps regulate our body temperature, our immune system, our hormones, and our stress responses. When our sleep cycle is misaligned from our circadian rhythm, we may experience difficulties falling and staying asleep, regulating our emotions, and performing certain cognitive tasks.
Meanwhile, growing research highlights the link between poor sleep and neurological diseases. Recent research has indicated that an interplay of circadian rhythm disruption and sleep deprivation likely increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease developing. Other research has indicated that REM sleep behavior disorders (RBDs) may be an early predictor of the development of Parkinson’s Disease, sometimes preceding the onset of motor-related symptoms by years.
So, we know that quality sleep is correlated with better brain health, which begs the question…
😴 How can we get better sleep?
A few months ago, we wrote up some tips for getting good sleep. These include:
- 🛏️ Prepare for bed. This means finding a wind-down routine that works for you and your brain, minimizing screen time before bed, writing down daily gratitudes and anxieties to get them out of your mind, performing bedtime rituals to signal your body that it’s time to wind down, and finding stress management activities that work for you (on that note, consider trying one of our meditation or breathwork videos as part of your routine).
- 🌙 Adjust your sleep environment. This might include using a white noise machine, listening to sleep stories, ensuring your sleep environment is dark (the circadian rhythm is heavily affected by light!), and setting the room temperature at a comfortable setting.
- 🍽️ Mind your diet and nutrition. This could mean avoiding heavy meals too close to bedtime, trying sleep inducing foods and drinks (like a nice herbal tea), limiting caffeine intake later in the day, and limiting alcohol.
As we’ve learned, there’s lots of evidence that sleep is crucially important for brain health, and the good news is that there are plenty of small adjustments we can make to improve our sleep quality and circadian rhythm alignment.
💡 Have other ideas that we missed? Feel free to send us a note at info@ompractice.com and we’ll add your suggestions to our next sleep-related post!
Sleep well and sweet dreams ❤️