The
average Briton gets six-and-a-half hours' sleep a night, according to
the Sleep Council. Michael Mosley took part in an unusual experiment to
see if this is enough.
It has been known for some time that the amount of sleep people get has, on average, declined over the years.
This has happened for a whole range of reasons, not least
because we live in a culture where people are encouraged to think of
sleep as a luxury - something you can easily cut back on. After all,
that's what caffeine is for - to jolt you back into life. But while the
average amount of sleep we are getting has fallen, rates of obesity and
diabetes have soared. Could the two be connected?
We wanted to see what the effect would be of increasing
average sleep by just one hour. So we asked seven volunteers, who
normally sleep anywhere between six and nine hours, to be studied at the
University of Surrey's Sleep Research Centre.
The volunteers were randomly allocated to two groups. One
group was asked to sleep for six-and-a-half hours a night, the other got
seven-and-a-half hours. After a week the researchers took blood tests
and the volunteers were asked to switch sleep patterns. The group that
had been sleeping six-and-a-half hours got an extra hour, the other
group slept an hour less.
While we were waiting to see what
effect this would have, I went to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford
to learn more about what actually happens when we sleep.
In the Sleep Centre, they fitted me up with a portable
electro-encephalograph, a device that measures brain wave activity.
Then, feeling slightly ridiculous, I went home and had my
seven-and-a-half hours of sleep.
The following day I went to discuss what had happened inside my head during the night with Dr Katharina Wulff.
The first thing she pointed out was that I had very rapidly
fallen into a state of deep sleep. Deep sleep sounds restful, but during
it our brains are actually working hard. One of the main things the
brain is doing is moving memories from short-term storage into long-term
storage, allowing us more short-term memory space for the next day. If
you don't get adequate deep sleep then these memories will be lost.
You might think: "I'll cut back during the week and then make
up for it at the weekend." Unfortunately it doesn't work like that,
because memories need to be consolidated within 24 hours of being
formed.
Since deep sleep is so important for consolidating memories it
is a good idea if you are revising or perhaps taking an exam to make
sure that you're getting a reasonable night's sleep. In one study,
people who failed to do so did 40% worse than their contemporaries.
Deep sleep only lasts for a few hours. My electrode results
showed that during the night my brain went through multiple phases of
another kind of activity, called REM sleep.
"This is the phase when you are usually paralysed - so you
can't move," Wulff explained. But the eye muscles are not paralysed, and
that's why it's called rapid eye movement sleep."
During REM sleep an extraordinary thing happens. One of the
stress-related chemicals in the brain, noradrenalin, is switched off.
It's the only time, day or night, this happens. It allows us to remain
calm while our brains reprocess all the experiences of the day, helping
us come to terms with particularly emotional events.
We get more REM sleep in the last half of the night. Which
means that if you are woken unexpectedly, your brain may not have dealt
with all your emotions - which could leave you stressed and anxious.
Drinking alcohol late at night is not a good idea as it reduces your REM
sleep while it's being processed in your body.
Dr Michael Mosley takes part in a sleep study
Back at the University of Surrey our
sleep volunteers had finished their second week of the experiment. What
we wanted to see was the effect switching from six-and-a-half hours to
seven-and-a-half hours, or vice versa, would have on our volunteers.
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Computer tests revealed that most
of them struggled with mental agility tasks when they had less sleep,
but the most interesting results came from the blood tests that were
run.
Dr Simon Archer and his team at Surrey University were
particularly interested in looking at the genes that were switched on or
off in our volunteers by changes in the amount that we had made them
sleep.
"We found that overall there were around 500 genes that were
affected," Archer explained. "Some which were going up, and some which
were going down."
What they discovered is that when the volunteers cut back
from seven-and-a-half to six-and-a-half hours' sleep a night, genes that
are associated with processes like inflammation, immune response and
response to stress became more active. The team also saw increases in
the activity of genes associated with diabetes and risk of cancer. The
reverse happened when the volunteers added an hour of sleep.
So the clear message from this experiment was that if you are
getting less than seven hours' sleep a night and can alter your sleep
habits, even just a little bit, it could make you healthier. "Have a
lie-in, it will do you good" - that's the kind of health message that
doesn't come along very often.
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