Look at any fitness magazine, blog, Instagram influencer, and you will be inundated with dozens of new “discoveries” that claim to be the next best thing, promising to bolster your health and “optimizing” your wellness with gimmicks and hacks.

It might be a new diet trend, soft tissue gun, apparel, supplement, or god forbid, another shake weight.

Remember that the old cliche is true: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. There is no way to replace a foundation of good habits and behaviors with gimmicks.

If you don’t do this ONE thing, you can say goodbye to a majority of the gains from all of your efforts…

That one thing… is…

…

zZzZzZz…

Huh? Oh my bad. I fell asleep.

It’s sleep.

Yep. It’s that simple and possibly boring.

Sleep is THE most important factor of health, fitness, performance, and wellness. If we had to rank the main pillars of fitness in terms of importance, sleep will be the number one factor, followed by a three way tie between exercise, nutrition, and stress management.

Sleep essentially affects every process and function in the body from the cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, digestive, and muscular system.

In fact, poor sleep or not enough sleep will negatively impact ALL functions of the body. Every marker of health will suffer. Sleep is so important that a single night of being sleep deprived will negatively impact cardiovascular readiness, cognitive ability, and emotional regulation. There is a good reason why top athletes will invest so much effort into making sure they sleep well. Truck drivers who have a risk of sleep apnea are required to undergo a sleep study and it will be on their license if they require a c-pap machine.

For those of us who really want the bottom line of how it will affect our mental and physical performance, being sleep deprived will impact our hormone profiles so that it will reflect the values of someone much older. Imagine being in your thirties and having the testosterone levels of someone in their forties or fifties. THAT’S how important sleep is.

The Gist of Sleep

Sleep, in simple terms, is when are body grows, repairs, and does maintenance to our brain.

Deep sleep is attributed to repairing our body after heavy workouts and is associated with the greatest levels of secreting growth hormone. If you short sleep, you are severely depriving yourself of performance gains. Beyond growth hormone, sleep deprived individuals have been shown to have significantly lower levels of testosterone. This means less muscle mass, decreased performance, and poor sexual health and performance.

Perhaps even more important or equally important is its effects on brain health i.e. cognitive and emotional health. Sleep is associated with the processes in which metabolites and junk from being awake is cleared out. For one example, this is when you flush out a protein called beta amyloid, a protein that builds up in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. Imagine all of the damage that you do to your brain if these proteins chronically build up in your brain without having a chance to clear them out. In fact, poor sleep patterns during the lifetime is one of the things that are most strongly related to outcomes of Alzheimer’s disease later in life.

A more recent discovery is the role of REM sleep and its role in emotional health and regulation. REM sleep is associated with dreaming. Now, interpreting dreams outside of repeated nightmares (something that we observe with cases of PTSD) has been shown to be wholly unscientific and is beyond what we will discuss here. However, dream sleep, or REM sleep, has been shown to be somewhat of a phase of emotional first aid for our brain and cognitive health. It essentially allows our brain to process emotional and stressful events of the day so that it doesn’t seem as traumatic or stressful the next day.

What has been observed is that patients who suffer from PTSD constantly wake up during REM sleep due to incredibly stressful nightmares. In a somewhat interesting blunder, a group of veterans who were suffering from PTSD were getting treatment for a separate pathology with a cardiac medication. In a beautiful mistake, they also discovered that the medication crossed the blood-brain barrier and somehow allowed these patient’s to sleep through their REM cycle, thus allowing them to dream without waking up. During the treatment cycle, those being treated reported that their symptoms of PTSD were also subsiding.

I don’t think I have to keep going to stress the importance of sleep. This is almost a complete over-simplification of the summary of sleep, but a comprehensive look would span a textbook.

The Negative Impacts of Sleep Deprivation

I have already mentioned few things that sleep will affect, but let’s keep going. Sleep deprivation is so dangerous that the Guinness Book of World Records will not allow an individual to try and beat the record for the longest time without sleep.

As I mentioned earlier, sleep affects every process in the body. Our muscular and cardiovascular performance will suffer from a single night of poor sleep. Our cognitive function and reflexive speed also suffers.

If it can’t get any worse, it’s not just sleeping enough that affects our health, but when and how well we sleep is important as well. In fact, the WHO (World Health Organization, not the band) classifies night shift work as a “likely” carcinogen and increases all cause mortality, meaning that we know for sure that it increases the risk of cancer and shortens life from any cause but we haven’t been able to perform a randomized control trial. The only reason why we haven’t performed an RCT is due to the fact that it would be extremely unethical to do so.

In more practical terms, your day to day functioning will suffer. You will not feel as well and energetic, your physical performance, sexual health, mood, emotional regulation, impulsivity, sociability, and cognitive abilities will all take a turn for the worse. You will not be nearly as productive. This is important in today’s hustle culture, as many say they will sleep when they die. It’s important to note that you will likely get much more done during the day after a night of good sleep than just 4 hours. You will also live a much longer and happier life.

Well Sh*t, Then What Can We Do?

Not all is lost in our world where sleep seems to be in short supply. The guidelines around getting good sleep are relatively simple.

• The general recommendation is for adults to get around 7-9 hours of sleep. This will change between individuals, but it’s a good starting point.
• Go to bed at the same time each night and try to wake up at the same time as well.
• Try to make your sleeping environment as dark as possible. Use blackout curtains or sleeping masks if needed. A good, silk sleeping mask is very comfortable, doesn’t get too warm, and isn’t too expensive. Find them on Amazon.
• Make your bedroom as quiet as possible. If you live in a loud area, soft earplugs are a godsend. They make some specifically for sleeping.
• Make your bedroom as cool as your can tolerate. Our bodies naturally cool off at night and warm up during the day.
• Avoid bright lights and screens at least 2 hours before bedtime.
• Get sunlight first thing in the morning. If this is not possible, make the environment that you are in as bright as you can. We keep hearing about how we need to avoid blue light, but it is actually important to get blue light during the morning and day.
• Exercise during the day or at least 2-3 hours before bedtime.
• Turn down the lights in the evening. A bonus would be to warm up the lights with orange or red hues.
• Don’t eat an excessively large meal right before bed. It may also bode well to avoid fast-acting sugars, as an insulin spike in the middle of the night may disrupt your sleep.

Wrapping Up

This article really only scratches the surface of the science of sleep. There is so much to discuss here that there will likely be follow up articles to expand on this topic.

Some may read this and say that I am grossly over-simplifying the topic of sleep. I admit that I am, but I try to keep my material simple and relatively easy to read.

The bottom line here is to try and make good sleep a priority for your health. Next time, I will expand on the recommendations to continue improving your sleep.

If you would like more information on sleep, Dr. Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep is incredible and breaks down the science into a digestible, easy to understand read.