The Importance of Sleep

Sleep is very important. As the parent of two small children, I don't need a study to tell me that not getting enough sleep really sucks. But let's look at a few things we've learned from science about sleep.

Continuity Matters

In a 2014 study published in the journal Psychology and Aging (and available here) by Kristine Wilckens and co-researchers, findings showed that sleep continuity was important for executive function. Interestingly, the researchers noted that it is plausible that lower sleep continuity limits the time spent in slow-wave sleep. Their point was about cognition, but I note that slow-wave sleep is also when Human Growth Hormone is released, meaning your physical recovery suffers when your sleep is interrupted. I can confirm this anecdotally, since my sleep has been interrupted on a fairly regular basis recently by my nine month old son, and my recovery has definitely suffered.

Sleep is Important for Elite Athletes

This article from the Gatorade Sports Science Institute talks about a few different things regarding sleep and elite athletes. I am not surprised that it takes more than 30 hours without sleep to impact anaerobic performance, or that aerobic performance is affected sooner after only 24 hours without sleep. The bottom line is really that sleep is pretty important to athletic performance.

So What?

I'm mainly writing about sleep because I think it is so often overlooked and it's currently one of my biggest problems. I hear people talking about good nutrition on a fairly regular basis, but as far as sleep is concerned I mostly hear about how much coffee or other caffeine people are drinking. As the Gatorade article mentions, regularly not getting enough sleep (less than 6 hours/night) is known from other studies to disturb glucose metabolism and appetite regulation, in addition to compromising immune function, cognitive performance and mood. What this tells me is that it's hard to have good nutrition without having good sleep, because you can't even trust your body to correctly identify your level of hunger.

In my personal experience and from anecdotal evidence from other parents, eating right when you're tired is really hard. A lot of us start craving less healthy foods - in my case, chocolate and chocolate desserts like ice cream and brownies. And we eat because we're tired and we hope that maybe we're just tired because we're hungry, but it doesn't help. So as far as I'm concerned, I worry about getting enough sleep first and nutrition second. I still try to eat healthy when I'm tired, but I also give myself a break when I slip, because I'm only human and I'm doing my best to maintain a healthy relationship to food and avoid the kinds of restrictions and negative thinking that can lead to disordered eating.

Because I haven't been sleeping enough, I'm making more of an effort to go to sleep early until I've caught up on sleep a little more.