Sleep Expert Answers Questions From Twitter 💤 | Tech Support | WIRED

hi i'm dr jeffrey iliff a sleep researcher today we're going to be answering your questions on twitter this is shh this is sleep support [Music] at cattywampus it's 5am i can't sleep i'm eating summer sausage what is time what are circadian rhythms well i don't know why you're eating summer sausage at 5 a.m what are circadian rhythms i can answer that circadian rhythm is the drive in your body that entrains all of its functions to the 24-hour light cycle so there's a part of your brain called the supercharismatic nucleus that's the master pacemaker for the circadian rhythm and what it does is it cues off of the light dark cycle so sunrise and sunset to get your brain and actually the rest your body ready to rest at night and ready to act during the day at rg will underscore asks why do we take naps and wake up more tired oh that's a good question because there's good napping and there's bad napping when you wake up after a nap and you feel like you just got hit by a truck it's because what has happened is you started to build what's called sleep inertia so once you start sleeping after you get past a certain point your brain gets into the mode that thinks oh we're doing this for the next eight hours and if you interrupt it after it's gotten past that point it's sort of a rude awakening and that's why you feel super groggy after a long nap that's why when you nap you should actually nap either a very short nap maybe 20 or 30 minutes or 90 minutes so setting an alarm for a 90 minute nap a 90 minute nap is enough time for you to go through an entire sleep cycle so going through shallow sleep to deep sleep up to rem but only once not long enough for you to build a lot of sleep inertia but enough time for you to actually get some of the benefits of sleeping at punk ass book joke says everybody talking about their weird covered dreams and i'm over here like lol what is rem sleep these are actually eeg caps that measure your what's going on inside your brain so that we can see not just whether you're asleep but what stages of sleep you happen to be in so rapid eye movement sleep is the face of sleep connected with dreams it has a couple of weird features to it so in one of the things if we record the electrical activity happening in your brain it actually looks a lot like an awake brain in fact one of the only ways that we can tell that you're in rem sleep and not awake is one of these electrodes here actually connects to the muscles on your face and so we can actually detect the tension or the absence of tension in your face muscles and that's how we know you're in rem sleep not just laying there awake so during rem sleep what's happening is your brain is working to consolidate the memories that you form through the course of the day helping to harden those memories into your long-term memory things that are powerful things that are fearful things that are scary things that create anxiety all of those things are the substance of our dreams that's part of the way that you encode dreams is with fear and pain and emotion so it's probably no wonder that we're all having the same weird covet dream at rusty covey asks how will your brain get rid of waste it isn't sent back into the body to be processed by the organs how does your sleep play a role in it this is a really interesting question it's actually the subject that my lab studies so your brain is very different from the rest of the body in the way that it manages the waste so the brain sits in a pool of water called cerebral spinal fluid and that water helps to cushion the brain from blows that happen and actually helps the the brain which has the kind of the consistency of room temperature butter it helps it to not you know slouch under its own weight during the day time the spaces between the brain cells which are like the pores of this sponge are actually pretty small and pretty narrow so as a result the water that's outside the brain sort of sits on the outside but when you go to sleep the situation completely changes and the spaces between the brain cells open up allowing the water that's on the outside of the brain to actually wash into and through the spaces between the brain cells collecting up the waste that's accumulated through the course of the waking day and so then this waste laden fluid like ammonia that's produced washes out of the brain out into the fluid around the brain and then those lymphatic vessels surrounding the brain collect it up and eventually dump it back into the blood it's like brainwashing but without being in an occult at kbraham 21 asks have you ever wondered what your brain actually looks like when you sleep like i wonder if my neurons are really just beating the snot out of each other and my dreams are the real reason i'm losing brain cells i don't think dreams are the reason you're losing brain cells you can actually see your brain when it's sleeping you can see it by mri sometimes you can see it during neurosurgical procedures the thing about the brain that's really striking is the way that it pulsates so the brain is just this big pulsating mass of tissue and blood so you see it pulsating with the heart rate and you see it pulsating and swelling with the respiratory cycle and there's actually these even low frequency oscillations that happen as blood vessels in the brain dilate and contract those pulsations are actually part of the process driving the clearance of waste into and out of the brain at fxmish asks does anyone that can lucid dream have any tips on how to do it so lucid dreaming think the movie inception is being aware of the fact that you're dreaming when you are so that you can control what's happening around you it's a little fringy but there's actually a little bit of research on the subject so there's some data that suggests that you can use transcranial electrical stimulation so stimulating your brain with electricity at certain frequencies can increase the likelihood that a person who normally can't lucid dream actually can be able to there's also some approaches in sleeping itself that seems to increase people's ability to lucid dream you set an alarm for five hours after you go to sleep and then wake up right after you wake up you think to yourself i'm going to be dreaming i want to wake up during my dream repeat that to yourself again and again and again as you go back to sleep your chances of go being able to know that you're in a dream when you go back into sleep actually increase between a hundred percent to a thousand percent so it may be either through stimulation or maybe through some cognitive tricks you can actually increases your chances of being able to lucid dream caramel cookie asks so it's like sleepwalking a real thing yes sleepwalking is a real thing so sleepwalking is more common in kids and in adolescents it tends to disappear as people move through adolescence into adulthood the interesting thing about sleep sleepwalking is that your brain is asleep and yet you can accomplish very complicated tasks so when you're sleeping your brain is supposed to be a little bit disconnected from your awareness and it's supposed to be disconnected from how your body moves sometimes those connections they can get opened or they can get closed at the wrong time so you see things like sleep talking or sleep moaning you see people who have something called rem sleep behavior disorder which is where you actually act out the things that are happening in your dreams sometimes even violently sometimes injuring your bed partner so there's a bunch of different types of things some of them interesting some of them a little scary that can happen when the processes governing sleep and your body become misaligned at swank farm asks how many types of sleep do we have you actually see that your brain is doing a couple of distinct things through the course of the night one set of that is called rem sleep or rapid eye movement sleep and that's the part of sleep that's most associated with with dreaming there's also non-rem sleep non-rem sleep sort of breaks into three different categories there's n1 and 2 and m3 and one is the shallowest type of sleep so that's maybe the first 10 minutes after you first fall asleep and that's the time when you're sort of most awake it's easy to sort of pop back up away and to sleep is sort of the mid layer on your way to deep sleep during that phase you're a little deeper in and your body starts to actually do some funny things so that's when sometimes people twitch and move a little bit during n2 sleep the deepest sleep is called n3 sleep or slow wave sleep and during that time if we record what's happening in your brain your brain is actually oscillating between states where everything's on and everything's off and it's doing those oscillations about one every second those are called slow oscillations that slow wave sleep is the deepest part of sleep and then you'll come back up into rem sleep where you'll typically do dreaming one of those cycles is about 90 minutes or so during the course of the night you go through several of those cycles maybe three or five of them later on in the night there's less slow wave sleep and more ram which is one of the reasons why maybe we remember the dreams that we're having late in the night better atmoniagre asks what is sleep apnea i would have asked google but i prefer a more simple answer sleep apnea is a condition where you stop breathing several times through the course of the night so it can actually be a physical obstruction to your airway that keeps you from sleeping regardless of the cause the result's bad your brain is incredibly active so the the neurons in your brain are firing trillions and trillions of times a second and all of that activity takes a huge amount of oxygen and glucose and energy to keep it going and every time you stop breathing during the night you're depriving your brain for just a little while of the energy that it needs and of the oxygen that it needs and it isn't until your brain is screaming for more oxygen that you actually gasp yourself away and as you add that up over the course of many nights over weeks and months and years the added stress that that puts on not just your brain but actually your whole body can increase your risk of cardiovascular disease like heart attacks and strokes diabetes the good news is that sleep apnea much of it is actually pretty treatable with an approach called cpap which is basically just a mask that goes over your face and it uses a little pump to sort of force air in and out and the forcing that air in and out of you out of your lungs helps to keep your airway open and keep you from stopping breathing during the night the bad news is many more of us actually have sleep apnea than know it what does it look like how do i know if i have sleep apnea well common symptoms include heavy snoring waking up gasping if that sounds like you might be worth getting checked out with your physician athalia clara asks what causes insomnia because i literally cannot go to sleep at a decent time no matter how tired i am upside down smiley upside down smiling upside down smiley well insomnia is pretty common so it's not being able to either go to sleep or it's not being able to stay asleep once you are asleep there are genetic causes of insomnia sleep apnea can cause insomnia but frequently it's the stress in our lives that can cause either acute insomnia which is insomnia that just happens every so often or chronic insomnia that happens all the time so things that are important for sleep hygiene include going to sleep at the same time every day and waking up at the same time every day so that your body can entrain to a certain rhythm that can become predictable it's staying off the screens for an hour before you go to bed it's sleeping in a cool dark room where that isn't also your office so that you can sort of sort of focus in on the process of either having sex or going to sleep which is really the only two things you should be doing in your bedroom atmashcelelo asks what causes sleep paralysis had it twice last night scream emoji that sounds like kind of a rough night sleep paralysis is when you're laying in bed you're sort of coming out of sleep or sometimes it's when you're going into sleep you're aware of your environment around you you perceive what's happening but you can't move the rest of your body you're sort of paralyzed and sometimes it can be accompanied by visual or auditory hallucinations or feelings of fear or tear or even feelings of suffocation so it can be completely terrifying your body has a couple of disconnect switches that it throws so that all the activity happening in your brain while you're dreaming or during your rem sleep doesn't cause you to act out your actions in the world around you in sleep paralysis those disconnect switches seem to get a little jumbled up so that the switch that disconnects you from awareness of your of your environment sort of gets opened so you become aware even while the switch disconnecting you from your body is still closed if we do an eeg study in people who are having sleep paralysis episodes we actually seem that they still seem to be in rem sleep so even though while you're aware of what's around you your brain is still dreaming and your body still thinks you're asleep it's just that you're stuck feeling awake at yatu sabes who asks how do sleeping pills work it depends a little bit on the sleeping pills that you're talking about so let's start with the simpler ones so a lot of people take melatonin to help them sleep melatonin is actually a naturally occurring molecule in your body that is part of how the body induces drowsiness it's actually a part of the circadian sleep drive to help sort of prime the brain to get ready to sleep other commonly used sleep medications include drugs called sedative hypnotics like ambien which is a commonly used one and also benzodiazepines which are sort of anti-anxiety medications that can be used sometimes to help with sleep those drugs are very powerful drugs they're available only by prescription they have the potential for forming addiction and for habit forming so they need to be used under the supervision of of a physician they work by targeting a neurotransmitter system in the brain which dampens down neural activity and to reduce arousal in the brain to help you sleep many of the sleep medications don't produce the same type of natural cycling of sleep that your brain wants so if you suffer from an insomnia or if you have other sleep issues other approaches like improving your sleep habits or even cognitive behavioral therapy can be actually more helpful in helping your brain to sleep naturally than trying to accomplish that with the drug at talia glasgow asks is it really true that you can never catch up on sleep if yes i'm actually so well you kind of are the sleep that you lose is sort of gone forever and many of the benefits of that sleep whether that's memory consolidation or whether that's the rejuvenation that happens in the brain you sort of miss the boat but there is something that builds up the longer your sleep and the less sleep that you get that's called sleep debt and what sleep debt is is the drive to sleep more that builds through the course of the day and it builds with sleep restriction and so when you go to sleep that sleep that is relieved and sort of paid off so there is a sense in which you can catch up on sleep an interesting study that was measuring waist clearance out of the brain showed that if a person was kept up all night the slowing of brain clearance that happens in a person who stays up all night actually it took seven days for it to catch up so even the second day after the sleep deprivation it hadn't even caught up so you don't necessarily catch up on lost sleep within a day or two it may take much longer at ferlingberg asks how long does coffee affect your sleep system the answer is that it's longer than most people think so the active ingredient in coffee is caffeine which targets a receptor in the brain that helps to turn off neurons and so by blocking that receptor it turns on neurons that's how coffee has its main effect on on you being awake now the half-life of coffee in the blood is between four and six hours which means it takes the better part of half a day for it to clear out of your body so if you want to not have caffeine influencing your sleep when you go to bed you probably need to be stopping drinking caffeinated coffee or other drinks like monster or these other energy drinks probably around two or three in the afternoon one of the things that caffeine does is it sort of keeps your brain aroused it keeps your brain awake maybe not all the way away because so you might be skimming through the shallow parts of the shallow phases of sleep and not getting into those really deep phases of sleep that are necessary for brain health at lindsay chat asks would love to get your tips on how to handle jet lag what do you find effective one approach is ahead of your trip if you can do this if your schedule allows you you can start moving your sleep wake cycle back an hour a day so that by the time you leave you're within an hour or two of your target time zone so if you're going to europe and it's a six hour difference six days ahead start moving your time to go to sleep ahead one hour one hour one hour so that by the time you leave you're going to bed at 6 pm but the good news is by the time you get into europe jet lag will be smaller at that juan pablo how do you track your sleep of course most of us don't have eeg systems in your house unless you're some kind of weirdo so most of us use an approach called actigraphy to measure our sleep and so that's like your apple watch or a fitbit and what that does is it it's measuring your movement and inferring from your motion it's good at detecting when you're in bed when you're asleep it's not as good as detecting what kind of sleep you're in so when your apple watch tells you or your fitbit tells you well i had this much deep sleep maybe you did maybe you didn't but in terms of knowing how much sleep you're getting which is probably the more important thing it's actually pretty good for that at bikie84 asks ran on four hours of sleep going to sleep to wake up in two hours are there negative effects of lack of sleep was that a dancing bear it probably wasn't a dancing bear that was probably the visual hallucinations from you not sleeping enough the human brain needs seven to nine hours of sleep for adults kids need more teenagers they seem to need a lot more if you don't get enough sleep if you go a night without sleep we can actually measure deficits in your memory in your attention in your processing and response speed and in your decision making so your lack of sleep you know that it affects how you feel today and tomorrow but there's emerging data that suggests that long-term lack of sleep or long-term poor sleep may actually be setting the the stage for chronic diseases like diabetes or heart disease or even cancers some pretty recent data suggests that actually poor sleep especially in mid-life may be setting the stage for risk for developing dementia later on in life in your 60s 70s and 80s so how you treat your brain today may be influencing the mind that you get to have in 20 or 30 years at last moonicorn asks if dreams are your brain trying to sort out memories and information while you sleep or work through general data what is my brain doing why is it creating places i totally forget when i wake up but in my dreams it's like i have my own separate memory so all of us have sort of these uncanny dreams that are weird mishmashes of beluga whales you know disneyland vacations and our mother-in-law so what's going on there one of the things that the brain might be doing is it's actually using our memories putting them together to try to generate new insights and that maybe it's that that sort of novel recombination process is where human creativity and maybe even human inspiration comes from in terms of why you don't remember it maybe it's a little bit like your laptop the way that it does disc maintenance during the night so while it's doing its defragmentation the screen's off the keys aren't lit but it's because that's something that's for the computer it's not for you the user it's not for the outside world at an amnesis 80 says you know what bugs me why do we need to sleep i mean i know the biology behind it but why what's the purpose of sleep well first i have to say that you probably don't know the biology behind sleep if you're asking this question but you shouldn't feel bad because the reality is we really don't understand completely why it is that we sleep we have some hints so at a cellular level though we see that some interesting things are happening so the brain is made up of trillions of connections between all the nerve cells those connections are your motions they're your thoughts they're your memories and you're making new connections constantly but some of those connections are important the connections like how do i get away from a saber-toothed tiger but some of those are less important like the 19th cat video that you watched on youtube last night and so if your brain kept all the connections every single day it would become this clogged up rat's nest of information and connection so you'd never be able to think your way through anything so during sleep connections that are important the ones that are connected to emotions or that are powerful those actually firm up and the ones that are less important the weak ones actually get trimmed away there's actually cells in your brain that eat the extra connections while you're asleep and so if you don't sleep those processes of firming up and of pruning don't get to happen which is why we think it has such an important role in memory all right so those are all the questions for the day there are some really awesome ones out there the big takeaway is your brain needs sleep to be healthy and it wants to sleep our job as sleepers is to try to get out of the way try to set the stage for it to do the thing that it wants to do thank you for watching sleep support

Channel: WIRED

Views: 2,114,722

Keywords: bad sleep, control lucid dreams, dr. jeffrey iliff, dream expert, dreams expert, expert on sleep, good sleep, good sleep explained, ilif, innovation, lucid dreams, ott tech support, science & technology, sleep explained, sleep researcher, sleep support, sleep tech support, sleeping expert, sleeping explained, sleeping well, tech support sleep, why do we sleep, wired, wired tech support

Id: PvDq0U1K5Ss

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Gazelle0520]

Explanation by Angmo: Brain activity, stimulation, REM sleep, etc. and all the scientific theory and jargons.

Nahhh... things work differently in Asia and we have a simpler explanation - you were sat on by Kena Tindih Hantu (Night Hag). xD