The World's Greatest Miracle Drug

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Why do I stay awake so much later at night when in New York compared to LA?

How much of our sleep patterns are biological versus behavioral, or impacted by our environment?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with sleep. In high school, I was most interested in the recovery benefits of sleep and how it was a secret weapon to improve running performance. Then, when I first arrived at college, like any fresh college student, I mistakenly thought I was invincible and could get by on 5 hours of sleep. Being both a night owl and an early riser works for a few days, but it doesn’t take long before your body and mind start to break down. After months of running on empty, I realized I needed to make some changes and reprioritize sleep.

At the same time, over the past few years, there’s been a lot of research coming out about the benefits of sleep, there’s a growing number of sleep trackers, and people are starting to grow accustomed to the idea that getting better sleep is one of the most important things we can do for our health.

But with all sorts of contradictory advice out there, it can be confusing to navigate. How many hours of sleep do we actually need? Should we take naps? What do I do if I have insomnia?

We’re going to dive into it all.

A brief background on the history of sleep

To understand sleep, let’s start with a guy who studies it for a living — Robert Ekirch. Ekirch was doing research for a book on sleep and how older societies used to think about nighttime.

He found mentions of the terms “first sleep” and “second sleep” in societies back in the 1600s. As he dug deeper, he found mentions of the same terms across Italy, France, Germany, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America.

The main takeaway from his findings was that most people who ever lived broke up their sleep into two parts — a concept called “biphasic sleep.”

… that is until the Industrial Revolution.

In the late 18th century, the “accoutrements of modernity” (clocks, caffeine, and the modern 9-5 work schedule) took this idea of biphasic sleep and smushed it into one single block.

Electricity and other forms of artificial light delayed bedtimes, as people could now stay up later to eat, drink, read, or do any number of things.

Caffeine also made earlier wakeups easier to bear for the newly needed factory workers. (Side note: a lot of people believe coffee actually kickstarted the Industrial Revolution, but we’ll save that topic for another day.)

Biphasic sleep is still commonplace in some parts of the world (think siestas in many southern European cultures), but it’s no longer the norm.

But why was biphasic sleep a thing to begin with?

How we evolved to sleep

Two-part sleep might just be the way we are biologically meant to sleep. In the 1990s, a study by the NIH deprived a cohort of people any artificial lights at night.

What happened?

They reverted back to their pre-industrial two-phase sleep habits. Their circadian rhythms literally changed themselves!

But sleep is incredibly diverse, both across different people and across different species of animals.

Certain cultures, such as hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, actually always had the same one-phase sleep that we have in our modern industrialized world.

Every animal species has different sleep patterns too — cows chew while they sleep, some birds fly while they sleep, and elephant seals only sleep 2 hours per day (broken into multiple 20 minute power naps).

We all sleep differently. Some of us are night owls, others morning larks. Some people never nap, while others swear by it.

Let’s dig into how it works.

Waking during the night

Within a given night of sleep, the first part is called deep sleep (or “slow wave sleep”), which is considered high quality sleep.

As we go about our days, a chemical called adenosine (which causes sleepiness) accumulates in our brains. Deep sleep is when this chemical drains out. But about halfway through the night, we’ve pretty much burnt through all of this adenosine, so the 2nd half of the night is driven by our circadian rhythms.

Why is sleep so important?

High quality sleep is like a life-enhancing drug — it stabilizes our mood, relieves stress, boosts our immune system, makes us more productive, and prevents long-term diseases.

But the irony of it all is that if we worry too much about sleep and take it too seriously, we actually have a harder time falling asleep. Especially for us Type A people, this can be problematic.

Sleep Deprivation vs. Insomnia

According to Dr. Jade Wu, a sleep researcher at Duke University (gross), sleep deprivation and insomnia are two completely different things.

Sleep deprivation is when you don’t have enough opportunity to sleep (think the college student studying and partying all day and night, or the investment banker working for days and nights on end).

Insomnia, on the other hand, is when you can’t fall asleep, even if you have enough time set aside to do so. In many cases, people with insomnia take sleep super seriously, but they have an underlying anxiety that prevents them from falling asleep.

Sleep deprivation tends to be a greater long-term health risk, but insomnia creates more anxiety. Insomnia can cause people to go about their lives feeling miserable because they haven’t gotten quality rest. So even if the long-term negative health effects aren’t proven, insomnia can have detrimental consequences such as tiredness, crankiness, or GI issues.

All that said, insomnia is really only bad for us when it’s interfering with our daily functioning and doing things that are key to living, like socializing, working, and enjoying ourselves.

The challenge then is understanding just how important sleep is, without freaking out about it too much.

The most important thing about sleep — circadian health

We all have circadian rhythms, which are the biological clocks in our bodies that regulate most of our functioning.

But the crazy thing?

If we were stuck in a cave with zero indication of what time it was, we would naturally wake up about 20 minutes later each day — and that cycle would continue all the way around the clock!

Scientists don’t really know why this happens, and circadian clocks vary from person to person. Some people’s clocks are less than 24 hours, while others’ are as high as 25 hours.

People with longer circadian clocks tend to be night owls (like those who find themselves staying up too late), while those with shorter circadian clocks tend to be morning larks (like those of us who doze off at 9pm).

Evolutionarily speaking, this variation among people was actually healthy in our tribal days. If all of us went to sleep at the same time, predators would take advantage of us and we would be toast.

But with a variation in sleep schedules between individual members of the tribe, we had “night watchmen” would could stay alert late into the night, while morning people could rise early to sharpen tools and prepare for the day ahead.

Today, most teens are hardwired to be night owls. Younger people tend to be more sleep-deprived than older people, which is likely due to earlier school start times that aren’t in sync with their circadian clocks.

Night Owls vs. Morning Larks

So apparently this idea of “night owls” and “morning larks” isn’t just astrology — it comes from real biological phenomena. Chemically speaking, melatonin is the main cause.

Melatonin is a “timekeeping” hormone that tells our bodies to get sleep. It tends to ramp up in the evening, which is our body telling us that it’s nighttime, and it peaks in the middle of the night, before falling early in the morning.

This curve is called the “melatonin curve,” and the shape and size of its rise and fall varies from person to person. This variation is where we get differences in our natural tendencies to go to sleep at different times.

Morning people have curves that rise earlier (like 4 or 5pm), and they’re ready to sleep by 9 or 10pm.

Night owls’ curves, on the other hand, might not rise until 7 or 8pm, which is why they may not even think about sleeping until midnight or later.

This difference in melatonin curves across ages explains why so many college kids have productive work sessions late at night, while many of our parents and grandparents enjoy waking up well before the sunrise.

Personally, I’m in the minority of young people here and tend to get sleepy by 9pm but naturally look forward to early mornings.

While biology plays a large role, some of our circadian rhythms are behavioral too. A lot of us had more free time (or at least flexibility over our schedules) in college compared to when we started working full-time jobs and have less of a choice on how early our day starts.

But, as we know, our environment can change us.

A study by Kenneth Wright in Colorado took groups of both natural morning larks and night owls camping, where they had no access to artificial light or electronics. After a week of being naturally in sync with the sun, both groups’ melatonin curves shifted, and they all became morning people.

So apparently we can actually change our biological clocks — and light exposure plays the main role.

In our own lives, we could apply this insight by finding times of day where our melatonin curves are at the lowest to do the most important, high impact things at those times (while doing the more mindless things at times when melatonin is higher).

How do we know what our natural melatonin curve looks like?

Ask ourselves — if I had a two week long vacation, when would I naturally wake up and do things? If you’re a college student, what time of day would you prefer to take an exam?

Whatever we naturally gravitate towards probably tells us our natural melatonin curve.

Can some people thrive on less sleep?

We all probably know someone who says they’re “built different” and only need 4 hours of sleep.

However, only around 1% of the population actually falls into this category.

Far more people think they are “short sleepers” than the number who actually are. The reality is that most people who say this are just chronically sleep deprived.

While many of us can “get by” on 4-6 hours of sleep, we’re probably damaging our bodies and not functioning as high as we could be (or think we are) with more sleep.

Living fast-paced lives, pounding red bulls, and forgetting about sleep might work while we’re young, but it often leads to health issues later in life.

So what can we do to sleep better?

Now that we’ve dug into the science behind sleep and the history of how we evolved to sleep as we do today, what can we do to improve our own sleep?

1. To cure insomnia, it might actually be better to spend less time in bed.
   By doing other things besides laying bed, we can teach ourselves to have higher quality sleep, since we’ll be sleepier when we do go to bed. Ironically, when we spend less time trying to fall asleep, the sleep tends to come.
   

2. Create an environment that is more welcoming to sleep that improves our personal relationship with sleep.
   If you can’t sleep do whatever you enjoy! We don’t want to be “dreading nighttime” — we want to associate the nighttime with comfort, something we look forward to.
   

3. Get exposure to natural sunlight as early as possible.
   As Derek Thompson describes it, “deep down inside of us is a caveman that wants to wake up 20 minutes earlier each day.” Sunlight timing is a way to naturally adjust our body’s natural melatonin curves.
   

4. Find the routine that works for us.
   It could be as simple as a 20-30 minute ritual before bed that makes us feel comfortable and cues us to sleep. For example, my grandpa watches the same episodes of “Everybody Loves Raymond” every night; and like clockwork, he falls right asleep.
   

5. Be more aware of dietary & lifestyle choices.
   Beyond the things mentioned above are the obvious ones — alcohol has clear negative effects on sleep, but if we are going to drink, we can do it earlier in the day and try to hydrate well to minimize these impacts. Similarly, caffeine is best limited to earlier in the day for most people.

Similar to investment strategies, the best we can hope to do is find what personally works for us and stick to it. By becoming more aware of the science and history behind sleep, we can be more intentional about how the lifestyle choices we make affect our sleep.

After all, we spend a third of our lives doing this weird thing, so it’s probably worth understanding it.

-Owen

This post was inspired by Derek Thompson's interview with Dr. Jade Wu on understanding insomnia.

Fresh Finds

Chimp Empire (Netflix)

Docuseries | 4 Episodes

Randomly came across this new series on Netflix and thought I’d check it out. The same guy that directed "My Octopus Teacher” also directed this series, which is essentially a a year’s footage of Ngogo chimps in Uganda. The storytelling here is incredible — it feels far more like a historical conquest or cutthroat thriller than a nature documentary. It’s mind-blowing just how similar these animals are to humans with their range of emotions, desire for power, and need for belonging. Maybe we really are just domesticated primates.

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