Selenium: What You Should Know
Autumn is here and the kiddos are back in class which reinstates a school year norm in many families. Bedtimes, alarm clocks, homework, meal planning and other routines abound. While no children live in my own home it got me to thinking about sleep cycles. I can recall my own mother struggling to get us tucked in earlier and earlier throughout August in preparation for the week we went back to school. Younger me of course didn’t see the merit in having to go to bed early and was caught doing all kinds of things under the cover of darkness. If only I could recoup those wasted hours today…
I would wager that the average adult aims for 8 hours but probably ends up with around 6 hours of catching zzz’s per night. I would also wager that the average adult is fairly caffeine dependent which isn’t an entirely great habit. There is however an increasing body of evidence showing that we haven’t always slept the way that most of us do today. Doctors manuals, sleep scientists & historians are all pointing to the idea that we used to sleep not through the night, but in two distinct chunks with a period of waking in between. Things changed with the introduction of street lamps beginning in Paris in 1667 and eventually spreading to become mainstream globally. Our exposure to light sources has changed the way that we evolved to sleep- and not necessarily for the better. Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford says that “Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied”.
There are a number of “alternative” sleep schedules out there such as the polyphasic and biphasic set-ups described here and Uberman’s Sleep Schedule, but there hasn’t been a whole lot of long term research into these over a timeframe longer than 6 months. These largely utilize the time between REM cycles (non-REM) when sleep is “unnecessary” and optimizes what is getting accomplished within the body when ones eyes are shut. The idea of gaining more working hours in the day on account of fewer hours spent with head to pillow comes off as embracing a work to live lifestyle rather than a live to work ideal. Not my personal idea of a great way to live ones life to be honest.
Regardless of whether or not you’re as passionate about your work as those who follow these kinds of schedules, the fact still remains that the body does a lot of important work while you’re sleeping, including during non-REM time. Immune system strengthening, tissue repair, growth & regeneration all happen when your eyes are closed. Those are pretty critical processes. Aging is largely the opposite of these things which leads me to go out on a limb and label sleep as an anti-aging tactic. Tyra Banks has famously stated that “sleep is the most important thing in your makeup bag”. Perhaps just not in 8 hour chunks…
Aspiring top models take note.
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