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Reversing Sleep Debt

By Christine Cioppa

We all know that we need to get enough sleep. Precisely, 7-8 hours is needed for adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Besides creating some hefty dark eye circles, skimping on sleep can affect memory and increase the risk for certain chronic diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes and obesity. Sleep problems are also linked to heart disease and depression.

The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) says not getting enough shut eye can cause people to make more mistakes and be less productive at school or work. NSF also says getting enough sleep helps improve memory.

Recently, sleep expert Lauren Whitehurst, from the Sleep and Cognition Lab at University California, Riverside, discussed her study on sleep and memory. The article, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences this past August, was about memory consolidation during sleep.

Specifically, her study was on autonomic activity and sleep. “When we say the autonomic nervous system, I’m referring to the body: the heart, our lungs, and our gut. All those organs are communicating with our brain…. Our study was one of the first to show that autonomic activity is related to memory processing. In this case, we are looking at heart rate activity.”

Whitehurst says that the scientific literature on sleep and memory over the past 30 years has already established that memories are solidified during sleep.

“I was really interested in the brain-body connection. What are these relationships between the heart and the brain? And then very specifically, in the study, we were looking at memory consolidation…. What we found was, yeah! There is a pretty reliable and predictable relationship between what is going on in your heart—particularly, in this case, how variable your heart is…. Heart rate variability.”

Whitehurst said, “I think the implications are pretty large. Cardiovascular disease is one of the biggest that our health care system is constantly combatting…. What is going on in our body is affecting our ability to remember… affecting our cognition, our learning,” says Whitehurst.

Currently, Whitehurst is studying how suppressing and stimulating the autonomic nervous system affects memory consolidation.

So what can you do now? Helping your memory now still comes down to sleep. Whitehurst offers some specific tips for students:

 

Reversing Sleep Debt

So what happens when you burn the midnight oil too long and are running on fumes, especially during exams?

“If you have two days or even any amount of time of sleep deprivation, you are really unable to remember things the same way that you would if you did get sleep after learning information,” says Whitehurst.

“What I typically say is, really think about the summation of sleep. If you get your 5-6 hours of sleep at night, which isn’t quite enough, and isn’t what’s recommended, but sometimes that is what day-to-day schedules allow, really try to get a nap—a 30- to 45-minute nap.”

If you can’t get in one big nap, try two or three 20-minute naps, she suggests, which can help reduce sleep debt.

 

Study Tip

“I think a lot of times, we say ‘If I stay up late’ or ‘If I cram or if I study really, really hard, I’m going to do much better on this test.’ But sleep has to happen between studying and test taking. So make sleep a priority. Just like you put time aside to study, you have to put time aside for sleep. Make sleep a priority!”

DID YOU KNOW?

After 18 hours of being awake, you may start to function like you’re drunk? —DrousyDriving.org

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