Sleep: external influences

Resuming from the previous couple blogs advertising sleep, and consequently, the issues of sleep deprivation, tonight’s late-night segway will delve deep into the environmental factors that might impact your sleep schedule.  It’s astounding the extent of daily habits and routines can serve an impact on our sleep quality.

Looking at sleep from a scientific level, there are two hormones that play an essential role in navigating and processing our natural sleep cycle: Adenosine and Melatonin.

1. Melatonin:  Melatonin (chemically coined N-acetyl-5-methoxy tryptamine) is a hormone secreted by our endocrine system (more specifically the Pineal Gland) as a way for us to maintain circadian rhythm.  As a sleep regulator, Melatonin acts as an inhibitor to our arousal and awareness – thus making us sleepier. While we can ingest melatonin through natural foods and even daily supplements, this hormone usually naturally builds up as we stay awake and go about our daily work. What makes it fascinating however is the sensitivity Melatonin has to light. Publications by the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience have noted the effect of light as a direct inhibitor to melatonin production. As such, exposure to light during and before sleep can have a direct negative consequence towards your quality and ease of which you fall asleep. As an advancing technological society, it’s getting harder and harder to go without light. Light (and most importantly blue light) is practically everywhere and is definitely a major contributing factor to sleep deprivation.

2). Adenosine: While Melatonin is the primary hormone for our internal body clock, Adenosine serves as a quantitative sleep indicator. From a biological perspective, any action we do requires energy. This energy is generally obtained from cellular respiration in which food is broken down as a resource for our body to obtain Adenosine TriPhosphate (ATP), an essential molecule whose degradation releases energy necessary for everyday function. Interestingly, this very same degradation also generates increasing amounts Adenosine whose build up in your body can accumulate stress acting as a natural indicator of tiredness (and thus how much you need sleep). While adenosine builds up as we consume energy, the act of sleeping serves to break down adenosine, resetting our bodies in preparation for the next day.  Interestingly, problems start to happen when we end up with not enough sleep. Being sleep deprived fails to give our body enough time to break up adenosine which may, in turn, lead to an adenosine build up over time.  It is this failure of adenosine breakdown that leads us to feel oh so tired and groggy when we wake up. Naturally, the best solution to feeling tired is a morning cup of coffee. The act of drinking coffee, tea, and numerous other substances serve as a natural stimulant to the central nervous system, invigorating us while at the same time interfering with our bodies natural reception of adenosine in the brain.

As we continue our everyday lives, there will inevitably be times where we are forced to pull an all-nighter (or stay up particularly late).  Under such circumstances, reasonable measure for optimal function and ease of transition into sleep may be to drink tea and reduce exposure to blue light. Surprisingly, tea while acting as a stimulant also possesses notorious calming effects. Technological advances in modern society have also enabled night lights with programs such as Flux (as provided here) that works to exclusively eliminate blue light when working all-nighters.