Personal Resilience

Dr. Brecher: Hello, I’m here to talk about the importance of sleep as a learning strategy and as a thriving strategy in our lives, generally and specifically, as students. So I want to pose the following question to you: what do you need to know if getting a good night’s sleep is your choice or a new habit? What do you need to understand about sleep in order to feel that it’s worthwhile investing in making it a priority on a regular basis?

So we’re talking about sleep as a way to thrive and as a way to learn. And I want to start off by really posing a series of questions that you may find very helpful to simply answer as I go through them in your own mind and jotting things down.

So how many hours of sleep do you typically get on a weekday and is it different than the number of hours of sleep you get on a weekend? How many mornings do you wake up feeling really refreshed? Is it most days? Occasionally? Almost never? Do you have a wind-down period before going to bed? Now, what are you doing in bed other than sleeping? Are you eating and drinking? Are you talking on the phone? Are you watching Netflix or Prime? Are you working on to-do lists, studying, writing assignments, worrying? And how often do you find yourself taking a nap because you’re absolutely exhausted and you’re dozing off without planning to? How often do you find yourself using the snooze button, delaying that wake-up? Do you often pull all-nighters? And in what ways does your sleep pattern shift when you aren’t actively taking classes, like when you’re on holiday? Or during periods of time where you’re just working but not taking a class? How long does it take you to fall asleep? And typically, how many hours do you actually sleep? So I’m posing this as a 24-hour challenge. All of us know about time management. We have to find time in our schedule for all of our responsibilities, everything that we have to do and that we want to do. So it’s attending class, working, study time, exercise, go to the gym, food shopping, time to eat, social time, family time, all that has to fit into that 24-hour day. Sleep management is about making a plan for a good night’s sleep every night and making it a priority. And what if you scheduled sleep first, make sure you got the correct number of hours of sleep that you need. And we’ll be talking about that shortly. And making sure that you do that on a regular basis. Students did a survey at Ryerson of other students. About 1,400 students answered this survey across undergraduate years primarily. And they found that five out of six students stated that lack of sleep affects their productivity. And then when asked do you get enough sleep, 60% said outright “no”, another 11% said they weren’t sure. 74% of these students stated that they got between five to seven hours of sleep at night, which is considerably less than the seven to nine hours of sleep that most adults need most nights. I want to introduce you to Matt Walker, who’s a neuroscientist from the University of Berkeley and he talks about the perils of an all-nighter. Let’s watch.

[Dr. Brecher plays a TED talk entitled “Sleep is your superpower—Matt Walker.” Matt Walker is on the stage facing the audience.]

Matt Walker: Here’s the data. Here in this study, we decided to test the hypothesis that pulling the all-nighter was a good idea. So we took a group of individuals, and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups: a sleep group and a sleep-deprivation group. Now the sleep group, they’re going to get a full eight hours of slumber. But the deprivation group, we’re going to keep them awake in the laboratory under full supervision. There’s no naps or caffeine, by the way, so it’s miserable for everyone involved. And then the next day, we’re going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner. And we’re going to have them trying to learn a whole list of new facts as we’re taking snapshots of brain activity. And then we’re going to test them to see how effective that learning has been. And that’s what you’re looking at here on the vertical axis.

[Matt Walker shows a column chart with two columns entitled “Sleep” and “No sleep”. The “No sleep” bar is 40% shorter than the “sleep” bar.]

When you put those two groups head to head, what you find is a quite significant 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep. I think this should be concerning considering what we know is happening to sleep in our education populations right now. In fact, to put that in context, it would be the difference in a child acing an exam versus failing miserably. 40%. And we’ve gone on to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities.

[Next to the chart, a 3D illustration of a brain appears. It is replaced with an illustration of a person’s brain. The hippocampus is highlighted.]

And there’s a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain called the hippocampus. And you can think of the hippocampus, almost like the informational inbox of your brain; it’s very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them.

[Next to the hippocampus illustration, a column chart appears. The vertical axis reads “Brain activity”. The first bar, entitled “Sleep”, indicates a high brain activity. While the bar entitled “No sleep” is negative.]

And when you look at the structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet, in those people who are sleep-deprived, we actually couldn’t find any significant signal whatsoever. So it’s almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox, and any new incoming files, they were just being bounced. You couldn’t effectively commit your experiences to memory. So that’s the bad that can happen if I were to take sleep away from you. But let me just come back to that control group for a second. Do you remember those folks that got a full eight hours of sleep? Well, we can ask a very different question. What is it about the physiological quality of your sleep when you do get it, that restores and enhances your memory and learning ability each and every day? And by placing electrodes all over the head, what we’ve discovered is that there are big powerful brainwaves that happen during the very deepest stages of sleep, that have riding on top of them, these spectacular bursts of electrical activity that we call sleep spindles.

[A new slide appears and includes three elements: the “Sleep” bar that is 40% higher than the “No sleep” bar, a side picture of a woman lying in a bed, electrodes on her head and an image of brainwaves overridden by bursts of electrical activity.]

And it’s the combined quality of these deep sleep brainwaves that acts like a file transfer mechanism at night. Shifting memories from a short-term vulnerable reservoir to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain.

Dr. Brecher: So it’s a wonderful TED talk, I would strongly encourage you to check it out. But for our purposes today, I think Matt Walker really underscores an incredibly important set of facts, which is that when we sleep, we learn. And when we don’t get adequate sleep, it is much harder to learn and retain new information, and stored in long-term memory.

[A PowerPoint slide, entitled “Sleepiness Threshold”, appears; it includes a chart. The horizontal axis shows different times of the day. The sleep drive is illustrated by short or high arrows. At the top of the chart, a dotted line represents the sleepiness threshold. Daytime and nighttime are represented with the drawing of a sun and a moon.]

So moving on, to give you a little bit more information about how we sleep. I want to talk about a sleep drive, which is the body’s natural need for sleep that builds over time. So from the moment we wake up in the morning, let’s say you’re up at six or seven, it will build over the course of a day until let’s say 11 or 12 at night, you go to sleep, sleep drive drops. But then it starts up again when we wake up the next morning. So it’s a constant cycle of the need for sleep increasing and then decreasing. Well, what happens if you take a nap?

Let’s say two in the afternoon, you take a nap, your drive drops, it then makes you delay your need for sleep, let’s say to two in the morning instead of midnight, and then if you’re going to get the right number of hours of sleep, your sleep drive won’t drop fully until eight in the morning when you’re ready for your cycle.

[On the chart, pieces of tape illustrate a new sleep pattern where the sleep drive goes down at 2 pm, then up until 2 am then down again until 8 am.]

So in effect, you’ve created kind of a jetlag situation for yourself that the nap in the afternoon interferes with your normal sleep drive, and then throws off your sleep rhythm. It’s a little bit like having a snack just before dinner, you kind of ruin your appetite for dinner. It’s the same kind of idea. Now there are some people who say a 20-minute power nap really is a game-changer for them and it works really well and it doesn’t interfere with their falling asleep at night. Great. But if you find that taking a nap, whether you plan to or not, can interfere with your sleep pattern, it’s something to consider avoiding.

[A new PowerPoint slide, entitled How does a good night’s sleep impact us?”, appears and it compares the increases and decreases.]

So Russell Foster, another neuroscientist who, by the way, has a wonderful TED talk as well, talks about what happens when we do get a good night’s sleep. Well, all kinds of things increase that we would like to see. So we would like to see an increase in concentration, our capacity to make good decisions, sense of creativity, our social skills are better. And even our physical markers of health, our capacity to have a strong and robust immune system are all linked to a good night’s sleep. And it also results in decreasing the kinds of things that we don’t like to have, like being really moody or feeling really stressed or angry and impulsive. An interesting fact that you might want to consider is in all the diagnoses of mental illness, disturbed sleep is a common thread throughout each and every one of them. So it’s implicated in depression, and all of the anxiety disorders, in trauma in all kinds of different kind of emotional distress, disturbed sleep is a factor.

[The slide changes to a new one entitled “Which of these interfere with sleep?” It lists several items. Substances: alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, cold medication; Wide awake in bed: reading, computer/phone, studying, to-do lists, thinking about sleep; emotional state: stress, anxiety; pets; room temperature: too hot; exercise before bed.]

It turns out, there are a lot of things that can interfere with having a good night’s sleep. Different substances can either influence your capacity to fall asleep or to stay asleep. So alcohol being one of them, you may fall asleep fairly easily. But you find yourself perhaps waking up in the middle of the night unable to stay asleep. Emotional states can interfere with sleep, if you’re highly stressed or anxious, it’s difficult to fall asleep. Or you may find yourself waking up really early in the morning and being unable to go back to sleep. Pets can interfere with sleep simply because they may want to play when you’re sleeping. Doing all kinds of things in bed that are not sleep-related. So reading, being on your phone or computer, studying, even thinking about sleep. The best way to think about your bed is that two things should happen there, one or two things: either sleep or intimacy, but really nothing else. When we are too warm, it’s difficult for us to fall asleep or stay asleep. So it’s always better to make sure your bedroom is a little cooler if that’s possible, if it’s opening a window or having a fan whatever might be available. And also doing a robust exercise, kind of cardio, just before bed can interfere with sleep. It’s better to do that in the earlier part of the day. Doing stretching or yoga or something like that, that’s fine, but I’m talking about a real cardio workout can be difficult.

[A new slide, entitled “Sleep changes”, shows the 4 cycles of sleep: wakefulness, REM sleep, illustrated by green horizontal bars, light non-REM sleep illustrated by pink horizontal bars, and deep non-REM sleep illustrated by red horizontal bars.]

So it turns out that while we’re sleeping, our brain is not inactive. There’s a lot going on during that time, much of it in service of our waking lives. So we sleep in cycles, 90-minutes cycles that repeat through the night. In fact, these 90-minute cycles also repeat during the day, except we’re not sleeping, we’re having other kinds of cycles. And in each cycle, we have REM sleep, which is rapid eye movement, which is when we’re dreaming. And you’ll notice that these green segments bars throughout the cycles get longer as the night wears on. We have light sleep, that’s indicated by the pink here, that also gets longer throughout. And then we have the deep sleep, in this dark red here. And you’ll notice with deep sleep is that we have the longest periods of deep sleep in the first two cycles of our sleep. Why is this important? Different things are happening in our brains during each of these cycles, and some of them are really important for learning. So during light sleep, I think if it is like a broom kind of sweeping away all the things that we no longer need to remember from one day to the next. Deep Sleep is the most essential as a learning strategy. It is when we consolidate and store new information into long-term memory. And REM sleep is rapid eye movement is when we’re dreaming and that’s when we have very creative and innovative solutions to problems and insights. And what’s important about deep sleep is that if you have a choice to pull an all-nighter for an exam the next day or to study while you can and then get a good night’s sleep, chances are that’s the better bet because you will have really learned and remembered what you had studied the day before when you have to perform the day. And in fact, Matt Walker talks about when we sleep before we learn something new, so when we wake up refreshed had a good night’s sleep, it enables us to absorb and imprint new memories into the brain. So that’s how it’s useful for learning new information. And then while we’re sleeping, we talked about the surrounding sleep, we’re able to take those memories from short-term and move them into long-term. So Walker refers to this as future-proofing that information, making sure that we’ll remember it in the future. And as well, sleep leads to a three-fold increase in creativity and problem-solving, by integrating new information with what we already know. So if you’re engaged in a program that requires you to be creative and innovative, you might want to be thinking, “Am I getting enough sleep to really be my best in terms of those creative solutions?” I want to talk about a concept called “social jetlag.”

[An illustration of a plane flying from daytime to nighttime appears.]

So most people are familiar with jetlag, which is when your body clock is not the same as the time where you’ve just travelled to by plane, so maybe three-hour difference, or seven-hour difference, and it can be very disconcerting, where you know, you might be really tired, and everybody else is just waking up or you’re really alert and they’re going to sleep, it can be really off. Well, it turns out, we can do the same thing to our bodies in a social context, which is, let’s say you’re a morning lark, you’d like to wake up early and go to bed relatively early, 10 11 at night, and for a whole set of different reasons, you end up staying up several hours later on a regular basis, because you’re doing shift work, or because you’re caregiving, or because you live with people who are night owls, and they like to interact late into the night. And so what ends up happening is you’re leaving your optimal window for sleep, and you’re sleeping kind of at the wrong time for you. And as a result, you don’t get as restorative a sleep. So sleeping in your optimal sleep window can be very, very helpful.

What about falling asleep? So it turns out there are different strategies all kind of connected to in that one hour or half an hour before you’re planning to go to sleep. What are you doing? Are you doing what you’ve been doing all day, kind of busy, active? Or do you give yourself the opportunity to what’s referred to as kind of like landing the plane, slowly descending into kind of slowing down? So can you take a hot bath? Can you read a relaxing book, can you meditate, write in your journal, can you do some gentle stretches, and also perhaps listen to quiet music, anything to kind of slow you down? It’s also important not to have very bright lights on in that buffer zone. And it also turns out that taking a hot bath, it’s called the warm bath effect. Intuitively, we know we tend to feel much more relaxed after a bath. But there’s also something else going on, which is we’re cooling our bodies off a bit once we leave the bath, and being slightly cooler makes it easier to fall asleep.

So here’s kind of a summary of best practices to get a good night’s sleep on a regular basis. Set a regular sleep time. So if you like to go to bed at 11 at night, do that seven nights a week if at all possible. And if on the weekends, you decide to go to bed a bit later don’t make it four hours later, make it maybe only one hour later, try to stay in your optimal sleep window. Stay in bed long enough to get the sleep you need. So what I mean by that is, it takes the average person half an hour to fall asleep, so if you need seven hours, spend seven and a half in bed. Don’t spend 10 hours in bed to get seven and a half hours of sleep. Sleep in your optimal sleep window. Try to exercise earlier in the day, not just before bed. Limit caffeine to daytime, not just before bed. Try to reduce screen time during that buffer zone period. Keep your bedroom a bit cool. Use that buffer zone, use relaxation strategies. There’re lots of different guided visualizations and meditations or yoga that can help kind of relax you before you want to fall asleep. And if you find that you either can’t fall asleep or during the middle of the night you wake up and you can’t get back to sleep, the trick is to not toss and turn in bed, but to actually get out of bed, do something boring and then come back to bed when you’re feeling sleepy again.

I wanted to acknowledge a couple of resources that you may find helpful. Colleen Carney, a colleague of mine in the psychology department has developed an app that is free that you can kind of monitor your sleep, understand how to make changes. It’s individualized to you once you input your information. It’s a wonderful tool to use if this is something that’s a priority for you. And in our library, there is—she’s written multiple books—but this book “Goodnight mind” is really accessible, easy to read, and it’s filled with tons of information about sleep and how to bring about a really good sleep pattern for yourself. If you have any questions about sleep, please feel free to contact me, my information is on the slide dbrecher@ryerson.ca). And if you have any questions about this video, please contact Fenella again, her information is on the slide (Fenella Amarasinghe—Senior Manager, Education Planning and Development—famarasinghe@ryerson.ca). Thank you.

Dr. Brecher: I’d now like to do a bit of a debrief for the instructors who are sharing this video with their students. My name is Diana Brecher and I want to talk about a couple of ways in which you can use this video in your classes.

[The presentation changes to a slide entitled “Debrief” and includes an infographic that sums up the conclusion of the “Student sleep habits” survey. A pie chart indicates that 32.15% sleep 6 hours, 22.19% sleep 7 hours, 20.32% sleep 5 hours, and 12.47% sleep 8 hours, 8% sleep less than 5 hours and 4% sleep 9 hours or more.]

So the first is why share it in the first place? Well, I would say that the survey that I spoke to earlier on in the video, in which 1,400 students who answered this survey, five out of six say that lack of sleep is affecting their productivity at school, and more than 60% are saying for sure they don’t get enough. And another 11% aren’t sure if they’re getting enough sleep. And so it really speaks to the fact that there are many students who are struggling with sleep.

So how can you share this video with students? If you’re teaching through virtual learning, you can assign this as an asynchronous task, and then dedicate some time perhaps to talk about it in class or with the teaching assistants. Or you can show it at the beginning of term, kind of conveying the message that you think that this is really important and that you encourage students to get their sleep schedule in play from the start. Or you can choose to share just before midterms or finals, as a message that giving up on sleep is really kind of counterproductive. I also think it’s really important to acknowledge that, for some people, a good night’s sleep might be a luxury or a privilege that they cannot access for a host of different reasons. It may be that they do have to work shift work, and so their sleep is regularly impacted negatively. Or because of caregiving responsibilities, either for young children or for family members that they’re caring for them need help during the night, which means that their sleep is interfered with. And so in those kinds of situations, we just want to be as compassionate as possible and acknowledge to these individuals that right now their circumstances are really working against them. But there may come a time and hopefully will come a time where they can take charge of their sleep, that it really is just up to that. But for the rest of us who are making really a choice about this, and they do have a choice whether or not they’re going to make sleep a priority or not, this is information that can help them make choices much more consistent with helping them be well and productive and their best selves.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me my contact information is dbrecher@ryerson.ca and if you have any questions about the video, please contact Fenella (Fenella Amarasinghe: famarasinghe@ryerson.ca) and her contact information is on this slide. Thank you very much.