How much sleep do you, personally, need to function properly without craving a nap in the middle of your day? How much of a role does sleep play in when you exercise? Let us talk about the relationship between creating a powerful exercise high and good sleep.
Although some people appear to get away with significantly less sleep than others, meeting your specific needs is crucial. That is, if your goal is to experience a powerful mental high from exercise. There’s no way around it: Getting a good sleep is fundamental to your well-being. That’s why I consider it one of the pillars of health (besides regular exercise, nutrition, and stress management). Yet, so many people neglect sleep.
Exercise High and Good Sleep
Are you one of these people? Do you believe you slept enough this week? Can you remember the last time you woke up without an alarm clock feeling refreshed and without the need for caffeine?
If you answered no, and your eyes are red or puffy, then you are not alone. Adequate levels of restful sleep provide the foundation for optimal performance, participation, and engagement in daily life. However, roughly two-thirds of adults in developed countries do not get the recommended eight hours of sleep a night.
My Sleep Struggles
I know that I used to be the same way. Enjoying my quiet, most relaxing hours of the day reading a book or getting caught up on my social media feed often makes it difficult for me to say “Stop” and go to sleep early enough so that I could get my recommended amount of sleep that night.
But my habits changed once I devoted the time needed to really understand the effects of a good sleep on one’s quality of life. I accomplished this by reading a number of books on the subject. Additionally, I talked to sleep experts to gain their insights. From them I learned to develop practices that made me feel tired at night and ready for bed. These and other related practices helped me stick to a routine and eventually master my sleep.
But what is sleep, and what are the reasons we spend so much time in bed? If you search for “sleep” in a search engine, you may come across the following definition: “A condition of body and mind that typically recurs for several hours every night, in which the nervous system is relatively inactive, the eyes closed, the postural muscles relaxed, and consciousness practically suspended.”
While every part of this is technically accurate, sleep is so much more than that.
The Exercise High and the Power of Sleep
Getting sufficient, high quality sleep has the power to regenerate your energy levels, keep your mood and energy levels stable, as well as provide a host of other benefits to your health and well-being. And as you will learn in this chapter, great sleep can drastically enhance your experience of the Exercise High.
Why Do We Sleep?
Why do we sleep? That’s a question that has been keeping scientists busy for decades. We all know that sleep is necessary. But its precise role remains somewhat mysterious. Clearly it must provide quite a substantial advantage, considering that we spend around one-third of our lives asleep, and that during sleep we are (well, used to be) vulnerable to predators.
Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, is the author of the NY Times bestseller Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which carefully examines why we sleep. (If this topic interests you, I highly recommend Walker’s book; it’s the best one on sleep that I’ve read.)
Walker explains that even though we are still not fully confident of the exact answer, there are multiple theories as to why we suspend our consciousness for about 7–9 hours each night:
The Four Theories
- Energy. At night we replenish glucose levels within the brain. Glucose is what provides our brain with the energy necessary to perform its functions. It helps us to think clearly, as well as maintain our focus and concentration during tasks that require it. Besides that, it is much cooler at night than it is during the day. From a survival perspective, therefore, it makes more sense to perform the many activities of daily living during the sunlit daytime, when significantly less energy is required to stay warm.
- Tissue Repair. Throughout the night, your body repairs tissues that have been damaged during the day. It grows new tissues where needed (e.g., muscle cell repair if you have performed a workout that day, processes responsible for wound healing, etc.). This process helps us to grow stronger and more resilient than we were the day before and enhances our performance for the following day.
- Dependence on Vision/Light During the Day. At night it gets significantly darker compared to sun-brightened hours of daytime. Humans are not well adapted to survive and be productive without light, so it makes sense for us to conserve our energy by finding a quiet spot to sleep during the dark hours of the night.
- Memory Consolidation. The purpose of consolidating our memories is to learn from past behavior and access positive memories that we associate with certain people, events, and objects. As we sleep, our brain consolidates recently encoded memory representations. This happens during slow wave, deep phase of sleep, and integrates memories into our long-term memory.
Are You Sleeping Well?
As you can see, there are plenty of reasons for getting a good night’s rest. We function better, live a higher quality life, and are significantly more productive. But I’m sure you probably already know all that. The real question is how to achieve great sleep. But in order to properly answer that question, we first need to dive more deeply into the science of sleep.
Now that you understand the reasons we sleep, as well as some of the basic science, let us analyze your sleep. First off, let’s state the fairly obvious: You will reap the greatest benefits from sleep when you get enough hours of sleep each night (you cannot consistently cheat yourself on sleep quantity and hope to maintain your well-being), have sleep that is relatively uninterrupted, and maintain a consistent sleep schedule suiting your natural circadian rhythms.
Calculating your biological prime time will help you find out the best times to go to bed for maximum productivity and provide you with insight as to when your best hours to be productive may be.
Knowing this, do you still find yourself regularly struggling with getting enough quality sleep? If so, let us go over the signs (what is observable) and symptoms (your feelings) of a bad sleep. Noticeable physical signs that you are not sleeping well include skin breakouts (e.g., acne), red and swollen eyes, dark circles beneath your eyes, and weight gain within a short period of time.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Moving on from observable physical signs of poor sleep, let’s examine your subjective feelings related to sleep:
- Are you waking up rested in the morning? Do you feel rested or could you sleep for another 30 to 60 minutes? In addition, do you experience a sore throat, dry mouth, or headaches upon waking?
- How energized do you feel during the day? Quick drops in energy levels throughout your day may be a sign that you are not getting an efficient enough night’s sleep.
- What is your mood like during the day? Sleep helps to regulate our hormones, which helps us to keep a stable mood throughout the day. So if you find yourself having a lot of mood swings and suffer from symptoms of anxiety and depression, it may be worth analyzing your sleep routine.
- Do you feel clear-headed throughout your day? Good quality sleep helps us process stressful events that happen during the day. If we do not get a restful sleep, we feel more stressed as we have more on our mind. Our cognitive performance (our focus and memory) suffers, in addition to having unprocessed thoughts and ideas from the day before.
- What foods/drinks do you crave during your day? If you have increased cravings for junk food or for drinks containing caffeine, then this might be a sign that you have not been sleeping well.
Good Sleep Leads to Exercise High
Our body is constantly attempting to get back to its baseline through the process of homeostasis. Getting enough good sleep plays a fundamental role in aiding this process, and in significantly increasing the likelihood that our hormones are balanced and our mood remains stable and positive.
In contrast, if you lack healthy sleep, your body will produce greater-than-normal amounts of the hormones that are responsible for stress. This is because your body did not recover the way it should have during the night, and your energy stores were not replenished.
As a result, your body produces greater amounts of cortisol and noradrenaline, hormones which function to break down healthy bodily tissue for energy and survival. Consistently elevated levels of these stress hormones can make it difficult for your body to reach a balanced state, and will certainly sabotage your efforts to achieve the Exercise High.
I cannot overemphasize how crucial good sleep is to your physical and mental well-being.
Exercise High and Good Sleep: Conclusion
It’s something you must take very seriously. Only sleep of proper quality and quantity will help to optimize your hormonal balance, which will make room for your body to produce the maximum amount of hormones responsible for putting you in a good mood. Rather than focusing on survival, your body will instead shift its focus toward rewarding you for supporting it in keeping it in the best shape possible.
Provide your body with the rest it needs by following a sensible sleep routine, and you will be more than repaid for your diligence during your next workout!