Transcript

Give it up for the down state -- sleep | Sara Mednick | TEDxUCRSalon

hello okay well I'm going to tell you something you're not going to like I'm sorry well actually part of you is going to really like it and say God please listen to this lady and the other part is going to say uh-uh not me and it's this are you ready we need to rest we need to take more breaks because you see taking breaks is actually part of life it's part of being active it's part of being productive and having endurance it's part of being creative it's part of being happy so what I hope to convince you of today in this talk is that you should be taking breaks on a daily basis on a weekly basis on a yearly basis and if you do you'll be a better person okay so we need to take breaks but it's not just you every person every plant and animal on this earth needs to take breaks and here's why here's the Earth spinning on its axis imagine every day we get the night and the day from the Earth spinning on its axis it tells us when to be up in this Upstate where we get to go out in the world and explore and find our riches and then the down state right the night time we get to go home check all these things out and then go to sleep and dream about them this happens every day that's every plant and animal on the surface of the Earth for 4.54 billion years uses this cycle that's 1.6 5 trillion nights and here's a secret about life if something happens every day since the beginning of time it's probably important you might want to think about it so we all sleep right nighttime tells us when we should be sleeping and we all sleep so doctors lawyers babies even President Obama sleeps hopefully and so what do we sleep for well science shows us that sleep is very important for restoring our basic functions and they know this by looking at people who aren't sleeping people who aren't sleeping has they have messed up metabolism and their insulin regulations messed up and what does that do well it makes them Reach for more high high fat High sugary Foods it makes them um uh gain weight more quickly and even with five nights of sleeping say even 5 hours at night you start looking like like you're pre-diabetic so along if you think about uh the epidemic of obesity and diabetes in this country maybe we should also be thinking about how people sleep so along with these problems with um metabolism not sleeping enough also creates larger risk for cardiovascular disease depression and impaired cognition okay so a lot of you might be saying well some of you might be saying well you know Sarah I sleep fine I get like seven to eight hours of sleep at night and to you the few the proud the well-rested I have this to say listen to this next part this might be more relevant to you so in my lab we decided to look into well how do people who are well-rested actually deal with just being awake all day long so we brought people into the lab and we tested them for four times in one day on a really simple visual memory tasks and what you see here is the graph of their results we tested them at 9: noon 400 and 7: and as you can see their performance continued to decline across each day with every test session they got worse and worse the astonishing thing about this result is that we tried several different methods to get them to actually get their Rel their their performance back to their Baseline so in one case we told them well we'll give you some money because that's a big motivator right we say okay we'll give you $25 for every test session you could get just back to your Baseline well sadly for these subjects we didn't have to give them a single dime because they couldn't get their performance back to Baseline we thought okay well motivation didn't work what about just letting them take a little break by just resting quietly so we had them sitting with their eyes closed between noon and 4: and these people still their performance just declined so what was the one thing we did that got them to actually get their performance back to Baseline it was taking a nap so when we gave a nap in between noon and 4 just about a 60-minute nap what happened oops their performance went back to Baseline and it stayed there for the next two sessions so we thought that's pretty surprising right this little nap in the middle of the day could actually make you maintain your performance across the day so we decided to replicate this but this time we just tested people twice at 9 and 7 so here's people people's performance at 7 p.m. if they didn't nap and here's people's performance at 700 p.m. if they did nap and as you can see their performance actually went back to Baseline and everything exceeded Baseline so they actually showed perceptual learning they showed Improvement in performance so we were pretty surprised by this and we thought okay well let's just compare that to people who have a whole night of sleep maybe they're going to show even more and as you can see a night of sleep is the same as a a daytime nap in terms of this performance so people are actually getting the same benefit from a nap as a night of sleep so we thought okay well we should just test this across a bunch of different domains and a bunch of different cognitive domains and we showed the same result in one case we looked at creativity the reason why we did this is because many creative people have said that they have gained an insight into a problem that they're having during sleep such as Paul McCartney wrote yesterday Mary Shelly wrote uh Frankenstein Frederick kulle actually designed the Benzene ring in his dream okay so we thought well we'll take people bring them into the lab give them a creativity test in the morning and then either have them have a nap or no nap in the afternoon and then retest them again in the evening so here's the results as you can see when you had no nap you don't have a change in your creativity but when you have a nap you have a 40% increase in your creativity so what's going on what's Happening Here in the brain that you can actually have such uh increases in memory and height in creativity well the thing to think about is that during sleep your brain can do things that it just can't do during waking because during waking we're constantly bombarded with new information on a one momentto moment basis we have to interact with the world but when we sleep we turn off the external world we go internal we start to repair a tissue and Bone we promote growth we start to protect all of those new memories that we just learned and consolidate them into long-term memory so once these new experiences are in long-term memory then we get to associate them with everything that we know about our lives the things that we think the things we believe the things we feel so say you're going on a job interview or you're writing a song or you're dealing with a relationship all those waking experiences that you have when you go to sleep you start to play around with them you start to associate them with the things that you already know about life you start to dream about them and start to hypothesis test well what if she said this well what if I did that well what if this happened and then when you wake up you have a new appreciation for the situation your brain is refreshed the Slate is blank and you're ready to go out there again and gain new information and there are these unconscious processes that go on during sleep which are these invisible influences right and these are the things that make us who we are they make us who we want to be the surprising thing is that they can happen in a short daytime nap but let's move on to a bigger scale so now we learned about sleep well what about even something even larger like a week let's let's look at an entire week how do we do well there seven days in a week right there's five days of work to two days of rest that's basically like a 2:1 ratio so one day of rest approximately two days of work well that's kind of the same ratio as night to daytime right so basically a third of Our Lives we spend either asleep or on the weekend and the rest of it we're just working our asses off okay do you see something wrong with this picture didn't I just show you that across the day we're miserable at actually um keeping our performance at Baseline that we just continue to deteriorate across the day well why do we then think that we're going to not deteriorate across a week of five days of long ass work that's the question and so you know you you begin to wonder why people look so exhausted by Friday I think it's because we're not actually naturally supposed to be working this much so what do we do what do we do in order to not listen to the internal signals from the down state that tell us to relax and we just keep our nose to the grindstone well we self-medicate right we use caffeine at record levels 90% of North Americans drink caffeine on a daily basis or will you go for the harder stuff right Aderall or Ridin 75% of college kids say that they use Aderall and that number has tripled in the last 10 years so I'm going to think about so we thought about in my lab and we thought okay well let's see let's compare the benefit of a nap to caffeine so we brought people into the lab and we gave them two different kinds of tests one was a verbal memory task where basically they just have to remember a list of words very similar to an exam you know like a vocabulary list the other one was a motor task where they just have to type with their non-dominant hand a sequence of numbers kind of just a typing task so they take these two tasks in the morning then they get split into three groups they get either a nap they get a dose of caffeine which is approximating a cup of coffee or they get placeo which is no drug then in the afternoon in the evening they get retested all right so here is the performance after a nap on the verbal task here's the performance with the placebo so the placebo is always an interesting category right because in this case it's really the effect of what you think is going to happen to you when you take that drug so here's the effect of what you thing is going to happen to you when you're on caffeine and here's the effect of what actually happens decreasing in performance right okay so that's too bad that may not help so caffeine may not help for a verbal exam a memory kind of exam but let's think of something more simple like like the motor task which just could be sort of speeded motor action could be helped by caffeine okay so here is the nap and uh so now we have the performance after a nap and now we're going to look at the performance from Placebo pretty good right so you're performing really really well if you think you're going to get caffeine well here's what happens if you actually do get caffeine ouch so on two different cases caffeine isn't really helping you with what you think it's helping you with it might make you feel more alert but is it actually helping you with the stuff that like a student actually needs right memory processing and the thing is none of these tests have actually been done in Aderall or Rin so we don't really know what those drugs are doing okay but let's just say we've been taking some caffeine or anything else and finally we decide okay let's get to sleep because now I've I've done studying and I want to get to sleep the problem is that it you know these drugs are in your system for a long time six to eight hours is the half lifee for caffeine so what's the next most reasonable thing to do when you want to go to sleep I mean besides obviously you know stopping taking all the drugs right take more drugs because now you can take a pill that'll help you get to sleep and then another pill that'll help you stay asleep throughout the entire night I mean the problem there is you got to set your alarm wake up in the middle of the night take the pill and then get back to sleep but once you do you sleep like a baby I don't know I just wonder whether there's some better way to get through the work week my thought is if you think about the weekend as the night well then somewhere in that week we need to have a nap my thinking is this if we could if we really wanted to be as insightful and creative and thoughtful about our work and what we were doing we would take every Wednesday afternoon off we would work really hard all day long Monday and Tuesday knowing that Wednesday afternoon we were going to get that time off and during that time we'd be able to do what we really wanted to do right we'd be able to spend more time with our families maybe catch up on our sleep go hang out with our friends and play guitar or take a walk all of these things that actually restore us and then Thursday Friday when we hit it back we'll have two more power days doesn't that sound great yeah but there's some people in here think I'm TI but I know out there there's some people out there who don't believe me right you guys are the naysayers out there who think oh there's no way this is just a a joke she's just saying that so would it surprise you to believe that this is already happening all over the world so in Europe the average work week is no longer 40 hours the average work week in France is down to 30 and the average work week in the Netherlands is down to 25 and this conversation about decreasing our work week has actually come to the US Shores us economists are predicting that if we actually decrease the work week it'll save a sagging economy because decreasing work weeks overall actually raises the amount of people who get to work more part-time jobs for everybody and in really excitingly it actually balances the sex differences in the labor force because finally women with families who cannot actually work 40 hours a week will get a chance of having more jobs as well the idea of of decreasing the work week or just decreasing the hours that we work also has a poti potential to slow global warming because it decreases in carbon emissions so let's hear it for the Wednesday afternoon [Applause] break all right but I don't think everybody should just run home and take a nap on Wednesdays I mean I get it I get that naps are not for everybody as much as I want them to be you know I mean take my husband will he hates to nap when he naps he oversleeps he feels groggy he feels terrible actually I have to correct that I feel terrible because I got to deal with him so for him what he needs to do is just switch tasks do something different go play guitar go play with our daughter Violet do something that's going to really Inspire him so when he gets back to work he'll be refreshed the point is that taking breaks comes in all different shapes and sizes what we want to do is get our mind obsessive mind and body off of one obsessive theme and let those unconscious processes those invisible influences take over I think you'd be surprised about what you found so I want to take this one step even larger let's move out into the year if you think about our year Americans get under two weeks of vacation a year when people in Europe are getting around 5 to six and the ridiculous thing is that Americans are actually decreasing in the amount of vacation days that they're taking these are vacation days that are paid to take and it's just silly because there's many studies that show that the more vacation that you take the more productive you are at work the happy you are in your job and the longer you stay there's even a study that showed that the long more vacation days you take the better your performance is as rated by your supervisor so the good news is is that the US economy or the new structure of business is actually bringing a lot of these positive things to the workforce such as taking shorter work weeks an unlimited vacation what unlimited vacation that's right do companies that have unlimited vacation and what they're reporting is a 200% increase in their productivity it's exciting can you imagine working for an employer who actually gave you the choice believe that you should have the choice for to decide what kind of break you should have how long and when because that employer knew that by giving you that choice you would actually be more productive that's a pretty good world that we want to actually strive to live in right okay so I hope today I've told you I've explained a little bit about why it's a good idea to take a break that it's important to take a break and that there's many benefits taking a break and I've given you some options about how you might want to take a break you could take a nap you could take Wednesday afternoon off you could take a vacation the question is now what are you going to do to give yourself a break thanks [Applause]