The Primal Blueprint (42 page)

Sleep was long thought to be a passive state, but we now understand sleep to be a dynamic process. The brain is active during sleep (but responding to internal stimuli, not external), and it drifts in and out of various sleep stages, or cycles. Our natural sleep pattern
is to progress from light sleep (rapid eye movement [REM], when you dream and can be woken easily) into escalating stages of deeper sleep cycles (non-REM sleep, when you are out like a light and experiencing maximum restorative hormone flow, balancing of brain chemicals, and cellular repair). This cycling of REM into non-REM sleep is repeated throughout the night, with each complete cycle believed to last about 90 minutes.

If you divide your night’s sleep into three equal time periods, your first third is characterized by the highest percentage of non-REM sleep, while the final third of your sleep time is characterized by a lengthening of the REM cycles and a shortening of the deep sleep cycles (the middle cycle is a balance between the first and the last). Waking up naturally involves letting the cycles play out until finally, after a period of exclusive REM sleep, you wake up effortlessly. (REM sleep is characterized by increases in heart rate, respiration, and muscle and brain wave activity, making it easy to rise from this more alert state.)

Sleeping success is not as simple as merely accumulating the hours (hey, reminds me of exercise!). The Center for Applied Cognitive Studies in Charlotte, North Carolina, and many other experts report that in order for a person to feel refreshed, the number of complete sleep cycles achieved is more important than total sleep time. Achieving these ideal sleep cycles as described is a delicate process guided by hormone flows that can easily be disturbed by outside influences. Cortisol levels are sensitive to light, gradually peaking in the morning to help you summon the energy to start your day. Kelly Korg’s predawn alarm arousal resulted in an unnatural, excessive, and therefore destructive spike of cortisol. I’m completely serious when I say she would absolutely be healthier and fitter by all measures (including the pinch test for body fat) if she replaced the majority of her early-morning strenuous workouts with an extra hour of sleep and a moderate 20-minute walk around the neighborhood.

Melatonin release is triggered by darkness, and levels of growth hormone and other restorative substances achieve peak levels while you are sleeping. Throwing artificial light and digital stimulation at your circadian rhythm, as seen with the late-night habits of Ken and Kenny Korg, will create hormonal stresses and imbalances that mess up metabolism, cognitive function, mood stability, and overall enjoyment of life. For example, staying up past your bedtime buoyed by artificial light and stimulation (say, a late movie or a bunch of teenagers going on a toilet paper raid) triggers a cortisol release. Remember, your genes desperately want you to achieve peak performance; melatonin flows to get you some sleep, and cortisol flows if you need to rally. The cortisol release gives you a “second wind,” but it also increases your overall life stress. It doesn’t matter if the stress is fun and exciting or whether it’s negative and upsetting—it all goes on the opposite side of the balance scales to rest. Observing regular bed and wake times will help regulate cortisol production, something that is essential to good health.

Here are some important measures you can take to get optimum amounts of high-quality sleep. Visit
MarksDailyApple.com
for more discussion on this topic, including some helpful tips to beat jet lag.

Create an Ideal Sleeping Environment:
It’s critical to make your bedroom an area of minimal stimulation and maximum relaxation. Your bedroom should be used only for sleeping (well, okay, that other stuff, too)—with absolutely no computer, television, or work desk present. You should have a clear physical and psychological separation between your bedroom and other areas of the house where you do work or enjoy entertainment. Eliminate any clutter, such as excess clothing, books, magazines, and tabletop stuff (car keys, cell phone, mail, spare change, etc.). Browse the Internet or page through design magazines to get a feeling for the beauty of contemporary minimalist bedroom styles.

In his book
The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity
, author Daniel Reid relates an ancient Tao maxim called the Four Empties. Taoist theory says that restraint and moderation are the keys to longevity and that we should strive to avoid excess in our lives by pursuing an Empty Mind (focus on the present, meditate daily), Empty Stomach (eat when hungry and finish when satisfied, avoid overeating), Empty Kitchen (eat primarily fresh foods and minimize processed, preserved, and frozen foods), and Empty Room (avoid excessive noise, clutter, and distraction in your private sleeping quarters).

Follow Consistent Bed and Wake Times:
Just like with exercise, think quality over quantity. Establish a consistent, circadian-friendly routine to optimize hormone flows and ensure you enjoy complete sleep cycles. Remember that melatonin floods your bloodstream on circadian cue triggered by darkness. More accurately, it’s the time when you typically “make it dark” (e.g., when you turn out the light at your typical bedtime or when the sun sets if you’re camping) and that you experience the highest percentage of deep sleep at the outset of your night. Sorry, but if you miss bedtime, sleeping in to reach your typical hourly total will not completely catch you up.

If you are a night owl, you can probably develop some level of tolerance and effectiveness for a consistent, artificial light–induced late-night bedtime and late-morning awakening. This is certainly less stressful to the body than the more common practice of fluctuating your bedtime—fighting the natural melatonin release occasionally or regularly with various artificial stimuli (TV/movie/computer, caffeine, etc.). The latter is akin to Kelly Korg’s forcing her body out of bed too early and triggering a stressful cortisol release. The bottom line is that the more artificial light and stimulus you throw into your circadian equation, the farther you get from Primal, period.

Wind Down the Night and Ease into the Day:
Because everything you do after sundown is technically non-Primal, it’s important to wind down calmly in the hours preceding your bedtime. Minimize your central nervous system stimulation before going to bed, so you can have a smooth, relaxing transition from your busy day to downtime. Reading is a time-tested popular method to wind down, but even the subject matter should be chosen carefully. In
The 4-Hour Workweek
, author Tim Ferriss argues that we should avoid reading newspapers, something related to work, and even nonfiction, instead promoting maximum relaxation of the mind by sticking with fiction for our leisure reading.

It may also be helpful to decompress your busy brain by writing down your thoughts before bed. Take five or 10 minutes to write out everything from your day: accomplishments, to-do tasks, stresses, and worries. It’s easier to arrive at solutions if you don’t try consciously to force them. Get them down on paper, and then let your sleeping mind do the work for you. You’ll wake up feeling clearer and more positive.

In the morning, awaken gradually and naturally coming off a complete REM-dominant sleep cycle. Staying in bed for a few minutes to read or talk (“Again, your name was…?”) or starting your day with some light breathing and stretching exercises is preferable to springing up after the fourth snooze alarm and rushing into action. A brief warm shower can help stimulate your central nervous system naturally and get blood circulating—a particularly good idea if you are going to exercise soon after awakening. Hard-core Grok disciples can even try a cold-water plunge upon awakening in the summer months—beats a high-carb breakfast any day as a morning energizer.

Eat and Drink the Right Stuff:
What you eat and drink before bed can have a significant impact, either positive or negative, on your ability to achieve restful sleep. In contrast to the folly of Ken Korg’s ingestion of sugary foods and sleep medication, it’s better to eat lightly before bed so that blood sugar fluctuations and potential digestive complications from lying down with a full stomach do not interfere with your sleep process. If you are a wine drinker, one fine glass with dinner may help you relax and unwind in the evening hours. The same goes for herbal teas. Chamomile in particular is touted for its mild sedative effect. A handful of nuts can also be helpful, thanks to their ample levels of magnesium (helps relax muscles) and L-tryptophan (promotes the production of serotonin, the potent neurotransmitter that becomes melatonin as darkness triggers sleep). Other tryptophan-rich foods that can be eaten in moderation before bed are eggs, meat, fish, and cheese.

“No day is so bad it can’t be fixed with a nap.
—
Carrie Snow
Stand-up comedian”

Avoid the Conventional Wisdom that promotes carbohydrates as a catchall bedtime aid. You may have heard—accurately—that consuming carbohydrates stimulates the production of that “feel good” hormone serotonin. However, more than a little carbohydrate will cause an energy boost followed by that now-familiar insulin cascade, neither of which is a good idea near bedtime…or ever, for that matter!

If you are able to obtain all of your requisite sleep at night, there is probably no reason to routinely take naps during the day. On the other hand, if you do have obstacles (job requirements, young children, noisy surroundings, etc.) that prevent you from getting adequate nighttime sleep, napping can help you sustain the focus, energy, and productivity you need for an active life. Many cultures across the world—especially warm weather countries in Latin America, Asia, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East—have appreciated nap time throught their history. Furthermore, more than 85 percent of mammals have polyphasic sleep habits, meaning multiple sleep-wake incidents. For proof I needn’t look further than my dog, Buddha, crashed out under my desk right now but ready for quick action should the doorbell ring!

Unfortunately, it seems the fast pace of life in the USA (combined, perhaps, with some weird puritanical guilt factors) prevents napping from being a culturally acceptable lifestyle habit. The promo message for Dr. Sara Mednick’s book
Take a Nap! Change Your Life
reads:

  Imagine a product that increases alertness, boosts creativity, reduces stress, improves perception, stamina, motor skills, and accuracy, enhances your sex life, helps you make better decisions, keeps you looking younger, aids in weight loss, reduces the risk of heart attack, elevates your mood, and strengthens memory. Now imagine that this product is nontoxic, has no dangerous side effects, and, best of all, is absolutely
free
.

At first glance it might seem like marketing hyper-bole, but each exciting claim is well documented with respected studies (research abstracts are provided in the
Primal Blueprint
Resources appendix at
MarksDailyApple.com
).

“A nap of 20 to 30 minutes will recalibrate your brain’s sodium:potassium ratio, a critical factor to recover from nervous system fatigue and wake up feeling refreshed.”

Because the rhythm of sleep cycles is so critical to brain and body restoration, brief naps can produce remarkable benefits by helping you catch up on non-REM sleep cycle deficiencies, shortcutting you into the
deep sleep cycles characterized by theta brain waves. Many experts recommend a nap period of 20 to 30 minutes. This time frame is believed to be sufficient to recalibrate your brain’s sodium:potassium ratio, a critical factor to recover from nervous system fatigue and wake up feeling refreshed. However, a 20- to 30-minute nap is not too long to produce the unpleasant grogginess you might experience from a prolonged siesta. Notable nappers throughout history include Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Napoleon, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and Paris Hilton.

Few would argue the importance of play, yet compliance among many health-minded people is low in this area. We have been so heavily socialized into regimented, technological, industrialized life that scheduling time for play (now there’s an oxy-moron!) is a big challenge. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think the word
playdate
existed when I was a kid. Oh, we had playdates in my neighborhood, all right—365 of them, to be exact. They lasted from the final school bell till the dinner bell, not deterred by mud, rain, sleet, or snow (no kidding, I’m from Maine!). We didn’t need our moms making transportation arrangements via e-mail or cell phone. We just needed air in our lungs, bike tires, and basketballs.

As the challenges and responsibilities of making a living or managing a family accumulate in our adult years, we collectively adopt the belief that play is for youth. The truth is that play is for everyone, particularly those absorbed in the incredible complexity and breakneck pace of modern life. Regular play—time away from work, home duties, school, and other scheduled and unscheduled responsibilities—helps quench your thirst for adventure and challenge (physical and mental), improves health, relieves stress, strengthens your connection with friends and community, and simply enhances your enjoyment of life.

“
Art is older than production [making things for practical use] for us, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness.
—
Eric Hoffer
American social writer and philosopher (1902-1983)”

Learning disability specialist Dr. Lorraine Peniston enumerates many research-proven psychological benefits of play, including:

• Perceived sense of freedom, independence, and autonomy