Give it Up for the Down State – Sleep: Sara Mednick at TEDxUCRSalon (Transcript)

That’s 1.65 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 – they have messed up metabolism and their insulin regulation is messed up.

And what does that do?

Well, it makes them reach for more high fat, high sugary foods. It makes them gain weight more quickly. And even with 5 nights of sleeping, say even 5 hours at night, you start looking like you are pre-diabetic. So, if you think about 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 metabolism, not sleeping enough also creates larger risks 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 Sara, I sleep fine, I get like 7 to 8 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 4 times in 1 day on a really simple visual memory task. And what you see here is the graph of their results. We tested them at 9, noon, 4 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 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, “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? 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 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 is people’s performance at 7 pm if they didn’t nap. And here is people’s performance at 7 pm if they did nap. And as you can see, their performance actually went back to baseline and even 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 are going to show even more”.

And as you can see, a night of sleep is the same as a daytime nap in terms of this performance. People are actually getting the same benefit from a nap as a night of sleep.

So we thought, okay, well, we should test this across a bunch of different memory domains and a bunch of 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 had gained an insight into a problem that they were having during sleep. Such as Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday”, Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein”, Frederic Kekule 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 result. 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 increases in memory and heightened 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 are constantly bombarded with new information. On a moment to 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 our 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 the hypothesis test. What if she said this? What if I did that? 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 something even larger? Like a week. Let’s look at an entire week. How do we do?

Well, there’s 7 days in a week, right, there’s 5 days of work to 2 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 in 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 keeping our performance at baseline, that we just continue to deteriorate across the day?

Well, why do we then think that we are going to not deteriorate across a week of 5 days of long-ass work? That’s the question.

And so, 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 downstate that tells 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 we go for the harder stuff, right? Adderall or Ritalin. 75% of college kids say that they use Adderall, and that number has tripled in the last 10 years. Something to think about.

So we thought about it 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 had 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 had to type with their non-dominant hand a sequence of numbers, kind of just a typing task.

So they’d take these two tasks in the morning, then they get split into 3 groups. They get either a nap, they get a dose of caffeine which is approximating a cup of coffee, or they get placebo, 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 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 think is going to happen to you when you are on caffeine. And here is 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 exam, but let’s think of something more simple, like the motor test, which just could be sort of speeded motor action, could be helped by caffeine.

Okay. So here is the nap. And so now we have the performance after a nap. And now we’re going to look at the performance from placebo. Pretty good. Right? 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 a student actually needs, like memory processing? And the thing is, none of these tests have actually been done in Adderall or Ritalin. 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 done studying, I finally get to sleep. The problem is that these drugs are in your system for a long time, 6 to 8 hours is the half-life for caffeine.

So, what’s the next most reasonable thing to do when you want 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 will 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’ve got to set your alarm, wake up in 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 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, 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 are some people in here think —

But I know 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 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 will save our sagging economy. Because decreasing work weeks overall actually raises the amount of people who get to work. More part-time jobs for everybody. And 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 decreasing the work week, or just decreasing the hours that we work, also has a potential to slow global warming, because it decreases carbon emissions.

So let’s hear it for the Wednesday afternoon 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’ve 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 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 2 weeks of vacation a year, when people in Europe are getting around 5 to 6 weeks. 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 they’re paid to take. And it’s just silly, because there’s many studies that show the more vacation that you take, the more productive you are at work, the happier you are in your job, and the longer you stay. There was even a study that showed, that the 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 work force, such as taking shorter work weeks, and unlimited vacation.

What? Unlimited vacation? That’s right. There’s 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, believed that you should have the choice 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 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 of 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.

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