Sleep debt

My deep sleep is very rarely over an hour per night, and I, after this trip, from day one of... 'Cause I started off the trip with a decent night's sleep, uh, on the airplane.

Uh, from day one being in Australia until I got home, I am in 21 hours of sleep debt.

Yeah, you, uh, you, you need like a week just to sleep, dude.

Yeah, man.

No, I needed it.

Sleep debt was about over five hours.

So my average sleep.

No, because I've got the aura ring.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Let's look at the science of sleep debt.

When you sleep, you cycle through deep restorative sleep and REM sleep.

During these cycles, your brain utilizes something called the glymphatic system.

He recognized that for long-term physical consistency, you have to adjust the balance between pacing and resting.

He gave himself just enough sleep to allow the glymphatic system to clear the critical toxins and prevent a systemic breakdown.

He proved that sometimes moving slower but longer and allowing for baseline recovery is vastly more efficient than sprinting, accumulating massive sleep debt, and just crashing.

So you can dial in the calories with liquid sugars, you can slice holes in your shorts for ventilation, and you can map out your sleep cycles to clear brain toxins.

Yeah.

But yet, that sleep debt accumulates and it's not easy.

For sure.

But anyway, I wanted to maybe give a shout out to our friend Nim and Adrian.

Visit SpinQuest.com for more details.

There is a concept in sleep science called sleep debt.

the accumulated shortfall between the sleep your body needs and the sleep it receives.

Sleep debt is real in a physiological sense.

Performance deficits accumulate across nights of insufficient sleep, just as they would across one extended period of wakefulness.

The idea that you can catch up entirely on a weekend is more complex than it once seemed.

and preventing someone from functioning safely and has health effects and it doesn't include chronic fatigue syndrome and pathological fatigue from other medical illness from the cohort practice so that to make it clear that they are different and we generally call tired or tiredness tiredness can be a lay term and it is non-specific term it doesn't translate directly into excessive daytime sleepiness There are a couple of concepts that I would also like to cover.

The first is sleep debt.

So it is an accumulative shortfall of sleep over days, weeks or years, which is common in shift workers, FIFO, parents and people on multiple jobs.

sleep inertia is another concept it is the feeling of grogginess immediately after waking and especially from the deep sleep and that can have relevant effects on how it take you to get to get going or after waking up is excessive daytime sleepiness or sleep deprivation important yes it does and up to about 15 of australian adults report that they have problematic eds and also sleepiness contribute to Maybe, you know, 15-20% of fatal heavy vehicle crashes in Australia and car crash risk double after continuously waking awake for more than 17 hours.

Now, nighttime, people are still working as...

they do in the daytime so especially working at night time disrupt our circadian rhythm and the time where we are supposed to be resting and because of that our sleep is shorter typically one to four hour less per 24 hour and it became more fragmented with reduced REM sleep and the second mechanism is that failure to adapt there is assumption that if someone is doing the same type of shift in the evening or night time they will get used to it they could but it is rare in fact less than five percent could adapt to the shift rhythm completely and most of them most of the workers don't and that is important to understand that the that we can't rely on adaptation to as a control mechanism And when we do shift work, rotating shift or forward or backward shift, what happens is that we start to feel tired after the second or third day.

And you can feel that some of the thought processes are not clear and you're essentially relying on stimulants such as caffeine to keep going because you are suffering from cumulative sleep debt it is not avoidable and because when you do the shift work you have restricted or less opportunity to sleep and that become causing impact on your neurobehavioral thing so it can cause impairment however if you are someone they will always underreport or underestimate the level of impairment since they are the one who is impaired you can't expect them to tell the difference they're also individual modifier if they have already quite sensitive to sleep deprivation and or age and when you get older your tolerance to gradually get lower if there is comorbid sleep disorder responsibility or you know child care duties at home so shift worker with young family can have the largest impact because of that How long do you have to drive after shift work? Some people need to go to one to two hours of driving after the shift.

That is quite dangerous.