How We Sleep

We sleep like rocks, Roman ruins.

That was what I said in a Facebook post to friends in the first week of living in our Roman apartment. Anyone who has gone through a period of sleep deprivation or worse, insomnia, can attest to the restorative power of getting a good night’s sleep.

Sleeping Hermaphroditos, a Roman marble restored
by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1620 by adding a
marble mattress. Paris, Louvre Museum. 

I got interested in sleep science a long time ago when I was part of a sleep deprivation study at the University of Washington, where I had been temping in a women’s health office. Someone had dropped out of a three-day study looking at thermoregulation and it paid pretty well, plus did not involve any drugs, so I agreed to participate. The researchers were trying to figure out how new mothers, suffering from sleep deprivation, also had thermoregulation problems that could be quite acute. They had rigged a way to measure thermoregulation using a sort of shower system that took subjects from sweating to shivering by altering water temperature, and needed three days to test because subjects had to forego a whole night’s sleep between tests two and three. I didn’t need to see the published results to know that I had a much shorter time between sweating and shivering on day three after no sleep. The whole thing fascinated me.

One benefit of moving to a new place with no furniture is getting to start over. I knew that mattress technology had improved a lot since the last time I bought a bed, so I did a bit of research and decided to splurge on new mattresses from Eve, a UK-based company that shipped their high-tech foam mattresses in a box and gave you a 100 days to try them out. I was sold after the first night. In fact, I continue to be amazed at how well I sleep on this mattress, but I don’t want to turn this into an infomercial. Suffice it to say, proper support for the body and head (pillows matter too) make a difference in how we sleep and how well-rested we feel. My mother has radicular pain in her neck that had recently required physical therapy and medication, and she has been able to stop the pain meds altogether. 

My cat Mimi sleeps with me and
during the day likes to nap under
the covers, right in the middle of the bed.

It has been claimed that there is nothing that will prevent, delay, or reverse Alzheimer’s disease. Most of the mainstream medical establishment is focused on diagnosis and treatment of disease, and limits attention to matters of general wellness to stating the obvious. For example, the California clinical care guidelines for Alzheimer’s Disease give hardly any space to issues of healthy living, and only suggest that lifestyle modifications may lower risks and help the brain.

In her latest book and personal crusade to enlighten the public on the worsening sleep deprivation crisis, Arianna Huffington documents new findings from research that show the benefits of sufficient sleep to brain functionality, what she describes as “memory consolidation, brain and neurochemical cleansing, and cognitive maintenance.” Certainly for those with compromised brain health, these benefits are even more vital. Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs, a renowned advocate for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to cure insomnia, warns that commonly prescribed medications such as Lunesta and Ambien have risks including elevated mortality for long-term use and are only mildly effective. I shudder to think what Alzheimer’s patients, already dealing with sleep disruption side-effects from Aricept and Namenda, do to themselves if they add insomnia medication. I only recently read that the vivid nightmares can be mitigated by taking Alzheimer meds earlier in the day instead of before bedtime. It’s no wonder that people turn to online forums for suggestions and advice in the absence of clear medical guidance.

One doctor’s blog called Eating Academy that I have been following since my own health issues in the past few years, provides an important source of health information that will soon be revamped into a book and website, peterattiamd.com. Sleep and recovery, what Dr. Attia calls “sleep hygiene” require a deliberate effort, especially as technology alters our habits and routines in ways that may have important consequences for health and wellness. In this post he shares how movement, and preparing the body for a workout, are crucial aspects of maintaining the body and being free of pain. I find his arguments and explanations to be very helpful and enlightening.

 There’s no clear number of hours of sleep we need for optimal health, although some argue evidence points to seven as the magic number. All I know is, we are now sleeping better than before, and we wake up pain free. We are lucky to have plenty of Roman sunshine to start the morning off on the right track, although a grey cloudy morning has its own kind of beauty too.