The Power of Sleep: your number 1 optimisation tool

We’ve all heard that we should be sleeping 8 hours per night yet 36% of adults in the UK struggle to fall asleep at least once a week and 14% of Brits sleep less than 5 hours per night. And to add to this, not only do we need 8 hours of sleep, but we also need good quality sleep.

Dr Matthew Walker, sleep expert, neuroscientist, and author of ‘Why We Sleep’ said: “Sleep is the greatest legal performance-enhancing drug that most people are probably neglecting”, and I agree, but the problem is that most people don’t understand the importance of sleep. This article will help to elucidate the importance of sleep and how you can leverage it as a performance-enhancing tool to feel better, think quicker, focus more, and improve your mental, cognitive, and physical health by understanding the physiological mechanisms to drive these modalities.

When we sleep, we cycle through two phases of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep, and each cycle is approximately 90 minutes. On average you’ll go through 4-6 REM cycles per night, with each cycle getting longer as the night progresses. Healthy adults spend around 20-25% of their time sleeping in REM, that’s around 90 minutes if you sleep 7-8 hours.

We also go through stages of deep sleep, early on in the night, the slowest wave sleep where the brain reaches delta brain waves, also called slow-wave sleep; we only go through that twice, but if your sleep is well-curated you can reach those three times in the night. One should be spending around 20% of their night in deep sleep. Typically, you’ll descend into a deep sleep within an hour of falling asleep, with each cycle getting progressively shorter as the night progresses. This stage of sleep is critical for restorative sleep, allowing the body to repair and grow. It’s also responsible for cleaning out toxins in the brain through something called the glymphatic system. This system ensures the efficient elimination of soluble proteins and metabolites from the central nervous system; think of it as a waste clearance system for the brain. When this system isn’t functioning properly it is attributed to neuronal loss, inflammation and potentially even leading to dementia. There is evidence to suggest that honing in on your deep sleep can contribute to insightful thinking ^[1] and improve memory ^[2] and learning ^[3].

Hormones and sleep

Both men and women have testosterone, women just have it in lower quantities, but it’s a vitally important hormone for both. The majority of testosterone release in men occurs during REM sleep, and whilst the data on women and testosterone is limited, we do know that there is evidence to suggest that low testosterone levels in women are linked to lower levels of sleep efficiency. It’s a bidirectional relationship, where lack of sleep lowers your testosterone, and low testosterone impairs sleep duration and quality.

Since testosterone is mostly released during REM sleep, cutting your sleep to 6 hours means you’re losing an entire cycle of REM, which also means you’re losing an entire cycle of testosterone release. A study in healthy adults found that if men slept 5 hours per night for eight nights, their testosterone levels dropped by 10-15% ^[4]. This is a drastic amount; to put it into perspective, normal ageing decreases testosterone by 1-2% per year.

Testosterone – a key regulator of cognitive function with neuroprotective properties, directly related to insomnia and responsible for muscle growth and bone density – is forfeited due to lack of sleep. During our busy lives, it can feel as though staying healthy is a hopeless feat that requires many fancy luxuries, but it can be as simple as improving aspects of the very basics that our physiology already provides us with, sleep is an example of them.

Growth hormone on the other hand is mostly released during deep restorative sleep. Makes sense, right? Because if deep sleep is restorative, then it only makes sense that growth hormone, the mayor of restorative processes is released during this stage. Whether you’re an athlete or someone who works a stressful job that doesn’t require muscle growth because you don’t exercise, growth hormone is there to aid in all restorative functions regardless of your activity levels. Growth hormones regulate the repair of many bodily functions including the damage caused by chronic stress; so, it’s not just important for bodybuilders, athletes and growing children, but vital for everyone and anyone. Growth hormone regulates metabolic functions such as insulin action and blood sugar levels, and it also helps with repairing glial cells and astrocytes, these supporting brain cells in the brain, that help with cognitive function and regulate mood; worth hormone can improve alertness, and endurance and irritability. Therefore, getting a good length of sleep, but also deep quality sleep will help with your overall physical, emotional and cognitive performance no matter who you are.

How adding Reset to your night-time routine can impact your sleep.

Reset contains some extremely valuable ingredients, perfectly curated to manage the multiple pathways involved with helping someone fall asleep.

Glycine

Glycine is one of the twenty amino acids that serves as a building block for protein synthesis in the body. Aside from its involvement in protein building, glycine acts as a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system and has been demonstrated to enhance sleep quality in individuals by improving their deep sleep domain ^[5]. More studies have shown that individuals with insomnia tendencies were able to fall asleep quicker after ingesting glycine before bedtime compared to those taking a placebo ^[6]. There are two mechanisms by which glycine may improve sleep — by helping to lower core body temperature and by increasing serotonin levels in the brain. Your body’s core body temperature is at its lowest when you’re asleep, hence why having a hot shower can fast forward you to sleep. Homeostatic processes will lower your core body temperature due to the heat warming you up. Serotonin is also increased which, in turn, increases melatonin.

The sleep hormone melatonin is synthesised at night, around two hours before bedtime and the synthesis of melatonin involves serotonin as its precursor. This brings me to my next two ingredients:

5-HTP and Tryptophan

The 5-HTP pathway goes like this (in simple terms):

Tryptophan > 5-HTP > Serotonin > Melatonin

So, can see the importance of serotonin as a sleep precursor, even though it is mostly attributed as a happy chemical, its relevance in sleep is important. Reset includes both essential amino acids that aid someone in being able to sleep better and longer. Studies show that people who took 5-HTP went to sleep quicker and slept more deeply than those who took a placebo ^[7]. More studies show that tryptophan, taken 45 minutes before bedtime, will decrease the time taken to fall asleep in those with mild insomnia with no effects on alertness the next day ^[8]. It’s a win/win combination.

L-theanine

L-theanine exerts its effects via a different mechanism, it acts as an anxiolytic, to help you rid of ruminating thoughts before bed. According to the UK mental health foundation, concerns about personal finances led to almost one in three (30%) adults in the UK having poorer quality sleep. L-theanine has been shown to promote relaxation without drowsiness and even though it doesn’t directly act as a sedative, it promotes good quality of sleep through anxiolysis ^[9], helping you switch off your brain before bed.

Magnesium Bisglycinate

Magnesium bisglycinate, sometimes referred to as just glycinate, is probably the most popular type of magnesium on the market and the most researched when it comes to sleep.

It works by increasing gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) levels, an important amino acid involved with sleep. When you start winding down in the evening for sleep, GABA helps signal to your brain that it’s bedtime, and gradually the communication in your brain starts to slow down, helping you reach lower brain frequencies, eventually taking you all the way down into deep sleep. Magnesium bisglycinate supports this pathway by maintaining healthy GABA levels.

Overall, Reset contains the best concoction of ingredients that can help you naturally achieve your best quality sleep further promoting mental speed, improved decision-making, memory, and learning, and supporting bodily functions such as physical endurance strength, power, and improved immunity. This supplement provides you with the ability to harvest the lowest hanging fruit that is grounded in your physiology; sleep: your number 1 optimisation tool that can help you leverage your best performance yet. We would be crazy to ignore the benefits that this product can help bring.

References

1. Yordanova, J., Kolev, V., Wagner, U., & Verleger, R. (2010). Differential associations of early- and late-night sleep with functional brain states promoting insight to abstract task regularity. PloS One, 5(2), e9442. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0009442
2. Mander, B. A., Santhanam, S., Saletin, J. M., & Walker, M. P. (2011). Wake deterioration and sleep restoration of human learning. Current Biology : CB, 21(5), R183–R184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.01.019
3. Walker, M. P., Liston, C., Hobson, J. A., & Stickgold, R. (2002). Cognitive flexibility across the sleep-wake cycle: REM-sleep enhancement of anagram problem solving. Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research, 14(3), 317–324. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0926-6410(02)00134-9
4. Leproult, R., & Van Cauter, E. (2011). Effect of 1 Week of Sleep Restriction on Testosterone Levels in Young Healthy Men. JAMA, 305(21), 2173–2174. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2011.710
5. Subjective effects of glycine ingestion before bedtime on sleep quality—INAGAWA – 2006—Sleep and Biological Rhythms—Wiley Online Library. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 May 2023, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1479-8425.2006.00193.x
6. Yamadera, W., Inagawa, K., Chiba, S., Bannai, M., Takahashi, M., & Nakayama, K. (2007). Glycine ingestion improves subjective sleep quality in human volunteers, correlating with polysomnographic changes. Sleep and Biological Rhythms, 5(2), 126–131. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1479-8425.2007.00262.x
7. Sutanto, C., Heng, C. W., Gan, A. X., Wang, X., Fam, J., & Kim, J. E. (2021). The Impact of 5-Hydroxytryptophan Supplementation on Sleep Quality of Older Adults in Singapore: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Current Developments in Nutrition, 5(Suppl 2), 372. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdn/nzab037_082
8. Young, S. N. (2003). Is tryptophan a natural hypnotic? Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, 28(2), 160.
9. Rao, T. P., Ozeki, M., & Juneja, L. R. (2015). In Search of a Safe Natural Sleep Aid. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 34(5), 436–447. https://doi.org/10.1080/07315724.2014.926153

Written by Nicole Vignola