Dr. Matt Walker

And that instigates together with other things.

And we've demonstrated by the way that we published a paper probably about a year and a half ago, that these slow waves and these sleep spindles and the coordination of them, how well that they're coordinated seems to instigate a signal down into your bodies, what we call the autonomic nervous system, which carries both the sympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system inside of it and forces you over into a parasympathetic state.

So these brainwaves, one of the things that they seem to be doing is transacting a message to your body's nervous system to say, calm down, quiet down.

What then happens?

Firstly, what we see is your cardiovascular system ramps down.

Deep sleep, you could argue is almost the very best form of blood pressure medication that you could ever wish for.

It's beautiful.

then something happens within your immune system.

We're starting to unpack this, but we still don't quite know why.

These pulsing, deep, slow brainwaves seem to be a trigger for instigating two things for your immune system.

Firstly, it stimulates the restocking of the weaponry in your immune arsenal.

so that you wake up the next day and you are a more robust immune individual.

So these are things like T cells, natural killer cells, things of that sort.

Correct, all of that good stuff.

But what's also interesting, there's a more recent discovery, it's not just that your body has put back all of this armory in place and in fact amplified it, but your body's sensitivity to those immune factors has also increased.

So you've restocked the weaponry and you've made your body more sensitive to those immune signals.

And that's why we will see in probably later discussions, your immune system can start to become

really markedly impaired when you're not getting enough sleep.

So that's a second benefit of the deep sleep brainwave patterns.

The third benefit that we've realized is that it's very good at regulating your metabolic system and specifically your ability to control your blood sugar and your blood glucose.