Chapter 1: What happens to our brains when we don't sleep?
My mind starts to wobble at the edge of things. Thoughts turn into mush. Then suddenly, the switch just flips. The night shift clocks in. My brain stops doom-scrolling my life scenes and starts housekeeping. Filing memories, running repairs, balancing the books, taking out the biochemical rubbish. I look inactive, but up top it's a busy office with no windows and excellent HR.
Then comes the theatre. My brain is buzzing in its own way, but my body is on don't act mode. I'm starring in a film I didn't exactly write. Familiar streets, impossible physics. I'm in my old school wearing pyjamas. And then, naturally, I'm knighted by the Queen. Then... I open my eyes, the light pours in. Now, I'm ready to face the world. Maybe in five minutes.
Welcome to Life Without, where I yank a Jenga block out of our magnificent world. A piece we rely on has just vanished. My doing, of course. No heads up, no easy fixes. Just the game of life wobbling in front of our eyes. Will the tower stand or will the whole thing come crashing down?
APPLAUSE
For BBC Radio 4, this is Life Without with me, Alan Davis, and together we'll find out if a life without sleep is game over.
Sleep is essential. We should take sleep seriously, but not too seriously and not obsess about it.
With me on this restless journey, Dirk Youngdyke, Professor of Sleep and Physiology at the University of Surrey and founder and director of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre. And Dr Sophie Bostock, a.k.a. the Sleep Scientist, a health psychologist who has helped everyone from Google to the Royal Marines sleep better.
We need to change our perceptions of sleep and see it as a gift that we are giving ourselves to have a better day tomorrow.
I love that. Sleep keeps us healthy, sane and moderately pleasant. Wild animals delay sleep to migrate or escape predators. We delay it to watch one more episode or meet a deadline. So I've made an executive decision. With my omniscient powers, there'll be no sleep. Zero winks allowed, let alone 40. It's one sleepless day in... It's basically a worldwide all-nighter.
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Chapter 2: How does sleep deprivation affect our mental health?
How are our brains fighting this situation?
One of the defining features of sleep deprivation is you get these unpredictable, invasive micro-sleeps. So for the most part, you're functioning pretty well. But what happens is that your brain switches off consciousness for anything from one to maybe even 30 seconds. And these micro-sleeps are thought to be responsible for probably about one in five fatal car accidents.
You know, driving is a pretty boring task, and the effects of sleep deprivation are largest when you have to do a boring task. If you have to do something difficult, the brain engages. At a cost, of course, you have to put in an awful lot of effort.
Is it true that children don't grow if they don't sleep?
If you sleep less, your body has less opportunity to produce growth hormones. You can see a correlation. I'm not sure that it's direct.
We can't do the experiment. We can't do a randomized control trial to find out the answer to your question, Alan. So I'm very sorry. It's ethically not allowed. So annoying. I can completely fully agree with that position.
Margaret Thatcher famously claimed she could get by on four hours. Three days in, are some people genuinely coping better without sleep than others?
We typically say that most working age adults need seven hours or more to function at their best. But you can think about your sleep need a bit like any other biological characteristic. There will be some people who can naturally thrive on a little bit less and some people who need a little bit more.
But what does it mean being able to still function? When you look very carefully, you can say after three days without sleep, I'm still very good at riding my bike. At the same time, that person may be very much impaired if they have to give a speech. Whereas for the other person, it's exactly the other way around. I'm sure that Sophie without sleep can still do that rowing very, very well.
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