When Sleep becomes your Friend: the importance of sleep for reality

NEUROLOGY, psychology

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Distortion happens everywhere, all the time. 

We see it in translation, perception, communication, feelings, socializing, cognitive biases, our senses, and more. 

With C&C’s mission, however–examining how cognitive science and the arts affect our human experience–one of the best ways to explore the distortion within consciousness, perception, and our senses, is sleep.

Sleep is either a lauded haven for some, or a place of anxiety for others. According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, roughly “50 to 70 million Americans have chronic, or ongoing, sleep disorders.”And when we aren’t well-rested, we see distortion happen at an all-time-high level. 

But turns out, more of us are distorting reality than we know–especially teens. 

Approximately “1 in 3 adults in the United States reported not getting enough rest or sleep every day,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Stanford Medicine’s Ruthann Richter says 

“According to a 2006 National Sleep Foundation poll, the organization’s most recent survey of teen sleep, more than 87 percent of high school students in the United States get far less than the recommended eight to 10 hours.” 

“Sleep deprivation increases the likelihood teens will suffer myriad negative consequences, including an inability to concentrate, poor grades, drowsy-driving incidents, anxiety, depression, thoughts of suicide and even suicide attempts.”

“Tired teens” were declared a public health epidemic by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2014.

So what’s so interesting about the way sleep deprivation distorts? It blurs our perception of memory, reality, our feelings, and time. 

Even just one night of sleep strengthens your memory. Sleep deprivation is tied to the hippocampus, the primary brain center for memories. Sleep enables memories to be revisited from their initial “raw and fragile form,” and be filtered by means of what’s necessary, according to sleep expert Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School. Plus, UC Berkeley neurology and psychology professor Matthew Walker explains how “the slow brain waves of stage 3 sleep (deep NREM sleep) ‘serve as a courier service,’ transporting memories from the hippocampus to other more permanent storage sites [3].” Dr. Jade Wu, sleep psychologist and author of Hello Sleep explains how “if you get even a few bad nights of sleep, your brain will likely store memories differently. They get jumbled up. What should usually get dumped gets consolidated. Your memory does curious things.” When we don’t have those processing mechanisms used for storing, retaining, and enforcing memories, we can blur the line between what is stored as a memory and what is stored as reality. 

Not only can it distort reality, but how we perceive our feelings.

According to a 2022 University of Bern study, the “brain triages emotions during dream sleep to consolidate the storage of positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative ones.” This suggests that prolonged wakefulness exacerbates distortion via the negative cognitive bias.

What’s more interesting, however, is in addition to its neurological and psychological ties, the topic of sleep deprivation has philosophical ties. Leading global multi-media web portal Big Think brings up two different philosophical connections: one with the senses, and one with time.

Senses

Take the following passage excerpted from Big Think’s article, “The hidden ways sleep deprivation warps your reality:”

 “Philosophers have long written about how fallible our senses are. Sextus Empiricus placed a stick in water to show how it would appear bent. René Descartes wrote, “The senses deceive…and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us.”

“The point, at least in Western philosophy, is not to entirely disregard the senses but to correct them. We should treat them suspiciously, but we have to use them. Trust, but verify. When we’re seriously sleep-deprived, however, we cannot so easily process our senses. Kant once wrote, ‘All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason.’ Reason is the final arbiter that calibrates all that we see. According to Wu, though, knowledge doesn’t end with reason. It ends with a good night’s sleep.”

Time

Immanuel Kant believed that “time is a category of human understanding, not a real property of the world,” that it is 

“All in our heads.”

Now, this isn’t proven true, as cosmic time may exist; nevertheless, two truths can exist at the same time. Word for Thought’s motto, “It’s all in your head,” in a very non-gaslighting way, is represented by how something like time is malleable via perception. Dr. Wu describes how individuals with insomnia can perceive a couple of minutes as hours during the night; plus, according to Big Think, a 2003 study published in Sage Journals describes how sleep-deprived individuals overestimated time passed in an experiment.

Ultimately, there are seemingly endless facets for humans to distort, but a vast one is perception. Of course, reality can be different for each one of us, time passes differently based on numerous factors, and senses feel different in different bodies. Who knows if there is one, True reality under that. Nevertheless, if we want to continue experimenting with these types of mysteries of life, we must be able to acutely sense, and give ourselves the respect of sleep.

At the end of the day, no one can say it better than the NIH: “research shows that getting enough quality sleep at the right times is vital for mental health, physical health, quality of life, and safety.” Perhaps it is best to leave it to the professionals. 

Sleep tight,

Rachel Jeong, Editor-in-Chief