This just in, sleep matters. Not just for our beauty, as the saying goes. In fact instead of the popular “beauty sleep,” given the sleep statistics on Alzheimer’s prevention, maybe we could rebrand “beauty sleep,” to “brain sleep.”
“I’d love to have another, but I have to get my brain to sleep!”
Definitely not as sexy, but much more important for the long haul. And a long, healthy life.
I recently had the chance to interview Jake Weinbaum, a man who has put his money where his mouth is in pursuit of his passion for brain health. Based on his research, Weinbaum lives an admirably disciplined lifestyle that includes no eating/drinking 3 hours before sleep and no eating 8 hours after that. He also exercises daily and has greatly reduced his alcohol intake. Remarkably, he’s still able to laugh!
Following a life as a serial entrepreneur, he is now committed to bringing awareness to the public about our glymphatic system and finding solutions to make it as efficient as possible. For the non-bioscience people, myself included, Weinbaum explains, “The glymphatic system removes metabolic waste, including proteins like beta-amyloid associated with Alzheimer's disease, from the brain.” As the daughter of someone who suffered from Alzheimer’s, he had me at amyloid plaque.
Lucky for us, the glymphatic system does its best work while we sleep. Which is why Jake has become a veritable proselytizer of getting solid shut-eye.
I love to wax on about the benefits of laughter for endorphin release, the dopamine hit and how it brings more oxygen to our organs, including the brain. Good to know that on days you can’t find anything funny, if you can commit to eight hours of sleep at night, you’re still putting in valuable time at the brain office.
If you’d like to read more about brain health, check out this article published by the American Brain Foundation, or this one on the relationship between our circadian rhythms and brain health.
I was on the road this week hitting three states in three days. Day two, my throat felt a little scratchy. Often in my hotel room my indulgence is watching TV in bed, something I never do at home. Sometimes, I’ll even doze off with it on! I’m crazy like that. But after my conversation with Mr. Weinbaum and his insistence on the cleansing health benefits of uninterrupted sleep away from screens, I shut it all down and closed my eyes. Eight hours later I woke up clear eyed and whatever irritation my throat was fighting had vanished. I love non-pharmacological intervention like this!
So no more calls from me between 10pm and 6am. My phone will be on sleep mode.
