Recently I’ve been interested in strength training — building muscle and losing fat to increase health, energy, and metabolism. Like most health topics, strength training is multifaceted. You can tackle it from different angles. Strength training isn’t just about lifting weights. It’s about diet and psychology as well.

In fact, with some diets like the anabolic diet or cyclic ketogenic diet (CKD), you can build some muscle without even lifting weights.

What you do out of the gym is just as important as what you do in the gym. A great workout won’t make up for a junk diet.

Psychology also plays a huge part in strength training. A rigorous gym routine requires motivation. Some strength training books even talk about training the mind to handle bigger weights. I can attest to the effectiveness of mind-training: simply visualizing lighter weights before a set makes the reps easier.

Brain Health and Sleep

Sleep is “for the brain, by the brain,” as they say. Meaning: as we drop off every night it’s our brain that runs the mechanism for sleep, not our body. And it’s our brain, not our body, that needs the sleep.

A simple nudge of intuition would lead us to believe that a healthy brain gives us healthy sleep. So if you’re looking for that wake-up-and-feel-great feeling every morning, is it enough to optimize your sleep habits? Or should you focus on proper brain health as well?

I’ve often wondered this. I’m starting to realize that sleep is a lot like strength training. You’ll have a hard time building muscle with a poor diet, even if your weight lifting routine is perfect. Likewise, if you focus solely on sleep habits (sleep/wake times, using sunlight in the morning, etc) you’re really only getting half the picture… The orchestra of neurotransmitters and overall brain health are the major determinants in sleep quality — ignoring them will leave you with sub-par sleep, even if you religiously follow all the rules of “sleep hygiene.”

Now let’s take a closer look at the connection between brain health and sleep…

Sleep and Age

Cognitive decline is a part of life. Much in the same way skin or hair degrade with old age, so does the brain. Over time, oxidative and other stressors put dents and dings in your neurons, making the brain as a whole less efficient.

Sleep quality also declines with age. Teenagers typically spend around 20% of their sleep time in slow-wave sleep (the deepest, most restorative sleep). The elderly, however, experience much less — some studies show they average around 0-5%. The elderly also experience more time in light sleep and more interrupted sleep. The graph below gives examples of a young person’s sleep (top) and an elder’s (bottom).

In fact, if you’ve ever wondered why 10-year olds are always wired up with seemingly unlimited energy, one of the reasons is that their sleep stage architecture so closely follows the “textbook example” — lots of deep sleep, noticeable cyclic patterns, and more continuous stage distribution.

Other interesting points include the fact that brain morphology (i.e. brain volume) decline with age, and some studies suggest that it’s this change in morphology that accounts for increasingly poor sleep. This may also account for the fact that the slow-wave pulses on an EEG are weaker (i.e. smaller amplitude) in the elderly.

Sleep and Dementia

When you enter REM sleep your body becomes paralyzed. This is your body’s way of preventing you from acting out your dreams. In a rare sleep disorder, REM behavior disorder (RBD), the paralysis mechanism fails, causing the sleeper to move throughout the night, sometimes violently injuring their bed partners.

One study from the Mayo Clinic showed that all patients with RBD eventually develop dementia or Parkinson’s disease.

While some [RBD] patients don’t exhibit symptoms of dementia, all patients we have seen with RBD do develop the pathology… It’s an ethical dilemma. We know that many patients with RBD will develop dementia or parkinsonism, but we can’t positively predict what will happen in each individual case. -Dr Boeve, Mayo Clinic

But the correlation doesn’t stop there. Just about every form of dementia, especially Alzheimer’s, has been associated with extremely poor sleep — increased number of nighttime awakenings, lower sleep efficiency, increased daytime napping, decrease in REM and deep sleep.

A 2006 study showed that sleep disturbances increase as the severity of dementia increases.

In other words, brain health is sleep health.

Bringing it All Together

Although half of us (statistically speaking) will eventually develop some form of dementia, I’m more interested in how this information effects me now. Since I’m in my 20s, I don’t think about dementia and age-related cognitive decline often (or at all?), but I think the above information provides important clues into how to improve both sleep and brain health now, regardless of age.

So the question is: Can we preserve or even improve sleep quality by keeping our brains in tip-top shape?

I think so, at least based on the above information. All the intricacies may not be entirely clear, but it’s something I will explore in upcoming articles. So if you’re looking for ways to improve sleep quality through brain health, stay tuned for future articles.

In summary, keep in mind these key points:

1. Good sleep improves brain health. Good brain health improves sleep. It’s a positive feedback loop.
2. Likewise, poor sleep encourages cognitive decline, poor brain health, and psychiatric disorders. All of those give way to poor sleep. It’s a negative feedback loop.
3. Sleep health and brain health are two pillars upholding optimal quality of life. Neglecting one does no good for the other.