Bedicine

Last night at a party, a fellow working-stiff friend and I were giving a hard time to two of our retiree buddies.  “You need to be productive,” my friend said.  “Napping all the time, goofing off… you need to accomplish something.”

It brought me back to one of my favorite reads (and re-reads) this year, Dr. Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep.  

Walker, a sleep scientist at UC Berkeley and self-described “Sleep Diplomat” gives a fascinating and layperson-friendly overview of the science behind why we need sleep and the hundreds of benefits that it offers.  

From the benefits for memory (forget the all-nighters, kids), heart health, muscle and bone repair, athletic performance, mood, cognition, hormone regulation, and more, he shows that your sleeping hours are, in fact, the most productive hours of your day!

The book (and, for the attention-span-deprived, his TED Talk)  is chock-full of mind-blowing facts and scientific studies.  But at this time of year, one seems particularly relevant: immunity.  

Walker describes how in a recent study, scientists brought in a group of healthy volunteers and monitored their sleep habits.  The lucky folks then received a healthy dose of the common cold virus — sprayed directly into the nasal cavity — and were then monitored for a week.

What they found was that people who slept less than 5 hours a night were four times more likely to come down with a cold than those who slept more than 7 hours.  

It’s interesting to me that even after taking the virus straight up the sneeze chute (the same technique that my vet uses to give Jake his vaccines), only 42% of the sleep-deprived group got sick (as opposed to 17% of the well-rested group).  It tells me that the body is more resilient than we think.  It also tells me that this cold and flu season, when folks shrink-wrap themselves in everything from Purell to surgical masks in a futile attempt to shield themselves from the germs that are literally everywhere, maybe your best medicine is some good old-fashioned Vitamin Z.