You feel cranky, out of sorts, tired. Reflexes slow. You try so hard to focus on what you’re doing, much of the rest of the world goes unnoticed.
Cognitive ability declines — that’s med-speak for ‘You get stupid and make bad decisions’. Memories made in the past hide deeper in the brain, and the brain doesn’t lay down new memories very well. Blood pressure and glucose rise; immune responses fade or go wacky.
Lack of sleep is the last thing you want to have added to your troubles during a time of crisis. But of course sleep is hard to get during a crisis. What’s a prepper to do? Knowing how the sleep cycle is supposed to work can give us some good ideas.
Note: I’m not a physician and this isn’t medical advice. It’s information gleaned from the literature.
How we regulate the 24 hr sleep and wake cycle
If you leave people undisturbed in a completely unchanging environment with no contact with the outside world (does being in this study sound like a fun summer job?), most people settle into sleeping 7-9 hrs out of the 23 – 26 hr ‘days’ they naturally fall into. Their internal clocks set the rhythm.
If you give them a window to natural daylight, their rhythms adjust to the usual 24 hr cycle, but they still sleep 7-9 hrs a night. Give them less than 7.5 hrs a night, on average, and their ability to process and remember information declines. Give them less than 5.5 hrs a night, and they *notice* they’re working and thinking slower. Interesting 2 hr gap there…
The mechanism that runs this natural cycle relies heavily on the hormone melatonin. Melatonin is released by the pineal gland deep in your brain. When you’re getting a lot of light, you make less melatonin. Sun sets, melatonin rises, sleep comes.
How it’s supposed to work: When light drops, melatonin rises and makes you sleepy. (1)
Melatonin as a sleep cycle regulator
A prepper can use this natural adjustment very easily: by taking melatonin as a supplement to encourage sleep. Its shelf life isn’t forever, but it will last a few years if kept dark and at a stable, low temperature. We refrigerate our stocks.
Dissolving 1 to 0.3 mcg under the tongue half an hour before you want to sleep encourages sleep. Swallowed pills take about an hour to exert their effects. Melatonin doesn’t force sleep as sedatives do, and doesn’t trash your ability to function if you must awaken earlier than planned. That makes it a safer choice, especially for troubled times. The sleep cycle itself is pretty normal with melatonin, so one often feels more rested than after taking a real ‘knock you out’ sleep aid. (2,3)
Many supplements are sold as 5 mcg, which is way more than most experts recommend. It might work a little better, but it’s more likely to make you dependent on the supplement over time, since we adjust to high doses by becoming less sensitive and reducing our natural melatonin production. Buy 5mcg because they’re handy and cheap and you can cut them into quarters before use.
Light as a sleep cycle regulator
Blue light is especially good at suppressing melatonin production. Smart phones and other electronic screens emit a lot of blue light. To improve sleep, avoid using those screens in the hour before you want to start sleeping, or at least use one of the apps that cuts blue light emissions.
Sunlight is also rich in blue light. Pack a light mask (they take almost zero room or weight) in the Go bag to improve off-cycle sleep.
Sleep cycles within cycles
The ‘sleep cycle’ is more than just one chunk of sleep per 24 hrs. All time asleep does not count equally towards our ability to function. To have sleep be really effective, we need to run through multiple complete sleep cycles per night. Each of these ‘mini-cycles’ is about 90 minutes long. We move from light to deep sleep, then experience a period of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is when we dream. Failure to get to every stage fails to refresh: People who were allowed to sleep as much as they liked but awakened whenever they entered REM started to hallucinate after several days.
What’s this mean to preppers? For one thing, if you get up every hour for a five minute security check, you’re shooting yourself in the foot … perhaps literally. One six hour sleep a night, plus one extensive nap (about 90 minutes) works well for many people. (4)
As it’s just Salty and I, we have no plans to keep watch cycles as other preppers propose. Arguing need — “But we need to keep watch!” — does not budge the facts of biology. Such disturbed sleep and sleep deprivation is certain to degrade efficiency and health. Being well rested will leave us better able to awaken and function if there is a night disturbance. If we thought night disturbances were a strong possibility, we’d instead shift our activity and get a big chunk of sleep during the day.
Disrupting your sleep cycle from within
It’s *possible* that I’ve been awakened from sleep by loud snoring, sleepily complained to Salty … and learned it was my own snoring that awakened me. Both snoring and sleep apnea are our own home-made sleep cycle disruptors. Both can play havoc with our rest. As far as our brains are concerned, it doesn’t matter if the problem was home-brewed; the brain ain’t a-gonna work if it doesn’t get its sleep!
If you snore like a pug, you’re likely to disturb your own sleep cycles.
What’s this got to do with the sleep cycle? Well, during the deeper phases of sleep, tissues relax more than when we’re awake, so soft tissues can collapse and partly block the airways. Partial blocks cause snoring; temporary major blocks cause sleep apnea. Both tend to drive us out of the deep, restorative sleep — and potentially disturb anyone else trying to sleep nearby.
This piece goes into more detail, but here’s the short form of assistance for these problems: Sleeping at an incline helps. Mouthpieces and/or nasal strips can join your preps. Losing weight helps many people. Decongestant drugs reduce allergic or illness-induced problems.
While alcohol and sedative drugs can help you fall asleep, this is not necessarily a win for sleep overall. All of these drugs can make snoring and/or apnea worse.
What if you do need to be alert at night?
Maybe you’re in a big group and are doing guard shifts. Maybe you’re having to bug out in a hot climate and need to move at night. Or you’ve decided to solve the “animals raiding the garden during the night” and “not enough meat” problems in one fell swoop. For whatever reason, you need to be sharp and alert at a time when nature doesn’t favor it.
The only good long-term answer I know of is to adjust your own internal cycles. Regular is key. When air traffic controllers were making lots of errors during the night shift, the FAA made them switch to schedules that kept each controller doing nights for several weeks at a time, instead of swapping shifts every week. Error rates dropped precipitously. (The reports don’t say how grumpy the families of the controllers were, never seeing each other at their best.) The point is the people always working nights adapted to it and functioned much better.
Nighttime errors dropped precipitously when the controllers had to stay on the same shift to let their cycles adapt.
If it’s a single-night thing, such as the critter hunt … well, we all know about coffee, don’t we? Mild stimulants do a great job in the short term. It’s only when you rely on them night after day after night that the sleep cycle disruption causes real problems with brain function.
Sleep quality is a big deal. Even if it’s not causing outright harm, sleep cycle disturbance just plain degrades your well-being. We here at 3BY are all about your thriving, not just surviving, so get those quality Zzzzzs and feel great!
References
1) Zhiqiang Ma, Yang Yang, Chongxi Fan, Jing Han, Dongjin Wang, Shouyin Di, Wei Hu, Dong Liu, Xiaofei Li, Russel J. Reiter, and Xiaolong Yan [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
2) Carter, M. and Juurlink, D. Melatonin. CMAJ November 20, 2012 vol. 184 no. 17 First published April 16, 2012, doi:10.1503/cmaj.111765
3) Costello, R. B., Lentino, C. V., Boyd, C. C., O’Connell, M. L., Crawford, C. C., Sprengel, M. L., & Deuster, P. A. (2014). The effectiveness of melatonin for promoting healthy sleep: a rapid evidence assessment of the literature. Nutrition Journal, 13, 106. http://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2891-13-106
4) Gordon, A.M. 2013. Your Sleep Cycle Revealed. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-you-and-me/201307/your-sleep-cycle-revealed
You can and should train for sleep deprivation like we did in the army if you think your going into a situation. Day 3 is the turning point for most of us where bad decisions get made. You need a good team to tell you when that’s happening and even more important you need to learn to drop the ego and be receptive. That was the hardest thing for me but once I did and learned that trust it was so much better as a leader.
Matt with respect you cannot train for sleep deprivation. That is why the military I served in for 20+ years made very sure we had sleep in proper amounts. Bad decisions because your sleep deprived costs too much. That is why I push my prepper friends about teamwork as to allow sleep and productivity. One of the most effective tactics of the VC was to send noisemakers all night long as to disrupt sleep of our soldiers. Part of the reason the Mi Li massacre occurred. My era of military service learned well from that. Soldiers are often short on sleep but true sleep deprivation is not acceptable because of the dangerous errors that occur.
You can train for it. Not for sleep but better choices and learning when you’ve had enough. You also learn your team and they you.
I served 20 as well.
Ask yourself how we got to Baghdad in 3 days on no sleep and winning.
Matt maybe we are defining the terms differently. While my unit did not enter Bagdad I do remember WE won because we Sleep Deprived the Republican Guard and all of Bagdad with air attacks for over a week IIRC. When you start being delirious, fall asleep marching and don’t care if a sniper is shooting at you then you are truly sleep deprived. As a MASH unit we took prisoners with out a fight because they simply wanted food and sleep, most fell asleep eating. The 3 days with out sleep is getting too close to the edge my friend. We as preppers need to plan ahead and prep as to avoid that trap. So Matt can you suggest some ways to avoid sleep depravation? My unit had us stand down for almost 24 hours prior to the big push to recharge our batteries so to speak. Personally for SHTF I have sleeping quarters in a modified root cellar available as to prevent VC style noisemaker attacks keeping off shift members from sleeping.
I got age and accident related autoimmune diseases in my household (but not with me). I try various herbals (food based) to see if it might help my household and not interfere with their Rx’s. I also work 3rd shift, sleep 2nd and usually fall asleep within two minutes (but too often sleep only for 5 hrs), and my household can get noisy during 2nd. My snoring frequently wakes me. Then I try fermented beet powder high in vegetable (safe) nitrate that produces nitrite (NOS, used by NFL’rs, Olympians before strenuous activity) that widens blood/fluid vessels, increases O2 in the blood, helps heart rest. Within 20 minutes of my first try my sinuses open up and stay open, 100% for 4 hours. During hours 5-6, they rermain open about 80%, and then it begins to fade off after 6 hours. I work heavy labor, lots of leaning/lifting @ 67y/o. I used to get leg cramps (4 at a time), but with Magnesium L-Threonate and 100% fermented beet powder. I sleep like a baby, no more cramps, less muscle strain at work. I gave a bag to a coworker (without no clogged sinus). He noticed he was breathing easier when smoking a few hours later and takes beet powder daily–I mean it is just food!
Good information about the beet powder. Any recommended brands?
From your comment about being awakened by your snoring I suspect you have sleep apnea. A very common situation that disrupts sleep (and commonly causes daytime exhausted feelings) and your beet powder seems to reduce the O2 issues of interrupted breathing. Raising the head of your bed has given me and my beloved some relief from Apnea. She uses a CPAP now and the change in her life has been remarkable when your not always semi-sleep deprived. Thus I have a off grid solar kit and batteries to feed that device plus..
Fortunately I only get bad when I am very congested by cold or allergies. There is a post up on sleep apnea already I did a year or so ago, it being so common as you say. The ‘sleep inclined’ pillows are in it, as are the nasal strips. Wherever you saw beet root; it wasn’t from me. The good science on it is very thin, so I don’t really have anything to say about it for good or ill.