Sleep

If you had a “PC” in the 1990s, you were probably prompted by Microsoft Windows to perform the occasional disk defragmentation. It’s still unclear to me what that was all about. Every once in a while, you’d be prompted with the question, “would you like to run a disk defragmentation right now?” Feeling confused but obligated, you’d click the ‘OK’ button, a program would pop up, displaying a random series of colored blocks. As the program ran, the blocks would move around, and you’d have to sit with the fear that somehow this would delete everything on your computer by accident. By the time it was finished, all the blocks were neatly grouped by color. I suppose the point of this was to consolidate and organize all your data in a way that would improve efficient access to it later on.

We can’t argue with that logic. When you’re about to walk out your front door, it’s always easier to grab your keys if you put them in the same spot every time you return home. It’s about smart storage and efficient retrieval. Something very similar occurs in our brains when we sleep. As we progress through the various stages of sleep, from light sleep, to deep sleep, to dreaming, our brains consolidate and organize information gathered earlier that day.^99–100 Sleep helps us store memories and encode new information.¹⁰¹ This provides us with better data storage and retrieval.

Our brains stay active during sleep. This activity builds wisdom as it makes meaningful connections between all those pieces of information we took in during the day.¹⁰⁰ On the way to making all those meaningful connections, we go into a dream state. That’s when things get weird. But it’s a good weird. By the time we wake up, our brain has hashed out all the craziness, and we are then in a much better position to respond to life.

Being human, we experience lots of emotions in a day. Some good, some bad. Sometimes, the bad ones outnumber the good. Our situations often dictate our emotional comings and goings. Intense emotions commonly stem from difficult or intense situations. Sometimes difficult situations stick around for a while. Often, difficult situations fade away as quickly as they came. Similarly, emotions well up inside, but can also pass on by relatively quickly. There can be the situation where a difficult situation pops up and produces strong emotions. But then the difficult situation is somehow resolved. Yet, our intense emotions remain. Whether our emotional response lingers long after a difficult situation has passed depends on how we make meaning out of that situation. That meaning either keeps an emotion front and center or allows it to fade away.

Emotional regulation is the ability to look at a situation from different angles, like turning a jagged stone over in your hand. From one angle, what you see makes you infuriated. Turn it over, and you can see another side that maybe makes you feel sad or hurt. Turn it over once more, and you can now see a totally different angle that helps you feel empathy and understanding. Our brain practices this sort of emotional regulation during sleep. Sleep helps us process our experiences. It puts these thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and experiences in the right place in our minds. All that digesting of life’s experiences is important for emotional regulation.¹⁰² This is likely where the saying, “just sleep on it,” comes from.

Good, quality sleep brings wisdom and fresh energy. We need that wisdom and energy everyday of our lives. Wisdom and energy are what’s needed to tackle our many unavoidable problems. As soon as our eyes open every morning, problems start flying directly at us from all directions. Which stressors we take on is a choice. How we approach these stressors is also a choice. If we take them on, we will feel stuff. Generally, we’ll feel some intense, dark, uncomfortable, icky stuff. Courtesy of a good night’s sleep, however, we are more emotionally regulated, and in a better position to face the tough stuff.

Maybe, after a good night’s sleep, it feels like a fresh start because our brains have already tackled our problems by breaking them down into smaller bits. Chopping up our big problems into smaller bite sized tasks makes them much more manageable. With this accomplished overnight, the next day our more emotionally regulated brain can put the pieces of the puzzle together in a rational and productive way. The alternative to emotional regulation is raw emotions that well up and catch us off guard. These upwellings of emotion frequently make us think and behave irrationally. We overreact.

Ironically, this surge of emotion starts with the opposite of emotional regulation, called repression. Repression starts with pretending the problem doesn’t exist. We do this almost instinctively because dealing with these things is uncomfortable. The opposite of facing our problems is repression. Instead of doing the work of turning over the stones in our mind to try and see different angles or make more sense of the situation, we can immediately go into repression mode. When we repress, we don’t have to deal. That’s the point. We forget for a while. Repression leads us to initially stuff our feelings. It works pretty well in the moment. Later, it’s up to us to go back and try to deal with all of it... in small bite size pieces of course.

Despite our amazing ability to pretend these stressors do not exist, they still do. At some point stuffing it doesn’t work any longer. Then we generally have a freak out. After freaking for a while, we end up exhausted. The emotion subsides, but without a resolution. We are left walking around with a pit in our stomach because we know it’s not over. Sooner or later, something triggers those feeling again and the freak out cycle continues.

Without effectively processing what is going on for us, we may turn into a any-minute-now volcano of overwhelming negative emotion. Intuitively, we know this is true, but don’t forget, we also possess the ability repress. In reality, repression is actually a short-term survival skill. We can operate as if we are unaware. We can, temporarily, totally disconnect from what’s going on inside.

Repression is not a forever solution though. Left unaddressed, the stressors revisit us often. Neglecting to face whatever needs to be addressed, sets us up for repeat crises and confusion. It’s just always there in the background, swishing around like hot molten lava beneath the Earth’s surface. It’s fine as long as things are fine. Then, for some reason or another, we get triggered by something. Maybe initially we have no idea what’s wrong or why we’re so upset. Other times, we know exactly why. Either way, we’re back in it. Too much all at once and our brain short circuits. That’s not only frustrating, it prevents forward progress in life. In addition, this whirlwind of emotion can be confusing and disorienting.

Good, quality sleep can help protect against this sudden, bewildering emotional storm. Sleep connects these dots so that those things that impact us deeply don’t suddenly resurface and hit us all at once. If we had a different or better way of thinking of these stressors, when we do get triggered, then we’d likely be able to handle things better. If you never defragment your disk in your sleep, or in therapy, or in purposeful self-reflection, you’re bound to experience this slingshot of overwhelming negative emotion. Sleep is reorienting, which is immensely helpful for our mental and emotional well-being.

Beyond the emotional regulation benefit, sleep helps regenerate brain structures and improves their function,^103–105 as well as removing wastes from the brain.^106–107 There really is no optimal brain function without an adequate amount of undisturbed sleep. Good, quality sleep keeps your brain healthy and functioning at its best. Sleep is the ultimate reset button. So make sure you don’t neglect your sleep!