The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health (32 page)

Veasey thinks that the same sequence of events happens in aging brains. As neurons become less adept at cleaning up their waste, they poison themselves. So a good question is: What are we doing to our brains when we don’t get enough sleep? If we suffer from chronic sleep deprivation, are we simultaneously aging our brains prematurely? Is it possible for the brain of a thirty-year-old to look more like that of a sixty-year-old? Some of the research is already showing that yes, this might be true. After all, if sleep didn’t have value, then it would be one of evolution’s biggest and most inefficient mistakes!

In research performed by Maiken Nedergaard, codirector of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester, it’s been found that nonneuronal glial cells in the brain, which hadn’t been given much attention previously in research circles, act as little pumps when the body sleeps.
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All organs use energy, but perhaps none so much as the brain. And in the process of using energy, organs create
waste products. Most organs sweep away their own garbage with the help of an efficient system nearby, such as by recruiting specialized immune cells that can chew up the trash like a disposal. Some organs are tied into a mesh of vessels that are part of the lymph system, the body’s drainage pipes.

Although we just recently discovered in 2015 that the brain is connected directly to the immune system by lymphatic vessels we didn’t know existed before, the brain isn’t couched in lymph vessels like other parts of the body.
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During our wakeful hours, it’s the glial cells that help the brain’s neurons carry out their main function: firing electrical impulses and transmitting signals. Because glial cells can’t conduct neuronal activity, they were ignored for a long time by neuroscientists. But then Nedergaard, a busy mother who wanted to get to the bottom of why the brain needs sleep, discovered that glial cells aren’t as static and boring as previously thought. With the help of clinical trials on mice, she noticed that as soon as a mouse fell asleep, the glial cells would take center stage, turning the volume way down on the brain’s electrical activity.

There’s a dramatic and measurable difference between a brain that’s operating in a person fully awake versus someone in deep slumber. The wakeful brain “resembles a busy airport, swelling with the cumulative activity of individual messages traveling from one neuron to another. The activity inflates the size of brain cells until they take up 86 percent of the brain’s volume.”
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The sleeping brain, on the other hand, is characterized by repetitive cycles of low firing and nonexistent firing of neurons depending on which stage of sleep the brain is in. Meanwhile, the brain’s cells shrink in size to make room for the fluid in between them to cleanse the system.

“It’s like a dishwasher that keeps flushing through to wash the dirt away,” says Nedergaard.
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This purifying action also goes on when we’re awake, but not at the same level of intensity. All of which is to say that when we don’t get enough sleep, we don’t experience that high level of detoxification in the brain thanks to those glial cells. Such findings have gotten neuroscientists curious as to whether sleep deprivation
contributes to degenerative brain disorders, especially if they occur earlier in life than expected.

Both Nedergaard’s and Veasey’s work also points to why older brains are more susceptible to developing dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease, which may be caused by hostile proteins that aren’t cleared quickly enough. The molecular trash builds up, but the garbage collectors are not picking up fast enough, so the trash continues to pile up and adversely affect nearby cells and their functionality.

Most people don’t like to be told that sleep is often the quickest and easiest way to regulate their bodies and feel a positive difference in a short time. They’d rather take a shortcut through pills, caffeine, or sugar than be told to sleep better. Even in the Lucky Years, with lots of revolutionary technologies and medicines available, we need to respect and practice good sleep hygiene. While plenty of things can knock us out, nothing can replicate all of sleep’s benefits. We’ve spent decades trying to find a way to package the benefits of sleep into a pill, but it hasn’t happened and probably never will. It’s fine to track and monitor your sleep using apps and technologies, but aim to achieve restful, all-natural sleep as much as possible. Although there will always be some genetic mutant who can get by on just a few hours of sleep a night, just as there will always be someone who can run faster than you, the vast majority of us need at least seven hours of shut-eye.

Remember, sleep is just one activity in the chain of events you undergo each day that contributes or takes away from your health. What you do during the day will undoubtedly affect your sleep at night. As I’ve said throughout, regularity 24-7 is the goal. Far too often, we learn to suppress our body’s preferred schedule to meet goals that might satisfy other areas of our lives but shift us further from health.

Speaking of sleep, I should mention the other activity related to the bedroom that confers substantial health benefits: sex. Beyond just helping us sleep, sex is an activity whose frequency and satisfaction can be
considered a vital sign of health, but its benefits can be downplayed in our society as much as sleep.

I’ll preface this section with what should be the obvious: I’m referring to healthy sexual habits that eliminate risk for the transfer of disease. And I’m talking about consensual sex between two people.

Although sex is touted to relieve stress, reduce pain, ease depression, strengthen blood vessels, boost the immune system, and lower the risk of prostate and breast cancer (not to mention improve sleep and burn calories), a good question is: Does sex actually make people healthier or do healthier people have more sex?

It turns out that not only is that a difficult question to answer scientifically, but all the claims about the benefits of sex are not that easy to prove on a purely scientific basis, meaning one backed by randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. More research is needed. Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a urologist and editor in chief of the
Journal of Sexual Medicine
, stated it best when he said: “The biggest obstacle is lack of funding. If ‘sex’ is in your grant proposal, it’s very hard to get it approved.”
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Goldstein is also president and director of the Institute for Sexual Medicine in San Diego.

I don’t think we need scientific proof to show what most of us have experienced when it comes to sex. Under the right circumstances (i.e., good sex), it feels good and life seems great. We experience both a relaxation and satiation response. Now, scientifically speaking, there are biochemicals involved. Sexual activity entails a chemical cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters that can have lasting effects. Arousal increases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward centers—the same places that create positive feelings upon eating dessert or winning a hand in Vegas. After orgasm, dopamine levels drop and prolactin levels rise to bring on feelings of satisfaction and sleepiness, particularly in men. Sex also increases oxytocin, the bonding hormone that reduces fear and stimulates endorphins, our body’s natural painkillers.

As with so many things in life and health, the “more is better” recommendation doesn’t even apply to something as pleasurable and innocuous as sex. Decades of research show that the satisfaction and meaning
you attach to sex are what’s important. Put simply, if you’re enjoying your sex life and it’s compatible with who you are, then it doesn’t get much better than that, and you don’t need to change anything. Ramping up your sexual activity isn’t going to make you any healthier. And even though there will be an endless number of studies that say people who have sex four or five times a week are happier and earn more money, these things are affected by many other factors. Nonetheless, sexual activity is an important player in our personal health and, from a broader perspective, our social welfare. It influences us throughout our life span. It’s also the behavior that affords us the ability to experience the granddaddy of the senses: touch.

The power of touch is a sorely underappreciated aspect of intimacy that confers substantial health benefits and doesn’t have to be sexual. Our need for touch is so compelling a hunger, in fact, that both animals and humans die for lack of it. Perhaps that is why the body has developed a special reflex to preserve the sense of touch when faced with something that might damage it, such as a hot stove. Your hand pulls away quicker than you can consciously think about the fact that the stove is dangerously hot.

Clearly, when you’re in an intimate setting with a loved one, whether it’s sexual in nature or not, skin-to-skin contact is often part of the experience. Only in the past couple of decades have we come to understand the true power of touch, starting with the landmark studies done in the mid-1990s by Harvard’s Mary Carlson, a neurobiologist who measured stress in Romanian children raised in orphanages or attending poor-quality day-care centers. Carlson performed her work during the height of the
leagăne
, which literally means “cradles” and refers to the state-run institutional homes for very young children that proliferated during this time.
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In the mid-1960s, Romanian Communist president Nicolae Ceauşescu had enacted ironfisted policies that forced families to bear more children than they could afford. In his attempt to increase the population to boost industrial output, not only did he restrict contraceptives
and ban abortions unless a woman had at least four children, but he taxed childless men and women who were over the age of twenty-five. The tax hike was a ghastly 30 percent. The birthrate rose, but not enough for him. By 1985, he took measures even further, raising the minimum number of children per couple to five and forcing women as old as forty-five to bear children.

The eventual result of Ceauşescu’s brutish governance was that thousands of young children, from newborns to toddlers, were orphaned by their biological parents who could not afford to take care of them. So they were left to grow up neglected in the
leagăne,
understaffed institutions where they were deprived of adequate sensory experiences, especially that of touch. Most of the babies were abandoned right after birth in hospitals or maternity wards. After they turned three in the
leagăne
, they were transferred to another type of children’s home. Much of the rest of the world didn’t know this was going on until Ceauşescu was overthrown and subsequently killed in December of 1989 and images of these children finally landed on television. In 1994, Mary Carlson and her husband, Felton Earls, a Harvard psychiatrist, traveled to Romania to learn more about these children and the effects of maternal deprivation. Carlson had studied under Harry Harlow, the famous psychologist who first wrote about the impact of social deprivation following his experiments in the 1950s with monkeys. After conducting a series of observations and measurements of stress levels among Romanian children, including children in an early-enrichment program and a group of controls, Carlson concluded that the lack of touching and attention stunted the growth of the
leagăne
children and adversely affected their behavior. They’d be found rocking, swaying, staring blankly into space, and they would be disturbingly quiet and antisocial. Carlson published her results in 1997, and since then others have confirmed the overwhelming power of physical touch and attention.
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Newer research has gone so far as to show the intricate play between our skin, the brain and nervous system, and our immunology and ability to evade or fight disease.

One of the first senses we develop is touch. It’s arguably the most essential and fundamental sense for survival, stimulating our bodies
in important ways throughout our lives. Different types of touch hold different meanings. Like a magic wand, touch has the power to change our heart rate, lower blood pressure and cortisol levels, spark the release of feel-good hormones and neurotransmitters, and stimulate the area of the brain that controls memory, the hippocampus.

Tiffany Field, the head of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, has studied the sense of touch for more than thirty years. In a 2010 paper, she showed how the brain is adept at telling the difference between an emotional touch and a nonemotional one.
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Certain touch receptors are charged with conveying emotions to the brain, while others are tasked with reporting sensory information about the external environment. It’s also recently been shown that we can interpret other people’s emotions based on how they touch us. And this is possible in the absence of sight—we can detect a person’s basic emotions through touch without even seeing them. Emotions aren’t just “touchy-feely” experiences. They are unique drivers of our behavior, shaping how we act and what we do.

In our everyday interactions, we always experience touch in context. But it’s not always easy to separate touch’s physical and emotional effects. In 2014, a coterie of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Virginia, and the University of Pittsburgh published results that reveal the power of hugs on the immune system.
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Indeed, hugs may be as vital to our health as food, sleep, and water. In their experiment, they monitored 404 adults over two weeks, asking them about their daily hug counts and social interactions. Then the people were sent to rooms on an isolated hotel floor where they were exposed to a common cold virus. Most of them (78 percent) became infected, and a little more than 31 percent had the obvious signs of illness. But there was a difference between those who came down with the bug in a bad way and those who weathered the illness like it was no big deal. Those who had the most loving social interactions sailed through the infection with fewer symptoms. The researchers determined that the effects of their social support and, in particular, hugging and touching, accounted for 32 percent of the reduction effect.