Raquel Marín is a neuroscientist and professor of Physiology. She obtained her doctorate in Biomedicine at the Laval University of Quebec (Canada) and carried out her postdoctoral studies at the Rockefeller University (New York, USA). She has dedicated her professional career to researching brain diseases in aging and nutrients for brain health.
With 147 scientific works published and dozens of presentations at international conferences, the scientist has a vocation for dissemination that has led her to write five books. The last of them, Nourish the Soil for a Healthy Brain, is a guide to learning how to sleep better. On a scientific basis, Marín discovers the keys to achieving the revitalizing rest that sleep provides and acquiring new habits that not only lead you to cope better with daily life but also to lengthen and improve your quality of life.
In conversation with La Vanguardia, Raquel Marín explains how diet influences sleep, its peculiarities in women or adolescents and answers the eternal question of whether it is better to sleep alone or with a partner.
Why sleeping better lengthens life?
Especially because if we don't sleep, we die. In order not to sleep they have to prevent you in some way because naturally you are going to sleep at some point, just like you are going to breathe. Having something or someone prevent you from sleeping against your will is lethal. That is, in a certain period of time, you die.
Why has sleeping become a problem in today's society?
As beings who have always slept, we need to have adequate environmental and organic context. And since we are modifying this, we have changed the sleep model. Our body is still the same as that of a person who had a series of sleeping patterns hundreds of years ago, but we no longer live like we did centuries ago. Human beings have to adapt to their professional field and their life context, but in essence our way of sleeping has not changed. It is still the same as when we were nomads.
To this we must add phenomena such as climate change, which has shortened sleep by 40 minutes on a global scale. But above all our lifestyle, which makes the cognitive system always active. We are exposed to schedules and situations that keep us constantly alert and awake. For example, the light pollution that you bring into your own bedroom with your tablet or cell phone are additional factors for poor sleep.
Why do we need sleep? How does poor sleep affect health and mood?
On the one hand, it affects the brain, because you need it to consolidate memory and clean it of rubbish. You somehow increase neurotoxicity when you don't sleep. You also need it to manage vascularization.
At the cardiovascular, metabolic, visceral level, etc., you need it because we must not forget that we are chronological beings. We operate on 12-12 cycles. Our viscera, our intestine, our muscles and our metabolism adapt to these cycles. So cardiovascular regulation occurs during sleep: it is known that the risk of heart attack increases if you do not sleep. And it also affects metabolic regulation (glucose metabolism) and the immune system, which needs these cycles. Lack of sleep generates changes in eating patterns, thus affecting the prevalence of childhood and adolescent obesity. Also at the level of muscular activity, which is something that elite athletes know well: sleeping well affects the improvement of their physical performance.
Sleep is also essential for the emotional part, for self-esteem, self-perception and even improves the quality of the skin. All organs are influenced by that internal clock and the skin, for example, is one of the largest organs. In short, it is important for everything related to health.
What would you say are the key aspects to sleeping better?
We must remember two very important aspects that have to do with how we have slept throughout our evolutionary history. We have slept following the patterns of light and darkness. These patterns have adapted our brain to an area called the optic chiasm: during the day I have light and I am active, and as that light dims I go into mental rest mode.
On the other hand, for a brain to decide to disconnect and feel vulnerable to dangers, it needs to feel that when it is going to do that there are no threats. If we have that constant feeling of anxiety, of stress, of trying to solve the world when we get to bed or of being interested in bad news... our brain suffers. In itself, it is an organ that loves to sign up for bad vibes. That's why we survive, so the brain is not going to decide that disconnection.
What is better to sleep alone or with a partner?
The way people sleep is not identical. From the point of view of temperatures, women are more sensitive to changes. To sleep, an adequate temperature and optimal conditions for the brain and body are necessary. Ergonomics at bedtime are not identical for all people, and the most appropriate type of bed does not have to coincide.
Thirdly, the schedules do not always coincide; Number four, there are people who have a tendency to get up at night. Fifthly, sleep apneas, which generate noise pollution; number six, the synchronization of the brains. It is known that there is a synchronization of brain waves and in the case of sleep we go through different phases of these waves; some slower, others more active, deeper sleep, etc. And there are couples who don't synchronize. There is usually a tendency to synchronize better in long-term couples.
All of these factors make me think that the relationship can deteriorate if there is no organic and mental harmony at bedtime.
In addition, lack of sleep also lowers libido and worsens temperament and character, resulting in a greater tendency to conflict. That is why I am in favor of everyone having the optimal conditions for their sleep in the different phases of life as long as they can afford it from an economic point of view.
Do you mean sleeping in two beds or two rooms?
The ideal would be two rooms, especially due to the temperature and schedules.
Does sex help you sleep better?
Sex, even masturbating, can help you sleep better, without a doubt. There is a small section in the book in which I make a small nod to feminism. I'm talking about the classic idea that men seem to fall asleep after having sex and that they nevertheless stay awake. Studies indicate that this depends largely on whether you reach orgasm: women do not always reach it while men usually achieve it. That's where the difference could be: it's not the sex itself but reaching orgasm.
Is it advisable to take a nap?
Yes, it is recommended. In the book I talk about different types of naps; the refreshing, the restorative, etc. In general, cortisol drops in the early afternoon and there many times a nap is restorative. But a maximum of 90 minutes, because if not it can cause you to be sleepy the rest of the day or have difficulty falling asleep at night.
Is food important for sleep?
Of course. There are daytime foods and evening or nighttime foods. We must also not forget that there are some foods that promote the production of melatonin, which is our sleep hormone, so they are better candidates. All foods that generate a lot of diuresis are not highly recommended because you can spend the night in the bathroom.
What foods would be better or worse for sleep?
Mushrooms, tomatoes, bananas, basmati rice, fish that is not too fatty would be nocturnal, evening foods. And the daytime type would be more complex legumes, red meat, saturated fats... those would be better for the midday part.
You dedicate part of the book to specifically talk about sleep in women. What are the peculiarities of female sleep?
Firstly, the idiosyncrasy of female sexual hormones, which initially cause them to not have the same levels every day of the month. If you are at a time in the cycle when it is more difficult for you to lower your temperature, you will sleep worse.
On the other hand, progesterone, which is the female sex hormone that induces sleep the most. It corresponds to the ovulation stage, in which we tend to be more sleepy.
They also have a significant influence on the mood, since sexual hormones can generate a greater tendency to have a certain nervousness. And if we enter the moment of pregnancy, it is a whole private world.
Finally, menopause usually causes a lot of sleep disturbance in women, precisely linked, among other things, to temperature deregulation: heat strokes, hot flashes and alterations of the nervous system from a psychological point of view.
You talk about how female sex hormones affect them, but men also have their hormones that will affect them, right?
Yes. The difference is that men do not have general alterations during the month. We have moments in which we sleep more and better than them (in fact, sleep institutes recommend that women sleep about 20 minutes more than men); But we are also going to have some moments in which it is going to be more difficult for us to sleep than them, especially falling asleep.
This recommendation to sleep more is because studies indicate that female brain activity, especially in relation to the assimilation and processing of language and communication, is more developed. This requires that we also need a little more time to process that information at the brain level.
Are there also peculiarities in the sleep of adolescents?
Yes. To begin with, adolescents have the handicap that it is a time in which there are important changes in the production of melatonin. In childhood is when the most melatonin is produced and as we grow there are sudden changes in melatonin, which cause sleep to be different and the adolescent becomes disoriented until he gets used to it.
Furthermore, the increase in sleep disorders in adolescents today has to do with the fact that they are exposed to screens practically at any time of the day or night. They have a lot of exposure to blue lights until late at night, which are brain stimulants and that is incompatible with sleep.
Can you catch up on sleep on weekends or vacations?
It does not work. Sleep is not easily recovered because each night you need to complete a series of cycles. The ideal is to go through between 4 and 5 cycles of all sleep phases and each of them is 90 minutes.
If you want to recover it on the weekend you often find that maybe on Saturday you want to recover everything at once. And on Sunday, which is the day of major rest, you want to spend another 10 hours sleeping and you can't. What happens is that your brain needs to readjust to the cycles again. That's why on Sunday you may spend many hours in bed but not be able to fall asleep.
It is better to do it gradually. If you have been getting up at 6 in the morning all week and going to bed at 12 at night, start the next day at 6:15, then at 6:30... and go to bed at 11:30 and so on. short periods rather than trying to recover by biting hours of the day.
Obviously it can't always be done. Hence our big problem in sleeping well, as we talked about at the beginning, is our lifestyle.
