Wanted to take a bit of a detour.
Well before I could even tell the difference between Type 1 & 2, in fact before the dark days of COVID, I read what in retrospect was the first book to tip me into the pain in the proverbial know it all I am today... "Why we sleep" by Dr Matthew Walker. Unbelievably, this was simply a case of having an Audible token I needed to use up in a hurry, and I'd always been interested in dreaming.
To cut a long story short - my sleep patterns have been totally different ever since - I never valued sleep, but now I'm tucked in before 11 pretty much without fail, and I stopped having coffee past early afternoon, and in some ways that was my first step to giving up my lifelong pursuit of happiness in a bottle.
I won't even try to get into the details - though I would utterly, utterly recommend it; suffice to say I was shocked at the data on inflammation, infection rates, likelihood of cancer and aggressiveness of growth, and certain mental capabilities, relating to short term memory and mood fluctuation.
Now - the science really is fascinating - much of the work is all new, based on people trained in lucid dreaming (being aware of dreaming, while you are dreaming) while undergoing MRI scans during different phases of sleep - you can actually map the path of packets of information around the brain - amazing stuff. Anyway - I say that only to stress that this is a book focused on the function of the brain.
- and as an aside - this week (this will sound like science fiction, but it really is true) was the first recorded passing of information between one dreaming person and another in a different place - truly astounding, but a little tangential.
anyway - as I dig into more and more metabolic literature, I'm struck by how many of the effects of lack of sleep overlap with the effects of chronic high blood glucose and insulin resistance. Just so many parallels that - I thought - there has to be a connection, and sure enough, there is.. or at least a review of a few studies suggest a strong association and a few causal links.
On the one hand, lack of sleep is one of the things that can drive IR at a cellular level, but the reasons why are fairly complex.
On the other - it's another balance thing - The main reason for sleeping is to allow the body to heal and repair. In fact, you can argue that we evolved asleep long before we further evolved to wake up.. and now we live lives in two states - the time when we are awake (and under control of our frontal cortex - the "here and now" part of our brain) which we value and tend to want to make the most of, and feel like we're wasting our time if we don't get more... and the time when we are asleep, and under control of much older parts of the brain, during which we encode long term memory, and allow the rest of the body to undergo healing. If you don't get enough, and good quality of the latter, eventually you affect the former.
.. and to some extent that mirrors the way we (I, certainly used to) think about lifestyle and food - we just don't value the time we spend "not eating" enough, we value the time we spend doing and eating, and give little thought to "not eating" as a positive thing - but we are designed to be using that time healing and repairing in just the same way. Carbs play a part in this, because we end up (at a cellular level) running around like a headless chicken trying to deal with all the excess glucose.. filling up all the time with snacking, and of course that can affect sleep directly, but I don't mean to be that clumsy; it's more about realising the value of the downtime itself - we need to give the body more time to be in healing and repair mode because over time we get run down in exactly the same way; at the most basic level, and the science is catching up and presenting us with more and more evidence of exactly how things go wrong when we do the equivalent of thinking we can get away with partying all night for ever...