How to Solve Sleep’s Greatest Mystery

Humans spend about a third of our lives asleep, and sleep deprivation makes us irritable, foggy, and unfriendly. We all know that.

But is there a way to help people sleep more soundly without sleeping pills?

Scientists are peering into the recesses of the brain to see how it governs the functions necessary for individuals to feel refreshed in the morning.

A new study from Johns Hopkins Medical Center shows it’s worse for us to get broken sleep than to get fewer hours of uninterrupted sleep. In an October study, 62 healthy men and women were either forced to wake up eight times a night, or were given delayed bedtimes. The next day, they were asked about their mental states.

Those with fragmented sleep reported feeling less energetic, more depressed and less friendly toward others. The group that slept fewer hours but straight through the night reported being in a more positive frame of mind in the morning.

“We’ve known for a long time that sleep quality is more important than sleep quantity,” said W. David Brown, a sleep psychologist at the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Texas.

While we snooze, the brain never rests. It is hard at work, sorting through events and impressions of the day. To do that, the brain must pass from light sleep, known as stage one, to deep or “slow-wave” sleep, where the mind can reboot.

In deep sleep, the brain handles important functions. Names and faces of people met earlier are selected to be consolidated into memories. Facts are coded to become long-term memories. Difficult emotional events get replayed — usually in dreams — to take the edge off of them. One awakens from deep sleep not just physically refreshed but with more emotional stamina.

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“Once people become accustomed to being woken up, it snowballs. It makes them less confident they’ll get back to sleep,” said Dr. Jose Colon, a sleep expert in Fort Myers, Florida.

This is also the case with insomnia, where individuals might spend 11 hours in bed sleeping in fits and starts but feel less refreshed than someone who slept for only six hours.

Related: Will More Sleep Really Help You?

Penny Lewis, a neuroscientist at the University of Manchester in England, has studied how the brain associates different phases of sleep with things like smells or sounds.

“We are all sleep deprived,” she said at a TEDx talk this summer, “but there might be ways to manipulate our sleep to get the most out of it.”

Lewis tells LifeZette that in laboratory studies, when people have learned something in the presence of a particular noise or smell, the things become linked in their brain. Reintroducing the same noise or smell while they are asleep can help reinforce the memory. She is working on creating an external aid that would mimic that association — such as a smell or a ticking sound — and design sleep that also makes memories stronger.

Related: Kid Can’t Sleep? Check His Meds

The goal is to help individuals get to deep sleep much faster, especially those with insomnia or who have fragmented sleep, so that if they are awakened in the middle of the night they can fall back asleep rapidly.

This would be a windfall for anyone battling fragmented sleep — such as a shift worker, a doctor on call, or a nursing mother of a newborn child — so that they can also report feeling refreshed in the morning.