When all the world is asleep, the body is hard at work. 

While many people view their resting hours as lost time, the Share Your Sleep Story initiative explores sleep as time invested in a deeply human act of being. The public engagement initiative highlights individuals’ experiences with sleep—and the effects of not getting enough—and seeks to bridge the policy gap between abundant research and a society that ignores the importance of getting a good night’s rest. Madhura Lotlikar, a McGill PhD student in neuroscience and the initiative’s founder, sat down with The Tribune to discuss the project, the impact of sleep loss on health, and sleep as a human right.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Eliza Lee (EL): To start off, can you talk a little about your current research outside the Share Your Sleep Story initiative? How did your research lead you to the project?

Madhura Lotlikar (ML): I have [several] different projects I’m working on, but the common theme is sleep loss. My priority is to understand the effects of sleep loss on human brain and memory and the ways to offset those effects [….] So I’m looking at if exercise training can make our brains resilient to the effects of sleep loss. Another project […] is implementation of sleep research and rehabilitation settings, because there’s a lot of data on sleep issues in rehab settings. We have people who need support for stroke, […] or traumatic brain injury or physical injury, these kinds of things—they have a lot of issues of sleep, but there is no translation of sleep research into practice. 

When I started working in this field, I quickly realized that there is a lot of data on sleep health [….] I thought that there must be a lot of policies surrounding this issue, and I was baffled that there is very little [….] I was thinking that if we want to actually implement things in society, we need to understand what [those] who face sleep issues need [….] That’s where I was like, ‘Okay, we need to have some lived understanding, some lived experiences of these people.’ That’s just one part of the puzzle. It’s not going to solve things, but it’s just one part. 

Jamie Xie (JX): Sleep is so human, but society sees it as a barrier to productivity and often tries to take that away from us. Could you talk a little bit about your perspective on sleep in the context of healthcare, and how we don’t give it the full respect of healthcare?

ML: There is a misconception that we are not being useful when we are sleeping. Actually, we are not being useful when we are not sleeping—if we don’t sleep, we are not going to be productive. Sleep is important for emotional regulation, mental health, productivity, and quality of life [….] I think a lot of people still take pride in not sleeping enough, because they want to say that they are busy, and as you said, that it’s very personal. Sleep is not only governed by your individual factors, like […] your sleep needs, but also by societal and social factors. What does society think about sleep? Do they think that you are lazy because you’re sleeping more, or you have more sleep-need? What social circumstances are you in? Are you coming from a low socioeconomic background? Maybe you have to work two shifts, two jobs, and you’re not going to kind of get enough sleep, or you have food insecurity.

Importantly, [sleep] also affects other diseases [….] You have data for people with Alzheimer’s—they have sleep issues. People who have sleep issues have an increased risk of dementia, cardiovascular diseases, mental health issues [….] Tackling sleep health is essential, not only for the individual, but for society as well. 

EL: Returning to the impact of sleep on Alzheimer’s, risk of dementia, and other diseases—how does that impact the brain?

ML: When you’re sleeping, there are a lot of toxins that get removed from your brain that have accumulated throughout the day [….] That is one of the functions of the lymphatic system. For example, this protein called amyloid beta starts accumulating in your brain, and if you don’t sleep, it stays in your brain. That protein, amyloid beta, […] is one of the important proteins that can get clumped into plaques, and is one of the pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.

But there are other functions of sleep, such as [recovery]. The different stages of sleep help you to restore your brain and body. If you’re injured and you have chronic pain […] your body is not going to heal and recover as much if you don’t sleep, or you have sleep apnea, or you are not getting full, restorative sleep. 

EL: The Share Your Sleep Story initiative also describes ways to prioritize sleep through policy-making. Can you talk about how we can protect sleep through policy, and why it’s undervalued currently?

ML: There are a lot of misconceptions on sleep and its importance, and there is not a lot of awareness [….] Currently, sleep health education is very [minimal] for family doctors [….] They need to be asking about [patients’] sleep no matter what condition they have, because it’s integral to any disease that a person might [have] at a clinic. Sleep health education programs should increase—many times, […] whenever [the people I talk to for the initiative] have sleep disorders or sleep issues, they just don’t get enough help. There are no accessible resources.

For night shift workers, for example, […] maybe organizations […] could provide them with some service to drop them off at home, because after working for 12 hours in a very stressful environment, you don’t want to take the metro. Drowsy driving is a huge problem amongst workers [….] There is a lot of evidence and implementation is lacking. 

JX: The role of the night shift worker, […] and this idea of sleeplessness as a way of life—it makes me think about the way that society accommodates you. Before you were talking about how often we relegate these people to making a sacrifice for society [….] Can you talk about how we can accommodate workers’ needs and rights to sleep?

ML: Sleep should be a human right [….] If you’re not sleeping, it’s going to affect everything. In terms of accommodation, it affects your social life. [For those] who have circadian rhythm disorders, you are basically awake at the time that most of the society is not [….] Of course, that affects everything, from who you date to what you can do [….] You have to work on society’s time. It’s very difficult [….] Just decreasing the stigma and understanding sleep needs, […] that is the first step before we can even start accommodating the needs of people. 

Share Your Sleep Story is also run by co-director Adrián Noriega de la Colina, and team members Marie-Pier Villeneuve, Nour Chahine, Josianne Barrette-Moran, Hannah Moore, Jyothi Inampudi, and Stefanie Tremblay.