Name: The Power of the Downstate
Rating: 4.7 (564 reviews)
Author: Sara C. Mednick

What’s in it for me? Learn the secrets to reenergizing yourself every day and every night.

Do you feel exhausted all the time?

Then this Blink is for you. It presents some relatively easy, evidence-based ways to recharge your batteries. All of them are based on a single principle that provides the key to feeling more energetic, relaxed, and able to perform at your peak, both mentally and physically.

So, what is this key? Well, as you may have gathered from the title of the book, it’s to do with tapping into the power of something called the downstate. And what the heck is that? Well, to understand it, you’ve got to know a few things about how some of your body’s systems work.

We’ll start by looking at them, and then we’ll shift to some practical takeaways. By the end of this Blink, you’ll have learned several steps you can take to re-energize yourself, starting now.

In this Blink, you’ll discover

why you experience a mini brain death every night;
how to synchronize your heart and lungs; and
why timing is one of the most important aspects of sleep, exercise, and diet.

The “downstate” is a term borrowed from neuroscience that describes your body’s restorative systems and processes.

Every night, while you’re sleeping, a strange thing happens inside your brain.

Picture your head as a concert hall filled with about 86 billion tiny musicians. These are your neurons – the cells that make up your brain. Like an orchestra, they’re organized into different sections, which are usually playing different melodies at different times. The notes are the electrical and chemical signals they send to each other, which can be measured as brain waves. When you’re awake, these notes tend to play at a rapid tempo, creating brain waves that vibrate at 13 to 25 or more cycles per second (or hertz, to use the technical term).

But during a stage of sleep called slow-wave sleep, they go all the way down into the range of 0 to 4 hertz. Not only that, they stop playing separately, and they all start playing the same note in unison. For half a second, they fire their signals at once. This is called an upstate. Then, for another half a second, they stop – the orchestra goes silent. And this is called a downstate.

At this moment, your brain enters a place of pure tranquility. All is quiet. All is still.

Sound refreshing? Well, it is. In fact, as you'll learn in more detail later, it’s the secret to why a good night’s sleep is so revitalizing. But it’s also kind of creepy, because, during that half second of inactivity, your brain is basically dead.

Fortunately, it doesn’t stay that way for long. After the half second of silence has ended, your neurons return to the upstate and fire off their signals in unison again. Then they go back to the downstate, they stop firing, and they keep repeating the same pattern over and over – on and off, on and off.

Now, the weird thing about slow-wave sleep is how your neurons all turn on and off in unison, on the other hand, it’s completely normal for them to turn on and off at separate moments. They do that all the time, throughout the day and night. And they do it because neurons are just like us: they need to work, but they also need some downtime.

In fact, they need to take a break after every round of sending messages. And that’s because they lose their electrical charge whenever they fire their signals, and they need some time to recharge themselves before they can do it again.

A similar pattern governs many systems of your body – from your cardiovascular and autonomic nervous system to your metabolism and circadian rhythm. Each of them follows the same basic playbook: build up resources, energy, and strength, use them to get something done, and then take some downtime to replenish them and be able to do things again.

To provide us with some vocabulary for describing this pattern, the author borrows the terms “upstate” and “downstate” from neuroscience. For example, imagine one of your body systems is expending itself? Then we can say it’s in an upstate or doing an upstate activity. And then, if it’s restoring itself, we can say it’s in a downstate or doing a downstate activity.

Your body has various downstate systems and processes for revitalizing itself. By tapping into them, you can reap the benefits: more energy, less stress, and better physical and mental health. So what are these systems and how can you take advantage of them? That’s what the rest of this Blink will explain.

Many of us don’t spend enough time in the downstate, leading to a condition called autonomic imbalance.

To understand the power of the downstate, let’s start with one of its most important components: the autonomic nervous system.

This is the part of your nervous system that regulates bodily functions that aren’t under your conscious control, like your heartbeat and digestion. It splits into a few different branches. One of them is your sympathetic nervous system, which regulates many of your body’s upstate processes.

Improve your autonomic balance by doing things that will increase your heart rate variability.

Alright, so the goal is to regain autonomic balance between your sympathetic REV system and your parasympathetic RESTORE system. That’s a whole handful of words, and they refer to a complicated array of biological systems and processes. But there’s a simple way to get a handle on them, and it’s to do with something called your heart rate variability, or HRV.

Your HRV measures the rhythmic pattern of your heart rate. You can either have a high heart rate variability or a low heart rate variability. If your heart beats steadily like a metronome then you have a low HRV; your heart rate isn’t variable. If, on the other hand, your heartbeat is more uneven, with longer and shorter intervals between the beats, then you have a high heart rate variability.

To fully tap into the power of the downstate, make sure you’re getting enough slow-wave sleep.

Want to have a good night’s rest? Get seven or eight hours of sleep. You’ve probably heard that a million times – and it’s true. But it’s only part of the equation. You see, it’s not just how much you sleep but when you sleep that matters. Timing is crucial.

It all comes down to your circadian rhythm – the way your body is regulated by the 24-hour cycle of day and night. As a species, we evolved to follow the same pattern as most other organisms: wake up and shift into REV mode at sunrise, do most of our upstate activities during the day, and then shift into RESTORE mode and go to bed soon after sunset, so we can have a full night of sleep, the ultimate downstate activity.

Kernaussagen in The Power of the Downstate

Über den Autor

Sara C. Mednick is the director of the Sleep and Cognition Lab at the University of California, Irvine, where she’s also a professor of psychology. She’s also the author of Take a Nap! Change your Life. Her research has received funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.