The Power of the Downstate: Dr. Sara Mednick Says All Of Us Are Running on Low Battery—and Shares Tips to Help You Recharge

This world is hard. Adulting is hard. It takes an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and other resources to respond to the pressures bearing down on you from work, finances, family, personal health, and other areas—not to mention the never-ending information barrage from the news and social media.

Most of us live our lives as the human equivalent of smartphones running on 10 percent battery power. At any given time, you’re just an hour or so away from shutting off, but you insist on eking out a few more minutes in Low Power mode. Which means you’re slower than you need to be. Dimmer. You feel drained. Stressed out. Your processing time stinks.

The truth is that you have battery chargers everywhere, and I’m here to help you find them.

Welcome to the Power of the Downstate

The Downstate is a comprehensive term that refers to the wide range of recovery systems you can tap into on a daily basis to restore your most vital functions at a cellular level, including giving your heart, brain, and metabolism a rest; repairing overtrained or inflamed tissue; and allowing time to process some of the more complicated business of being human—your memories, emotions, carefully made decisions, and Aha! moments.

The Downstate is also the time for housecleaning the brain’s toxic byproducts of everyday living. It’s your opportunity to plug yourself into a metaphorical outlet and power back up.

You won’t find the Downstate I’m talking about in any self-help books, medical manuals, or laboratory studies because until now, there hasn’t been a word for it. I developed the concept based on research insights discovered in my University of California lab.

For the past decade, the scientific community has recognized that a type of Downstate happens every night, starting when your head sinks into your pillow, your eyes close, and your brain takes its delicious dive into sleep. As a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine and world expert on sleep—specifically, the role that sleep plays in forming our long-term memories, regulating our emotions, keeping our cardiovascular system functioning properly, and helping older adults stay alert and agile—I have discovered just how important that nighttime Downstate is for our mental and physical health.

Thanks to experimental findings from my sleep lab, along with other labs’ findings, we now understand that in the depths of sleep, a healthy brain switches from On to Off mode in successive, one-second intervals, called Upstates (when brain activity is high) and Downstates (when brain activity is low). Together, the sleep science community has established that these Downstates are the driving force for all of sleep’s restorative benefits.

And most alarmingly, they are the very thing we’re losing as we head into middle age.

But the story doesn’t end with sleep. The Downstate is an integral part of all the physiological, cognitive, and emotional processes that allow us to stay resilient, yet it is often ignored by our go, go, go and do, do, do society.

The good news? You can capture Downstate moments at any time of day by taking your fingers off the keyboard and sinking into a deep breath, taking yourself on a walk around the block with your furry friend, or mindfully preparing a meal that will do your body good.

Downstate moments can also be harnessed by maintaining a regular schedule with your sleeping, eating, and exercise routines such that your mind and body synchronize to your own natural rhythm, rather than the rhythm imposed on you by society, your family, or your job. By honoring these Downstates, we tap into our personal renewable resources that help us live longer, wiser, and healthier lives.

What Goes Down, Must Come Up . . .

The Downstate is here for you whenever you need to recharge and restore so you can get back to the chaos of the day. I call this other half of life the Upstate (again borrowing from neuroscience), when all activities that require energy, focus, action, and the mobilization of mental and physiological forces happen.

The Upstate is when you go to work, when you’re industrious, when you kick ass and take names. It’s when your body and mind naturally conspire together to make sure you have all the energy you need to climb a mountain, tackle a work assignment, or stand in front of a crowd and tell them what you know. It’s when you’re most resilient to stress and, not coincidently, it’s when most stress happens. The Upstate is what makes living, living . . . but it’s also what drains your batteries.

I want to emphasize a crucial point here: You can handle a significant amount of Upstate stress as long as you replenish yourself on a daily basis by engaging in Downstate activities that make you feel rested, full of energy, loved and cared for by others. The foundation of your mental and physical health is in the symbiotic relation between Upstates and Downstates, and this unifying theory is just as relevant to the smallest kernel of the neuron as it is to the cycles of day and night, the weekdays and weekend, seasons of the year, and even beyond that to a lifetime.

Think of the interplay between Upstates and Downstates as the ebb and flow of ocean waves eternally lapping against the shore. At the beginning of every wave cycle, the ocean draws the water and all its riches back into the cold, deep sea, pooling its resources and accumulating velocity, nutrients, mass, volume, and power in the process. This is the Downstate ebb of the wave, which is inevitably followed by the cresting, thunderous explosion of all that energy in the Upstate portion of the wave.

The magnitude of drawing inward during the Downstate is directly proportional to the power of the outward Upstate blast; as long as there is a Moon and Earth to promote this rhythm it will always be there.

All animals and plants are resource-limited, so they need to cycle between Downstates and Upstates to generate power and then release it. Whether your goal is to learn the ukulele; have more energy for your kids, grandkids, or garden; or to reach some work-related goal, playing at full capacity in the Upstate requires that your tanks get refilled to their maximum capacity as frequently as possible.

The Downstate is where that happens.

Think of the Downstate as the new way humans “take a break” that is based on principles as old as Earth itself, and which come in the most unexpected ways . . . a powerlifting session; a challenging mountain ascent; falling into a deep conversation with a friend; spending the last third of your day fasting; taking a walk in nature; making time for creative thinking; having a smoothie in the sun or pretzeled up with someone listening to the rain. (I know I said it can be a noun or an adjective, but it can even be a verb: Come Downstating!)

By following the guidance in my book, you’ll be living according to an instruction manual invented by Nature, designed to help humans get the most out of each day. Get ready to be more alert, productive, and cognitively sharp during the day, feel greater intimacy and affection, and enjoy consolidated, restorative sleep at night... not to mention expand your years of mental and physical vitality.

Ready to get Down?

This piece has been excerpted from THE POWER OF THE DOWNSTATE by Sara Mednick, copyright Sara Mednick, courtesy of Hachette Books.