Sleep Better
If you or some one you love isn’t getting enough sleep, is struggling to get to sleep or you’re waking up feeling tired and worn out, this post is for you.
As stated in previous post on this blog: Sleep is super important.
So important that we really need to think of it as a pillar of health the same way we do diet, exercise and stress management.
What happens when we don’t get enough sleep?
One of the major areas impacted by sleep issues is our cardiovascular health.
Impacts of sleep on cardiovascular health include:
Increases chance of both developing and dying of CV disease by 45%
Heart attack - leading cause of death in Australia and stroke is a leading cause of disability.
Main mechanism - increases BP
Often people can think of sleep as wasting time, but the reality is that your brain doesn’t work as well without it.
in an Australian study, no sleep for 19 hours was shown to have equivalent impact on concentration as being over .05 blood alcohol
As well, less than 5 hours sleep can lead to a 500% increase in risk of car accident
Once again, Martin has come through with the goods with a video that will have you catching some of the best quality Z’s of your life in no time!
As always, the video is transcribed below. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do to get you back on track!
Intro: 0.00
Hi, Martin Harvey here from Align Chiropractic, and today’s video is all about sleep, why you need to get more of it, why it’s important for both your health, and also how easy it is to get the things you need to do done. So, timing this video, I’ve decided to do this video partly because I think sleep is super important, but also because this Saturday is when we go to daylight savings. Daylight savings is kind of like this mini experiment that we have each year where we all get like a tiny little bit of sleep deprivation and all feel mildly excited that it’s a step closer to summer. It’s interesting how many people are coming into the practice each year in this sort of period of time afterwards just not feeling as well as they normally will because they’ve missed out on one hour of sleep.
Impact of not enough sleep: 0.51
So, what I want to do is share with you a little bit of information about why health is super important, and then I want you share with you a couple if really simple things you can do to help yourself sleep better, and in the context of transitioning to daylight savings, what you can do to kind of get past that little hiccup as quickly as possible.
So, when we’re talking about sleep and impacts on health, there’s lots of things that it affects. It affects your risk of obesity, your risk of diabetes etc. One of the key things that I wanted to highlight was the impact of not enough sleep on cardiovascular health- your heart health, because the leading cause of death in Australia is cardiovascular issues, and also one of the leading causes of disability in Australia, Stroke, is also at an increased risk if you have sleep deprivation. So, interesting research in this area shows that you increase your risk of having cardiovascular disease by about 45% if you’re not getting enough sleep, and if you already have cardiovascular disease, increase the chance of dying from it by about 45% if you’re not getting enough sleep. So, it’s kind of important.
Now, how does it work? What’s the link between not enough sleep and this impact of cardiovascular health? It’s probably a bunch of mechanisms, but what the research suggests is a lot of it is because it increases your blood pressure. Even one night of not enough sleep can have a measurable impact in terms of increasing your blood pressure. So, it’s not a tiny thing- it’s a really important thing.
So, the information that I’m sharing with you is mainly from a really cool book by a neuroscientist called Matthew Walker. It’s kind of a world leader in the area of sleep and health. Another thing- and this is often one of the things that people notice, is that they just kind of feel a bit foggy and a bit out of it when they haven’t slept as much as they should, and the science in this area is really, really interesting. You see, if you haven’t slept enough, it impacts your concentration. That not only mean that it’s harder to get the work that you want done, it’s harder for you to be as present for your family and friends, it’s harder for you to do everything. It’ll measurably increase the chance of you having a car accident.
Experiment: 3:15
So, there was some research done in Australia where what they tried to quantify this. What they did was look at how well subjects in these studies did on a standardized concentration test, and the findings were really amazing where having the subjects be up for 19 hours- which isn’t a huge amount, like it’s not missing a complete night’s sleep, but just staying up a little bit later than you normally would. It meant that those subjects performed as badly on concentration tests as people who were over 0.05 blood alcohol level. So, not having enough sleep dulls down your brain to the level that you’re functioning almost as if you’re a little bit drunk.
Sleep better: 4:00
Now, what you can do to sleep better? If you’re one of those people who have trouble sleeping, or you just want to optimise your health and sleep better, there is a couple of really simple things to help yourself sleep better.
It feels bad to say this because I’m such a coffee fan, but avoiding caffeine late in the day is an obvious, but really important one. When Matthew Walker’s talking about this in his book, he talks about the half-life of caffeine. This means how long does it take for the amount of caffeine in your bloodstream to reduce by half- which is about 12 hours. So, what that means then is if you’re wanting to go to bed at 10 and you had a coffee at 10, you still have a significant portion of the caffeine in your blood. So making sure that if you are a coffee lover like I am, biasing that toward earlier in the day is going to help you sleep better later at night.
Interestingly, a lot of people will say that they sleep better if they have a glass or two of alcohol, but the science says there’s a pretty fine balance there. Yes, a glass or maybe two glasses can help people relax and be in a better state to sleep, but it often reduces your ability to go into the deeper levels of sleep which are the ones that we need to really rest, repair, and wake up rejuvenated. It also puts you into a shallower state of sleep. Often if we’re having more than a couple of drinks, there’s a mechanism which will often wake up once your liver has finished dealing with the alcohol- so, you’ll often find that after having had a few drinks that you’re then waking up at 3 in the morning finding it very, very difficult to sleep. So, minimising alcohol is a really important thing. So, looking forward to this Saturday when we lose an hour of sleep, it’s probably a good night to go easy in terms of how many drinks you have.
Exercise: 5:52
Exercise is a really powerful lever in terms of impacting our sleep. Exercising earlier in the day tends to create a biorhythm where we’re much more relaxed and drowsy for sleep later in the day. For a lot of people – particularly people who are in that night owl sort of group, exercising late in the day can often act as a stimulant, making it much harder to get to sleep.
Sleeping Strategies: 6:15
There are a couple of things that you can do in your environment to help you sleep better. One is having a hot bath later in the day because the heat and then the drop in temperature when you get out of the bath, that drop in temperature will make it easier, and sort of allow you to become dozy. We’re very strongly triggered by cool temperatures that will tend to stimulate an appropriate melatonin response, which is the sleep hormone
Related to that is having a cool room. They talk about wanting a room that’s under 20 degrees- ideally about 17/18 degrees Celsius, is sort of the sweet spot for most people to sleep better.
The last thing I want to share with you is the importance in terms of melatonin and getting sunlight into your eyes earlier in the day. So, getting outside and getting natural sunlight. Our melatonin production is stimulated by sunlight coming into our eyes, and then stimulating our pituitary to make melatonin. That production earlier in the day is what helps us feel sleepy later in the day. It sort of sets that biorhythm, but it’s strongly stimulated by light that’s coming in at that low angle that is present earlier in the day. So, getting outside without sunglasses early in the day, particularly going for a walk can be really powerful way of setting your biorhythm so you’re better able to sleep later on in the day.
Conclusion: 7:50
So, this is Martin Harvey from Align Chiropractic with a few tips to help you sleep better and get over the hump of the daylight savings.
The top 11 tips for improving your sleep - how to sleep your way through lockdown
Supporting your sleep cycle.
This article is for anyone who needs to address how they are sleeping, want’s to feel more rested or are looking for the best thing they can do for themselves to make the most of our new lockdown.
I have written about sleep on this blog before but when I was asked to speak about this topic in a webinar last week I realised that this topic is too important to leave further down the list of blog posts we have accumulated thus far. Also, for reasons that will become clear shortly, this is actually a perfect time for all of us (especially Melburnians) to be assessing their sleep habits.
I wish I were writing this under better circumstances, but unfortunately we have all found ourselves back were we were several months ago.
Lockdown 2.0 - This time it's frustrating.
Obviously Victoria’s current situation is less than ideal but it has actually highlighted to me the importance of today’s topic.
This could not be coming at a better time for us all, who among you reading this found during the lock down that days just rolled together and that it was hard to find any real rhythm?
I want to set a challenge to all of you during this lock down period, and that is, I want you to genuinely and honestly re-appraise your sleep habits and find ways that you could improve them, then set yourself the goal to make the most of your lock down by creating new habits that WILL change your life.
I don’t often use this term, but in terms of habits or activities you undertake to improve your health and your life, sleep is like a magic bullet.
It has probably the largest impact of any one activity you can undertake.
Speaking of undertakings, the research indicates that it takes just 3 weeks to set a new habit. People in Melbourne have been given 2 rounds of that time to set new habits up and really hone them before hopefully getting to enter the world a little more normally again. Make the most of it!
So now, having said all that, I want to come clean to you.
I come from a bit of a weird back ground with sleep.
If I am really honest, I was always known amongst my friends as someone who just flat out doesn’t sleep. This was until just over 2 years ago Martin the other chiropractor that I work with exposed me to some information that TERRIFIED ME.
The information was an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast with Professor Matthew walker who is the author of a book called “Why we sleep”.
Now academically, I was already aware that sleep was good for me, I was convinced that I was just one of those people who didn't need as much sleep as everyone else. I just genuinely believed that lack of sleep obviously didn't affect me as much as it seemed to affect everyone else.
The reason we became interested in sleep in our practice is that we take care of a lot of people with stress related issues. As I am sure many of you are aware and especially if you have ever read my blog posts or spoken with me in the practice, stress is perhaps the leading cause of illness in Australia and as it turns out, poor sleep and lack of sleep is one of the leading causes of increased daily stress.
Reducing stress is actually soo important to spinal health that in our practice we have a special interest in stress management.
Martin and I have completed courses on adjusting and management techniques aimed specifically at stress reduction and sleep promotion.
So today, I wanted to break down for you, what exactly IS sleep? How much do we need? I want to discuss what happens to us when we don’t get it sleep and finally, my 11 best tips to improve your sleep.
The Background
It has taken millions of years to develop into homo sapiens. We came into anatomical being at least 315,000 years ago, with our modern behavioural and mental capacities being at least 60-80 thousand years old.
We have only had a reliable and controllable ability to erase the night using electric light for - give or take - 150 years. Since that time, humans have become the first and only known species that actively and persistently forgo sleep.
Think about that, no other species will choose any activity over sleep outside of a survival situation.
For us, far from being a survival situation, it means, to stay up and watch Netflix, scroll Instagram, or generally to just get a few jobs done without anyone interrupting us.
Think about that...why is it that WE choose to avoid rest, when no other mammal will do this naturally?
And apparently this is incredibly common, according to Matthew Walker, 1 out of every 2 people are sleep deprived, and almost 1/3 of those people are sleep deprived on 6 hours sleep or less. But let’s face it, have you ever heard any person say to you “you know what, I am just getting soo much good sleep at the moment!”
SO the first thing to ask ourselves is;
HOW MUCH SLEEP ARE WE MEANT TO GET?
As humans we need between 7 and 9 hours of good QUALITY sleep for our body to operate the way it is intended to.
Thats not just physical time in bed,
Quality in this sense refers to our biological imperative to get through all of the stages of sleep for an appropriate amount of time, in order for our brain to recharge.
What are the 4 stages of quality sleep?
stage of sleep:
1. Awake,
2. light sleep,
3. deep sleep,
4. REM (Rapid Eye Movement), and repeat.
Awake time is the time spent in bed before and after falling asleep. It also includes brief awakenings during the night.
As I said earlier, quality sleep contains appropriate time spent in each of 4 stages of sleep.
Although all 4 stages of sleep are essential to the quality of your sleep, I wont get into the nitty gritty of how sleep works specifically, it can be more complicated than my level of specific understanding and that would involve MANY blogs about that topic alone, so just to hit the high notes here today, I am going to GROSSLY oversimplify everything.
Stages 1 and 2 are your “set up” stages of sleep, they are the period where your body begins to turn off your monitoring systems and relax the “awake” portion of sleep, changing your heart rate and breathing to eventually get into stage 2 and eventually into deeper levels. This is also the stage where you can have a power nap as long as you don't doze for more than 20 minutes.
Stages 3 and 4 are where you get down into deeper levels of sleep.
In Stage 3, your brain waves become very long and slow and become much less responsive and harder to wake up, while your brain “paralyzes” your body in a type of muscular incarceration so that during stage 4, otherwise known as REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you don't get up and start acting out your dreams…it sounds scary but its a handy survival mechanism. You have probably experienced this lock down first hand if you have ever suddenly felt awake at night time but been unable to move your body.
Stages 3 and 4 are where most body replenishment occurs. This type of sleep is excellent for cardiovascular health, metabolism, and most importantly, removal of waste products that accumulate in your brain throughout the day.
SO...WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DON'T GET ENOUGH SLEEP?
Think honestly about how many hours you spend sleeping and if you are honest, what sort of quality do you believe you actually achieve?
When we sleep for fewer than 7 hours, our performance, both physically and mentally dimities by 10%.
When the hours we sleep are fewer than 6, our performance is decreased by 30%.
30%.
That means if you average fewer hours than that, like I did over a 15 year period from year 11 onwards, my ability to work, to remember, to drive, to study or even enjoy downtime with my friends and family was down by 10-30%.
Equally as scary, the research suggests that people who are sleep deprived are actually incapable of measuring the negative effects of lack of sleep on themselves. It's like knowing your exact blood alcohol while drinking (a comparison that will become more relevant in Part 2 of this post). We know we have been drinking but have no actual way to know if we are .05 or not until its measured externally.
Imagine the compound interest of life lost over 15 years of being 30% less of yourself. I am certain I would likely still be at Align, and I know I would still be a chiropractor, but who knows how much further I would be in my career, how much more I could have given to my clients or how much more I could have enjoyed those years?
WHAT HEALTH ISSUES DOES IT CAUSE?
Short answer? Heaps. Almost everything in fact.
According to more recent research, the shorter you sleep, the shorter your life.
Fewer hours of sleep predicts all cause mortality. Put simply, you’ll be dead sooner and the quality of your life will be worse.
Fewer than 6 hours of sleep leads to a decrease of physical endurance and function of 30% due to lactic acid build up as well as the bodies ability to expire our breath, but anything below 7 hours has been shown to impair us, with decreases in our peak muscle strength, peak running speed and our vertical jump.
Coupled with this fact is that it has been shown that sleep and frequency of injury has a linear relationship, stating that 9 hours of sleep Vs 5 hours of sleep leads to a 60% increase in the probability of injury.
Another more functional element to sleep is that it has been shown to improve learning performance (in rats at least) by 20-30% as it is thought to be the time when our brain strengthens its connections when learning something new.
Have you ever been trying to learn something new or studying and come to a point where you are just stuck so you give up for the night?
If your anything like me, I know that you found that the next morning it just clicked. Things you were struggling to learn just came to you, or you could remember the whole piece of information correctly.
It appears that while we sleep the brain literally prunes away the unnecessary elements of the pathways and streamlines your new skill.
Another health issue lack of sleep causes, is weight gain. Sleep doesn't just help you lose weight, it actually helps you keep it away!
Lack of sleep decreases the body’s levels of a hormone called Leptin, who causes the sensation of satiation (aka - feeling full). At the same time, the hormone ghrelin (the guy responsible for NOT feeling full, and making you hungry), is ramped up.
It has been shown that people who sleep between 5-6 hours a night will eat 200-300 MORE calories a day, equalling roughly 70,000 calories a year, leading to 10-15 pounds (or 4.5-6.8kgs) of obese mass a year.
Worse, you eat more of the WRONG THINGS, going for heavy hitting carbs and heavy processed food, while simultaneously staying away from leafy greens etc.
So just to clarify…on average, if you slept more than 7 hours a night, you would eat fewer calories, crave better quality food and with no extra effort or will power necissary, you would have to manage up to 7kgs of fat FEWER, each year.
Do you know any other “magic” weight loss solution that can offer all that with zero negative side effects and at zero cost?
More importantly, insufficient sleep according to the podcast, degrades our DNA.
Specifically it has a negative effect on immune response genes, decreasing their reproduction. At the same time, we get increased chronic inflammation, increased stress response leading to cardiovascular disease and an increase in the expression of genes related to the promotion of tumour growth.
Apparently this is most exemplified by people who do shift work. Night shift workers suffer from higher rates of obesity, diabetes and cancers, most notably bowel, prostate and breast cancer.
This is apparently so prevalent Matthew Walker states, that the World Health Organisation now classifies night shift work as possible carcinogen in and of itself as 4 hours of sleep even for just one night, causes a remarkable state of immune deficiency, a significant drop in anti cancer cells in our immune system.
Sleep deprivation affects your sex hormones too, in fact, Men who sleep 5-6 hours a night will have testosterone levels 10 years their senior, a critical element of health, strength, muscular performance etc, in short, it ages you a DECADE (apologies for not having the data for women too but you can safely assume similar effects can be found).
Consider how you are when you're deprived of sleep; reduced alertness, impulsive, lack of ability to concentrate, difficulties with learning and memory.
What do you think happens to your brain when you are like this for weeks, months or even YEARS on end?
While we are awake our brain builds up toxicity, especially a protein called ‘Beta Amyloid’. You may have hear of this protein before as it is the main mechanism in the development of Alzheimer’s Disease. When we sleep properly, the process of sleep wipes our brain, reducing build up of Beta Amyloid.
Insufficient sleep across lifespan now appears to be one of THE most significant lifestyle factors in determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Simply put: wakefulness causes low level brain damage and sleep offers reparatory function.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan have arguably had a huge effect on our world today. They were both known as having strong wills with sharp minds. They were both also famous for getting around 4-5 hours of sleep a night. They both died with Alzheimer’s.
This anecdotal evidence is hardly proof of the research but it raises a few questions about the concept, two people with very active minds and social lives (two factors previously thought to be predictive of the disease) got it anyway.
Now you might be saying to yourself:
“I’M ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO DOESN’T NEED THAT MUCH SLEEP…SO I’M ALL GOOD RIGHT?”
Wrong.
Well…at least its a safe bet that you're wrong anyway.
You’ll remember that Matthew’s research has shown that people are completely incapable of determining how much they are affected by sleep deprivation.
I was convinced of my own ability to get things done when I was working off lower levels of sleep, but it turns out, like you, I am completely unqualified to make that assessment.
Negative effects of your lack of sleep can ONLY be assessed by external sources and measurements.
Although studies show us that there is a population of humans that can function as normal from just 5 hours of sleep, but those same genetic studies show that is a group of less than 1% of the population.
In fact, you're MORE likely to be struck by lightening in your life time than to be one of those people, so you should probably assume that you aren't one of them.
SO…WHAT CAN I DO THEN?
Get to sleep. Seriously, its as simple and as difficult as that.
The minimum you should aim for is 7 hours! 7-9 hours appears to be our sweet spot as humans.
11. WAYS TO IMPROVE SLEEP:
Consciously think about sleep hygiene. Make it something you factor into your health routine like you do exercise.
Regularity; try go to bed at same time.
Decrease light; Try away from screens for at least an hour before bed or at LEAST have your screens on night mode. Think of circadian rhythm, no blue light, black out curtains, eye masks.
Halve the number of lights on in your home in an evening. Apparently, if you are in an environment with no lights at all, we fall asleep 2 hours earlier.
Keep it cool, brain decreases temp by 2-3 deg fahrenheit to initiate sleep. always easier to sleep in a room thats too cold rather than too hot. We fall asleep faster and deeper in cold.
Wear fewer clothes to bed. Again, its a heat thing.
Try to have warm feet and hands. It helps keep your brain cool as it stakes blood away from your core. You could also try having a hot bath or shower before bed, it brings blood to the surface then your core body temp plummets when you get out of the water and you're more ready to sleep. The reverse is true for waking up, studies have shown that its the rise in temperature in the morning not just the light that wakes you.
Time your exercise, try to exercise earlier in the day, hormonally exercising earlier sets you up to sleep whereas later in the day it can wake you up.
Eat earlier and go for a short walk, help your body digest so it isn’t working soo hard when you are trying to settle down to rest.
Decrease stress in other areas of your life, meditate, work on your posture, breathing exercise, plan opening your emails etc, decreasing stress chemicals will allow your body to relax faster and more fully, letting you get to sleep.
Watch the Joe Rogan podcast I talked about a lot of my information coming from here. It goes into a lot more detail if you are that way inclined, but it is worth the watch. It is also available as a traditional podcast.
AND REMEMBER
Sedation is NOT the same as normal sleep, pills and alcohol might help you nod off but they do not allow you to go through the full normal stages of sleep and so you will miss out on a lot of it’s benefits. Be sure to discuss your inability to sleep with a health practitioner about improving your sleep hygiene as Matthew Walker states in the podcast that sedatives are an absolute last resort.
Sleep is NOT like a bank, you cant accumulate debt during the week and then make it up on the weekend.
Lastly NO ONE tells you to stay awake on a problem. “Sleep on it” so that you can have a fresh perspective is a suggestion with no cultural boundaries.
Accumulated wisdom for centuries has promoted sleep as a way of better tackling your problems, getting things done and improving your life.