This week, I’ve got some very exciting homework for you- GET SOME SLEEP! As reported by the American Sleep Apnea Association “More than 50 million Americans already suffer from over 80 different sleep disorders and another 20 to 30 million suffer intermittent sleep problems each year.” They also state that “25% of U.S. adults reporting insufficient sleep or rest at least 15 out of every 30 days.”
Dr. Tracy Marks, with Marks Psychiatry, defines chronic sleep loss as “having a loss of sleep, too much sleep or broken sleep for 4 or more nights per week for over one month’s period.” During sleep your brain not only gets to rest, but it gets to process all of your day’s events and heal and regenerate itself and the rest of your organs. Without sleep, however, not only can we become irritable and cranky, but it can also lead to immunity drop, weight gain, impaired memory, lowered sex drive, and lowered cognition abilities (think slower reflexes). When we aren’t getting enough sleep, it dramatically affects us past just being drowsy - our entire health is at risk of becoming compromised.
How many nights a week do you find yourself on your phone, scrolling through emails and checking social media or binge watching another episode of your favorite show? Or come evening time we are sitting at dinner with loved ones, but or mind is off in a thousand places rehashing our day, making a mental list of what we have to accomplish tomorrow and all the places the kids need to be and in turn. Very few of us really allow our brains downtime to just sit and relax throughout the night before drifting off to sleep. The constant activity mixed with the blue lights from our screens effectively knocks our circadian rhythm completely out of whack.
Before we continue, let’s define a couple of terms we hear often, but without explanation, to pin-point their correlation to sleep and their importance.
Melatonin- This is the hormone correlated with the circadian rhythm, when it gets dark, your body should naturally start releasing melatonin to help us wind down then go to sleep.
What is our circadian rhythm? Basically, it’s the internal clock we all have that wakes us up in the mornings and lets us drift off to sleep at night. When this gets messed up, our ability to go to sleep then stay away during the day is thrown off-kilter.
How does blue light (specifically from screens) affect our sleep? The blue light that we absorb tricks our body into believing that it is daylight and to stay awake. In turn, this alters our bodies melatonin response.
Dr. Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist
at Stanford, released The
Other Pandemic (and a Real Solution): Light, Optic Flow & Health
(a video on Instagram) going into detail describing our internal mechanisms and
why we need to be conscientious about what times of day we are getting
light.
Huberman says that how we interact with light both in the morning and evening are vital to pay attention to. We need to be getting lots of light in the day and none at night, as we are NOT nocturnal beings. He articulates further that viewing natural light early in the morning around sunrise sends a trigger to the melanopsin cells in the brain, these detect visible light then send a message to the body clock (aka suprachiasmatic nucleus) that it’s time to get going. Huberman suggests we get 2-10 minutes of light directly from the sun in the mornings. (Please note, this is not saying to look directly at the sun, just get its light.)
A lot of research has shown that not sleeping at night can lead to weight gain, but why is that? Huberman says it equally as important however, is to NOT GET BRIGHT LIGHT at night from screens, especially from 10 or 11pm-4am, as this triggers a prodepressive circuit which in turn throws off blood sugar regulation. To answer the earlier question: seeing light increases our cortisol levels, which is our body’s stress hormone, which is a good thing in the morning. But, when our cortisol levels spike, our blood sugar levels also rise. If we are looking at these blue lights throughout the night, we are triggering that cortisol response excessively it can lead to Cushing syndrome. This can in turn leads to weight gain and diabetes since we have so much extra and unnecessary glucose running through our blood.
Some natural ways to help sleep maybe come a little easier, would be to try Ashwagandha, Hops, Chamomile, or Valerian. (Which can be taken as supplements or drank in tea.) Another way to help aid sleep is to take Calcium and Magnesium as calcium works with tryptophan to create melatonin and magnesium helps lowers cortisol levels!
Sleepless nights are no fun, and if you’re anything like me, can lead to you being an awfully cranky individual the next day. But even further than just being ill tempered, a lack of sleep can spur many other long-term health effects. So if you are having sleeping troubles, it would behoove you to seek further sleep aid, and please reach out to a specialist!
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