Good Neighbor Podcast North Atlanta
Bringing Together Local Businesses & Neighbors of North Atlanta
Good Neighbor Podcast North Atlanta
EP 114: Healthy Conditions - Why Am I Still Tired? With Dr. Vahid Yeganeh
Ever wonder why you feel exhausted even after what seems like a full night’s rest? Join us in a compelling conversation with Dr. Vahid Yeganeh, physician and co-owner of Healthy Conditions, as we uncover the mysterious world of sleep and its vital role in our health. Dr. Yeganeh shares profound insights into why many of us struggle with fatigue, despite seemingly sufficient rest, and how poor sleep could be impacting our cardiometabolic health and mental acuity. We also dispel common sleep myths, such as the misconception that catching up on sleep during weekends can compensate for weekday deficits.
Understanding the science behind sleep cycles is crucial to unlocking the secret to feeling truly rested. With Dr. Yeganeh's expertise, we navigate the significance of REM sleep and discuss how fragmented sleep can leave us feeling worn out. Learn about the benefits and pitfalls of napping and how maintaining consistent sleep patterns can transform your energy levels and overall well-being. This episode provides clarity on why you might feel sluggish even when you're clocking in enough hours of sleep. Tune in for eye-opening advice on cultivating better sleep habits and improving your overall health.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, north Atlanta, where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, stacey Risley. Hello friends and neighbors, welcome to North Atlanta's Good Neighbor Podcast. Today we are back with Dr Vahid Yagana. He is the physician and co-owner of Healthy Conditions, which is a concierge lifestyle medical clinic in Buckhead, and he is our expert contributor for North Buckhead Neighbors and has been for a little while for Dunwoody Neighbors as well, and we are so happy to have you back, dr Vahid.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me back. It's always fun to talk to you.
Speaker 1:Well, it is fun and I'm especially excited about this topic. This was at the end of our last podcast recording. This is one that I requested.
Speaker 2:I don't know that I've ever requested a topic for an expert article. This is all for you, stacey. I appreciate it, the whole article.
Speaker 1:There should be a dedication page. This article is dedicated to you.
Speaker 2:It is a great topic, it really is.
Speaker 1:The topic that the title of your article is why am I still tired? And it surrounds, you know it's. It's surrounded by sleep and sleep issues and how to correct those. So, Dr Raheem, thank you for writing this, and let's go ahead and jump in with just the importance of sleep overall.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually that's a good one. So it's probably of all of the lifestyle measures that I deal with every day, it is the most underrated. I think most people generally understand that sleep is important, you know, but they associate it with just yeah, so that I'm not tired, so that I'm not sleepy. But the reality is that one in three American adults don't get enough sleep. So, first and foremost, it's something that affects a wide range of people and quite a few people in the US, and it will affect so many elements of your health across the board, like cardiometabolic health, so things with your heart health and your blood sugar. I'm going to just start listing all of the things that get impacted negatively if you don't get enough sleep. I'm not going to be able to cover it all.
Speaker 2:That's how long this list is, but if we're talking specifically, let's say, about your metabolic health, it will increase insulin resistance, if you ever heard that term. We associate that with things like prediabetes and diabetes, and that's why it is also associated with an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes. It's associated with an increased risk of having weight gain and suffering from obesity. It will slow down the metabolism. It is associated with increasing your blood pressure. It's associated with more heart disease, more risk of stroke. It'll weaken your immune system. It will increase your risk of cancer. Specifically, it's been shown to be linked to higher rates of breast cancer, and it's October's Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Colon cancer, prostate cancers, anxiety, depression I can go on and on and on, but needless to say, it affects a lot that has to do with the kind of all across your health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, and I am the furthest thing from a doctor that one can be, but this is something I can really relate to. You know, this is something that at different periods of you know my life, I've had, you know, sleep issues and not get able to get a good night's rest, not getting enough sleep. You know, there's just so many components to it and it does affect everything for me, you know, and and I feel like I'm a pretty healthy adult, I for the most part, and and when I'm not getting regular good sleep, and it's like cumulative, like the more nights of course in a row, it's just it will be to where just I'll have like cognitive shutdown, it's just. I mean my mental acuity just declines significantly with lack of sleep. So let's the next part of your and I know that I'm touching on stuff already that I shouldn't be yet, but this is a conversation- we're just going to talk.
Speaker 1:But you mentioned two common myths in your article about sleep. You know, and this I, I love this because I learned this through my sleep struggles Um, this the first one, the first one of these myths, which was talking about the weekend. So lead in with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so basically that if I'm not sleeping well during the week, that's okay, cause on the weekend I'm going to sleep in and I'm going to catch up on that sleep.
Speaker 2:So that's the myth, right? Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work that way. So our circadian rhythm right, so our sort of natural wake and sleep cycle, is highly dependent on us being consistent with those habits. Right, it's highly dependent on our exposure to light, our exposure to darkness, and we can go into detail about that maybe a bit later. But when we have a disrupted sleep cycle right, and I'll get into what that looks like during the week and then we sleep in on the weekend, usually what ends up happening is we will probably be groggier anyway on the weekend, but also Sunday night, when it's time to kind of get back to bed for an earlier wake up the next day, we have a hard time falling asleep and we just kind of repeat that cycle. So unfortunately, it doesn't make up, so for this chronically sleep deprived state that we're in, like we're not getting enough chronically, and it just doesn't work that way, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've heard it referred to in the past as as you're accumulating sleep debt you know, and that you can't I mean you can't get out of it, but you've missed this except it's debt you can't can't get your, you know, crawl out of. So that's. I used to try to do exactly what you're saying and try to make up for it on the weekends, because, especially when I was a school teacher and my days started so early cause I was an elementary school teacher, you know had to be at work, you know, at 650, before the kids arrived, and I'm not a typical, I'm not a natural morning person. So it was tough and so I would try to. You know that was getting up super early and going to bed not early enough, because I had my own kids to take care of.
Speaker 1:You know, everything comes before your own sleep. It seems like that's like a lot of times last on the list. So the other myth was one that surprised me a little bit. So the other myth was one that surprised me a little bit because I thought that you know it says that waking up during the night means poor sleep, and I thought if you were waking up during the night, that did mean you weren't getting quite as restful sleep. So I was really happy to read about this myth.
Speaker 2:So with that one, I'll be very clear about what I mean by that. I'll be very clear about what I mean by that. So we go through sleep, different sleep stages, throughout the night, and then we cycle through those stages several times. So if we're waking up at the end of one of those cycles, briefly, that's actually fairly common and in the case of most people we don't remember having woken up in between, right, so you just associate it with oh no, I was asleep the whole night.
Speaker 2:Sometimes we'll be at the end of one of our cycles and we'll wake up briefly and realize we feel like going to the bathroom, and that's okay. I mean, if you're going to the bathroom four or five times a night, definitely that'll start disrupting your sleep. But one trick actually or not trick, but I guess a thing that I like to tell patients to do is to use lights in the red light spectrum in their bathroom, as long as it's bright enough so they don't trip and fall, but it doesn't send the wrong signal to the back of your eye that okay, bright lights, it's time to wake up, and it helps you sort of get fall right back to sleep. But usually, what's that?
Speaker 2:What happens as we're cycling through these stages? At the end of that cycle it will be up for a second or you know, for a little bit, and we'll fall right back asleep. The problems arise when we can't fall back asleep, and so there's different things in our day to day that can impact that and cause our sleep to be fragmented. But yeah, waking up is actually something you're probably doing and not remembering that you're doing.
Speaker 1:Very good, all right. Well, so the next thing you mentioned is sleep cycles there. But the next thing in your article you kind of talk about understanding the sleep cycles, starting with light sleep, intermediate sleep, deep sleep and then REM sleep. So you want to touch on those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it'll be a good idea to go through that a bit. So we can divide our sleep into two big sort of sections, right? So we have what we call non-REM sleep and REM sleep, and non-REM just means non-rapid eye movement sleep, right. And when we look at that non-REM sleep we can divide that further into three stages. So in the article I've labeled it, as you know, light and intermediate and deep. These stages are called N1, N2, and N3.
Speaker 2:You could, you know, and some of my colleagues will group the N1 and N2 both as light sleep. I called it intermediate there, just because what I consider N1, the best way I could describe it is kind of when you want to, you know, you lay down to go to sleep and then you get woken up and you feel like you didn't really fall asleep. Well, you're probably in that sort of N1 stage. So those two stages are considered light. One is a little bit lighter than the other. And three would be the deep sleep. That's where most of our physical sort of restorative sleep is going on. Then we go into that second portion, the REM sleep. That's when, you know you alluded to cognitive function, right, Like having cognitive impairment, so a lot of those cognitive repair functions and memory processing, emotional processing stuff. All that's going on during REM, and REM is when we're having you know, those when we're dreaming, obviously in rapid eye movement, sleep.
Speaker 2:So that's typically how our cycle looks. Now we will go, let's say, to go from one end to the other end of that. To complete that cycle is roughly around 90 minutes and we'll do that typically around anywhere from four to six times a night. We'll cycle through oh wow, Okay, Four to six times a night.
Speaker 1:We'll cycle through. Oh wow, okay, four to six times a night. And so how long like if you are, say, 15, and this is off topic a little bit, but let's say you were taking a nap, you know, like that you had time on a Saturday afternoon for a nap how long would you need to sleep to make it through those sleep cycles?
Speaker 2:Typically, so going through the whole thing will typically take about 90 minutes. It doesn't mean that taking a 30 minute nap is necessarily bad for you or anything like that.
Speaker 1:That was where I was going with. This. Is a cat nap a good thing? Is that good? Or is it just going to make me feel worse?
Speaker 2:That could be a topic for another article. Actually, we could get into the nitty-gritty about naps and the timing of that and how that's impacting your nighttime sleep.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Actually thanks for the idea.
Speaker 1:I think that'll be a good thing to get into. You can dedicate that one to me too. Yeah, I think that'll be a good thing to get into. You can dedicate that one to me too.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so these cycles again. When I say typically, I'm saying in a situation where you know things are functioning as they should. It's about approximately 90 minutes. It's obviously going to vary from person to person. As we get older, we spend less time in REM sleep, and so there's a lot of factors to consider, but I would say a simple answer would be around 90 minutes.
Speaker 1:Okay, lot of factors to consider, but I would say a simple answer would be around 90 minutes, okay, and I didn't mean to get straight off too far there, but no, that's okay. We are talking about nighttime sleep, so we'll get back into that. So one of the next major portions of your article where you were giving us some reasons why we might feel sluggish even we feel like we are getting enough sleep. Why are we still feeling tired?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm trying to remember what I wrote first, fragmented sleep.
Speaker 2:Fragmented sleep, yeah, so essentially anything that disrupts those cycles, right? So anything that's going to impact how much time we spend, let's say, in the deep sleep, how much time we spend in the REM sleep, is going to impact how tired you feel. Basically, it's going to impact how restorative that sleep was, first and foremost, and that feels like fatigue the next day. That feels like that grogginess and whatnot. So again with fragmented sleep. So, again with fragmented sleep, that can be caused by lifestyle, but that could also happen when you have a full-blown sleep disorder. So it's important to distinguish here between you know what's an actual sleep disorder and just not getting you know, not having good sleep hygiene, for example.
Speaker 2:So sleep disorders would be things like restless leg syndrome or sleep apnea or just chronic insomnia. Those are things that you'd need to see a sleep specialist about and deal with because they are serious things that have their treatment protocols that will vastly improve your quality of life if you respond well to them. So, outside of that, lifestyle factors could be. So, outside of that, lifestyle factors could be everything from your physical activity levels, your stress levels, all of your habits in and around your nighttime routine, your habits in and around the morning. What are you doing when you're getting up in the morning. So really pretty much everything you do throughout the day can impact your sleep.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that you touched on when you were talking about lifestyle factors was the excessive screen time, you know, before bed, and that's something you know. You know, as a teacher, I was always telling parents, like you know that, because we were, you know, guided that that really can be an issue for kids during their developmental time, you know. And inability to sleep, and it really translates to us too. I mean, today we are all on our phones, you know we are, you know I try really hard to unplug because I it's not good for my mental health to be too tuned in to everything else.
Speaker 2:By the way, there's higher incidence of anxiety, depression, with more and more use of these you know of these applications on our phones and also just with less sleep. And you mentioned kids. Kids need more sleep than adults, right? I don't know if I mentioned it earlier, but the average adult requires anywhere from seven to nine hours of sleep, so that's what we're aiming for. Maybe I didn't mention that.
Speaker 1:I don't think we did yeah, so how much is the right?
Speaker 2:amount Anywhere between seven to nine hours of sleep. So that's what we're aiming for. Maybe I didn't mention that, but I think, yeah. So how much is the right amount? Anywhere between seven to nine hours, yeah. And what about kids? Depending on their age, so the smaller they are, the more sleep they need. You know, it could be anywhere from 10 to 12 hours, and then the much younger kids, but it could be something like nine to 10, nine to 11 hours for, let's say, adolescents. I would, I would be aiming for at least nine to 10 hours there, yeah. And then so having those age groups essentially growing up in an era where it's all about screens is a challenging thing as a whole.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I could not agree more on that. You did want to touch on a note about caffeine and alcohol and I this is, I'm not. I don't drink much alcohol very rarely, but I do like I'm a I have, I have my coffee in the mornings and I drink. I mean, I don't drink. I try not to drink caffeine late in the day, but this is something that's very relevant to me, so I'm very interested to hear your take on it.
Speaker 2:I picked these two on purpose because I feel like there's a quite a decent number of folks out there who will consume either one or both of these things. I personally love coffee. That could be a whole other conversation Me too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'll be clear I'm going to talk about. You know, I'll tell you what caffeine is going to do in terms of sleep, right, specifically with regards to that. But it's not me telling you that caffeine is bad for you per se, right? Or having a cup of coffee in the morning is bad for you. It's just you know the quantity and when we're consuming it, etc. That's what can start impacting it. So let's start with that. Let's start with caffeine, and what caffeine is going to do is overall, in a nutshell, it's just going to reduce the amount of time that you're sleeping, right? So we're reducing time both in that deep sleep stage as well as time in the REM sleep stage, and overall it just makes that sleep less restorative and is it because of the difficulty falling asleep?
Speaker 1:You're going to sleep later because of the caffeine intake.
Speaker 2:Yes, so that has something to do with it as well, right, so that is one aspect of it. However, you'll have some people that will be like, oh no, I can have a double espresso and just hit the pillow and I'm done. Hit the pillow and I'm done. You're still causing some fragmentation in the sense that you're decreasing the amount of those stages of sleep. So even in those folks that don't have a hard time falling asleep, it's still not the best situation to be in if you're having caffeine so close to bedtime.
Speaker 2:So what does this look like for someone that does like to enjoy coffee? Well, coffee, depending again on the person, ballpark half-life is about, let's say, five or six hours. What does half-life mean? The time it takes for half of that substance to come out of your body, right To leave your body. So if it has, let's say, let's go with five hours, right, because, again, your age and so many things can factor into how you process the caffeine. But if you think about it like that, if you have a morning coffee, for most people you'll be okay. By the time you go down to bed you've gotten quite enough of that caffeine out of your system. But let's say you're having like a 4 pm coffee. Well, five hours from then that's 9 pm.
Speaker 2:Half of that caffeine is still banging around your system and is going to disrupt your sleep or the quality of that sleep. So the timing is crucial here. Obviously, the quantity is important, right, if you're having 20 cups of coffee a day, you know we're gonna have other stuff to talk about maybe. But another important thing to note is we you know we're thinking caffeine, coffee and tea. There's a lot of stuff out there that has caffeine in it. So I would just be wary of what I'm ingesting in terms of these drinks that are out there. There's a lot of things that have caffeine and we don't realize it. So I would look at nutrition labels, look at ingredients, because we could be ingesting it without knowing it. Yeah, because we could be ingesting it without knowing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in alcohol, the biggest thing that was surprising to me on this is that, because alcohol, for me, does have a drowsiness effect, you know. So I think, oh yeah, you know, if I were to have a glass of wine before bed, that's going to help me sleep, and you know. I know having a cup of coffee isn't going to help me sleep.
Speaker 2:But I think alcohol could be misleading.
Speaker 2:You're not entirely wrong. So you're absolutely right in that alcohol is a depressant right, and so it's actually going to make it easier to fall asleep, that sort of initial stage of just falling asleep. What ends up happening when you do have alcoholic beverages? It will fragment your sleep in the following way In the first half of the night you're going to have less of that REM sleep, right, you will have a bit more of the deep sleep initially, and you're falling asleep a little quicker. Now, in the second half of the night, as your body's metabolizing the alcohol, you'll have what we call a REM rebound. So now your body's trying to make up for the REM sleep that it didn't have in the first half, and so you'll have much more of that. And then also in that second half of the night, we become much more prone to awakenings, we get much more of that light sleep and we're just easily woken up, and so that fragmentation tends to happen in the second half of the night disrupts the sleep in that way. So that fragmentation tends to happen in the second half of the night disrupts the sleep in that way. So, even though it helps you fall asleep, it is in terms of quality of sleep overall throughout the night.
Speaker 2:It is detrimental and I wouldn't recommend it. I wouldn't recommend any alcohol beverages. You know the new data we have there's no good amount, unfortunately. I just made a lot of enemies, I know, but I'm sorry, that's the data talking, not me.
Speaker 1:That's right Basically, strictly talking about the data.
Speaker 1:It's not his fault, oh man. Okay, so let's talk about the snooze button trap, because I used to be so guilty of this. I mean, and I don't know what I thought, hitting the snooze button, setting my alarm intentionally now so that I could hit the snooze button three times, like when I was a school teacher, I would intentionally do that and I knew that it wasn't. I mean, I knew, I knew it wasn't a good, but in my mind it helped me get up because I was having to wake up before, you know, the sun came up. Especially now that we're about to have, you know, daylight savings time, that's going to affect a lot of school teachers. Especially now that we're about to have, you know, daylight savings time, that's going to affect a lot of school teachers.
Speaker 2:They have to get up so early before the sun is even thought about rising. You know how many of us have like three or four alarms ready to roll, cause we know the first one, won't you know? So it's a common thing and the snooze button is a common thing. Okay, so what's let me? Let me actually start by asking you a question. Okay, Since you say that you, you know you've suffered from that, how did you feel waking up after having hit the snooze button a couple of times?
Speaker 1:Irritated.
Speaker 2:Okay, did you feel more rested?
Speaker 1:Definitely not. No, I, yeah, I. I still I can't give a good answer of why I did it, but I was definitely caught in that trap. You know, I just I thought nine more minutes, oh gosh, it's going to give me nine more minutes. I need nine more minutes. I'm not quite ready yet. Okay, nine more. And then 30 minutes have gone by and I am rushing, trying to get ready. I'm by and I am rushing trying to get ready. I'm not anymore rested and you know I'm mad at myself for being so. I'm starting my morning frustrated with myself for having such a hard time getting up, you know, like it was just a really bad cycle.
Speaker 2:You touched on actually very good points there. So, first and foremost, if if you hit the snooze button and it meant you could sleep another two hours, there would be nothing wrong with hitting snooze, right. But typically when you're hitting snooze it's something like a 10 minute break I'm not sure which.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nine Right, yeah, nine minutes. I think that's pretty standard.
Speaker 2:Something along those lines. And so you can imagine, now that you have some knowledge about these sleep stages and how we cycle through them, that that's not a whole lot of time to really get into any real deep sleep, right, so you're going into a little bit, it's not 9-0, like the 90-minute nap, exactly.
Speaker 1:Nine minutes is not very much.
Speaker 2:Very light type of sleep and then you're getting snapped right out of it again, so it's not helping you feel more rested. That's the first thing right. And then we have that psychological component what you said where the tone we're setting for the day. It doesn't work well for us. At least for me it doesn't work well. I have one alarm and it goes off once, and I know that sounds kind of risky to a lot of people, but you'll be surprised if you know there's only one alarm and you're not going to snooze it. You'll get up. I mean, it might take you, you might get in trouble a couple of times, but eventually you know, eventually you probably will wake up a few minutes before your alarm goes off.
Speaker 2:I'm sure people listening are familiar with that sort of phenomenon and that's perfectly normal.
Speaker 1:So yeah, the snooze button. I don't know if there's any data you might. Can you know, tell me if there's any data to this to back it up? When I stopped, when I got out of the snooze button trap and in all fairness, it was when I stopped having to get up at, you know, five o'clock in the morning- you know.
Speaker 1:So when, when I didn't have to get up that early, and some really four, 50, you know was what was when my first alarm went off Um, I'm really 450,. You know was when my first alarm went off Once I didn't have to get up that early, but still early, you know, but the sun was at least coming up Once. Then I had no, no problem getting out of the snooze button trap, and I realized that's when I realized that, oh my gosh, I woke up in a bad mood for 20 years because of the snooze button, if I had just, you know like I mean it really, because the psychological component is real. You know you're starting your day off with a fail. You know, like the alarm went off and I didn't get out of bed. The alarm went off again, I still didn't get out of bed. Three strikes, and that's how I'm starting my day, fabulous.
Speaker 2:And then you feel tired throughout the day. Then you've had a busy day. You come home and like, well, this is the only time I get to myself, and so you end up staying up at a later, and then the cycle kind of just keeps repeating itself. So I'm familiar, and I'm sure many people are familiar with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Well, so you, you talked about the hype around sleep hacking. Is that something?
Speaker 2:Yes, the hype around sleep hacking Is that something? Yes, that's an important one. Actually, that's really important. So today we have a lot of technology available to everybody to measure sleep right. So watches and things you put on your finger, like the.
Speaker 1:Oura Ring, I think, is one of them.
Speaker 2:I think Loop or something. Don't quote me on the names. I'm not familiar. I don't use any of them. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with them. Inherently, we get into trouble when we get a little bit overly obsessive about tracking these different things right. So you'll have folks waking up saying oh, how much time did I spend in deep sleep?
Speaker 2:Oh, did I get enough REM sleep? And then? So what ends up happening? By actually trying to improve our sleep, we get so stressed about it, so anxious around it, that it actually has the opposite effect. So now we're causing our sleep quality to decrease because we're so anxious about getting good sleep quality. And you could apply the same thing to food. You could apply it to several things actually, where you get so concerned about that lifestyle aspect right, in this case, sleep that now it is affecting you psychologically, it's affecting your mood, it's affecting, and it will have the opposite effect. So I would just I'm not saying don't use these things, but your sleep is going to fluctuate, the quality of your sleep is going to fluctuate, and if you're aiming for like this, quote unquote perfect night of sleep, you're going to be disappointed because it doesn't look like that right. So I would just say it's an important point, because we can run into problems trying to fix that very problem right, and it happens. I know people that have experienced this, so it's a real thing, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, and you talked about the importance of getting evaluated. You know if you're having just ongoing sleep issues.
Speaker 2:The importance of that, yeah, because there's so many things that can impact it right, like we could be having thyroid issues and not know it. We could have underlying depression and not be aware of it. Necessarily. There's so many things. Like I said, there's these sleep disorders that you could be evaluated for, and, let's say, if you have sleep apnea, well, you can get on a CPAP and all of a sudden, your sleep quality improves and a lot of other things improve as well. But yeah, so I would say, if you have any doubt, get evaluated and just see what's going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and then you did give some summary tips of how to improve your sleep habits, and those were having a comfortable sleep environment, regular sleep schedule, limiting stimulants and alcohol, winding down before bed and screen time. And alcohol, winding down before bed and screen time those are kind of what we've already chatted about, but maybe, like, maybe touch on the winding down before bed, you know, like that.
Speaker 2:That's a good point, yeah, so I like to have a wind down routine, so something along the lines of an hour to two before the time you want to go to bed. So let's say I want to. I want to have a bedtime of 10 PM by around eight 30. I'm already starting to dim the lights, if you have dimmers on them, if not switching off certain lights, just because those are the signals that our body is getting through the day to understand when we need to go down to sleep, when to turn, you know, when to increase our melatonin and at a different date maybe we can talk about melatonin. But essentially, melatonin is telling our body it's nighttime and it's time to go to bed, and it increases when we're exposed to darkness, right? So turning down the lights, dimming those lights about an hour and a half to two hours before, is a good habit to get into and then doing any activity that relaxes you. You know, for some people reading a book might be very relaxing, for somebody else that might be very stimulating. So, understanding and knowing yourself, what do I find relaxing? Is it a bath? Is it some calming music? Find those things that you know calm you down, sort of wind you down. Think about how you would create a bedtime for a child and start applying that for yourself. There's nothing wrong with having sort of a nighttime routine as an adult. It's actually quite healthy.
Speaker 2:So that's what I mean by like sort of the winding down routine Again around sleep. It's all about consistency, right? So getting the daytime light exposure, like when you wake up, that exposure to light that basically tells your body oh, it's time to get up and increase our cortisol, decrease our melatonin, and at night, when it's dark. So that's why the screen time is such an issue, because it's sending a mixed signal to us. It's telling our brain look at all this bright light, it's definitely not time to go down. But you know, then these other aspects all the lights around you are dark and everything else is saying it's nighttime. So with the phone I know it's a tough one I would say if you can get the phone out of the room, that's probably the best case scenario where you're not even tempted to touch it. You're not. You know, just a notification going off the light of the phone, even if it's on silent, could disrupt some people's sleep. So if you can get out of the room, even better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know that one for sure. It's been a game changer for me.
Speaker 2:Absolutely One. I didn't write in there that kind of touches on. Something we mentioned earlier was weekends and weekdays. Try and have a pretty consistent sleep time and awake time. Yes, you will have some fluctuations, but try for that not to vary so much. That's at least what I do. People wonder why do I get up at 6 am on Saturday and Sunday? It's just that's how my body is now kind of trained to wake up on a weekday. So I try not to mess with it too much on the weekend. Give or take half an hour an hour, not a big deal. But you know I'm not doing this like getting up on a 5 am weekday and then getting up at 12 pm on the weekend. That's really going to send mixed signals and make it very hard to have a proper circadian rhythm.
Speaker 1:Well, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you writing this article in the first place, but you know you do such a great job of explaining it to those of us who don't have your expertise and I really value having you on who don't have your expertise, and I really value having you on and I do love the idea of you doing one on on how naps can be helpful and how like how to implement those.
Speaker 1:I just, I just love these, that you know these topics apply and I know that your practice also applies to, to all people you know to. To it's a basically a family practice type practice type practice. You know life's not just lifestyle, medicine, but um, but everything. So I love that that you have so much knowledge that you're sharing it with us and um, and that you treat such a wide range of of everything. So you are, hands down, one of my very favorites guests to have. I'm so glad you're a repeating guest to the next one.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Thanks for having me again.
Speaker 1:You are so welcome and if you guys want to have a sleep evaluation, if you're wanting to go and you know chat with Dr Vahid at Healthy Conditions, I just can't tell you. If you're wanting to go and chat with Dr Vahid at Healthy Conditions, I just can't tell you. If you have not had the pleasure of having a conversation with Dr Vahid yourself, you're missing out. He's a great guy to get to know, especially if he's your doctor. I can't imagine. Well, thank you so much for being on again, vahid, and we will see you next time. Thank you, well, that's all for today's episode. Atlanta I'm Stacey Risley with the Good Neighbor Podcast. Thanks for listening and for supporting the local businesses and nonprofits of our great community. Thanks for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast North Atlanta. To nominate your favorite local businesses, visit gnp north atlanta.
