Fix Your Sleep, Fix Your Life: The Science of Rest, Recovery, and Resilience

Ep 137. Sleep, hydration, and nutrition are the three foundations of human survival and performance. No matter where we live or what challenges we face, every person depends on quality rest, clean water, and healthy food to function, adapt, and thrive.

Among these essentials, sleep is the most powerful and often the most neglected. Sleep directly affects physical health, emotional balance, cognitive performance, and nervous system regulation. When sleep is disrupted by insomnia, stress, or irregular schedules, cortisol levels rise, inflammation increases, and the body enters a state of chronic survival mode.

Over time, poor sleep creates a cascade of downstream health problems—fatigue, anxiety, weakened immunity, impaired focus, mood instability, and reduced emotional resilience. As sleep quality declines, so does our ability to self-regulate, manage stress, and maintain psychological well-being.

Substances such as alcohol, THC, and excessive use of sleep supplements like melatonin can interfere with natural sleep architecture. While they may seem helpful in the short term, they often disrupt REM cycles, increase vivid dreams or nightmares, and reduce deep restorative sleep.

For individuals with sleep-disordered breathing, CPAP therapy has been associated with improved sleep quality, reduced nightmares, lower cortisol levels, and better long-term health outcomes. Restoring healthy breathing during sleep allows the nervous system to exit chronic alert mode and return to baseline regulation.

More than any supplement, stimulant, or productivity hack, sleep remains the most effective performance enhancer available. It accelerates physical recovery, strengthens emotional resilience, sharpens decision-making, and supports long-term mental clarity.

When you protect your sleep, you protect your health, your focus, and your capacity to live with intention.

Take care, and walk well.

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 137 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at a local community college. And what we're going to be discussing today is not only going to be about sleep, but dreams, nightmares, sleep quality generally and how it relates to self-regulation skills, but

Ultimately, we're also going to look at what is called sleep hygiene. Those things that not only affect our general health. Once again, I am a health psychologist and this is one of the things that affects not only mental illness, something I do work with on a very regular basis.

But also our general health, and this is from the youngest to the most old of those that are in our communities and sleep and how we sleep quality of sleep is also one of those things that we tend to pay less attention to unless we're really exhausted, but the impact of it is phenomenal. So from this point, we're going to start discussing elements of sleep to begin the discussion. What I'd like to talk about is sleep itself. And essentially we're spending.

about one third of our lives. If we're averaging between six to eight hours of sleep, now we know that it's not eight hours that is the default necessary for all people, but rather we have kind of this continuum and range. There's some people that live very well and comfortably at about five and a half to six hours. I do that regularly, but I like it when I can get seven to eight. But usually if I get closer to that eight hours, I get kind of sore and uncomfortable. But for some, that is more the realm of necessary.

Whenever they're one sick or two have worked out really hard and I do work out regularly and I do tend to sleep a little more soundly after a workout date. But, often the sleep need is reflective of what it is that we may have done before. and also the necessary time required to be able to repair itself. So some things to keep in mind about sleep. once again, a third of our life is spent doing that. And if you have trouble falling asleep, have disrupted sleep.

armando (02:51.107)
and much feeling your way around versus turning the lights on and getting to the toilet and doing your constitutional and eating and trying to mosey your way back without moving too quickly too abruptly you're turning lights on we we have these patterns that we start developing as a result that work better for us

And I can't say that they're all particularly driven by the instinctual, but they definitely are driven by the fact that our body knows when it needs to be resting. And we tend to tone down our reactivity and our activities during that time. And we try to sleep a soundly with the least amount of abrupt disruption or interruption that we can all help it. And where we live, maybe we live in a city and apartment where there's a lot of noise going on. might opt for using things such as a white noise or pink noise.

in background or even a fan that's droning to help kind of break the sound waves coming in through a window or through doors, walls, this sort of thing. And that's something that's been incredibly helpful for me sometimes. Even though I'm not living in a rural setting, sometimes the rural is much quieter. Generally speaking, the space between sounds tends to be a little larger, so to speak. But whenever you do have a sound, tends to become almost stark and overpowering that it may wake you and bring you

into that survival mode because whenever we're asleep, some things that most people don't talk about, but it has a lot to do with self regulatory skill and self recognition of symptomology of stress and anxiety, this sort of thing, not only when we're in our waking hours, but specifically when we sleep, when we sleep is when we're most vulnerable. That's whenever our assumption of safety has been met to the degree that we can have sleep. Some of us are lighter sleepers, based on conditioning, how we grew up,

And where we grew up this sort of thing But some things to pay attention to once again one third of our life at night that we spend where we're probably at our most vulnerable and if we hearken back to when we're all Living in simpler times as a human species many thousands of years ago the light sleepers those that slept very little were probably the alarm systems for the remainder of the tribe that was sleeping more deeply and That way they could wake an orient. So there was probably maybe

armando (05:20.579)
a small percentage of those that genetically speaking had the gene for less need for sleep and might have been annoying during the day because of their energy but also when they slept they slept hard they slept quick but they didn't sleep long or those that slept lightly for instance were the ones that played the worthy alarm rather for the overnights and just some things to think about relative to our experience in the more existential sense but as far as a practical sense what about self-regulatory skill

and sleep. From the mental health perspective, know that many of the mental health diagnoses, the heavier diagnoses such as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and even anxiety disorders such as OCD in the more severe sense, have different patterns of sleep and reported descriptions of what their dreams are like, but there are some that dream very intensely because of emotional dysregulation is very

closely correlated to nightmarish type dreams, just dreaming, also dreams that tend to be exhausting and very immersive, lucid, but not in the fun sense of where you enjoy the dream, but rather one where it's immersive and lucid to the point where it's exhausting and whatever attention that one might apply during the day, it's being applied at night too. So there is not as much restfulness in sleep. Now there are many studies that have been done where

They use kind of like a word report for for sleepers and those that do struggle with certain types of mental illness They have certain what they call repetitive patterns of certain words and descriptions and that might be reflective of in certain disorders disorganized thinking and if there's disorganized thinking there's definitely frustration anxiety sometimes irritation and and aggression that comes with that in waking states, but whenever describing dreams

It seems like that's reflective of that disorganized quality that is occurring during the waking states and that is very telling.

armando (07:29.989)
because much of what we make sense of at night when we are dreaming, it's basically our data being categorized and put into deeper memory banks, so to speak for later use. And we're making sense of our day. We're basically categorizing and organizing what it is that went on in our day and prioritizing whatever info is needed. And this is something we have to pay attention to because of that correlation having to do with that disorganized thing.

thinking. But there's also evidence to show that there are certain words that are over-repeated, which indicates that there's a lack of breadth to be able to describe what's going on.

And with many that are in states of depression and very chronic sense, often there's that sense of, can't get away from this or that hopelessness type of thing. They often will describe what it is that is that heavy quality that is hard to put words on because it's a visceral experience of depression. It's not all in your head. Once again, it's the body depressing and therefore the thoughts as a result of how the state of the depressed body is, will filter through that and reflect that state.

speak. So whenever we have good, healthy sleep, where we're saying that we're actually resting and feeling restful when we wake up, we tend to be a little more adaptive, more adaptable and flexible and response, which means my self regulatory skills are really good at that moment. Whenever we wake up and maybe it continues throughout the day, we feel rested and we don't feel as taxed by the end of the day. So this plays a big part in being able to self-regulate because much of that is not only attentiveness, but being

and able to stay in the sense of centered, of relaxed, wherever you're in a state that you don't feel in any way.

armando (09:20.196)
obstructed or overcome by your environment or overwhelmed and you have the ability to choose and respond versus react based on what's happening first and this gives us a sense of control and a plumb wherever we feel like we have more say in what's going on in my life and less feeling like my life is being driven and I'm being driven and I have no control. Now this plays a big part in how we sleep and some things that can rob

of that sense are chronic pain. chronic pain of course will disrupt sleep and if you have trouble sleeping on one side, you roll over and you have let's say back pain, sciatica, restless leg, or you have anything like neuropathy, those are huge disruptors of sleep. quality of sleep goes down. That means that it's harder to feel restful. And then we have this cascade of health implications as a result of that stress. And if we think about what happens to our body in stress and not necessarily just in the fight flight,

Sense but in a chronic sense we have elevations of cortisol. That is something that we all hear about Cortisol actually makes the blood coagulate more quickly. So it's useful in the immediate acute sense wherever the cortisol helps us become Safer and stronger in the moment as a result of whatever stress is going on but if it's chronic there is a corrosive quality in Cortisol that we start seeing what are called lesions inside the the smooth muscle the venous structure

the arterial structures that feed our heart and feed our peripheries and we start seeing the rougher inner edges wherever cholesterol starts to stick we start having occlusions where we have less blood flow we start having bits of venous structure that become weaker where we might see the beginnings of aneurysm so there's definitely a cascade over time downstream as a result of chronic discomfort and lack of sleep is one of those things that is a stressor

Having disrupted sleep in a very frequent sense having insomnia is something that disrupts and that's not always what we eat or drink too much caffeine after five this sort of thing a disrupted Diary rhythm can do that to you where we have bouts of insomnia. Now you have chronicity of insomnia a lot of times and this was before electronics Drinking warm milk was one of the things that if you're lactose-tolerant was useful to many but

armando (11:49.697)
anything like warm teas that have cac caffeine not a good thing green tea they say works really well for waking you up without that buzz but you don't want to do that at night also anything that is particularly stimulating in the sense that if you're very sensitive to sugar you don't want to do that either but those things are subtleties that might cause issues

when a rehab things along the lines of diabetes wherever there might be a frequency of urination just the need because of the cast off the micturation that's going on in the cells and the body is putting off all that extra water will disrupt us or else we could have an accident this sort of thing and this isn't something just relegated to the elderly population but people generally that struggle with type 2 diabetes type 1 has its own challenges as well wherever blood sugar is destabilized it can cause what they have disruptions

sleep insomnia. Also, one regulates that the insulin injection can also cause issues wherever there is sluggishness involved in general discomfort and what they call general malaise, just feeling like crap after the fact. that is a number of things that are generally having to do with how we ingest, how we eat, what we take in. But also there are some other disruptors that have to

with emotional dysregulation. If we experience that during the day in a very general sense, that will cause us to have disruptive dreams in the sense we may wake because we may have night terrors. We might have nightmares. And that is really strangely correlated to a feeling of I am feeling in danger in my environment. And yes, dreams happen in your mind. But if you think about this and the lemon example that I've used since the beginning of this podcast and before,

when I was just teaching in classrooms, if you think about somebody biting a lemon

armando (13:47.279)
Or maybe eating your favorite food, have salivation, pituitary hormone drops because of an imaginative lemon in your mind. Within a fraction of a moment, you have salivated because of that hormone drop. That means your body has changed as a result of entertaining that. Think about that lemon. Now it's the dream. And think about how strong the suggestion is when they're particularly vivid and how uncomfortable that can become. And especially if we're dealing with things that make us scared, things that are unresolved.

Carl Jung

Probably the the media honey right now as far as what work he's done with understanding the shadow self and That sort of thing. He was a big believer in dream work, but also interpreting those but the interpretation is not so much what I'm looking at but rather Understanding the why we would have not only night terrors, but nightmares It's not always what we eat but rather the distress that our body feels and our lack of sense of safety Whenever we're most vulnerable what I mentioned

at beginning of the podcast, most vulnerable is when we sleep. There are those that say they can never be vulnerable because they've been in war, they have PTSD, this sort of thing. And that is the verbage that is an exaggeration or, or, or hyperbolic speech that makes it hard for us to be able to speak to somebody whenever they're telling themselves they're salt talk that never it's like the ultimate, you can't touch it. It's terrible. And it is terrible. But the way in which they speak garners a set

of beliefs that will kind of armor protect this experience, even though it's an experience that they want to go away. So much of how we see things, we have to look at very factually. That's why the running man model that I teach is so important because it is not one based on belief or agenda or using words that are particularly emotionally laden because we want to talk about the facts, the experience of quantitative measurable facts, but also the qualitative experiences without necessarily going

armando (15:49.063)
into the descriptions that are dramatic or those things that indicate how much emotional weight there is, because then we start getting into the opinions and the whys of things versus the what of it and the how to fix it. And that's why I do this podcast. So we can point in the direction of what do do? What's happening? When does this occur? And not worrying about the why, the why gets worked out after the fact, it comes up as a result of dealing with the factual aspects of things. Now,

armando (16:27.963)
and Michelle Carr is called Nightmare of Skuta and obscure in Spanish or Skuta basically has to do with being in the dark or hidden and the dream aspect that she talks about has to do with how the dream field and the studying of dreams is a relatively new

field within medicine behavioral medicine is what they consider it but we've had dream labs and sleep labs for for determining if there are issues and and things that are disrupting sleep and often sleep apnea is treated whenever they measure people's sleep patterns and also they determine if somebody's

So disrupted if they're not getting any REM sleep REM sleep is the deepest aspect of sleep that happens in cycles and waves, but that's also very quickly correlated to those aspects of sleep the deepest sleep where our body's in repair whenever we're in that paralytic sleep aspect and I hate saying it that way because those are transient states that often whenever we're Hypnagogic or hypnopompic on the way in or on the way out of sleep. We tend to experience that that motor loss

and muscular motor control loss and that feels very uncomfortable for some and there are ways to get past that without necessarily freaking out but still qualities of sleep we were talking about here but what I want to point out is that these sleep labs have found out some really interesting stuff and one particularly interesting one is about the CPAP. The CPAP is for those people that have occlusion of their glottis or they have a lazy or maybe a flaxed glottis or maybe a really thick

neck and many athletes get this because of the weight of the musculature around the throat that tends to collapse the airway where there is an occlusion of breath going in and out and therefore we have snoring this sort of thing and the CPAP helps to force the air in so that way the oxygenation goes up there's no holding of breath and no choking at night this sort of thing so there is less distress on the body physiologically even though they may be sleeping through it and not aware of it

armando (18:40.609)
but it also improves dream quality. Apparently whenever CPAPs are used, whenever they're diagnosed as having sleep apnea, the beginnings of that actually correlates with a very quick drop in nightmares, not only dreaming, but nightmares. Nightmares tend to go away when a CPAP is used when it is needed, whenever there's a diagnosis of sleep apnea, which is terribly fascinating, but incredibly

validating in the sense that whenever we have distress, we're looking at regulation of physiology. Whenever we have a sense of holding our breath underwater and you've been swimming and you don't come up quickly enough, you have distress. It's kind of like that. Our body goes into an alarm reaction and we get that extra boost to get us to the surface. And not unlike that when we're sleeping, we have that extra boost as well. So that extra boost results in cortisol levels elevating as a result of the stress

trying to fight for breath. Not unlike whenever we're swimming underwater, just a little too deep and we have to go into that extra zone, wherever we've got some turbo boost going on so we can survive, so to speak. So what we have is a survival mechanism that is being triggered because technically we're having trouble breathing. And the most fundamental aspect of our survival need is breath above.

water above food. And these are the things that even when we're sleeping, if that's being compromised, we go into stress. And if we're in a state of sleep, wherever we're in that sleep paralysis, how does our brain talk to us? How does our body talk to us? Well, through our dreams. And why is it nightmarish? Because much of the stress that comes up, it's like death or impending death. And it's trying to get our attention. It doesn't mean that you're in danger in any sense that someone or something is trying to get you, but

It your body your basic self is trying to get your attention by whatever means possible and that's gonna use every Negative or dark memory that you might have and make a narrative or story to get your attention to wake you up So it is a survival mode reaction in many ways But also once again, it's really important to know that the sleep app is correlated with drops and nightmares if there's any kind of Sleep apnea that's going on very important stuff now the very end of this we're gonna talk about

armando (21:04.887)
Supplements and things that we take such as medications that can cause us problems or things we ingest that can cause us problems with our sleep Of course alcohol will cause you to have disruption of sleep and also maybe have less REM state sleep whenever you are drinking heavily or even infrequently bit enough that your body can tell a difference but if there's a chronicity of use of ETOH, Ethyl Alcohol, there are sleep problems and often there are nightmares that go along with that because

it is a depressant and depressants do what? They slow your breathing system and whenever our breathing, not unlike the CPAP thing we're talking about, is compromised then our body goes into fight-flight reaction, increased cortisol, issues down the road beyond the casting off of the poison of the alcohol itself. So some things to think about.

Now the next thing is whenever people are trying to stop smoking the patch, think, and yeah, I think it's called Chantix is one of them. there, there are warnings on the box that say that it can cause suicidal ideations. One of the things it doesn't mention so much that I remember the fact that it causes, let me take that back. It may be mentioned on the labeling. It's been a long time since I've seen it. I don't to be incorrect there, but I know a lot of people that I do know that we're taking that we're reporting.

extreme nightmares and they didn't have suicidal ideations, their sleep was terribly disrupted. There are very few that use that that had lucid dreams and they say, yeah, I like it my dreams are really cool. Now. Very few had a good outlook to wherever it was a fun, lucid dream versus an incredibly lucid, nightmarish quality dream. But those things can actually cause some disruption in sleep because there's a deprivation because of the nicotine and addiction.

substance, even though we're seeing that it has some benefits, the way that it is processed for general consumption cigarettes, this sort of thing, it is not good for you. And once again, if you're taking in smoke into your lungs, you're compromising your breathing machine and that is the primary survival mechanism above food and water. Once again, things to think about. Another thing that if you start doing anything along the lines of dip or

armando (23:26.783)
showing tobacco. The tobacconates that carry the nicotine by way of the cheek and the gum, this sort of thing, those will also induce some issues with sleep initially if you're not used to that. But usually they say that kind of goes away. But often people that use those tend to drink alcohol with that too. So it kind of smudges the results of what they can report. But there are some effects that are sleep disruptive things to think about once again. Now, as far as one of the over the counter supplements for sleep,

What we usually hear about is melatonin. It is now the honey of the sleep pattern Fixing and it is in my estimation and from what I know Not as good as what they tell you it is not a placebo effect It definitely has an effect of our brain and our body does make melatonin and what you're taking is a synthetic and often I hear and it Bothers me when I hear parents say yeah, I gave my kids melatonin so they'd go to sleep because they were so troubled with them during the day that they wanted to not

Only to sleep but to sleep long so that way they wouldn't wake up early and they could catch up But there's some issues with that whenever you're taking a synthetic and you go above and beyond what is your normal output Melatonin will not only make you sleep deeper But it will also induce nightmares in some people now this isn't meant to be medical advice in any way I am a psychologist, but I am not a prescribing MD But what I am telling you is because this is over-the-counter with melatonin be careful often There are 10 milligram doses and some I think five

Many people tend to think that because it's over the counter and you can get it in a gummy that somehow it's safer and therefore more is better just because it tastes good. I've heard this before so I'm not exaggerating. Please be careful with that because if you're doing that to your children and generally their machines are much younger and much more flexible and a lot healthier than the parents. We don't want to be inducing bad times for them or sleep that is not only uncomfortable but disruptive to them. Please be careful. On top of that

As far as sleep goes, sleep hygiene is very important. Sleep hygiene is a term that the military came up with many years back, I'd say late 60s, early 70s, and they would have sleep hygiene classes to teach the military because they knew how important it was to sleep. Now sleep is probably the most important performance enhancing supplement that you can take. And the better your sleep, the better your muscles grow, the faster you recover, the less soreness you have, and the better you respond to your life out and about. That means yourself

armando (25:55.925)
regulatory skills by default get much more effective because they're more accessible to you. You don't fear nearly as stressed or distressed or overcome by overwhelm in any way because you're more yourself whenever you sleep and you sleep well. And I certainly encourage you to seek better sleep. And for now, I would just want to tell you thank you for spending this Saturday evening with me. I wanted to talk about sleep. took a nap this afternoon and that counts as sleep too. And those things are helpful. If you ever need a nap, don't ever

feel bad about taking one sometimes you must sometimes we're just tired whenever we have this sense of I got stuff I can do and I can be productive and get your mind and your body tell you yes but you're tired and sometimes it's okay to just do that don't feel bad about it take the rest when you need it it's not a bad thing allow yourself to have the rest that you need rest well sleep well but do you have any questions of me please send those questions to the email at running man get skills project

at Gmail, I'd love to hear from you. If you want to talk more about this, there's definitely more sleep stuff that I can talk about along the lines of subjective programming and the Silva method that's used for programming for success during the day. Awesome stuff. Very useful, effective for me. But please take care, sleep well, rest well, give yourself a chance to recover well. Take those naps, if you will walk well.