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The Wellness Blueprint: With Dr. Caleb Davis
Welcome to The Wellness Blueprint with Dr. Caleb Davis, where we uncover the secrets to living a long, active, and pain-free life. Hosted by Dr. Caleb Davis, an orthopedic surgeon and fitness enthusiast, this podcast is your ultimate guide to musculoskeletal health, injury prevention, and wellness.
Dr. Davis combines his expertise as a shoulder and elbow specialist with a passion for empowering people to take charge of their health. From deep dives into cutting-edge restorative medicine to practical tips on avoiding surgery and optimizing recovery, The Wellness Blueprint offers valuable insights for anyone seeking to preserve their body and thrive at every stage of life.
Join us each week for professional guidance, fascinating medical discussions, and actionable strategies that help you move better, feel stronger, and stay functional for years to come. Whether you're an athlete, a weekend warrior, or someone looking to age gracefully, The Wellness Blueprint provides the tools to design a healthier you.
The Wellness Blueprint: With Dr. Caleb Davis
Episode 3: Optimizing Sleep: The Key to Hormone Health and Injury Prevention
What if improving your sleep could drastically reduce your risk of injury and enhance your hormone levels? In this episode of the Dr Big Guy podcast, we uncover the critical role sleep plays in your overall health, especially when it comes to balancing hormones like testosterone. We'll discuss the severe consequences of sleep deprivation and offer practical tips to elevate your sleep quality. From understanding sleep apnea to evaluating supplements like melatonin and magnesium, and examining how substances such as alcohol and medications (like benzodiazepines) can disturb your rest, this episode is packed with actionable insights to improve your sleep health.
But that's not all! Stick around for our lighthearted segment "Fractured Facts," where we discuss fun orthopedic trivia.
With humor and expert advice, we're here to help you understand the importance of sleep and keep you entertained along the way. Get ready for a fun and informative episode that will make you rethink how you prioritize your sleep.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Dr Big Guy podcast, a place to discuss injury prevention, optimizing health and educating yourself on all aspects of medicine. I'm Dr Caleb Davis, aka Dr Big Guy. As an orthopedic surgeon, I love to fix people after an injury, but my true passion is helping you stay healthy, injury-free and out of the operating room. But my true passion is helping you stay healthy, injury-free and out of the operating room. Today's episode is all about sleep. Why is it important? The consequences of not getting enough, how to improve your sleep quality. We'll cover how sleep impacts your body's hormone levels, including testosterone, and how sleep deprivation raises your risk of injury. We'll also talk about sleep apnea, common supplements that can help you sleep, like melatonin and magnesium, and how alcohol and certain other medications, like benzodiazepines, can disrupt your sleep. This episode is packed with valuable information, so get ready to take your sleep health to the next level.
Speaker 2:The information shared on this podcast is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only. The content of this podcast should not be considered medical advice, nor is it a substitute for professional consultation with a qualified physician. Thank you, personalized recommendations.
Speaker 1:We're going to start the episode today with Fractured Facts the segment where we learn interesting trivia about orthopedics, so you can impress your friends at parties, or maybe a Tinder date, maybe a cruise ship trivia thing. A cruise ship trivia thing.
Speaker 3:What do you call it? You're the one who does that. I'm not very good at the trivia.
Speaker 1:I guess I just call it trivia.
Speaker 3:Trivia, trivia, game show Trivia.
Speaker 1:All right, I have enough of that. Let's hear the intro song. Okay, nicole, did you know that the most commonly dislocated joint in the human body is Go ahead, guess.
Speaker 3:I'm going to go with the shoulder.
Speaker 1:Okay, did you just guess that? Because I'm a shoulder surgeon, is that? Why is it?
Speaker 3:because that's my specialty, or you know, it's actually because it's in a lot of tv shows and movies and books that I've read. Yeah, everyone's always talking about like, oh, my shoulder's out of place.
Speaker 1:And then they have like two people holding it down and like as usual, nicole is showing me up again, so I'm not really needed on this podcast anymore because she already has all the answers.
Speaker 3:Get out of here. This is no longer the Dr Big Guy show.
Speaker 1:You're not a real doctor, just everybody out there remember that.
Speaker 3:You know what? I'm just going to put fake doctor on some scrubs and wear that.
Speaker 1:We could make that happen. Maybe we can get a sponsorship, not a doctor? Well, yes, she's absolutely right.
Speaker 1:It's the shoulder Most common dislocated joint in the human body. Most commonly it goes out the front. There's something called a posterior dislocation. That's much more uncommon. It's almost always that the ball's going out of the front of the socket. This is largely due to the fact that there's so much degrees of motion in the shoulder. It has an incredible range of motion, has more range of motion than any other joint in the body. But also, if you think about other joints, especially like the hip joint, you think of like a deep socket and a ball that's inside that socket with a ring of bone around it when the shoulder is really more like, kind of like a golf tee, like a flat disc, and so that shoulder ball can move in all directions, sort of front, forward, up and down and rotationally, and that just makes it inherently more unstable. But yeah, you do see it a lot in movies and I feel like I see it people just popping their shoulders back in, left and right in movies. I'm not sure that's possible.
Speaker 3:I feel like the only time somebody pops their own shoulder back in, it's like a Navy SEAL.
Speaker 1:Right, I guess that's part of Navy SEAL training.
Speaker 3:Probably. I mean, they're pretty badass, you know.
Speaker 1:Well, those guys are always on Rogan, so maybe if I ever talk to one of them I'll get an answer to see if they learned that in training.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Also, babe. I was just going to say it's pretty sexy hearing you talk about shoulders, Can I?
Speaker 1:just say talk shoulder to me. Is that Not on the air? Let's get back to business, please. So let's get into the bulk of this podcast. So do you know where the eight hour rule comes from? Do you think that's real?
Speaker 3:I figured that it was a bunch of scientists who had done a bunch of sleep labs and then they followed people to figure out if they were more or less stupid.
Speaker 1:Well, if sleep deprivation makes you stupid, I probably lost a lot of brain cells at some point in my life. Sleep is much more important to me now than it used to be, so we're going to dive into that a little bit. The the short answer is sort of what you said. There is a lot of data over the last decade several decades really, that kind of indicates that seven to nine hours is the optimal sleep range. They talk. They've looked at a lot of different variables but the scientific consensus is anywhere between seven and nine hours of sleep is optimal to improve health, optimize hormone levels and reduce injury and optimize stress and cognitive function.
Speaker 3:But that's for adults, right.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's for adults. I wasn't going to get into the differences for adolescents, but that is something that we could cover in the future. But I didn't feel like digging down too deep this time just because I felt like our last podcast just went too long.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's all right.
Speaker 1:So seven to nine hours is the general recommendation, but a lot of people find that if they actually shoot for seven hours, they're actually not getting seven hours of quality sleep if they lay down in bed for seven hours. With the popularity of wearable biometrics like whoop straps and Fitbits and Oura rings, we're seeing that if you lay down in bed for seven hours you're not actually getting seven hours of solid sleep where you're going through all those sleep phases.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I do like to track on my Apple Watch. I had a Fitbit for a long time and now I have an Apple Watch. It's a little bit depressing to go in there sometimes and see like, oh, you've got this percentage of deep sleep in this percentage of REM sleep and like pretty much all of its light sleep. But I know, maybe because I've had a sneak peek of what this podcast is about light sleep is like the least important one yeah, you can get benefits from light sleep, but yes.
Speaker 1:So, going into the next thing, we will talk about sleep cycles a little bit. I don't want to go really into depth in this, but essentially you have light sleep, you have deep sleep and then you have REM sleep. Deep sleep is one of those areas where you're getting a lot of your hormone balancing, where you're getting increases in testosterone and growth hormone, both hormones you've probably heard of.
Speaker 3:Sure, but testosterone is mostly in men, or is it also in women?
Speaker 1:Women have testosterone. Men you generally do think of men when you think testosterone, but women have it too, and it's also essential for their health as well. It just isn't as concentrated in their body as it is in males. The growth hormone is also essential in repairing tissues if you have an injury or just regulating normal homeostasis in the body.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry say that again.
Speaker 1:Homeostasis, equilibrium.
Speaker 3:Nope, dumb it down.
Speaker 1:I'm not doing it, Okay. A good balance of the way your tissue should function how's that it's equilibrium really is is balance okay, um, I can get behind balance yeah, the.
Speaker 1:the other thing that you'll notice is uh decreases in cortisol, which is also called the stress hormone, which can be elevated with stress, anxiety or even uh trauma or even just regular day-to-day activities. It serves an important function, but if it remains elevated for too long, it can cause breakdown of muscle tissue, it can cause chronically increased levels of glucose and it can raise your stress levels, and so if you don't have adequate sleep, you can have chronically elevated cortisol levels. If that doesn't motivate you enough, there's been a lot of different data that could show that chronically elevated cortisol levels can make you gain weight, have more prone to be diabetic and gain weight around your midsection. So for a lot of people, if you're not taking it seriously, that could be something to consider.
Speaker 3:Well, let me go back to men, because the common trope is men don't listen to their physicians or go to physicians, right, whatever. And so, if it's affecting testosterone, what are the main components of testosterone Like? Why should they care about sleep when it comes to their manliness?
Speaker 1:Well, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but usually when a male's coming to my office, a man comes to my office to see me, it's because their wife, girlfriend, partner is is making them. That's not true for everybody. So, yeah, there's a there's, there's some truth to that, but, um, that's a great question because it could probably help motivate you to take this a little bit seriously. Probably the things that we see most is low energy, uh, low motivation, uh, poor sex drive and loss of muscle mass in low testosterone. So these are all things that that would contribute to Something that's probably very important to most men out there listening.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'd say so.
Speaker 1:The one thing that we didn't talk about yet is in REM sleep. A lot of people believe that REM sleep is a very crucial portion of sleep for memory consolidation and improving your cognitive function, or I should say, optimizing your cognitive function. So if your REM sleep is getting interrupted or you're not sleeping long enough to get into REM sleep consistently, you may have a hard time integrating memories or things that you learned from the day in your sleep if you're not getting consistent REM sleep.
Speaker 3:Now, rem sleep is also when you're dreaming right.
Speaker 1:Yes, and some people believe that those dreams may be playing a role in memory consolidation. Obviously, the science of sleep is a difficult one, because none of us know what's going on when we're sleeping. Now, there's lots of different ways we can monitor it, like monitoring your brain waves, and there's functional MRIs so they can see what parts of the brain are active while people are sleeping. But to say that we can conclusively prove what happens in every segment of sleep is difficult.
Speaker 3:Now what happens if you don't remember your dreams versus remembering them? Does that make a difference?
Speaker 1:You know I don't know the answer to that. Remembering them, does that make a difference? You know I don't know the answer to that. I I don't remember my dreams most of the time and I know you happen to have very vivid dreams. I get to hear about your dreams all the time.
Speaker 1:It's pretty much first thing in the morning. Hey, let me tell you about my dream, and I don't know if that's I really don't know the answer, if, if it's a bad sign or a good sign, or if it doesn't mean anything at all. I can't remember the last time I remembered a dream that I had, so I'm hoping it's not bad. So just to sum that section up, let's talk about the consequences of sleep deprivation, so we can sum up the consequences that you might experience from either short-term or long-term sleep deprivation.
Speaker 1:You can have impaired cognitive function, you can have reduced reaction time. You can have a higher risk of injury. You see it in athletes who are sleep deprived, who have slower reaction times and are more prone to sprains, breaks and tears and long term it can be even more serious for people. You can have development of diabetes, heart disease, increased risk of osteoporosis in some extreme cases, osteoporosis in some extreme cases. Poor sleep that's chronic has all sorts of long-term, wide-sweeping medical effects on the body that everyone should really be taking into account.
Speaker 3:Well, I know that in some cases, you know, people just don't sleep for reasons like, oh, I was working too hard on my paper or my job, or I just want to crush this Netflix series. But in some very serious cases it's because of mental health issues or physical reasons insomnia. Or even somebody just had a baby or a toddler and that kid is not sleeping and therefore mama and papa aren't sleeping. So I think that that's got to be difficult as well. Does it give you long-term issues if you're, let's say, raising a small child and you have maybe two kids over the span of five years and you have massive sleep deprivation from that? Can you bounce back from that?
Speaker 1:You certainly can bounce back from it and the short answer is yes, it has an effect, a negative effect. You know we all have seasons in our lives where things are more difficult, that we have to have challenges that sometimes are temporary, sometimes are not. But no matter what we go through, we have to find that balance. Obviously, a newborn baby I'm not sure there's a way to get out of that one.
Speaker 3:I mean, we got to just go back to those times when there were, like nurse wet maids at night and like everybody lived in the community in order to avoid that. Yeah, I don't know how much, how feasible that is in our modern society, culture.
Speaker 1:But you know what? I'm certainly not volunteering to live in a commune so everyone can nurse all night and switch and take turns that's why we have your mother.
Speaker 3:God bless her I'm not bringing my mother into this either um, but on a serious note though, I wonder if there is a link between postpartum depression in women because of the sleep disturbances that they have.
Speaker 1:I would certainly suspect that it contributes. I don't know if it's causative, but if you're having postpartum depressive or any sort of depression or anxiety, I imagine poor sleep only confounds it or, I should say, compounds that problem. I think that's a very good theory. What do you think are some other common things that people see in their everyday life that might disrupt their sleep?
Speaker 3:things that people see in their everyday life that might disrupt their sleep. Well, anxiety is a big one and I know just from reading various things that a lot of America at least struggles with depression and anxiety. That's like a huge, a huge deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Anxiety is a very highly cited reason for people not being able to sleep, even when they're getting in bed and trying to sleep Depression. A lot of times you'll see people who are sleeping more often, but a lot of times it's hard for them to get into bed and hard for them to get out of bed. And then the quality of their sleep, if you look at their brain waves and the phases of sleep they're getting, is poor, even if they are getting 9 to 10 hours of sleep in a severely depressive episode. So it's sort of this harsh cycle that's difficult to break out of for people with any kind of mental challenges.
Speaker 3:Well, and I think about post-traumatic stress disorder as well, which, you know, ptsd. A lot of times people automatically think soldiers combat veterans, but there's a huge instance of people with PTSD who are women who maybe have had sexual trauma or trauma of some kind from domestic violence, abuse, that kind of thing, and so that's a huge rate of PTSD in that culture or subgroup as well. So with PTSD, one of the hallmark things is nightmares and sleep disturbances.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I've even heard that sometimes people have a fear of going to sleep because their nightmares are so vivid that they're afraid to even go to sleep to experience them, which sounds truly horrible. And I'm glad you bring that up because I think you're right that PTSD people think shell shock veterans, which is certainly a huge problem and very common and persistent, unfortunately. But you're right, you can see it in non-veteran, non-military personnel as well, although I don't know if there should be a subcategory. But I'm not trying to tell people that one trauma is worse than the next. It's, but it's. I think it's more prevalent than people think.
Speaker 1:I should note that Nicole works very closely with a lot of mental health professionals, so she is very passionate about this and uh is very, very. She's made it a very big part of her life to try to advocate for people with mental health disorders and speak to them and help them feel seen and get them plugged into resources where they can seek help for this sort of thing. So I just want to throw that out there because it's very important to her and she's really very inspirational when I watch what kind of work she does in that realm Some of the other things that I'd talk about that people probably face a lot would be stimulants like caffeine or nicotine.
Speaker 3:I didn't realize nicotine was a stimulant, yeah nicotine is a very powerful stimulant. Is that for vaping too? Is there nicotine in vaping?
Speaker 1:Some vaping has nicotine. A lot of vaping does Cigarettes have nicotine and then, as vaping has sort of risen in popularity and then started dropping again, people are now doing just pure nicotine pouches. They just put it in their mouth and they have a pouch just with nicotine which gives a pretty strong buzz. From what I'm told, I've never tried it myself, but having stimulants like caffeine or nicotine too close to bed, or some people even after 12 o'clock in the afternoon, they'll notice that they have poor sleep quality in the evening if they're having stimulants.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I always turn down caffeinated beverages after like 2 or 3 pm because I know I'll be up till 3 am and my brain's like woo, party time.
Speaker 1:So the next one I wanted to talk about is an inconsistent sleep schedule, because I think this is also incredibly common for people. I think everyone who's listening to this can probably relate that if you're going to bed every night between 10 and midnight because you're working a 9 to 5 job, but you go to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning on a weekend because you're out with friends doing whatever partying you know going to see it, watching TV, watching TV Hanging cats I'm feeling attacked.
Speaker 3:Caleb, you're out with friends doing whatever partying you know um going to see it.
Speaker 1:Watching tv, watching tv huddling cats.
Speaker 3:I'm feeling attacked, caleb this wasn't about you.
Speaker 1:I've got plenty of stuff to talk about you later I wasn't even trying to talk about you specifically, but trying to switch back and forth between times that you're going to bed and when you're waking up really throws your hormonal what they call the circadian rhythm really, really out of whack, and so I generally would recommend trying to have a more narrow window when you go to bed, even on weekends, versus weekdays, and I think we all probably struggle with that.
Speaker 3:Can we rewind for a second, or I guess for any people younger than us? Not rewind, but just go backwards for a second Rewind, be kind. What is circadian rhythm? Could you delve into that a little bit more?
Speaker 1:No, no, the circadian rhythm broadly refers to the rise and falls in different hormones that regulate sleep. So have you ever heard of melatonin?
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:So melatonin is a hormone that's naturally produced in your body and as light decreases, I'm going to go kind of broad. I'm going to go broad and not super into specifics on this, because I'll actually get it wrong if I do, because I'm not a sleep expert. But imagine this as light starts to fall, as the sun starts to set and light enters your eyes less, your body starts making more melatonin in preparation for sleep. So that would be something that's rhythmic hormone levels that are changing in your body based on the time of day. Cortisol levels also rise and fall. Testosterone and growth hormone levels also rise and fall. There's all sorts of hormones that are rising and falling throughout the day based on external stimuli and what we call your internal clock, and that's what most people refer to as the circadian rhythm. There's some, probably some nuance. I got wrong there, but that's.
Speaker 3:That's it in broad strokes you know it reminds me of people who work night shifts. Aren't they at a higher incidence level of getting cancers or serious diseases?
Speaker 1:yeah, the. I do remember reading a study showing that people who work a night shift so they're're working all night, every night, and they're asleep during the day, you know, for long periods of time actually showed a higher incidence of cancer. I can't say that staying up late frequently causes cancer, but I can say fairly confidently that it's not a healthy lifestyle. It has something to do with exposure to sunlight and frequently getting sunlight, or should I say not getting sunlight exposure frequently enough, causing some sort of health issues.
Speaker 3:And then eventually you turn into a vampire.
Speaker 1:That's yet to be seen, but I hear there's people tirelessly studying that topic. Yeah for sure. I think you're probably one of them. Weren't you just watching the new interview with a vampire show?
Speaker 3:I was. Yeah, I really enjoyed that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those guys are almost as pale as your husband. Here's one that we're going to talk about that's near and dear to your heart. I want you to tell the people listening some of the things that I do for my sleep oh boy, get ready.
Speaker 3:Y'all all right. My dearly beloved husband, well, well, where shall I begin? He is very regimented about his sleep, very, very disciplined. He takes it very seriously. It's something to do with his you know profession of being a surgeon and he's like oh, I got to cut into people tomorrow, so I guess I got to get a full night's sleep, I don't know Lame.
Speaker 1:I'd just like to interject a moment. I don't ever use the phrase I'm going to cut into people. I I've never said that in my life.
Speaker 3:It's just please continue more fun when I say it. I think, um, anyway, so he takes his sleep seriously. He actually does the math in his head, uh, of, oh, he's got to wake up at five in the morning in order to get to the or prep is whatever. And so then he counts backwards and he's like, well, I got to be in bed by you know 10 pm. And that means actually washed up for bed, in bed lights totally off, his alarms are set, that kind of thing. So really for me that means he's like getting ready for bed close to 9 pm, because I take a while to actually wind down for the evening.
Speaker 3:He also wears blue light blocking glasses, like at least an hour or two before bed. He might pop a melatonin or something if he's interested in making sure he can go to sleep. And then he sort of cajoles me into getting ready for bed for like three hours prior, because he knows it takes me about three hours to do that. But the main thing is he will make sure every single light is turned off, and it's annoying see, that's really what I was hoping you'd get to.
Speaker 1:We're gonna have to split this into three episodes at the rate you're going here, so yeah, so speed it, speed it up.
Speaker 3:Isn't this like a therapy session for me?
Speaker 1:this is a. This is a ranting and venting session. Yeah, yeah, okay, go ahead all right.
Speaker 3:So he turns off all of the lights. And he's so picky about this that even the little power strips on the floor where we plug our phones in, if it's got one of those little green lights, he's gonna throw something over it to block that light. Uh, I can't leave my whatever device plugged in anywhere because you know it going to flash a light somewhere. God forbid there's a light on anywhere. Have you ever heard of a nightlight, you monster?
Speaker 1:No, See, this is becoming a personal attack at this point. Oh yeah, Sorry you know, therapy is one thing, but just thrashing me in public on a recorded podcast is another.
Speaker 3:I think you're going a little bit far, okay. Well, the worst thing that he does, though Keep it civil. The worst thing he does is we're watching a TV show or a movie, we're getting to the exciting part, and then his little alarm goes off on oh this is when I have to stop and get ready for bed, and he will stop the show. Doesn't matter where we are, doesn't matter if something big's happening.
Speaker 1:He's going to stop it and he why you're clearly very wounded by this and I think maybe we should probably get a real marriage therapist at this point to to sit down and talk through this. Everything that she said is true, except nicole is the queen of hyperbole, so she's exaggerating on some things. But but really, the core of what she said is true. I have to admit, and I you know look at me, I get my beauty sleep every night. I look great. If you're listening, you'll have to get on the YouTube video to see if I'm lying to you. Spoiler alert I am lying, I'm I look terrible.
Speaker 3:You have a perfect face for radio, as you always.
Speaker 1:I do have a perfect face for radio and and the hits just keep on going that she got into that.
Speaker 1:On this long tirade. Um, sleep schedule's very important and I take it very seriously. Uh, we talked about blue light blocking glasses. Uh, briefly just now and in our last episode on inflammation. And um, the light the reducing light in the room is actually very important as well, and it makes a huge difference for me being able to have a pitch black room. The other one that we didn't touch on so much is temperature. When you sleep, your core body temperature actually drops to allow you to start to slow down and go to sleep, and as you're approaching waking up, your core body temperature rises. So I do like to keep the room very cool with a fan or a light blanket a cooling blanket that you thought was just.
Speaker 1:you know, one of those things on Amazon that I'm not going to lie, I thought it was a gimmick and it's. It's really great. It's this I don't know how it works, it just stays cool most of the time. It's magic and it's great and I love it. Nicole, you touched a little bit on mental health and sleep. Is there anything else you wanted to add to that? Because I think that's just such an important thing that people sometimes don't think about is that their mood can really affect their sleep, or if they have some sort of diagnosed mental disorder, it can also severely affect their sleep yeah, well, we, we talked about it a little bit with the, with the ptsd, um, I would say that it's.
Speaker 3:it's really important for your cognitive function and for you to feel rested, to actually sleep and get a full night's sleep, because if you're, especially if you're dealing with intrusive thoughts or some sort of anxiety, like stuff's coming at you in your brain, it's a lot harder to quell those thoughts and stop them and reason through them. If your brain's not firing on all cylinders and if you're not sleeping adequately, your brain can't function at its full capacity because it's sort of like almost intoxicated. In a sense it's really it's not doing great.
Speaker 1:On that note, something I forgot to mention when we were talking about elevated cortisol levels is chronically elevated cortisol levels due to poor sleep can often lead to irritability, irrationality and poor decision-making and reduced willpower. So that's another thing to consider. Even whether you have some sort of diagnosis of anxiety or not, it can really contribute to all those things.
Speaker 3:So that late night snacking episode could be related.
Speaker 1:You know, I don't know if I can relate that to sleep deprivation, because it seems like a lot of people, just when they're up late at night, they just want a snack. I'm not sure what that's about. Personally, I tried to cut off my eating by a certain time period, but I'm not always successful either. I'm not going to lie.
Speaker 3:Do you think that it's better for your sleep if you are not digesting food? Because I've heard of some friends of mine they purposely do not eat anything within three hours of going to bed.
Speaker 1:I think that's more of a personal decision, and you have to sort of notice whether or not you've seen an effect in that. I think certainly a large meal is probably not a good idea just because it sits heavy on your stomach, and any sort of foods that might trigger gastric reflux, like heartburn, can definitely disrupt your sleep as well. So that's something that you should consider.
Speaker 3:Oh, let's talk about alcohol too, because that's a big thing that people typically drink at night. But when I've read about sleep and alcohol, they say, oh, don't drink right before you go to bed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know that's a common misconception, not yours. I'm sorry that people drink alcohol before bed to sometimes actually help themselves go to sleep, because alcohol does create a sedating effect on you, but it actually it could put you to sleep. It can help you fall asleep initially, but it can also reduce the quality of your sleep. So even though you're in bed, you're not getting that rest and getting those hormone cycles going in the way that you're supposed to, with light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep cycling appropriately. So that's a great point. I do not recommend drinking alcohol before bed. If you're going to drink alcohol, you know, maybe have a glass of wine with dinner early in the evening. Generally I don't find that it's very beneficial to you, but if it's something you enjoy responsibly, then I'm not going to knock you for that. But yeah, right before bed or a few hours before bed, don't recommend it.
Speaker 1:Up next, lessons that I learned in residency. With lessons that I learned in residency Today, with lessons I learned in residency, I wanted to have a little bit more of a lighthearted approach. I was trying to discuss with Nicole what should I talk about today and what I learned, and she came up with a great topic she talked about. She said I should talk about the way I eat when I'm on call.
Speaker 1:I definitely have a history of stress eating and sort of as a theme of what we've been talking about. When you're tired and you're stressed out, sometimes your inhibitions are lowered a little bit and you make decisions that you wouldn't make. And so I noticed that if I was working an all night shift at the hospital and there was bad food in front of me, normally if I would have said no, in a normal situation I said, well, I don't know when I'm going to be able to eat, I'm going to eat it. And that temptation carries on to this day. Even as an attending surgeon, where I'm not having to be working as many late night shifts as I used to, I'll still find that I'm in the hospital lounge and there's some fried chicken fingers and maybe some fruit snacks.
Speaker 3:Those Oreo cakes.
Speaker 1:Or some Oreo pie in the fridge. You know, if I'm busy and on call and stressed out, I hear him calling to me.
Speaker 3:So Dr Pick.
Speaker 1:Yes, like that. That's exactly what it sounds like. Please don't tell anyone. I'm hearing voices, though.
Speaker 3:Well, that's in our episode about the dissociative identity disorder, so don't worry.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, I hope you're working on that, because I'm not writing those notes my other parts are.
Speaker 1:It's fine I I had to guard myself and steal myself from from doing those things. I had to make a very conscious effort say, okay, just because you're on call, just because you're working a late night at the hospital, doesn't mean you can let all your hard work go out the window and, uh, let yourself go and just eat whatever's in front of you, so. So it took a real concerted effort to recognize that I was just letting go of all my inhibitions when I was so stressed out in terms of food and eating.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think part of that also is you giving yourself availability of healthy choices that you can reasonably keep on hand. Keep on hand, so, having having like a pre-made meal that you can pop into your uh, your lunch box that has a freezer pack, or maybe you've got like a small mini fridge or a place where you can share a fridge with other medical workers. Um, those are. Those were all options that we explored later on, when we got wise to this.
Speaker 1:Are you offering to make me meals?
Speaker 3:Man, let's not, let's not get that far into this. Okay, that's crazy.
Speaker 1:You know, I do keep a mini fridge in my office. Uh, where, at my clinic, where I see patients on an outpatient basis, I do try to keep healthy things in there, so I'm not tempted. They do have a pretty well-stocked vending machine in the break room that I try not to touch. It's filled with honey, buns and cookies and things like that and, um, I have no control over that, so I just try to stay away from it. Um, by no control, I mean, I don't stock it, I don't make the decisions on what goes inside that vending machine. So that's something that I do.
Speaker 1:And you know, the probably the hardest part is if you get called in for an emergency surgery at 11 o'clock at night and you're like, oh, I'm hungry. The only thing that's open is Taco Bell or there's that Oreo pie in the fridge in the hospital lounge. But you're right, even then I can bring my own pre-made meals and that's a really good strategy. So this may have been a little melodramatic of a lessons I learned in residency, but nonetheless it still applies to me this very day and probably applies to a lot of other people, and hopefully that this, this gave you some insight and something to think about.
Speaker 1:We're going to go ahead and wrap up the episode for now because, as usual, we've talked way too much and there's a lot to think about and digest. I do hope that you'll join us for the next episode to learn more about sleep and how to wrap up and summarize things that you can do in your everyday life to improve your sleep. Hey listeners, if you're enjoying the podcast, don't forget to like, subscribe and leave a review on whatever platform you're tuning in from. Your support helps us reach more people and bring you even more great content. Also, be sure to follow me on social media at DrBigGuyPodcast for updates, behind-the-scenes content and more. Thanks for listening.
