Sleep Deprived to Energized - A Journey To Better Sleep!

Are you dragging through your days, feeling sluggish, irritable, and unable to focus? You might be one of the millions suffering from chronic sleep deprivation. But don't despair! Kimberly Beam Holmes and Producer, Jason, take you on a fascinating journey from sleep-deprived to energized, sharing  personal sleep struggles and the science-backed solutions that can transform your life.

In this eye-opening episode, learn about:
- The shocking effects of sleep deprivation on your brain, body, and mental health.
- How to track your sleep and uncover the hidden culprits sabotaging your rest.
- Simple strategies to optimize your sleep environment, bedtime routine, and daily habits for deeper, more restorative sleep.
- The powerful connection between sleep, weight management, mood regulation, and even dementia risk.

Who this is for:
Anyone who feels constantly tired and worn down.
People struggling with focus, decision-making, or emotional control.
Those interested in improving their overall health and well-being.
Individuals seeking natural, actionable solutions for better sleep.

Link to our research:

Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships

Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.

Website: www.itstartswithattraction.com

Thanks for listening!

Connect on Instagram: @kimberlybeamholmes

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to the podcast and leave a review!

Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships


Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

In today's episode, we are talking about one of my favorite subjects sleep. If you've been a listener of this podcast for any length of time, you know that one of the things that I'm consistently encouraging people to do is to focus on how they sleep sleeping well and sleeping enough. So I'm really excited to dive further into the research of sleep, why sleep matters, what happens in our bodies when we don't get good sleep, and then, finally, some of the top tips on how you can begin to change some of your habits and behaviors so that you can improve your sleep for a rested and healthier life. I'm joined today by our producer for the podcast, Jason. One of the things that I would love for you to share with our listeners is that recently, you got a sleep tracking device.

Speaker 2: 0:52

I did, I got a whoop. You got a whoop. It's a little band you wear around your wrist. Yeah, don't even know it's there.

Speaker 1: 0:59

So tell us about what? Having a sleep device, a sleep tracking device, like the whoop, like what happened the first couple of nights, Uh, I realized how poor my sleep was.

Speaker 2: 1:12

It was like bad, like below 50% sleep performance.

Speaker 1: 1:17

Right, and so sleep performances. Whoops, what, what is that trying to tell you?

Speaker 2: 1:21

Uh, it is like it's your overall score. It takes into account, like, the quantity and the quality of your sleep, um, and so it combines those two, gives you a score, obviously a hundred percent being the best, and mine has not gotten past 73. No way yeah 73 is the highest and that was like once.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Oh, okay, so I have more to say about that in just a minute, but I do want to point out that for how many maybe years, maybe two years I've been telling you you don't get enough sleep. But it wasn't enough for me to tell you that you weren't getting good sleep. Now you see it with the data.

Speaker 2: 2:00

It's been almost three years, almost three years, yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:02

So now you have the data to show you that you actually aren't getting good sleep.

Speaker 2: 2:07

And now I'm really interested in getting enough sleep.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Because it's gamifying it. Yeah, and I'm pretty competitive.

Speaker 2: 2:14

And I don't know who I'm competing with, but I guess I'm competing with myself.

Speaker 1: 2:17

You're about to be competing with me, though I'm about to get a whoop and beat your 73%. Yeah and beat your 73%. Yeah and like.

Speaker 2: 2:28

Probably one day Probably so Well, I mean, it takes like probably a week to get used to me.

Speaker 1: 2:29

Yeah, it does Right. But I remember back cause I used to have aura ring and one of my soap boxes is I'm not getting a new aura ring. I had it for three years, I loved it, but I'm not getting a new one because they have a monthly membership and I just I, I, just on the premise of pose, I had it for three years and never had to pay a monthly membership. Um so, anyway, I mean, I averaged like an 89 to a 92. I would get the crown.

Speaker 2: 2:57

Most days they gave me a crown, I don't even know if I get a crown, because I haven't been that high.

Speaker 1: 3:02

You haven't been that high yet, but it's been super helpful in at least exposing the awareness of how important sleep is.

Speaker 2: 3:11

Yeah, I mean, at least I know like what times of the night I'm awake how long I spend in each sleep cycle where my sleep cycles are all of that stuff and it also I mean it tracks like where I need to improve and also gives me like a sleep debt counter. So if I don't get enough sleep, it like tells me like okay, you actually need this amount of hours of sleep to recover from the previous nights and the night before that and the night before that. So it kind of builds up.

Speaker 1: 3:40

Yeah, You're never going to pay it all back but it's okay.

Speaker 2: 3:48

It's okay, we're going to get you to a good place. Is there a dave ramsey of sleep? Sleep I might, I might need that person sleep peace university yeah, I might.

Speaker 1: 3:57

I might need that person if they exist well, that's what we're gonna do today we're gonna shed some light on what your aura ring Ring or your Whoop Oura Ring whatever it is you might use. There's a ton of devices now, even your Apple Watch To some extent. If you have an Apple Watch, it can be telling you how good your sleep is. But in today's episode we're going to dive into all of that. So let's get started. First thing we want to cover is what is considered good sleep. So good sleep is composed of really two things. When we look at the research, it's the quality of your sleep and the quantity of your sleep. We were recording an episode yesterday where this quantity and quality thing came up as well. So we're looking at quantity, we're looking at quality. So what is sleep quality? Sleep quality is defined as one's satisfaction of the sleep experience, integrating aspects of sleep initiation, sleep maintenance, sleep quantity and refreshment upon waking. That is from the Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine as the actual definition of sleep quality.

Speaker 1: 5:01

Basically, at the end of the day, I right now am using a device because I refused to buy an Oura Ring. Maybe, if they sponsor the podcast, I'll get one again, but I refused to buy an Oura Ring. But I'm using something called Morpheus, and so Morpheus is just something I put on first thing in the morning. Around it's like a chest strap and it measures my heart rate variability and I answer four questions. The first question that I answer is how many hours of sleep did I get? It's not as in-depth as what Whoop is telling Jason, but we'll get into that in just a minute. I'm just saying really how long I've been in bed. Then my next question is how good did you sleep? How well did you sleep? And then it's just a self-subjective measure. And here's the thing the majority of the time you know when you wake up in the morning if you slept terribly or if you slept pretty well. So really, there is an extent of self-rated sleep quality that you can assess without any kind of extra type of device or anything like that, and that's the premise of sleep quality. How good did you sleep? How well rested do you feel after waking up?

Speaker 1: 6:16

So, furthermore, sleep quality if we're really going to dig into the research and these are the things that Aura, that Whoop, really look at when they're looking at the sleep quality a person has it's four things. The first thing is sleep latency, which basically means how long it takes you to fall asleep, and the goal is to fall asleep within 20 minutes from the time you lay down. In fact, the longer it takes you to fall asleep after you get in bed assuming that you're not on your phone or watching TV the longer that it takes you to fall asleep. The recommendation is actually to get up and out of bed and come back when you're actually ready to begin to fall asleep, because the longer you just lay there, not sleeping, worried about sleep, frustrated that you're not going to sleep, it's actually ruining psychologically You're. You're starting to put some negative thoughts into going to sleep, which has negative association, which can make it harder for you to go to sleep the next night.

Speaker 1: 7:16

So the first thing that it's looking at is sleep latency. You want to go to bed within 20 minutes of putting your head on the pillow. The second thing that it's looking at is sleep waking how many times do you wake up during the night? Now, for me, when I had my Oura Ring, this was the most eye-opening thing for me. I realized if I want to get eight hours of sleep, I actually need to be in bed and sleep like fall asleep and wake up nine hours later because about an hour of the night I am awake according to the aura ring. So it was, you know, 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. I'd get up and use the restroom or just, however like I would toss and turn a lot. And so the aura ring was telling me like, hmm, you're kind of awake a lot during the night. Does your whoop tell you a similar metric?

Speaker 2: 8:08

Uh, yeah. So looking at last night, I like I was awake for 40 minutes during the night, so 9% of my sleep, yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Yeah, so the goal is to wake up for once or less, but it doesn't really tell us in the research how long you should be awake or what the ideal time of wakefulness in the middle or sleep waking in the middle of the night is.

Speaker 1: 8:34

So I think I think, more than anything, it's more just knowing. Okay, if your average is going to be like 40 minutes, you just kind of add that time on to the amount of time you're in bed, Got it. The third thing that these apps look at is wakefulness, so how many minutes you spend awake after you first go to sleep. I am not a hundred percent sure how this is different than sleep latency or sleep waking. I think it's the combination of the two, because the goal well, I guess we just answered the thing from before the goal is to have 20 minutes or less of wakefulness total during the night. So, uh, you want to wake up once or less and for that total amount of time you're awake in the once that you're ideally awake to be 20 minutes or less. So you're double I was triple the 20 minute recommendation.

Speaker 2: 9:21

Yeah, and I was uh woke up four times, like last night.

Speaker 1: 9:25

So and then the fourth one is sleep efficiency. So this is the amount of time that you spend actually sleeping while you are in bed. So, taking that wakefulness, the waking, the sleep latency from the time you put your head to the pillow to the time you wake up, the goal is that you spend 85% at least, or more of that time actually asleep. Does your whoop give you a number like that?

Speaker 2: 9:50

Yeah, and this is like where I excel. I haven't had a number below, like I think, 80.

Speaker 1: 9:57

Well, okay.

Speaker 2: 9:59

But like haven't had a number below 80, but my average is between 87 and 93.

Speaker 1: 10:07

Well, that's great.

Speaker 2: 10:08

Yeah, so I'm always like in the green for my sleep efficiency. You know why? Probably because I'm so tired. That's right, because I'm not getting enough sleep. You're not getting enough sleep, yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:16

Because the amount, the average amount of time that you're sleeping according to your whoop, is six, six hours, six hours a night.

Speaker 2: 10:27

So you are so tired.

Speaker 1: 10:27

Yeah, it's probably less than that it's probably closer to like five. This is not good. Yeah, okay, this is not a batch of honor. We're going to change this. We're going to change this, jason.

Speaker 1: 10:36

So these are the things that we're looking at. When you're really looking at how good your sleep quality is, you're looking at latency, wakefulness, the time that you're awake and how efficient your sleep is. So how much sleep do you really really need? We know that the younger that a person is, the more sleep they need. Newborns need up to 17 hours. Adolescents need or toddlers need, 14 hours. Adolescents, you know 13, 11. The older you get, the less, the less sleep you need until we get to be adults. And then the national recommendation is seven to nine hours. People want to fight that. I don't really care. What I've seen in the research that I've done and in my own personal experience is that most people need somewhere between that seven to nine hours of sleep. So some interesting facts about sleep 13.5% of adults older than 18 report feeling tired or exhausted most days. Jason has one.

Speaker 2: 11:37

That is me, that is you.

Speaker 1: 11:38

Yeah, I actually thought that number would be higher.

Speaker 2: 11:41

Yeah, that's surprisingly low.

Speaker 1: 11:43

Yeah, it is. Additionally, though, 33% of Americans report getting less than seven hours of sleep a night, which is not ideal, and you're going to realize how much not ideal that is as we go on. 30% of adults have insomnia, which is when you have such poor sleep habits or something medically that's interfering with your sleep that you can't get good sleep on a nightly basis, which can really affect your sleep, and then anywhere from 10 to almost 40% of adults have sleep apnea. Now, this isn't something we're really going to get into in today's episode, but one of the things that I've been hearing from people that I know, even in the research, is that sleep apnea is becoming more common, and it's not just affecting people who have a neck size over a certain amount of inches, which is kind of what it was thought in the past. It's affecting people I mean people, young people, old people who are in great shape, because there's a lot of things that can begin obstructing your ability to sleep. Well. Some people actually just have smaller, like nasal cavities that can affect the amount of oxygen that they're able to get in while they sleep at night, and other things which, again, we won't get into, but there's the obstructive sleep apnea, where the upper airway becomes blocked somehow. But then there's also central sleep apnea, which has more to do with the brain and how the brain is actually sending signals to breathe while someone is sleeping. But here's the key that you need to know If you are concerned that you might be struggling with sleep apnea, and one of the signs of this can be if you're constantly tired, even if you're getting enough sleep. If you stay tired, you may want to go and get this checked out. But another key sign of this is if you are like, if you sleep with someone, if you're married or if you have kids that can come into your room and check on you at night, or if you're a parent and you can check on your kids. It's listening to someone while they sleep and hearing when they stop breathing. That is the key here. So if someone like I have an older sister who sometimes she stays with me at my house and she snores when she sleeps, and I went out when she was staying with me a couple of months ago, I was up early, she was still sleeping and I realized she was sn, so I can hear her snoring and then all of a sudden she stopped, and she stopped snoring for about 10 to 15 seconds and then started up again and I realized I'm pretty sure she has sleep apnea because she just stopped breathing. And that's what you're looking for. You're looking for that longer period of time where someone stops breathing. You really need to go get that checked out. There's a lot of advances that have happened with sleep apnea over the years. You need to get it seen about and do actually do something about it, because sleep apnea can lead to a whole host of health issues if it's left untreated for a long period of time. So that is my PSA Get checked out if you still feel tired or if you hear someone who stops sleeping.

Speaker 1: 14:51

Okay, so sleep, what is sleep? There are four stages of sleep. We cycle through well, we cycle through these four, but the four are broken into two main buckets. So there's REM sleep, which you've all probably heard of, and there is non-REM sleep, which, again, you've all probably heard of. So the non-REM sleep is broken into three stages. There's stage one, which is really kind of that twilight I think it might even be called alpha sometimes where you're going from being awake to being asleep. This is my favorite part, I think, but it can also be the most frustrating part of sleep, because sometimes I'll be dozing off and I'll like start dreaming or like thinking about something and all of a sudden I'm like bolted awake.

Speaker 1: 15:40

You like that. No, I like the feeling of it when I'm going into it, but then when I'm jolted awake it makes me anxious because I'm like now I have to do that again.

Speaker 2: 15:47

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. My heart rate feels like it shoots up when that happens and I hate it.

Speaker 1: 15:52

Yeah, yeah, but that's that first stage, that's how you know you're getting into sleep. Then the second stage, stage two, is when we are just asleep. The third stage is deep or slow wave sleep, which typically occurs earlier in the night and then as we sleep, the longer that we sleep is when our body transitions from that third stage of sleep, being that deep and slow wave sleep, which is very important for our bodies and for restoration of mind and muscles and all of that. But since the majority of that happens on the front end of our sleep, once that kind of finishes its cycle, we begin to move more into REM sleep, which is that fourth stage, if you want to put it that way, of sleep. And of course, rem stands for rapid eye movement. That's when our eyes move and our brain is active. That's when we dream and the activity in our brain fascinatingly, that's when we dream and the activity in our brain, fascinatingly is similar to when we are awake. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. It's crazy that our brains can do that while we are still fast asleep. And this is also when our body begins to get hot. So we don't regulate temperature as well when we are in REM sleep, which is why one of the strategies for getting and staying in a deep and restful sleep at night is to use something like a chili pad, making sure that your room is cold, and a chili pad is just something that you put on top of your mattress that flows cold water through it, that keeps you cool through the night. It's actually the device that I began to use when I was having insomnia in 2019. So about five years ago, and I would just wake up so hot in the middle of the night and I was like I'm not old enough. I was 29. I'm not old enough to be going through menopause, but I was hot in the middle of the night, and so we started using a chili pad and it revolutionized the way that I sleep. It was 100% worth it, and that's because when we're in REM sleep, when we dream, we get hot, we can begin to sweat, and that can disrupt our sleep as well.

Speaker 1: 17:54

Rem sleep, ideally, is going to take up about 25% of the total time that you're asleep, and that's the healthy average that you want to achieve.

Speaker 1: 18:04

Your first REM cycle is only about 10 minutes because, again, your brain is going in and out of more of the deep wave sleep on the front end, but then the longer that you sleep, the more your body begins to go into that REM sleep, and that's also very helpful and restorative to your body as well.

Speaker 1: 18:22

So each subsequent cycle of REM sleep is longer than the one before, and all of these sleep cycles together all four of these stages can take anywhere from 90 to 110 minutes for you to run through, and you ideally want to get four to five a night. That's what we're aiming for. This is also why it's really helpful if you are in a position at all where you don't have to use an alarm, then it is best for you to wake up naturally. Otherwise you're disrupting your final sleep cycle that you're in and you're not really allowing your body to fully move through it, which is why, if we wake up to an alarm in the middle of a sleep cycle, we typically feel that way, like we feel anxious, agitated, tired, because our body hasn't fully moved through that final sleep cycle. How much REM sleep do you get according to your WHOOP?

Speaker 2: 19:29

to your whoop. Uh, last night I got an hour and 55 minutes. That is 28% of my sleep, so I was awake 9% light sleep. So it breaks it down awake, light sleep deep sleep and. Rem sleep. So awake 9%, light sleep 38%, deep sleep 25%, and then REM sleep 28%.

Speaker 1: 19:41

So does it tell you that that's? Does it give you like a recommendation on that?

Speaker 2: 19:45

When you look at it, it gives you like little brackets around. So it gives you like a bar and gives you little brackets and depending on how far, how much sleep you get, the bracket will fill up and you should be between the little bracket range or whatever, and so I was it. This says that my REM sleep was actually above my recommended. So 28%. Obviously 25% is kind of that sweet spot, uh, but everything else was right in inside of those brackets.

Speaker 1: 20:10

So so for the short amount of time you're sleeping, yeah, I'm doing it correctly, at least now. You just need to get more of it.

Speaker 2: 20:17

Yeah, and I went through four sleep cycles as well, so not doing too bad.

Speaker 1: 20:23

Wait, maybe I'm wrong with my sleep cycles. Then I am, because four would only be six hours. I meant five to seven.

Speaker 2: 20:31

Okay, Are we just moving the goalposts?

Speaker 1: 20:35

Five on the lower end. No, we're not moving the goalposts because I that's my rule. My rule for myself is I need to get at least five sleep cycles. So what happens when we don't receive enough good sleep or when we receive too little or poor quality of sleep? So the first thing is that our cognition is affected, and this is when we're really going to start getting into some of the research studies that have looked into this.

Speaker 1: 21:01

So one study that was done in 2017 in PLOS One, which is one of the scholarly articles. It was titled the Effects of Total Sleep Deprivation on Divided Attention and Performance. It was conducted on 39 males ages 21 to 30 years old. They did a four-day sleep lab study, which isn't ideal. When you're in a sleep sleep lab, you're probably not going to get the same amount of sleep and the quality that you would in your own home environment that you feel comfortable in. But research needs to be in controlled environments, so at least great research needs to be in controlled environments. Most of the time anyway, participants completed a 15 minute divided attention task every two hours. So they were given a task where they needed to shift their attention in this task, and they had to do it every two hours. So what were the results? Significant interaction was found between task load and time, where impairing effects of increasing task load were greater during sleep deprivation. What does all of that mean? The less sleep that the participants had the night before, the more difficult it was for them to complete the task, the task load, correctly. Response times were slower when they were sleep deprived, especially the more things that they had to do in that task. The bottom line of it is the less sleep that they had, the more difficult it was for them to actually perform these tasks well, which is not really a surprise, but thank you research for doing and proving what sounds like common sense.

Speaker 1: 22:40

The next study that we looked at was the effects of sleep deprivation on executive functioning, cognitive abilities, metacognitive confidence and decision making. It comes from the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology. This one was done in 2018. So there were 13 male Australian Army personnel. They had been in the military from anywhere from two to seven and a half years and they were a mixture of enlisted and officers. The participants were tested on simple reaction time and they were given several different types of tests that they were tested on their reaction time and correctness in doing these tasks on, and then they were given two weeks to do these. So week one. The researchers just looked at the average amount of time that these 13 participants slept in that first week so normal sleep times. They practiced the tasks that they would be given the next week and so baseline assessments were given. So it would just be a normal week for them. They got to get as much sleep as they could and then they would perform these tasks every day. That gave us our baseline. So that is the control for this study.

Speaker 1: 23:51

Then the next week, monday through Wednesday, the same participants were sleep deprived and here were the results. And then they were told to do the same tests that they had done the week before. So these were things that they were already familiar with. They're doing the same tests that they had done the week before. So these were things that they were already familiar with. They're doing the same tasks. So their response times were significantly slower on their second day of sleep deprivation, more than day one, and the effect of sleep deprivation was more pronounced in the morning. Now I thought this was really interesting, but I think it gets more interesting as we continue to go through the research.

Speaker 1: 24:24

The other thing that one of the tests that they were given was for short-term memory ability, metacognitive confidence and patterns of decision behavior. It's called the medical decision-making test, and what they found when they did this test was that their proportion of accurate diagnoses declined from day one to day two, and their diagnostic confidence. So not only did they not get the right answers, they were less confident in the answers that they were giving. From the first day they were sleep deprived. From the second day that they were sleep deprived, and the results also indicated that participants may have felt they had recovered in the evening in their efforts to make accurate judgments, but they had not.

Speaker 1: 25:07

Okay, what does all of this mean? Sleep deprivation, sleep debt, like the whoop is telling on Jason's app, sleep deprivation accumulates. We can actually manage relatively well on one day of sleep deprivation. We can. Our body, because we are bodies of routine. Our bodies know I mean, we have a set circadian rhythm, we know when we're supposed to wake up, we know when we're supposed to fall asleep and our bodies can live up to the demands required of us even after one night of sleep deprivation, because we just fall into, basically, the muscle memory, for lack of a better way to put it of what our bodies are expecting of us.

Speaker 1: 25:51

But we cannot continue that level of performance and I'm not just talking about athletics, I'm talking about your normal day-to-day demands that you need to perform for especially a job going into multiple days of sleep deprivation, and that's what we're seeing in this research by the second day I mean, I'm sure their first day they already had declined, but by their second day it was even more so declined. But here was the thing they're more tired in the morning, and I think that makes sense because you we have all of this adenosine, which we're going to talk about in a minute. Adenosine is what gives us sleep pressure, and while we sleep is when adenosine is released back out of our brain so that we feel refreshed and we can be aroused in the sense of energetic and awake. And so when we haven't fully released that adenosine from the receptors that it's in, after a full night of sleep, it's still in there. So when we wake up we're groggy. But as we go through the day we can kind of meet the demands required of us.

Speaker 1: 26:51

However, what's super interesting about the results from this study is that by the evening, participants felt like, oh, I'm good, like I'm fully recovered, because they've had a full day. They've probably had some caffeine, they've had some sunlight, they've been doing some you know energetic work where they're like walking around or doing whatever. So they feel like they're much better by the afternoon. But they were not. So their judgments even about themselves and how they could actually perform were negatively affected by their sleep deprivation.

Speaker 2: 27:26

Interesting. I just want to say that I think, with 26 years of sleep debt, uh, I think I managed that fairly well.

Speaker 1: 27:36

You feel like you're a champion.

Speaker 2: 27:37

Yeah, uh, I deserve a gold medal for that.

Speaker 1: 27:40

You do.

Speaker 2: 27:40

Um, but in all seriousness, um, I do think. I mean, obviously this is true, there's research behind it, but I like I experienced this because I don't get enough sleep, mainly during the week, but like during the weekend when I have a ton of good sleep, like on Mondays, I feel so good. Take on the world, by Friday I am dragging. I have like three cups of coffee throughout the day, or a coffee and a Red Bull in the afternoon, whatever, um, and so I mean it is pretty obvious that the sleep debt definitely builds up, and even though I tell myself like, oh, I'm fine, you know, I'm managing 26 years of sleep debt, you know, whatever, I'm not doing it very well, because it really does affect affect me throughout the day, so why do you not get sleep during the week?

Speaker 2: 28:28

I don't know I'm I guess I'm just stubborn, a creature of habit, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 28:33

What habits Like? What are the habits that are keeping you from getting sleep?

Speaker 2: 28:37

You, you know this. I have a dog that is super high energy and he kind of keeps me awake every now and then, uh, throughout the night. He'll wake me up in the middle of the night, um, but other than that, I mean, I guess it also probably, probably doesn't help that I don't get into bed until like 1115.

Speaker 1: 28:55

Oh, here we go, we're getting to the source of it.

Speaker 2: 28:57

Yes.

Speaker 1: 28:59

And what time do you wake up? What time do you have to wake up?

Speaker 2: 29:04

Uh, nor so. Normally, my first alarm is set for 545, and that's normally what time I get up.

Speaker 1: 29:11

Why? Why do you set it for 545?

Speaker 2: 29:14

Uh, I don't know. Normally I like, so I like getting up. I have to go take my dog outside to use the bathroom before I leave for work. Uh, so I have to make sure I've given him enough time to to work up to be able to go to the bathroom, and then I feed him and I'm going to take a shower in the morning and get ready, and then I'm here by seven, 15, seven, 30 at work, even though, to be fair, you don't have to be here until eight. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 29:36

To be fair. Yeah, okay, okay. We will talk more about this. This is a great case study that we will unload and uncover later. Overall results of this study Response times were slower after a night without sleep.

Speaker 1: 29:52

The rate of lapses just how many times that they couldn't even focus on a task that needed their reaction time increased. They could not focus the ability to react quickly and remain vigilant to deteriorate without sleep. This is why, if you've ever read Matthew Walker's book why we Sleep, which is a fantastic book, there's a part in there where he talks about how, when people have four hours of sleep in a night, they actually can be equal to the cognition and judgment level of a drunk driver. For that exact reason, your ability to react quickly and remain vigilant deteriorate. Short-term memory suffers after one night without sleep, and the results of this study suggested participants were metacognitively aware of the changes of their cognitive performance, so they knew that they weren't performing to the level that they cognitive performance, so they knew that they weren't performing to the level that they needed to. So cognition is affected without good sleep.

Speaker 1: 30:51

The second thing that can be affected when we don't have good sleep is that we have a higher risk of disease, especially heart disease and other mental health conditions. So there was a study that looked at sleep deprivation and particularly people who reported that they had sleep deprivation and then looked at their heart disease. They 6.4% of the population in this study who had sleep deprivation also had heart failure, which was more than the general population, as well as 40% of these people who had sleep deprivation had hypertensive heart disease, which was much higher than the general population as well. So heart problems can come into the mix. But then we also see in one study that was done in 2020, and again this was PLOS One, so it was titled Independent and Combined Association of Sleep Duration and Sleep Quality with Common Physical and Mental Disorders Results from a Multi-Ethnic Population-Based Study, and in this study it was looking at Singaporean and permanent residents who were 18 years of age or older. They did a couple of different assessments around sleep and self-reported physical disorders and mental disorders, and what this study found was that less than six hours of sleep a night, and poor sleep on top of that, were associated with increased odds of having chronic pain. The other thing it found was that, compared to those who got seven to eight hours of sleep and good quality sleep. So all three sleep duration groups, who also had poor quality sleep, had an increase in major depressive disorder and any mental disorder. Let me put it the opposite way because I think it's easier to understand those who received eight to nine hours of good quality sleep had the least likelihood of experiencing major depressive disorder or any other mental disorder. Every other person if you're getting less than that or more than that and also not good sleep on top of that had an increased risk of experiencing depression or other mental health disorders, as well as the chronic pain condition. And then, finally, there was another study in 2008,.

Speaker 1: 33:14

Is sleep duration associated with childhood obesity? And basically what this study found was that children with the shortest sleep duration had a 92% chance of being overweight or obese, when compared with children who had a longer sleep duration. We're not going to get into that in this episode, but there is really fascinating data into how sleep and weight, like your blood sugar, all of those things can be really messed up, like we can mess up our hormones, mess up our insulin, how our insulin responds. We can become more insulin resistant when we don't get good sleep, which can wreak havoc on systems inside of our body that need sleep and rest in order to work well.

Speaker 1: 34:03

And then the final article that's associated under this one as well was from a 2021 study looking at sleep duration in middle and old age adults and looking at how it affects dementia, and this study used data from a cohort that spanned 30 years. So we're getting a lot of data in this study, and it looked at individuals who were 50, 60, and 70 years old and their rate of dementia that they experienced, and what it found was that the lowest occurrence of dementia per thousand person years. So basically, they're just taking if someone was 50, 70, 65, they're adding up those years of like the age of those people and adding them up to a thousand to normalize for and kind of give us a normal, a normalization to look at the data through. So the lowest occurrence of dementia per thousand person years was observed among those who slept seven hours per night. So getting at least seven hours of sleep a night had the lowest rate of dementia.

Speaker 1: 35:07

Shorter sleep duration was associated with a higher risk of dementia across all ages. We've seen this before in the research. I've seen this before, at least in the research talking about how not getting enough sleep, especially when you're 50, 60, 70 years old has an increased risk of dementia. And persistent short sleep duration meaning you're 50, 60, 70 years old has an increased risk of dementia. And persistent short sleep duration meaning you're not getting enough sleep every single night was associated with increase of dementia as well, and short sleep duration in midlife may also be associated with risk of dementia. So what's the key takeaway of that? For all of this, there's many health conditions that can come when you don't get enough sleep, including how it affects your brain and how it affects your heart, how it affects your weight. All of those things can be affected by sleep, so it is important to sleep.

Speaker 2: 35:57

Yeah, I feel like you're talking right to me.

Speaker 2: 36:01

We recorded another episode like yesterday where I felt the same thing and yeah, I mean all the research. If all the research is saying this, maybe I do need to listen a little bit, um, but yeah, I mean this is super interesting stuff. Um, especially the. This is the first time I've heard that short sleep duration was associated with a higher risk of dementia at all ages. That's kind of a wake up call a little bit, uh. So yeah, sleep is very important, people, sleep is very important. Get your sleep.

Speaker 1: 36:28

And now I mean for you. You know you're mid twenties, so the good news for you is you have so much opportunity to correct it, to correct this. It really especially for the dementia one and even the heart, like the older you get including. Including myself. Like, really, when you hit those thirties, forties, things start to matter.

Speaker 2: 36:48

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 36:50

Cause.

Speaker 2: 36:50

I'm getting old.

Speaker 1: 36:53

All right, and here's the third thing of why sleep matters because mood and the ability to regulate emotions is affected when you don't get good sleep and risk of suicidal ideation becomes even more prevalent. One article that looked at this in 2012 titled Enhanced Emotional Reactivity After Selective Rim Sleep Deprivation in Humans an fMRI study. It took 20 males between the ages of 21 and 35 who had their sleep manipulated, and those who were in the selective REM sleep deprived group were awakened as soon as the polysomnography showed that they were beginning to have slow wave activity. Participants then performed an emotional reactivity task in two separate sessions and they were shown 60 pictures from what was called the International Affective Picture System and were instructed to imagine being a part of the scene. So me and our research assistant, alina we today.

Speaker 1: 38:00

I went to her and I said well, what were these pictures Like?

Speaker 1: 38:04

Tell me what they were seeing and what they were instructed to see. So we went on a search and a lot of times in research you don't see like they don't share with you the assessment and the things that they're doing inside of the clinical or more clinical practices, because they don't want the assessment to start being used just everywhere because it could reduce the validity of it inside of a standardized protocol, which I totally understand. But here's basically the types of images that these participants were shown and then they were instructed to imagine being a part of it. So they were told imagine being a part of a scene and reacting to it, and many of these scenes you're either defending yourself or defending other people. And then the pictures were things like everyday objects, so they may be in a house with furniture and it's just a normal scene. They may be outside, in certain types of lands and landscapes, or it also said that it could be extremely rare or exciting, such as experiencing a mutilated body or erotic nudes.

Speaker 2: 39:19

What.

Speaker 1: 39:21

So these people are sleep deprived and they're being shown these pictures anywhere from like oh, a nice living room with flowers, or being out in a field with a beautiful cottage behind it, to a mutilated body or a picture of a naked person. It's just so crazy.

Speaker 2: 39:40

Yeah, research can be. I don't even know what to say. Right, that's crazy.

Speaker 1: 39:46

And so then they were told to react to the situation that they were in Crazy. Okay, so here's the results. Those in the sleep deprivation study, where their REM was being sleep deprived, experienced an increase in emotional reactivity after just one night of near total REM sleep deprivation. And they don't tell us what that means. They just said they were highly emotional when looking or seeing these pictures. So let your mind fill in however it wants to, finding supported other studies indicating that sleep is important for emotional regulation. Here's the thing. I know that to be true.

Speaker 1: 40:21

There was several years ago when I was with my dad in Dallas and he was about to do a workshop the next day and in the middle of the night he, uh, he got sick like food poisoning from food that we'd had at dinner, and I had to take him to not an ER at a hospital, but it was like one of those kind of dock in a box ERs. Anyway, we go to the ER and while and so none of us have slept they end up doing this like full CT scan on him, for whatever reason, at the ER, because there was no one in there and I guess they just wanted to I don't know make some money. Anyway, they ended up finding spots on his liver like randomly on his liver, like randomly, and I, so we, we ended up getting back to the people's home that we were staying in at like 4am I'm pretty sure I didn't go back to sleep because I've had two, maybe three hours of sleep. I'm so worried now about him and about what these spots on his liver mean that the whole next day I was just on edge, like anything someone said to me. I couldn't think, I couldn't process it. I was worried about this other thing.

Speaker 1: 41:29

Ultimately he ended up being fine. We ended up getting him seen, you know, after the workshop was done, and we got back into Nashville. But in the moment I could not downregulate my emotions. It was impossible.

Speaker 2: 41:42

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean that makes sense, especially after seeing the research, but I still can't get over the mutilated bodies. I've just been sat here Just like why?

Speaker 1: 41:55

Yeah, and apparently other pictures there was.

Speaker 2: 41:57

There would be like, um, an attacker coming to, and it wasn't just pictures I coming to, and it wasn't just pictures, I think it was also videos and they're imagined like they have to be in the scene, and so in some of them it would be like you have a gun.

Speaker 1: 42:13

Are you going to shoot this person or not? It's like so extreme, crazy, I know. Yeah, I don't know how it passed the irb, but it did another article that was published in 2012 looking at this as well. This was looking at insufficient sleep and suicidal ideation in adolescents. There was 8,000 students in the Republic of Korea that were given several different inventories, such as the Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation, the Deck Depression Inventory and others, and what the results showed was that the suicidal ideation score was positively correlated with age, so the older that a person was, the more likely they were to have suicidal ideation Scores were higher in female, but the scores were highest for the subjects who had insomnia and those who snored. I believe that goes back to the sleep apnea. You're not getting good quality sleep, perhaps, if you are snoring. Also, the suicidal ideation scores were higher in subjects with shorter weekday sleep duration and longer weekend oversleep, as well as larger weekday bedtime delay and larger weekend rise delay. Here's what that means they're not sleeping enough during the week.

Speaker 1: 43:27

Now, my husband and I lived in Korea for a couple of years, and one thing that we know about students in Korea is that they're at school 12 to 14 hours a day. There is a high amount of pressure put on them to excel in many different areas up until they go to college. So these students like I can picture this. Because these students are put under so much pressure, they're not sleeping. They're likely staying awake studying late into the night because after they get out of school they go to hogwands. They go to more school after school, all of them for different things, so they're in school for forever, and this is not a knock necessarily. The Korean culture has many amazing parts to it and they're very smart and advanced groups of people Like we would not have the advances in technology at all without many of our Asian friends. But overall, like looking at this and just how they did this study in the Republic of Korea, we see that sleep duration, even in children, even in adolescents, even in teenagers, has a negative impact on mental health and can really begin like not only can you not handle your emotions well, but you don't know how to process a lot of these things, and so there is a concern about the risk of suicidal ideation. All right, so what can you do? That's the bottom line. What is it that you can do to receive better sleep and enhance your sleep quality.

Speaker 1: 45:01

So the first point is to be mindful of light exposure. How many times have I said this, jason? How many times do I talk about light exposure? At night In my house, we begin to turn lights off. At like 7, 730. I start beginning to turn the lights off and by eight o'clock all of the major lights in the house are off. One of my biggest pet peeves is the fact and I'm going to fix it this weekend is the fact that our bedroom light went. The light bulbs went out, I don't know several months ago now, and my husband replaced them with, like the bright daylight lights which have so much blue light spectrum in them. I just want amber. I just want the amber lights in our bedroom because it drives me crazy. If he turns those on and it is past 8 pm, I will hide under every pillow and cover on our bed because I cannot let that blue light enter my eye.

Speaker 2: 46:04

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 46:05

It will disrupt my sleep. Yeah, I'm very, I'm very strict about this.

Speaker 2: 46:09

It's like it's like Howie from the bench warmers. Have you seen the bench warmers? I don't even know. The guy hides in the closet because he's scared of the sun.

Speaker 1: 46:20

What is the bench warmers?

Speaker 2: 46:23

Oh gosh.

Speaker 1: 46:24

Is it a movie? Yeah.

Speaker 2: 46:25

It's a great.

Speaker 1: 46:26

It's like an eighties movie. No, it's like heavyweights.

Speaker 2: 46:29

It's like two, like early two thousands. No, either way.

Speaker 1: 46:35

I'm not just crazy, though. There's a lot of research that shows us that this is something we should be concerned about. So there was one that was done in 2023, very recent light exposure behaviors predict mood, memory and sleep quality. So this was done in Malaysia 301 participants and they completed light exposure behavior assessments positive and negative affect schedule which is basically like asking them how happy or how sad they are. That's a gross overstatement, but that's the basic. That's basically what it was and then different things to measure their ability to concentrate memory, different things like that their sleep quality. All of that. Here were the results Using cell phones, smartphones in bed before sleeping predicted a decrease in perceived sleep quality.

Speaker 1: 47:24

So they woke up the next day and they just said like I felt like my sleep wasn't that great. We didn't even have any. They didn't even have a whoop to show them. Increase of electric light during the daytime increased perceived sleep quality. So looking at electric light, bright lights like you can't really see the light looking at me in the studio, but it's a very bright white light and looking at that during the day is really good for your sleep. Here's why because it helps to get that light.

Speaker 1: 47:54

With blue spectrum, the wider the light in it, the more likely it is to have some of those blue wavelengths in it, or blue blue light in it. And so looking at that during the day is right. That's what we want to do, because that's when the sun should be out. And if we didn't have, you know, roofs over our head, if we were back 1000 years ago, we would be outside with the daylight, which is what our body would be used to, which also helps to reset our circadian rhythm. So looking at light during the day is great. That's what you want to do. You want to get outside as much as you can.

Speaker 1: 48:23

Looking at light during the day is great. That's what you want to do. You want to get outside as much as you can, especially in the morning. And using mobile phones in the bed before sleeping also. Not just did it ruin their sleep quality, or at least their perceived sleep quality, but the participants also had an increase in the amount of memory and concentration problems that they had the next day. Your phones have blue light and if you're looking at them at night, you're ruining your sleep quality, you're ruining your memory, you're ruining your concentration. That is my soapbox. Do you use your phone at night? Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 48:59

Yeah, I was just thinking like I use my phone like, even like in my bed up until the moment that I close my eyes.

Speaker 1: 49:10

You fall asleep to your phone.

Speaker 2: 49:12

Uh, sometimes, yeah, Sometimes I fall asleep on Tik TOK, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 49:21

I have a challenge for you. I have a challenge for you. Okay, what if you started? Start slow, like put it down 15 minutes before bed 30, but eventually just don't bring it into your bedroom. Get an alarm clock.

Speaker 2: 49:40

I have an alarm clock.

Speaker 1: 49:41

Well, there you go. You don't even need it in your bedroom. That's my challenge to you. You need to go. You need to be able to go at least 30 minutes, if not an hour, without looking at your phone before going to bed.

Speaker 2: 49:54

What about a TV? Is that the same?

Speaker 1: 50:01

So okay, great question, it is not the same. It's still still not ideal it still puts off blue light it still puts off blue light unless you have the kind of tv that you can shift the brightness. So if you have the kind of tv where you can shift it to being less bright, yeah, that helps. It doesn't eliminate it. It helps. But the other thing about a TV that makes it a bit different than a phone is it's not right here.

Speaker 2: 50:26

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 50:27

So the fact that it can be a bit further is more helpful. It's still not ideal.

Speaker 2: 50:32

Yeah, I think there's also some TVs that have like a night mode like shift that like makes it makes everything warmer. Yeah so it takes some of that blue light out. Yeah, so check and see if your TV has that if you're wanting to Eliminate blue light.

Speaker 1: 50:46

Yeah, and still keep the TV on right before bed and I would still say I would still choose. If someone was like I have to have something, then I would still say, ok, tv is your better bet over your phone.

Speaker 2: 50:56

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 50:56

Because the phone is not just bright and you can even, like you can, take away the blue light from your phone. I don't have any blue or I have the blue light filter or whatever on my phone, but it's very dopamine spiking like there, especially something like tick tock.

Speaker 2: 51:12

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 51:12

It's keeping your brain way more engaged than a TV is.

Speaker 2: 51:16

Got it. That makes sense.

Speaker 1: 51:18

Another article was done in 2016 on the measurements of smartphones and screen time and the relationships of that with sleep 653 participants. The smartphone usage was measured with an app, so it was correct data, it wasn't just people self-reporting it and it was measured over a 30-day period. And then the participants self-reported their bedtime and how long that they slept and their sleep quality, self-reported their bedtime and how long that they slept and their sleep quality, and what it found was decreased sleep quality, shorter sleep duration, lower sleep efficiency and longer sleep onset latency so it took them longer to fall asleep after they got in bed were associated with greater overall average screen time. The more someone used their phone, the worse their sleep was, and that's the bottom line.

Speaker 2: 52:06

Yeah, something that's kind of crazy was the average screen time was an hour and a half a day.

Speaker 1: 52:11

I think that's too low. Yeah, mine's like very high More, yeah, no, are you serious?

Speaker 2: 52:21

Yeah, mine is very high. I think it's close to like six.

Speaker 1: 52:30

Oh my gosh, it is no wonder you're only sleeping six hours a night.

Speaker 2: 52:35

This is, it's worse than six, oh, seven hours and 52 minutes eight hours a day on your phone.

Speaker 1: 52:47

Yeah, jason, that's your sleep, like what are you doing?

Speaker 2: 52:53

I'm just like like when I wake up, immediately grab my phone.

Speaker 1: 52:57

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 52:58

Like.

Speaker 1: 52:59

I have anxiety for you.

Speaker 2: 53:00

When I get home like. I'm on like literally when I get home, like I'm, I always have my phone open when I'm at home, like that's just not just open sitting out, I'm always on my phone doing something.

Speaker 1: 53:12

We have a lot of work to do yeah, obviously.

Speaker 1: 53:14

Obviously, wow. Okay, jason's going to work on his smartphone usage. You should, too, as well. Second point is monitoring caffeine conception and this 2013 study that was titled caffeine effects on sleep, taken zero, three or six hours before going to bed, which is such a random title for the article, but this was done in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine and it's actually a fascinating study design. So in this there were 12 participants, which is pretty low, but the way that they did this is really cool. So there were 12 healthy, normal sleepers and they were free of insomnia and sleepiness, based on the insomnia severity index and a sleepiness scale Epsworth sleepiness scale and the way this was designed. It was randomized, double blind, double dummy, placebo, controlled, balanced, latin square treatment design. Basically, what that means is these results are as close to ironclad as you can get because of the way that the study was designed. So the sleep was measured using an in-home sleep monitor and participants. So again, there were 12,.

Speaker 1: 54:24

Participants took a 400 milligram caffeine pill three times a day Holy cow For four nights. But only one pill contained caffeine and the others were placebo, but no one knew which pill was which. Yeah, okay, so the caffeine pill was administered either at bedtime. So zero hours before bedtime, three hours before bedtime or six hours before bedtime. So if the bedtime was 9 PM, then it would either be administered at 9 PM, 6 PM or 3 PM, and they didn't know which one was going to have the caffeine in it. Caffeine had the. Here were the results Caffeine had the most consistent effects on reducing total sleep time relative to a placebo.

Speaker 1: 55:19

Okay, so that makes sense. Caffeine, of course, is going to reduce sleep time as opposed to the placebo. Caffeine administered six hours before bedtime reduced sleep time by 41 minutes. So if you're going to bed at nine and you did the caffeine at 3 pm, they got 41 minutes less of sleep. Okay, it doesn't sound terrible, but there's a whole lot of other things that it could affect. The next result was that significant effects were observed for sleep latency the amount of time it took them to fall asleep. With caffeine taken three hours before bed, this had the greatest effect. Now I read this and I thought to myself why? Why would it be that the people who took it three hours before bed, at 6 pm, had the hardest time falling asleep, as opposed to the person who took it when they went to bed?

Speaker 2: 56:11

I mean I guess it has to do with the caffeine actually getting in your system right the half-life that's right.

Speaker 1: 56:16

So caffeine tends to have a half-life of five hours. So the person who took it three hours before bed. It is nearing its half-life, so it's reached its top and half of it is still in their system and will still be in their system for the next two hours. And 400 milligrams is a lot of caffeine. Yeah, that's a ton of caffeine. It's a ton of caffeine.

Speaker 1: 56:38

The other result that it found was that caffeine had the most consistent effects on reduced total sleep time relative to the placebo, with administration at bedtime and at three hours prior to bedtime, and this was statistically significant. So basically, the people who took the caffeine pill three hours before bed or at bedtime, their total sleep time was the worst of the entire group and that sleep efficiency was reduced for each condition relative to this to the placebo. So every person, whether it was six, three or at bedtime, all of them had poor, poorer sleep efficiency than someone who didn't have any caffeine. Bottom line. Caffeine affects sleep and that's why you should not have it after noon, isn't that right, jason? And what time did you drink your Red Bull today?

Speaker 2: 57:33

Well, I literally just finished it, maybe 30 minutes ago, and it is, and it's 4.54 pm.

Speaker 1: 57:40

It's almost 5 pm. Yeah, yes, so we're starting to see why your sleep is struggling.

Speaker 2: 57:46

Yeah, it seems like it's a lot more than just like my dog waking me up.

Speaker 1: 57:49

Yeah, that was, that was your excuse, that it was the dog.

Speaker 2: 57:53

Turns out I have a lot more to do with it then that's right, yeah.

Speaker 1: 57:57

A 2016 study in the journal nutrients looked at caffeine consumption and sleep quality in Australian adults, so this one was 84 participants between the ages of 19 and 94 that had a mean caffeine intake of 164 grams a day, so not terrible. The average daily caffeine consumption was measured with a questionnaire, and then they also did a sleep quality index. So the males that consumed, or what the results found, were that males consumed more caffeine in the form of energy drinks than females. I believe that the time in bed was significantly related to total caffeine intake, with time in bed being longer. With the less caffeine a person had Makes total sense. The less caffeine you drink, the more time you're going to be in bed and going to be asleep, and poor sleepers reported greater total caffeine consumption compared to good sleepers. Again, further evidence that caffeine messes with your sleep. Would you like to make a defense for yourself?

Speaker 2: 59:02

There is no defense, I have no weapons, you have no, nothing, yeah.

Speaker 1: 59:07

No, nothing. So then, what is the third thing that we can do to help our sleep? Set a bedtime routine. Routines. Help our circadian rhythm. There was a 2023 article in the NCBI that stated that our circadian rhythm is a 24-hour internal clock in our brain that regulates cycles of alertness and sleepiness by responding to light in our changing environment. So our circadian rhythm sets and can be reset with light.

Speaker 1: 59:36

Sleep-wake homeostasis also helps us sleep. So the time we go to bed, when we go to bed at the same time each night, wake up at the same time each day. This helps us to have better sleep. Night, wake up at the same time each day. This helps us to have better sleep. It's the homeostasis that our bodies are craving. A quote from the US Department of Health and Human Services about understanding sleep says that the homeostatic sleep drive reminds the body to sleep after a certain time and regulates the sleep intensity. This sleep drive gets stronger every hour you are awake and causes you to sleep longer and more deeply after a period of sleep deprivation. This goes back to the adenosine that we talked about earlier.

Speaker 1: 1:00:19

Adenosine is a neurotransmitter that does a ton of things in our body.

Speaker 1: 1:00:23

One of them is the way it interacts with our brain and adenosine in the morning should be at its lowest. Because, as we said earlier, adenosine in the morning should be at its lowest because, as we said earlier, adenosine is cleared out, so to say, of the receptors in your brain as you sleep and then, as the day goes on, adenosine goes into those adenosine receptors in your brain and that's where this sleep pressure comes from. So the more adenosine that's getting into those receptors, the sleepier you get, until it ultimately helps you fall asleep, along with other things in our bodies, other hormones like melatonin and things like that. But that is why so adenosine, it supplements sleep, so it encourages us to sleep and it suppresses arousal. It encourages us to sleep and it suppresses arousal. And so when we drink caffeine, caffeine is this prickly little character that comes into our brains and it goes into our adenosine receptors and doesn't allow the adenosine to bind to those receptors, so the sleep pressure doesn't build up. That is why you shouldn't drink caffeine close to bed.

Speaker 2: 1:01:28

Okay, I get it Fine.

Speaker 1: 1:01:31

Fine.

Speaker 2: 1:01:31

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:01:32

Understanding, it is not the same as doing it or not doing it or not.

Speaker 1: 1:01:37

That's correct, so, but this is another reason as to why it's important that we fall asleep and we wake up at consistent times, because it helps our adenosine to kind of get into a routine as well. And then there was another article in 2010 that looked at the contribution of routine to sleep quality. This was done in the elderly, so the average age for this study was 75. And the results found that shorter sleep latency so quicker to go to sleep was associated with more stable duration of activities and life activities. So when people had a routine that they did on a consistent basis, it helped them to sleep better. The fourth thing that we can do to well, actually, before I move into that, do you have a consistent bedtime and wake up time? You have a consistent wake up time because you have an alarm.

Speaker 2: 1:02:22

Yeah, I mean normally it's around around 1115. Well, that's like when I laid down. That doesn't mean that's when I put my phone up and close my eyes that's closer to midnight. So it just depends. I mean, sometimes if I fall asleep, you know, like at 11, 15 on tiktok, then I'll close my, and then that's when I'll fall asleep, and then I can get closer to six hours.

Speaker 1: 1:02:51

But the goal is also that you have the same sleep and wake routine even on weekends.

Speaker 2: 1:02:57

That's where it's different, cause I wake up way later on the weekends, right.

Speaker 1: 1:03:01

Okay. The fourth thing that we can do to sleep better is exercise. The fourth thing that we can do to sleep better is exercise. This study was done in 2018.

Speaker 1: 1:03:15

Associations between sleep quality and its domains and insufficient physical activity in a large sample of Croatian young adults A cross-sectional study. 2,100 college students in Croatia were a part of this and they completed several different physical activity and sleep quality questionnaires. Well, they completed one of each and the results showed that participants with a higher percentage of sufficiently active physical activity reported very good subjective sleep quality. So what is sufficiently active, I asked, and we found. Sufficiently active, I asked and we found.

Speaker 1: 1:03:51

Sufficiently active means that the participants are receiving 150 minutes a week of moderate activity or 75 minutes a week of vigorous activity, or a combination of the two. So then you might ask what is moderate and what is vigorous. From best, I can surmise, because it wasn't blatantly clear in the research moderate activity and even when you look at the CDC recommendation, moderate activity is more likely when you're getting into the six to seven rate of perceived exertion. So you're getting your heart rate up above 60%. Whether that's doing strength training, metabolic conditioning, cardio, you're doing something to get your heart rate up for 150 minutes. That's just under three hours, two and a half hours a week and that's the low end. Or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, which would be more of that seven or that eight, nine, 10 rate of perceived exertion. You're sprinting, you're lifting heavy, you're getting your heart rate into that zone five to where it's an 80, 85%, actually more like 90% of your max heart rate.

Speaker 1: 1:04:59

So the people who were active under those guidelines tended to have better sleep. Associated with insufficient physical activity were poor sleep. Higher sleep latency took them longer to go to sleep, they didn't sleep as long, they didn't have sleep efficiency consistently every night, they tended to use more sleep medication and they tended to not function as well during the day. The bottom line is that sleep, not sleep exercise. The bottom line if it, is that exercise is incredibly helpful in helping our bodies to go to sleep at night, and there's that's one study that is has looked at it, but there has been several others as well.

Speaker 2: 1:05:44

Yeah, there's also, I mean, a relationship, a direct relationship with sleep and exercise, because when you exercise, it helps you sleep better and when you sleep better, it also helps your body regenerate and rebuild muscle and restore your body. So there is a kind of a homeostasis there. That's why I guess it's probably important to make sure that you have all of the other areas covered, so not drinking caffeine and doing all this If you're exercising, that way that your, your body, can get better sleep.

Speaker 1: 1:06:13

Yeah, absolutely. Now, the one thing I would say about exercise and sleep is I don't recommend that someone sleeps or, I'm sorry, I do not recommend that someone exercises close to sleep. Actually, if someone were to ask me, I would say you should sleep. If someone were to ask me, I would say you should exercise before 4 pm every day, 4 pm being the latest, because the later that you work out and you get your heart rate up, you're I mean, you're getting your your sympathetic nerve nervous system riled up and it can be hard to bring yourself back down. You're like you've gotten your heart rate up, You've gotten alertness. There's so many things that happen when you work out and then to try and go to sleep after being that energized can be very difficult. Okay, so the bottom line of it is sleep is important.

Speaker 2: 1:07:12

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:07:13

And we talked about four things specifically that are very important to getting the best sleep of your life and waking up rested and having a healthier life. The first one is light exposure, especially watching your cell phone usage close to bed. It's something that can give you quick wins in terms of being able to get better sleep soon. The next one we talked about was caffeine and really limiting your caffeine intake, especially before 3 pm, ideally before noon every single day. We talked about having a consistent routine of when you go to bed and when you wake up. Exercise is also a perfect thing that you can do to help your sleep. And then the fifth one that we didn't cover with research, but it is one that I would highly recommend.

Speaker 1: 1:08:01

If you are the kind of person who lays down and all of a sudden your head fills with your to-do list, then a great practice to include is writing down the things that you need to do the next day way before bed I say way before bed, 10, 20, 30 minutes before bed, so that you can get those things out of your mind, so you're less likely to lay down and think, oh my goodness, I need to do this, I need to do that. It can help you sleep better. Another thing that can help you to clear your mind as you get into bed is mindfulness. Going through and just listening to your breath, seeing how your body feels, and prayer. Using that as a time to release your burdens, to give them over to God and to just know that you can sleep well because God has it under control is a great way to help free up that mental space so that you can get good sleep and wake up refreshed and recharged the next day. What are your key takeaways, jason?

Speaker 1: 1:09:02

Well what are you actually going to do? Yeah?

Speaker 2: 1:09:06

Well, I want to say that I wonder if and I'm sure it's like this I wonder if there's a lot of people who listen and watch the podcast that are, like me, kind of had a revelation of maybe, like you've been saying, oh I can't go to sleep because at this time, or I can't get enough sleep because of so and so excuse, maybe there's actually more that you can control to actually get enough sleep because of so-and-so excuse, but maybe there's actually more that you can control to actually get good sleep, like I discovered. So, limiting the caffeine consumption that's obviously a big one for me. I drink caffeine way too close to bedtime, um 9 PM. Um, yeah, I. So eliminating caffeine at an earlier point in the day, maybe starting at like 6 PM and then working my way down closer to noon.

Speaker 1: 1:09:55

That's it. Work your way into it.

Speaker 2: 1:09:58

Uh, getting exercise. Um, that's a big one, and that's even something that I realized when I do exercise is that I always tend to get better sleep at nighttime. That's good, as well as practicing mindfulness right before bed, because I am one of those people that lays down and then, just like to-do list, comes on, I get a ton of ideas, like creative ideas. So maybe doing that before I actually lay down and get ready for bed, just jotting some stuff down and then going to lay down and then following a sleep.

Speaker 1: 1:10:26

Why do you think you have all those creative ideas when you lay down? Is it the first time in your day that you're like silent without a phone?

Speaker 2: 1:10:34

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. It's the first time that I put my phone down and I'm not actively like. My TV is probably still on, but I'm not like actively watching anything to start. Um, so yeah, the world kind of slows down, but maybe I can make the world slow down a little bit sooner.

Speaker 1: 1:10:51

That's right.

Speaker 2: 1:10:52

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:10:52

Even just taking time to like lay on your couch or something like eight and just have that quiet time and let the creative ideas come then. Yeah, yeah, those are great, great key takeaways. Thank you, we would love to know what your key takeaways are, too. If you are listening to this or watching this, you can always go and comment. So you can go to the YouTube channel, kimberly Beam Holmes. Leave us a comment under this video what did you like? What was helpful? What would you like for us to do more of on topics similar to this in the future?

Speaker 1: 1:11:25

Anything in the realm of physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual parts of ourselves and ways that we can work on ourselves are the topics that we want to focus on, and we love hearing from you. I know I love hearing from you. If you aren't a YouTube person, totally fine too. You can also find me on Instagram, at KimberlyBeamHolmes, and send me a DM about a topic that you would love to see or hear more of in an upcoming episode. I love hearing these things from you.

Speaker 1: 1:11:53

Share this episode with a friend. You are probably already thinking of someone in your life Maybe it's a spouse, maybe it's a best friend who could benefit from this. Share it with them if you believe it would help, and wherever you follow us. Please make sure you hit that follow button, whether it's on the podcast, on Apple podcast or on Spotify. Wherever you listen to podcasts, just press follow. And if it's on YouTube, and be sure that you are subscribed to the channel so that you are always aware of when the newest and hopefully best content comes out. Until next week, I want you to get some good sleep and stay strong.