Change Your Brain Every Day - Practical Tips to Get Better Sleep at Night, with Dr. Shane Creado

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

The coronavirus quarantine and working from home has caused many people to make shifts in their sleep schedules. Some are getting more sleep, and some less. In the third episode of a series with author and sleep expert Dr. Shane Creado, he and the Amens discuss some of Dr. Creado’s most effective strategies for planning and sticking to a healthy sleep schedule.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are here with Dr. Shane Criotto, who is a psychiatrist, a sleep disorder specialist, the author of Peak Sleep Performance. peak sleep performance. Shane, where can they get your book?

Amazon and Kindle. So if they just do a simple search on Amazon for peak sleep performance for athletes by Shane Criato, it'll pop up right away. Awesome. I highly recommend it. Dr. Criato also helped us create our supplement to support healthy sleep. Put Me to Sleep is the name of the supplement. Emily, our 10-year-old, she just loves it. She went through a really, really stressful time. And so to help her get back on track, she used it. And she just loves that stuff.

And it tastes great. It's actually a chewable. It does. And it's one to four chewables at night. All right. So I promised them practical tips, including for shift work. How can people get the best sleep? And, oh, by the way, Dr. Criato also has a course on Amen University called Overcoming Insomnia.

I actually recommended it to a patient yesterday. It's really great. So if you find this is an issue, my dad died a couple of weeks ago, and I've been talking about grief. And with grief, I always say, fix sleep first. So if you're going through grief, fix sleep first. And that's when a lot of people end up being hooked on Ambien or Restoril or Lunesta or Seroquel, you know, the ones you talked about. When people go through stressful times, whether it's you lose your dad or you're in the middle of a pandemic, what are the tips to really get people on track?

All right. First of all, I'm really sorry for your loss, Daniel. It was a beautiful funeral analogy. And these times, a lot of people are losing their loved ones, and it opportunity to optimize your sleep. Use this to be a little selfish for yourself because you need to protect yourself and your brain health and your sleep if you have to be a good relative and partner and be there for your kids and support your other loved ones in moments of need. We know that sleep deprivation will make you more irritable, make you more emotionally vulnerable. Even one night of sleep deprivation will make you more irritable, make you more emotionally vulnerable. Even one night of sleep deprivation has triggered manic and hypomanic episodes in some patients. So if you anchor your sleep, if you structure your days, you can schedule time to grieve and grieve well without causing you to end up in a danger zone.

And we do know that sleep deprivation is directly connected to increased suicide risk as well. 90% of people with depression report sleep problems. So yes, that is tied in with sleep. And we can address the sleep without simply throwing Ambien or Trazodone at people. We need to address it the way we do mental health. Underlying factors, the right kinds of therapy, CBT for insomnia, like is the basis of overcoming insomnia.

What can we do right now? Structure our days and our nights. Have a fixed wake up time as much as we can, seven days a week. Now we may have more free time so let's figure out how much sleep our brain really needs. Choose a wake-up time seven days a week and then lock it in. So if you feel like you want to wake up at 6 a.m every day and you want to go to bed at 10 p.m, do that. If you're still feeling sleepy during the day or if you feel you need catch-up sleep or naps during the day, you might want to extend that sleep. Maybe go to sleep, go to bed at 9.30 p.m. Have a nice wind-down routine. Your brain can't simply switch on and off like a light bulb.

So a nice wind-down routine, a calm, warming bath, meditation, saunas, hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Have your supplements maybe 30 minutes before your desired bedtime. Avoid using the bed for anything other than sleep and sex. And once you have those routines and your brain is still busy, there are specific strategies to calm your busy brain down. Your to-do list, your worry list, relaxation, mindfulness, there's some really good apps there. A lot of people make the mistake of trying too hard to fall asleep, and that's really going to set you up for failure because trying involves waking your brain up. So consider your sleep time at night every night to be your mini vacation.

I'm going on vacation in half an hour. Let me wind down and calm down before I go on my sleep vacation. Those are some important skills to use. And of course, there's other thought strategies based on whether you have PTSD associated busy brain, or whether you're a catastrophist, or an overthinker. So there's lots of amazing evidence based strategies to help you with those unhealthy thoughts? So you brought up PTSD, and there is a medicine that has been found to be useful for nightmares. And I had a patient recently that I prescribed that for him. Praises him.

Would you talk about that for a second from a sleep doctor perspective? So this is different. It's a blood pressure medicine. It's not addictive. It's not like Ambien or Restoril or Xanax, things that you develop tolerance and get withdrawal from. So prazosin, it was originally designed as a blood pressure medicine, and it reduces the blood pressure because it works on the sympathetic nervous system, the danger response nervous system, and calms it down. So it makes perfect sense that it could be helpful for nightmares. Now, it's been used for nightmares related to specific traumas, but some people use it for people who just have nightmare disorder in general. Because it calms the sympathetic nervous system down, it makes sense that it would reduce the frequency and intensity of nightmares. Other ways to reduce nightmares, though, as I said, if your brain is sleep-deprived, it's going to quickly drink as much dream sleep as it can get.

So actually extending the amount of sleep you're getting and the quality of your sleep by dealing with things like restless legs or sleep apnea will actually cause you to have well-balanced non-dream and dream sleep rather than excessive dream sleep. That means less nightmares. Also calming your brain down because your brain goes through the same cycles and dream sleep that it does when you're awake. So if you're calm or dealing with stress adequately during the course of the day, you're setting yourself up for success in terms of less nightmares. I know that Stratasyn has been used for nightmares. I also use a medicine called Clonidine for nightmares.

It was used in kids who had been abused and traumatized during the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. And it also helps reduce the blood pressure, reduce the sympathetic nervous system response. And I've seen some really good benefits in people, not just for the nightmares, but also the hyper arousal, the danger mode, looking over your shoulder all the time. And it makes sense because if you calm down your nervous system during the day, your brain is less likely to repeat those negative reactions while you're asleep. That's so helpful. You mentioned sleep apnea a couple of times.

The common symptoms, you snore loudly, you stop breathing at night, you're chronically tired during the day, it increases the risk of obesity and depression. How would someone know if they had it? And then what's the best way to assess it? So sleep apnea is extremely common. And I'm really glad you're bringing this up because there's many different kinds of sleep apneas. The most common one we think of is obstructive sleep apnea, where airway closes up, your tongue falls back, and there's less oxygen to the brain. So yes, it can result in more depression, tiredness, fatigue, or concentration problems, memory problems, dementia, heart attacks, strokes.

It's a really deadly disease. Now, you may feel you're getting eight or nine hours of sleep, but you still wake up really tired and sleepy. That may be a clue. A dry mouth may be a clue. Morning headaches, especially in the front part of your head, may be a clue. Impotence, low testosterone levels, aches and pains in the daytime, more inflammation are all linked directly to sleep apnea. We mentioned shift workers. Shift work has been designated a probable carcinogen by the WHO because it's directly related to increased risk of heart attacks. You know, with daylight saving time, after we lose that hour of sleep,

there's 21% of heart attacks the next day. Oh, it's miserable. People are dying. Yeah. So if you have any of the symptoms, just feeling sluggish, lethargic, and you try and get more sleep and you feel even worse, like you've been hit by a truck, it's time to get an evaluation for sleep apnea.

It's quick, simple, easy. You can get a home study done. It's quick, simple, easy. You can get a home study done. It's always covered by insurance. And they tell you how many times you stopped breathing at night and what position you were in. And then it's not just everyone deserves CPAP. It depends on the severity of the sleep apnea and the position. So if you have really bad sleep apnea while you're on your back, but not while you're on your side, you may not need CPAP. If you're morbidly obese, losing weight will improve your sleep apnea. There are mouth devices.

So I know people are scared to get tested for sleep apnea because they don't want CPAP. But there's lots of other strategies that we can use to help people with their sleep apnea. Great. When we come back, we're going to talk more about sleep, but specifically, was Freud completely off base when he talked about the interpretation of dreams? We're here with Dr. Shane Criato, psychiatrist, sleep disorder specialist, Amen Clinic physician who we adore. He is the host of our course, Overcoming Insomnia at Amen University. Go to amenuniversity.com and also the author of Peak Sleep Performance,

the cutting edge sleep science that will guarantee a competitive advantage. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from BrainMD, you can use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.