Change Your Brain Every Day - Sleep Stealers - How technology is Robbing You The Sleep You Need

Episode Date: March 7, 2017

Technology and gadgets are good, that's without a question, but one area that's making them a curse is the fact that gadgets and technology can rob much of your time to sleep. Today, we're going to talk about that and a couple more topics about how we are getting rob of the sleep that we need.  

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amon.

Welcome back, everybody. We are here with our friend, Sean Stevenson, bestselling author, Sleep Smarter, and the creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the number one health podcast on iTunes with millions of listener downloads each year. Graduate of the University of Missouri at St. Louis. We are talking about sleep. And in this podcast, we're going to talk about sleep robbers. You have to know the enemy.

And sleep, as we talked last time, is so important. It cleans and washes your brain. It helps you lose weight. It helps you focus. It gets your body ready for the next day. One of the things we didn't talk about, sleep also consolidates memory. And so if you don't sleep, you can't learn. All the people, all of us who crammed during college, you don't remember hardly anything of what you learned.

But Sean, talk to us about what are the most common things that steal our story. Sure, sure. So first, I want to talk about the most pervasive issue today, which is something that our ancestors didn't have to deal with. And that is our relationship with our tech, with our amazing iPhones, our laptops, our Androids, our tablets, our televisions. We're in the golden age of TV now. Netflix and chill is a thing that everybody knows, whether they're like barely out of diapers or they're in other kind of diapers, you know. And so we all understand that there's a lot of entertainment for us to consume and a lot of great things like this is allowing us to do this show right now. So there's a great advantage to them, but we have to have them in their proper place. So Harvard researchers recently confirmed that exposure to our specifically blue light, the blue light spectrum from our devices does in fact suppress melatonin and elevate your cortisol. And so the ratio that they discovered, and I'm just, this is, I'm rounding the numbers up. Basically every hour

that you're on your device unprotected from that blue light spectrum, every hour you use it, it suppresses melatonin for about 30 minutes. So if you watch three hours of TV or you're working for three hours, and this is only at night, they found that this doesn't have any kind of big change during the day. But this is, you know, we were exposed to light during the day, specifically blue light. So what they found was every hour, 30 minutes suppression. This is very important. So this is why this matters is that even if you physiologically are exhausted and you go to bed, you're like passed out and you sleep for nine hours or eight hours or seven hours, whatever the number is, if melatonin is

not being produced properly in the beginning of that sleep, your entire sleep cycle is thrown off. So can I ask you a question there? Like I said, in the first podcast, this is my issue. So I'm really serious about sleep. I do take time-release melatonin and magnesium. That's my cocktail along with some relaxing teas at night. So does taking- A lot of the hypnosis audio. I'm not kidding. So we even got a new bed that is split in the middle

so the mattresses don't touch, but they're together in the same frame because I'm really serious about trying to get sleep and not being disturbed at night. So does taking melatonin, if you are having trouble producing it, did they find that the studies are as effective with taking melatonin? So here's what's so fascinating. I'm so glad you asked this question because I was a little bit concerned about that because

it's really over-the-counter hormone therapy. Just because you can buy it at the drugstore, at Whole Foods, doesn't necessarily mean that it's ideal for us. So I was concerned maybe if you're taking this exogenous source of melatonin, it might suppress yours or something like that. But that wasn't the case. What they did find, however, and I cited this study in my book, is that excessive use of melatonin can downregulate your receptor sites for melatonin. So even though you're taking it in or even your body's producing it, it can downregulate your body sites for melatonin. So even though you're taking it in or even your body's producing it, it can down-regulate your body's ability to use it. So what I would recommend is to use melatonin in spot treatments, maybe just to get going, to get things on track. It's great

for travel, you know, if you're changing time zones, but if we create too much of a dependency on it, it's going to lose effectiveness possibly over time. This isn't all hard, hard locked in right now, but it's just something to consider. What I would recommend is more looking to precursors for melatonin, like give your body opportunity to do some of the steps. So that would be things like, you know, 5-HTP, tryptophan to give your body an opportunity to build it. But I think melatonin is great. I have some, but I tend to use it in spot treatments to get people going. Okay, so let's talk about the other things.

We're in the next podcast. We're going to talk about things to do in this one, things not to do. And so we talked about gadgets and on your phone, you can actually get blue light blockers or on your computer. As soon as the sun goes down, my screen turns yellow because it's blocking the blue lights. What about caffeine? Perfect. Perfect. Full disclosure, I'm a fan of caffeine. Let me just say that first.

All right. So also, I'm not the I'm not the anti-fun police and taking away, uh, the golden age of television. There's a way to do this stuff, which we'll talk about in the next episode to be able to still take advantage of our great resources with our tech, but also not having to destroy our sleep quality. So caffeine, love it. Here's the issue. So, uh, a recent study found that, and what they did was they took individuals and they had them to consume caffeine immediately before bed, three hours before bed, and even six hours before bed. And they found that even six hours before them going to sleep created measurable disruption in their sleep quality. I find that person to be true.

And so what they found was this is so crazy. They lost one full hour of sleep. So they were also, they were doing this by objective and subjective testing. So the person thought they got eight hours of sleep, but the test monitoring,

actually reading, you know, the sleep monitoring devices said that they only got seven because it robbed them of an hour of sleep. Because caffeine is a very powerful nervous system stimulant. You know, it can light you up. Well, it blocks something called adenosine

that tells your body to go to sleep. Adenosine is really important. And you said something interesting. I just want to push on a little bit. It's like, well, I don't want to take away fun. You know, I think of fun as Tana, not caffeine. Okay. Constricts because caffeine constricts blood flow to the brain, which you never want to do if you want to fully utilize your brain. And I only learned that vicariously when I first started doing SPECT. SPECT is a

blood flow study. They actually told people to hold caffeine because it could constrict blood flow to the brain up to 30%. And I'm all about blood flow, right? Anything that's constricting blood flow is not a good thing. Okay. So we only have a few minutes. Sleep ap It's a huge problem in this country. Yes, yes. Huge. And it triples the risk for Alzheimer's disease. And a lot of people who have it don't know it. And if they're sleeping alone, so if they're not, you know, they don't have a beautiful wife like mine,

then they actually have no idea, but they're overweight. They're tired. Talk to us about your experience with people who have sleep apnea. Perfect. Yeah. So this is, it's a huge trend right now with so many people. We're talking about many millions of people here in the U.S. alone struggling with sleep apnea and many of them not diagnosed yet. Right. And wondering again, why they can't lose weight, why they can't get their blood sugar in order, why they're dealing with, um, heart disease and high cholesterol. All of these things are a big issue that we're seeing today. And as a result of the sleep apnea, basically what's happening is

it's sort of like a very, very weak person choking you. And some people can stop breathing upwards of even over a hundred times within a minute, which sounds absolutely crazy. And that lack of oxygen to the brain, first and foremost, like you said, this can be tied to things like Alzheimer's. And that's just one issue. And what I found is the biggest culprit behind sleep apnea is carrying too much weight on your frame, collapsing that breathing pathway, the visceral fat that's putting pressure on your organs internally. There's a smaller category of people where it's obstructive. There is something that is in there blocking the way, like a mutual friend of ours, Jim Quick, he was dealing with abnormally large, I believe it was tonsils, but something can be blocking the way. Some kind

of obstruction or some trauma happens, but the vast majority of people, it's about getting the weight off of your frame. But ironically, it's hard to lose weight when you can't sleep. Right. And this is why the CPAP canap can be helpful again as a supplement something to get you going but you've got to do the things to get you get that weight off of your frame in my new book memory rescue there's a whole chapter on sleep and it starts with a ceo it starts with the story of a ceo who's diagnosed with sleep apnea. He has diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and he's known for three years, but because he also has ADD, he's never done anything about it. And his brain just looked

like crap. And so my big intervention was to scare him enough and get his wife on the phone to like, you need to take care of this because without it, you're not going to have the cognitive ability, not only to run your business, but to get healthy. And that's going to take decades off your life. So we cannot leave this conversation without talking about hormones. At 48 years old, this is a big issue for me. It's a big issue. Are you 48? I am. No, you don't look 48. Thank you. It's a big issue for a lot of the women in our community because as you come into these, you know, premenopausal perimenopausal menopausal years, hormones shift so dramatically. So we've got to talk about hormones. I know without

progesterone, I would be on the evening news. Um, so for mood stabilization alone, it's really great. I would be in the graveyard. So it's so helpful, but having, knowing what hormones are doing is really important, I think, and knowing that there's a solution. Absolutely. So when it really boils down to it, everything in our lives, what we experience physically, you know, our physical appearance and how we feel is based on what's happening with our hormones. And there's really nothing more important than that. And that's what I've been pointing and pushing into culture the last 15 years that I've been in practice, that we need to focus on hormone health. We need to focus on eating a hormone-healthy diet, not counting calories necessarily. We need to put a hormone focus,

not calorie focus. And so when it comes to sleep, our sleep is regulating so many different hormones. It's absurd. And so one of the studies that, and let me first make a caveat about this. When we're talking about menopause, it's not just about estrogen and progesterone, which a lot of people will jump right to that. It's also testosterone's involved as well. And we see a shift with all of these things. And so one of the studies that came across recently, and I talked about this on an episode of my show, is that other hormones have a lot,

there's a big influence by your circadian timing and how they're released, like human growth hormone. You know, it's getting secreted at spurts throughout the day, big spurt in the evening when you're asleep. The testosterone is 100% sleep dependent. When you're sleeping, you're basically building up that bank account of testosterone. There's things you could do during the day to get a boost, but sleep is where you build

up that bank account. And the longer you're awake, the lower your testosterone gets. So that's just one. And then we talk about estrogen, estradiol. But there's a big connection also with your sleep quality, regulating your estrogen and progesterone as well. And any kind of disruption there, especially as you're going through those changes, is going to immediately throw off your sleep quality. Because the other side is your hormones regulate your sleep. And that's where smart supplementation, properly used medication can be a nice bridge or transition.

But we want to do the things with our lifestyle to make sure we're cultivating and supporting normal hormone function to the best of our abilities, if that makes sense. It does. Let me just go through some of the list I have on sleep robbers that we wrote about in Brain Warriors Way. And then I want you to comment before we have to stop on shift workers, because that is just such a big problem. And Tana was a neurosurgical ICU nurse, and that was huge. So a warm room will steal your sleep. Light in the room, noise, gadgets we talked about going to bed worried or angry, medications like antihistamines, cough medicines, anticonvulsants, stimulants for ADHD.

Caffeine, we discussed. Alcohol, because yes, it decreases. You know, it'll help you go to sleep and then three hours later, it'll wake you up. Restless leg syndrome, because what, 70% of the population is low in magnesium. And that also affects your partner. Women's issues, thyroid conditions, congestive heart failure, pain, untreated psychiatric problems like bipolar disorder, prostate problems, snoring, stress. You lose somebody you love, in this list is shift workers, nurses, firefighters, security personnel, pilots. Talk to us about how shifts in your work can disrupt sleep.

And then when we come back for our next podcast with Sean, we're going to talk about what to do. Can I just jump in here with something, Sean, just to make this personal, because as a nurse, I had to work nights for a while. I was literally dangerous. I quit because I knew I was dangerous. So I'm not a night person, number one, staying up that late. And then I couldn't sleep during the day. So what I found I was doing was eating all night to stay awake so I wouldn't hurt someone. And so it becomes this vicious cycle. Then I'd get home and I couldn't sleep. And then it really messes up a lot of things for a lot of people. Some people love night shifts. But we have to do that, right?

I mean, firefighters have to do that. There's got to be doctors and nurses. Well, and we sometimes work double shifts. Right, right. So what does one do? I specifically address this issue because I think that our society, the way it's structured, has failed some of our most important individuals who are caring for us in those times. People who are working in hospitals, who are working in the police force, firefighters that are necessary and incredibly important to our culture in the way that the system is set up. And it's very abusive.

So I propose a solution to this in the book, which we'll talk about in a moment. But the bottom line is this, if you're not, your body is always looking for patterns. That's the natural, normal thing your genes expect you to do. As soon as you start to have a disruption in that pattern, we're talking about an epigenetic trigger. And this is something I was talking about in the book that's going to basically start to print out copies of you that have diseases. And so specifically, let me just share one. So the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified shift work, working the overnight shift as a class 2A carcinogen. Oh boy.

Right. So they've said that working overnight causes cancer. It's a cancer causing agent. That's what a carcinogen is. Holy cow. Well, that's not good for someone like me who's already had cancer. You know, and so, but we don't think about this. And why is that? Again, why is this? Is that melatonin isn't just our most powerful, well-known sleep related hormone.

It's quite possibly also one of our most powerful anti-cancer hormones that we produce as well. And that is suppressed when you're up at night, surrounded by basically manufacturing a second daytime under all of that artificial lighting and not allowing your body to have a proper day and night cycle. And so that's going to be suppressed. And specifically to talk about the big nurses study that a lot of people have cited over the years, but one of the pieces was published in the international journal of cancer and found that women who worked the overnight shift nurses had a 30% greater incidence of breast cancer. Holy smokes.

And every single one of these female nurses who worked overnight found that the greater number of years that they worked doing it, the higher their rates of cancer would skyrocket. Wow. Right, so this is about, and please understand, this doesn't mean just people who are going to a job to do this.

Some people are creating shift work by watching Orange is the New Black all night. Like that's their job. That's hilarious. You know, so. So what can they do before? Because I don't want to leave people feeling anxious. So they have to listen to the next podcast. But if I'm a nurse or I'm a firefighter or I'm a police officer or a security person and I'm listening to this and now I'm completely freaked out. And I believe some anxiety is good. Right. Know the truth. The truth will set you free. What can they do? Okay. There's two options, two things here. Number one, if this is just something where you're telling yourself, I have to do this job, this is what I have to do right now in order to support my family, in order to have work. And it's not about something deeper. Then we have to stop lying to ourselves because there is other right employment out there for you. If your health

is your number one concern, then don't work the night shift. All right. You can put your locus of focus and your intention. But a lot of times I worked, I worked at a casino when I was in college. So my shift would start at like three in the morning sometimes. And I would tell myself I'm going to get another job, but I'm so tired. I never get around to doing it, you know, until life forced me to change. Don't get yourself to that point. Make the decision. If this isn't about something deeper and it's just a job to you, get another job. Now, for those individuals that this is about service, if this is your, your Dharma, if this is your path in life and why you're here and your mission is to serve

and working the overnight shift, it's a part of that. We have to stack conditions in your favor. So we have to try to create as much of a routine and a pattern for your body as possible. And that would include making sure that when you are getting your sleep time, sleeping in a completely dark room so you can produce as much melatonin as possible. And a bunch of other things we'll talk about in the next show, but there's one other piece that we have to examine here. Many people who work shift work, it's things like three or four, like 12 hour days, and then like three or four days off. That was found to be just as dysfunctional as working overnight five days a week or six days a week. Because it's so disruptive. Get normal and then you get off. You get normal, you get off. What I propose and what I'm working

to push in the culture and even have an opportunity to talk to the military and things like that is to have greater cycles of being off of the shift work. So maybe you're on for two months, hardcore, and then you get 10 months where you can be normal because your body is so resilient. This is just so interesting. We could go on and on, but we're going to go on. And the next podcast, we're going to talk about what are the things you can do to optimize your sleep here. We're here with Shawn Stevenson, Sleep Smarter. Stay with us. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com,

where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.