These Fukken Feelings Podcast© - Fix Your Sleep Problems Now: Insights from a Sleep Expert, Dr. Chelsie Rohrscheib's

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Send us a Text Message.Unlock the secrets to a restful night with insights from renowned neuroscientist Dr. Chelsie Rohrscheib! Join us on These Fukken Feelings Podcast as we dive deep into the intricate world of sleep and insomnia. Discover how our fast-paced, high-stress lives contribute to the epidemic of sleep disorders, and learn about the concept of sleep debt and its effects on your health. Dr. Rohrscheib shares expert advice on breaking the habit of scrolling through your phone before...

you don't have to be positive all the time it's perfectly okay to feel sad angry annoyed frustrated scared and anxious having feelings doesn't make you a negative person it doesn't even make you weak it makes you human and we are here to talk through it all we welcome you to these fucking feelings podcast a safe space for all who needs it grab a drink and take a seat. The session begins now. What is up, people? Welcome to these Fucking Feelings Podcast. I am Micah. Got producer Crystal in the building. Hello. And we are on with our special guest, Dr. Chelsea. I'm not going to try to pronounce your last name because I'm going to get it completely wrong.

So I will let you do that. Yeah, no worries. My last name is quite a mouthful. It's Dr. Chelsea Rorschach. Rorschach. Did I say it right? Rorschach. Rorschach.

Yep. Perfect. Perfect. Got you. One thing, Dr. Chelsea, we like to do here is we like to get our guests to introduce themselves because we feel like no one knows you better than you. So tell our audience a little bit about yourself. Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, my name is Dr. Chelsea Roshaibe. I'm a neuroscientist and sleep expert. I've been working in the field of sleep scientists and sleep medicine for over a decade.

Currently, I'm the head of sleep at West Spur, which is a sleep disorder diagnostic technology. Sounds like a place I need to go to because I suffer from every kind of insomnia. I can't sleep for nothing. It is horrible. I know. As I was looking at some of your YouTube videos, I was like, Micah, this is for you. He's like, what? Help me sleep.

Honestly, most people have sleep issues. I think it's because we live in such a fast-paced, high-stress society. I think more often than not, you're going to have a sleep issue. And also, sleep disorders are on the rise as well. And, you know, sleep affects absolutely everything in your life. So it causes a snowball effect where you're sleeping poorly. It might affect other aspects of your health, your mental health, your physical health, your social life, your work. So it is it's a huge problem in this country and honestly around

the world. Definitely. I think today, so like last night, I had a hard time sleeping. And so I think today kind of like my whole day has been delayed, as you can see, because it was just like, I didn't sleep well last night. And it's so funny because like two nights ago, I had like the greatest night's sleep ever. I slept so well. Like I woke up, oh shit, I'm late for work. And I wasn't, but it just felt that way. It was so great. So it's like, how does that happen? How does that work? You sleep sometimes, but sometimes you don't sleep. What's up with that pattern? Yeah. Sleep can be really inconsistent in that way, especially if you're somebody who has a tendency to struggle with sleep issues. Especially in insomniacs, what we'll see is insomniacs typically have a string of really, really bad nights. And when they have inconsistent sleep, so if they're having poor sleep multiple nights in a row, this reduces the amount of good quality sleep you're actually

getting in total sleep time. So you build up what we call sleep debt, which is essentially your brain keeping tabs on how much sleep you've missed out on. And so by the time you're so sleep deprived that your brain has no choice but to force you into like this prolonged, really high quality sleep night. But then after you have that really good night of sleep, you start the whole bad sleep cycle over again. So we don't usually see insomniacs sleep poorly every single night, but it's the consistency that they don't have. All right. Now, so I feel like in my family, we're cause insomnia, ranging from stress, medications, lifestyle factors. But we do see that it tends to be inherited. So if you struggle with sleep, oftentimes you'll have a parent who has sleep issues or a grandparent that has sleep issues.

It's usually about 50-50. So if you have one immediate relative that has sleep problems, your chance always know when we're each, each other's up. Cause we're like sending each other crazy videos. Cause you know, that's what we do. I guess that's a bad thing though. Right? You got to put the phone down. Oh yes. I mean, we all have really bad habits. I think it's, it's hard, right? Because we have technology now and we have the whole world at our hands. So you get home from work, you just want to do things that give you joy. And that might be spending time on your phone, being on social media. So a lot of people will put off sleep in order to do the things that make them feel good and they procrastinate. And so what we find is they'll sit in bed with their phones and they'll just scroll instead of actually putting their head on the pillow and trying to go to bed. Now, me, it's kind of opposite. I actually it's like I go through anxiety because I can't sleep.

So then I get really, really anxious. So I grab the phone to kind of help myself with being anxious that I'm not going to sleep. You know, it's like, oh, I need something to keep my mind busy because if I sit here and think about how I'm not falling asleep, I'm going to go crazy. And that's really how I feel sometimes. Now, is there an age limit that you think that could fall under that category? I'm not even going to pronounce the word. She's talking about insomnia because her daughter doesn't sleep. My eight-year-old, she could be up for 24 hours and she'll just keep on going and going.

And then, of course, when she falls asleep, she don't want to get back up. But then she has to go to school. Yeah, there's no age limit at all. So we see insomniacs in really, really young children. It's kind of hard to prove in infants because infants have pretty erratic sleep anyway, at least up until a certain point. But we are actually seeing much higher rates of insomnia in adolescents and children. So a pediatric sleep medicine is becoming huge.

It didn't necessarily used to be, but we're seeing more kids go through the hospital systems to get sleep studies now more than ever. We're seeing really high rates of insomnia specifically because of the technology, but also just stress. Kids are under a lot of pressure from school. They are under a lot of pressure from school. You know, they are under a lot of pressure to play sports and socialize and, you know, keep up their academic performance.

There's a lot of mental health issues, and that's very correlated to sleep problems like insomnia. But we're also seeing a huge uptick in other sleep disorders like sleep apnea in children as well. Oh, wow. In children? Absolutely. So now I guess let's start in the beginning. What made you decide that this is something you want to study? Yeah, that's a good question. It was partially accidental and partially a personal interest. So I went into my career as a neuroscientist. So somebody who was just interested in the brain in general,

pretty much every aspect of the brain. And then when I did my PhD, one of the topics that I studied was how infections of the brain affect sleep. And so that launched me more into a sleep specialization. And I have a personal interest in it because I was always a bad sleeper. I had a lot of issues with stress and sleep related anxiety. And I also have a sibling who has narcolepsy. So sleep issues have just been floating around my family for a really long time. And now it's pretty much all I do. I love sleep. Everything to do with sleep in the brain and how it affects every aspect of life. You got to be really smart. I always think about, you know, people.

I had a friend of mine that wanted to be a neuroscientist. Is that how you say it right? Neuroscientist. She was like, you know what, I'm just going to stick with x-rays. She stopped and she's like, just x-ray technique. She was like, it is too hard. So yeah, that had to be pretty cool. What was it about the brain that fascinated you? It's the most complicated organ in our body and it's the least understood organ in our body. So we are so far behind on understanding how the brain works and why things in the brain go wrong compared to like the heart, the kidneys, the lungs, those are all fairly simple and straightforward, but the brain is so incredibly complex. I mean, we have millions upon millions of neurons and

those neurons have trillions of connections to one another. And we're still kind of figuring out how those connections relate to things like consciousness and brain function, and then how that relates to the rest of the body as well. So I like the puzzle of it. And I like that there's always going to be something new to learn. I mean, even in sleep medicine, sleep medicine has been around for decades, but we're always learning new things about what sleep actually does, specifically what it's actually accomplishing for us. Now, what if I have a problem with not only falling asleep, but once I'm asleep, I'll wake up like five times throughout the night. And then I want to say probably around five o'clock.

And then of course I have to get up for work, but I'll literally sit there because it takes me an hour to even get out of bed because I think I didn't get any sleep. I get nauseous in the morning. Yeah. So when you're waking up frequently, that is a form of insomnia. So a lot of people think that insomnia is just the inability to fall asleep initially. That's called onset insomnia. But the other side of insomnia is maintenance insomnia. So an inability to maintain your sleep once you are asleep. And that can look like many different things. So it can look like you wake up once and you just can't fall back to sleep at all. And you may be in your bed awake for hours.

It can look like waking up frequently and having really fragmented sleep, like what you're experiencing. Or it can look like waking up too early before your alarm. So maybe you wake up an entire hour or more before your alarm goes off and you just don't achieve enough sleep. And then what you're probably experiencing when you're waking up with nausea is something called sleep inertia, which is when you wake up at the inappropriate time when your brain is not ready for you to be awake. It can cause a feeling of like intense grogginess and fatigue. It can cause brain fog and it can cause that nauseous feeling you're describing as well. Because me and my daughter both have that,

she'll wake up and if she wakes up too fast, she'll start getting nauseous. And I'm like, that happens to me too. So I didn't know if that was a hereditary thing or if that was just coincidence. We both have it. Yeah, it can certainly be hereditary. So there's only a handful of genes that actually control sleep. And if you have any variations in those genes, that's obviously something that you can pass on to your children. So it's entirely possible that you have passed on your sleep issues to your child.

However, there are things you can do to improve your sleep and help your child learn healthy sleep habits to reduce the likelihood that the sleep inertia happens and the insomnia happens and just improve her overall sleep quality as she gets older. Now, are you like medicine driven or you think there's other things that you can do before you actually start medicine to kind of help with sleep? So I think primarily, especially for insomnia, behavioral intervention should always be the first step. So we don't like putting people on medications because the medications, well, they sedate you and they make you feel really tired and they kind of knock you out. They don't actually allow you to get a natural, healthy sleep. So when we sleep, we have to transition through various sleep stages, starting in a very light stage of sleep through a deep stage of sleep. And then we transition into REM sleep, rapid eye movement, and that's when we're dreaming. The way our brain transitions is very consistent for most people,

at least. And we know from clinical science that you need to spend a specific amount of time in each stage to actually accomplish all of the functions that sleep actually does for the brain and body. The problem with medications is they typically will knock you out and keep you in a very deep stage of sleep so that that transition doesn't necessarily happen. So in the long term, that's pretty problematic for your health, but they can also become very addicting to the point of where you actually need to take the medications in order to sleep anymore. And if you try to go off the medications, you actually make your sleep issues

worse. So instead, we always try to start with your environment. So improving your bedroom and your behavior. So looking at things like sleep hygiene habits, which are all the things you do during the day and while you're asleep, that can affect the quality of your sleep. And a lot of these things are super obvious, like make sure you stick to a really rigorous sleep schedule. Don't look at your mobile phone

or your laptop before you go to bed. Don't drink caffeine too late in the day. And then there's not so obvious things like make sure that in the morning you get plenty of sunlight exposure, exercising at certain times of the day. And there's a bunch of other things we can go over. If anyone's interested in learning more about sleep hygiene habits, the American Sleep Medicine Association has a really great list that you can go through. Definitely. So I take Ambien and I've been on Ambien for years. And I feel like sometimes I'll be like, I don't even know why I take it. I'm still up. I'm still up. So I have a brain that

doesn't stop. As you can tell, my mouth don't shut up right. So clearly my brain will not stop thinking. And I don't know how to get? So clearly my brain will not stop thinking. And I don't know how to get it to stop. And that's when my doctor put me on the Ambien, like the extended release one. It's supposed to help you fall asleep and stay asleep. And I'm like, this shit don't do nothing. But you make me wonder. It's like now I'm talking to you.

I'm like, I need to start looking at other methods. But I'm a really busy person. And maybe as an excuse, but sometimes I really feel like if you knew my life, if I gave you my schedule, there's some things I don't have time to do. Like get sun, like I'm never in a situation to get sun, you know, everything I do is inside. Yeah. And that's, I mean, it's partially our society. Well, not partially, it's mostly our society, right? Because we've created this culture where we're expected to work crazy hours and grind all day. And we don't actually focus on self-care and it's not just sleep. It's, it's every aspect of wellness. So your diet,

your physical exercise, you know, your mental wellness, all of those things. And it's, it's tricky because not everyone has access to medicine and therapists and sleep specialists either. So, you know, where do you go from there? I mean, we're, one of the things we're really making a big push with right now is trying to educate the public more about sleep and healthy sleep habits. So I think before we've done a really terrible job of helping people understand how to get good sleep and also why you need to get good sleep. But I push back on social media a lot because it is disruptive to people's sleep. Because like I said, people tend to sit in bed and scroll through TikTok and things like that.

On the other hand, it's awesome because there's a lot of medical specialists like myself who are making a big push to get this information out there and hopefully get it to people who have sleep issues like yourself so they can start making improvements. And then I guess it's something, so of course I'm really big on mental health. That's why this podcast exists, right? So for the last few years, it's been a big mental health, work on mental

health because, you know, I was a pretty crazy person. I can say that because I'm talking about myself. Just point that out there. But, you know, I never thought about the rest aspect in mental health, like just being able to rest. So I actually was like re-diagnosed with cancer in December. Oh, I'm sorry. I think, look, I'm going to say I'm in remission now. All right. We're going to speak it into existence. I haven't done final testing yet, but I went through a very, really aggressive 90 day course of like chemo and pills and all these things. My doctor just wanted to do it real aggressively because I was kind of like stage one, zero, kind of like on the line and they wanted to treat aggressively. So basically mortal story is like for 90 days, I didn't get any sleep. It was just pain and suffering, vomiting and throw it up. So now those that that time is over now, all I want to do is sleep. And you know, it's like, now I wake up and it's

like, I still have a hard time going to sleep, but I do think my tired, my body's just so tired now that it does sleep. And when it gets sleep, I do like my alarm clock goes off. And the first thought is I'm a call in sick today because I want to go back to sleep. I want to go back to sleep. So yeah, sorry. Oh no, it's, it's, it's cruel, right? Because I mean, we enjoy sleep when we get it, but it's so hard for people to initiate sleep and fall asleep. And I think the racing brain, the overactive mind is such a common complaint for insomniacs. And again, I think it really comes down to having too much on our plates and living in such a high stress society. One thing that we do is something called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. So it is therapy by trained sleep behavioral

specialists that specifically focuses on helping people like yourself who have too many thoughts, too many things on their plate, figure out how to train their brain to quiet down and actually initiate sleep. So there's so many techniques. We can definitely talk about some if you're interested. But a lot of it focuses on the things that you wouldn't necessarily think make any sense. A lot of it focuses on restricting your sleep when you're lying in bed and your brain is going a million miles an hour instead of staying in bed and trying to force yourself to fall asleep. We would instead recommend that you actually get out of bed and go do something completely different, something relaxing to take your mind off of the stress of not being able to fall asleep

and then get back into bed again. So it's counterintuitive, but it's definitely worth looking into if you really struggle. And especially since you're in your healing journey, sleep is so essential for repairing the body. That's one of the main things that sleep does is it repairs cells and tissues in your organs. So making sure that you can get as much sleep as you can when you're healing and recovering is absolutely essential. Yeah. Now, are these services that you offer or you tell people go find their own sleep doctors? Yeah. So I don't practice CBTI, but my colleagues certainly do. So there's many CBTI professionals around the country. A lot of it can be done via telehealth now. So you don't even necessarily have to go and see somebody.

What I do is I do sleep studies for people who typically have disorders like sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome or periodic limb movement disorder. And that's a little bit of a different process than somebody who has insomnia. So, but we all communicate and we all kind of overlap and refer to each other. So it's. Now, my mom. So my mom, Sunday, she was supposed to have a sleep study done because once again, this is a family trait. None of us get sleep.

But my mom really suffers. Like she probably sleeps an hour to a night, you know, and then. And but so we think she has sleep apnea, but she went Sunday was supposed to get her sleep study done. But I guess, you know, she's like claustrophobic with the mask and they didn't want to do just the nose. So she ended up being I got to get called in the middle of the night. She couldn't complete the study. It just wouldn't work for her. Like with her mental health, she couldn't complete the study. Are there other things out there that we

can look into for her? Yeah, absolutely. So that's a super, super common complaint, especially for people who have sleep apnea in combination with insomnia. When you have both disorders at the same time, and I know your mom hasn't been diagnosed with sleep apnea yet, but if she does, there's something called COMISA, which is comorbid insomnia and sleep apnea. So what happens is somebody typically starts out with sleep apnea, which is a sleep breathing disorder. And what that does is it means that you stop breathing periodically throughout the night. Sometimes you can stop breathing multiple times per hour. People with the most severe form can stop breathing a hundred times per hour.

When you stop breathing, your blood oxygen levels drop really quickly and your brain can detect this and your brain will wake you up to restart breathing again. And because somebody with sleep apnea, their brain is so conditioned to have to wake them up to start breathing, that then turns into insomnia where the brain just forces you to stay awake so that you don't stop breathing. So unfortunately, super, super common, up to 30% of people with sleep apnea have comica. And usually for individuals like your mother, we might recommend a home sleep study instead of an in-lab sleep study because it's a little bit more comfortable. There's less wires. You get to sleep in your own bed. You get to sleep under normal conditions. The home sleep studies are getting

really advanced to the point of where there's barely anything on you. So that's definitely an option. If your mother doesn't feel like she can sleep comfortably in a lab, I would definitely recommend that she talks to her sleep specialist about a home sleep study. Oh yeah, we're going to do that ASAP. It's like, why people don't tell us that exists? You know, like, why wasn't that an option? I think, you know, there's a lot of old school traditionalists. So some sleep specialists have just been running lab studies for so long that that's all they recommend. But I think last time I checked, the stat is about half of all diagnostic sleep tests are done in the home now. So it's actually getting more common

every single year. And it sounds perfect. I'm like, I'm about to go. As soon as I get home, we're going to be sending an email to her doctor. Like we need an in-home sleep study, please. Because everything you described is her, like that's exactly her thing. She stops breathing and then she wakes up and then, and then her problem is because she knows that she stops breathing. She's also scared to go to sleep. Yeah. And that's another factor of why people with sleep apnea tend to develop really debilitating insomnia is because they anticipate that they're going to have all these issues at night and it stresses them out so much, they just can't sleep. So after sleep apnea is diagnosed and you're

prescribed a therapy, then you can start speaking to your specialist about the options for treatment of both sleep disorders at the same time. So preferably for your mom, you wouldn't just tackle the sleep apnea. You would tackle the sleep apnea and insomnia at the same time to make sure that she has the best outcome. Right. I see. One thing that's really cool is that what you're teaching us, like I said, I've never heard that no one's ever given that as an option, but you know, one thing that we're really big about is if you don't feel like you're getting enough, find the doctor that's giving you enough. So it's like, maybe that's not an option with her doctor,

but now maybe I need to go find somebody who is willing to do those things too. Like I need to start doing the work too. You know, I've never thought so much into sleep to even think that there was something that she could do at home, you know, to me, like, like number one, I knew I was going to get a phone call to come pick her up. I don't know how I just knew it I was like I just gotta be ready because I know I gotta go get her so for some reason I knew that was gonna happen and then mama and then she knew that I knew because when she got in the car she was like you mad and I'm like no why would I be mad but yeah she definitely needs

to be here something like that so cool yeah I Yeah. I'm going to look for that. I'm going to look for that. Check that out. Yeah. I mean, even if you want to send me an email or something after, I can totally recommend some companies that you can look into. Since you volunteered. Email coming.

Dr. Chelsea. And now, and then I'm going to work on my sleep too. Now, so like for me, okay, I'm going to tell you what I do, right? I'll get desperate and take a shot of NyQuil. How bad is that? That's bad. It's not ideal. It's not ideal. I'll take Ambien and then I'll still take a shot of NyQuil. So Ambien's tricky because you get used to it, right? It's like any other drug. I mean, if you take it for long enough, your brain kind of gets used to it, right? It's like any other drug. I mean, if you take it for long enough, your brain kind of gets used to it

and then it stops working as well. And then people need higher doses and then it just, you know, causes more issues. I need to stop taking it because I feel like I just need to stop taking it. Not just stop, because I feel like don't you have to wean yourself off it? Yeah, definitely wean yourself off for sure.

Otherwise, if you stop cold turkey, you will have the worst sleep of your life for weeks, if not months. So make sure you talk to your doctor. Sometimes I thought, too, I started to feel recently like, I didn't mean to cut you off. I'm so sorry. But I started to think, number one, I've been taking it too long. And then sometimes it's like, I'll realize that my nap, like if I just take a nap, the sleep quality is so much better than my night sleep with Ambien. Now, I rarely nap, but what I do is just, you know, it's like that was just great. That was, you know, it was good. And then it's like, you know, I take Ambien to go to sleep and I take it at nine and it's one thirty and I'm still looking like, okay, NyQuil, here I come. NyQuil, I think, has diphenhydramine in it, which is basically Benadryl, and that helps people sleep. But there's a lot of kind of scary research out there about the long-term problems

with taking diphenhydramine. Specifically, there's some connection with neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease and dementia. So we're trying to steer people away from using that as a sedative for sleep now because we really don't fully understand the long-term effects it has on the brain. So would you say the same thing for like the Z-Quil kind of thing that they sell now just for sleep? Yeah. Most of it's going to have diphenhydramine in it if it's over the counter because diphenhydramine is not a controlled substance because like I said, it's just Benadryl basically and antihistamines. So it works for allergies, but it also has that sedation drowsy effect. So they sneak it into a lot of different over-the-counter medicines

and promote it as being helpful for your sleep. But there's just not a lot of research about what we're actually doing. And then we're seeing this stuff with Alzheimer's disease. And it scares our sleep community a lot that people have been taking this for decades. I know people who've been taking it for 30 years and it's like, who knows what long-term effect this has on your brain. And also because if you're on a sedative, your brain, like we were talking about earlier, can't get through those sleep stages naturally. And so you're missing out on a lot of those really crucial functions like brain maintenance, waist clearance in the brain, memory consolidation, cell and body repair,

hormone release. I mean, there's dozens of things that we're aware of that sleep actually does. And we're always learning more functions every single year. Yes, stop doing it. Look, I can lose what I just had. So I think I'm already starting to see those brain issues because I can lose something that was just in my hands. I'd be like, bro, you just had it five seconds ago. How could you lose it already? Like what is going on with you? And I just wanted to point out though, I say I do that. I know that you shouldn't be doing it, right? So don't be listening to me and going to take no. We listening to Dr. Chelsea today, okay?

We never judge people, right? So I'm not gonna sit here and be like, how could you do that, you know? But we try to educate people and help them understand why it's potentially problematic in the longterm. I don't think it's bad to take it every once in a while, especially if you're having maybe a string of really bad sleep nights, but it's just the every single night or multiple

nights per week where it does become problematic. So it is my job to help you better understand what the long-term effects are and help you understand some better options. You know what too, we speaking of the brain, right? So I think I have hypothalamus issues. Is that what it's called? Is that what regulates your, is that the brain function? Look, I don't even know. We're talking about the brain now. Doesn't that regulate your heat or whatever? Yeah. Yeah. Your hypothalamus is kind of like the internal control system. So it's like the regulatory system that regulates a lot of things. It regulates your body temperature. It regulates different cycles and things like that. Yeah. I'm always a hundred

degrees, right? Like standing up like this, I'm always a hundred degrees. Lay me down. Now I'm 286 degrees. What it is about laying down that I feel like my blood is boiling. Like, is that a sleep issue? Like, could that be cured? Some people are just really hot sleepers and it has to do a lot with your brain and how it regulates your internal temperature, but also your environment. So depending on your bedding and the type of mattresses, mattresses really retain a lot of heat. And then if you think about it overnight, all of your body heat is going into that mattress and it's just collecting there.

So when you're in your bed, the internal temperature of your bed and your body under the covers can be so much higher than the ambient temperature in your bedroom, which can make it really, really hard to stay cool. And we know that your body actually has to be cooler to maintain sleep. So before you can even fall asleep, your core temperature has to drop by one degree. And if your core temperature can't do that because you're sleeping in a hot environment, or you have really heavy bedding, then it's going to be even worse for your insomnia. You know, I saw I have a fan and my fan has come between me and a lot of relationships,

but because people just be cold and I'm always hot and that fan is my baby. You remember me forever. I do, but I did. So like I did go out and get a cooling bed, like a cooling mattress. I do have a cooling mattress. And then I just bought like this super turbo fan thing. And so we have central air, but now I'm considering getting like a window AC unit to put in my window because I'm like, still one of my biggest issues is the heat. And it's so funny. Like I'd never like, that will make so much sense. Like I need to just get off Ambien and find a way to stay cold because it is true when I'm cool, I sleep fine. But when I'm hot, which is all the time, I don't get no sleep. I'd be like, bro, like a cool blanket or something. I know they got, I get like satin sheets, just whatever the coolest sheets going to be like, I spent $8,000 on a pair of sheets because it was going to keep me cool, you know? But yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe that's your issue. Maybe you're just overheating and it's causing you all these sleep issues. There's so much cool, pardon the pun, there's so much cool cooling technology out there now. I mean, there's temperatures that are essentially,

they have air conditioning systems in them. There's mattress pads. Now there's pajamas that you can get. So, I mean, it does exist out there. It is kind of expensive, a lot of it anyway, but yeah, but, but we find that the perfect temperature to sleep at is about 66 to 70 degrees. You're probably going to be on the low end. So you're probably going to be about, yeah, but you will sleep like a baby if your body is cool enough, because it's kind of like hibernating a little bit. Cause unfortunately we still not in spring where we live. Like it was 29 degrees this morning, but I think it was like 14 degrees the other night and my windows were open and it was like cold and it was like i told you it was the best sleep ever i woke

up i was like oh my god i missed the whole day i was like what the like i just knew i didn't go to work and i knew i was gonna have a thousand missed calls it was just the greatest sleep ever so that's the thing okay i took a lot of for foro this time, it was a lot of pill forms. And then I did a clinical study, which was also pills. Right. So it was just a lot of pills. So now that like, I'm off of them, I want to get off of all of them. So I want to get rid of my Ambien. And then, you know, I have like a fast heart and it's like, oh, I know I need to take this, the beta blocker, but I don't know how to slow my heart down because of course I'm racing and my mind won't stop thinking. Dr. Chelsea, you done signed up for it when you came to this episode.

I'm making this about me because it's my show. Okay. So let me ask you this. So have you ever tried any kind of like relaxation techniques while you're in bed before you go to sleep, like meditation or deep breathing exercises or anything like that? So I try meditation, but then I'm meditating on how I'm going to decorate my meditation room. So that didn't work. And then I did. I have tried breathing. But once again, it's like I still can't quiet my mind. You know, it's either I'm doing 50 things at the same time or nothing. I don't know how to do the in-between thing. So it's like I try breathing, but then I'm thinking too much about whether I'm taking in enough air when they say go in and whether I'm letting enough out.

And yeah, it's so. I mean, these techniques are skills that you have to learn over time. So it is tough. I can empathize with you because it, you know, when you first start out doing it, your mind naturally wants to wander and think about other things. So it can take people months of practice before they get it down. It is super helpful for issues like yourself where you are having these crazy thoughts. And if your mind is constantly racing, and even if it's racing about things that aren't stressful or not that important,

the brain activity cannot slow down enough for you actually to step in transition into sleep. So your brain has to go through this kind of like brainwave slowdown process. And if your thoughts are going a million miles an hour, that slowdown process never happens. So it's really hard to make that transition. Other things that we do recommend is if you are sitting there and your brain is just going a million miles an hour and you just cannot fall asleep, just go do something else completely. So I want you to think about trying that. So next time you're in bed and you can't fall asleep and you've been laying there for like 20 minutes and nothing is working, don't feel bad about getting up and going to do something else. Yeah. And you can stay up

for 20 or 30 minutes. And then when you feel a little bit more relaxed and less stressed, get back into sleep and give it another go. I see. And my issue is luckily for me, I'm not troubled by a lot of negative thoughts lately. It's all the positive thoughts. So then I get excited by stuff because then i have ideas and it's like oh wow i could do this and you know i'm always thinking about the podcast and i'm in the middle of writing my second book it is like you know it's all these exciting things and then it's like i want to go build a house so you got to start winding down like an hour i gotta start winding down when i wake up so i got when i wake up start winding down when I wake up. So I got it. When I wake up, start winding down.

You need a long, what we call a pre-sleep routine. So a lot of times we'll prescribe people do a routine that you follow and do the same thing every single night. Usually it's about 30 minutes before bed. But for people who have a lot of sleep issues, we might even recommend that you start that wind down process an entire hour before bed. And you really, you know, if you have a lot of these thoughts, journal, journaling is super helpful, because you can get all of that info out onto paper, and your brain can feel secure and knowing that it's there and that you can read the information that you put down the next morning. And it kind of helps you just let go. And it's, we find that it is super helpful for people. You know, I guess number one, something else

you just taught me. So my insomnia is handled by my primary doctor, you know? So it's like, it just gives, you know, it's like, I never thought, you know, I don't I feel like I don't have sleep apnea. I don't need to sleep, see a sleep specialist, you know, and it's like because my primary doctor handles it or my therapist handles it, you know, but it's like in this I'm learning that maybe I just need to go see a sleep specialist. Like I probably should see someone who specializes in my issue. Yeah. And specifically a behavioral sleep specialist. So sleep, sleep specialists in labs. If you call me bad one more time, it was like, it's going back to your behavior. Think of it, think of it not so much as like a school master, more like a therapist for your

sleep. So they use a lot of the same techniques that you learn in therapy for other issues, mental health issues, stress, work, things like that. But they only apply it towards sleep. So they focus 100% on fixing your sleep, helping you understand all the things that may be disrupting your sleep and teaching you good long-term behavioral changes that are going to improve your sleep for the future. You done changed my life today. You don't understand. You done came up here. Look, if you ain't done nothing else in your life, you done changed my life today. Okay. Look, I bought the research.

Actually, can you recommend one for me too? Since you're going to recommend one for my mama, can I get a recommendation? Yeah. Depending on where you are. I mean, we're a big community, but we're also a very close knit community. So everyone in the sleep medicine world kind of knows everybody else. We see each other at conferences and things like that every year. So yeah, depending where you are in the world, I can probably help you find somebody. Now, we were talking about medication. Is melatonin something that is not healthy to give? So melatonin is a little bit different because it's not a sedative. It's not like a sleeping pill.

It doesn't actually have the effect of knocking you out like these sedative medications do. Melatonin is a natural hormone that our brain creates every single night. And when melatonin is at the highest levels in our brain, it tells the brain that it's time to start the sleep process. So it is a circadian rhythm regulating hormone. And what that means is it regulates our internal biological clock that exists on 24 hours. So when melatonin is very low, we're awake, we're energized, our brain knows that we need to be awake. And when melatonin is very high, we're tired, we're sleepy, our brain knows that we need to be awake. And when melatonin is very high, we're tired, we're sleepy. Our brain knows that it's time to initiate sleep. Some people,

their brain doesn't naturally create enough melatonin, or they have a lot of bad sleep habits where they're not helping their brain create enough melatonin. And they can take a low-dose melatonin supplement about an hour to 30 minutes before they go to bed to kind of kickstart that process. And that's fine. You know, generally speaking, most sleep experts have no issue with a really, really low dose melatonin, like a milligram or two milligrams. The issue is that Americans always tend to take way too much and they always tend to take it incorrectly. So they'll either take it at the wrong time or they'll take it at different times every

single day. And that can actually make your sleep issues worse. And when you're taking a ton of melatonin, it can make you really dependent on it like sleeping pills. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. I think it can be helpful in a lot of situations. Just make sure that you talk to your doctor before you start taking it. Damn, you answered my question because I was about to ask that. I was like,

is that something that a doctor should be telling you to take? And you know what? It's pretty safe. I mean, it's a hormone that's already in our brain. So it's not like we're putting anything foreign into our body. Just make sure that you're not taking more than five milligrams and make sure that you're taking it a good hour before you go to bed and try to take it at the same night every single night. So don't take it one night at 10 and then the next night at 1230 because you're just going to confuse your brain if you start taking it at completely

random times, because you have to remember melatonin is released in the brain at specific times of the day and the night. So you don't want to mess that system up too much. So my, my, I have a daughter that's 20 and she was taken melatonin and she told me that she was end up having like weird dreams as she was taking it. So she actually ended up stop taking it. And she's the one that also has that nausea when she wakes up too fast. That can happen. Yeah.

That's a, that's a weird dream. Yeah. It's a pretty common side effect, especially if you're taking too much. And really, again, it has to do with how these medications and supplements make your brain transition through each sleep stage. People who report that they have really intense, weird dreams usually spend more time in REM sleep than they should be. Or they're waking up typically during REM stage. So they remember all of their dreams because we don't usually remember our dreams unless we wake up immediately after our dreams occur. So very common side effects. Some other common side

effects of melatonin would be like grogginess during the day. Sometimes it can make you feel a little bit weird and sick, but usually it's okay at really low doses. And then you also said that you, damn, I said you hard, sorry. You do like restless sleep syndrome and stuff. So I have restless sleep syndrome. And that's one reason why it's hard for me to fall asleep because I'm constantly moving and it's annoying. And then when I finally fall asleep, eventually fall asleep. But then I get up and it's not because of the restless leg syndrome. It's, I just, it feels like I shouldn't have been sleeping. Restless leg syndrome is an interesting disorder because for a really long time,

people believed it was fake. They didn't, a lot of doctors thought it wasn't actually a medical condition and they thought it was more of like a mental health condition. It was all in people's heads. And it took a really, really long time for the sleep medicine community to actually add it to our list of sleep disorders. It's not fully understood. We just haven't had enough years of research to fully understand why it occurs. But we do know that it has something to do with the neurotransmitter dopamine in your brain. And for some reason, people who are really prone to restless leg syndrome, the dopamine is acting inappropriately. So dopamine is kind of like our pleasure hormone. It's our motivation or not hormonal transmitter. It's the neurotransmitter that spikes when we do something we enjoy. And it also spikes when we need motivation to do something. But a lot of people

don't know that it also controls our movement and our locomotion. And this includes our muscles and how our muscles react to the brain telling our legs to move and our arms to move. What's happening with people with restless leg syndrome is when you lay down, your brain is telling you, you know, your brain is sending you a signal to move your legs, even though you don't need to move your legs. So that incredibly annoying and sometimes painful urge is because your brain and your dopamine is telling you, we need to send the signal to the muscle to move, even though you don't want your muscles to move. So it becomes this incredible urge. We know that people with restless leg syndrome

have issues with their iron levels a lot of times. So it's often related to anemia. And we also know that it's oftentimes related to other sleep disorders as well. So people with insomnia are more likely to have restless leg syndrome and people with sleep apnea are more likely to have restless leg syndrome. So it's all kind of connected. And there's also certain medications like Benadryl and other sedatives that can also make it a lot worse. So people who are suffering from this disorder, I really recommend getting your iron levels checked. I get infusions. Okay. Iron infusions, but it still hasn't went away so i'm like maybe that's really not the

cause of it sometimes it's so bad where i want to cry and in that case you know there are medications that you can go on for restless leg syndrome that are available now for really severe causes and the reason reason I recommend talking to your doctor about that is because when you have restless leg syndrome, it ultimately gives you insomnia. And when you have insomnia, you're ultimately losing sleep. And being chronically sleep deprived turns all the way back around and it makes your restless leg syndrome worse. So it's a snowball effect. It's perpetuating itself. So going on these medications

can help you reduce your restless legs and that will ultimately reduce the insomnia and ultimately, hopefully, come back, circle all the way back around and make your restless leg syndrome less severe. I guess I'm also learning now that a lot of things cause insomnia. Trauma is one of them, right? Oh yeah. Pretty much anything can cause insomnia. So anything in the brain,

any medication, stress, other medical conditions, you name it. The brain is just so, so, so sensitive when it comes to sleep right how many hormones do we have just a random question i never got to ask anybody is there like a number sorry what was that i didn't quite catch that how many hormones do we have hormones oh hundreds hundreds yeah they they were kind of like a lock and key system so they float around your body and they unlock or they shut down certain processes in your body yeah i know it may be a random question it was so random but i i saw your tiktok video where these two guys were arguing well like one guy was like you only got 12 hormones the other person was like you got hundreds i mean the guy

who said you had 12 he had a good argument and i And I was like, well, damn, do you only got 12? Like it's all these other shit I'd be going through. Not really. I mean, I could, I could say here and name way more than 12, but the thing I always like to remind people is like, there's a lot of things we don't know about yet. So there's hormones that exist that we don't have any awareness of. We'll probably, because you know, and so is it true that you only use 10% of your brain? Oh no, no,

no. Use all of your brain. You don't necessarily use all of your brain at the same time. So every area of your brain does something a little bit different. And some areas of the brain are super coordinated. So they're always in communication. Some areas get quiet when you're doing certain things. Some areas get activated when you're doing certain things, but there's not a single area of the brain that we don't use. So it's a, it's, I'm not even sure where that myth came from, but I'm glad I asked too. Cause it was a myth that I thought was true because I feel like there's so much about the brain people don't know, you know, that theres different areas of the brain from one another.

So it will keep your brain from communicating with itself. So it's not necessarily putting us to sleep, but it's just kind of putting a block between like the hypothalamus from talking to the cortex and talking to the amygdala and things like that. So I just find anesthesia to be very fascinating. It's kind of sleep adjacent, but not really. I was put under anesthesia one time, and I don't think I'll ever do it again. As I was being put under, I had so many thoughts. They were going through. It was like if I was dying and then like, they're the only things I can remember and then waking up. Anesthesia's it's, it's troubling because it's, it's a weird thing to lose part of your life

for an hour or two. You know, it's not like sleep. Sleep, our brain is actually very active. It's still, you know, doing a lot of things, you know, especially during REM sleep, your brain looks like it's still awake because it's so active. Whereas anesthesia, your brain is basically completely shut down. So you're essentially losing hours of your life. And I think that can be really scary when you're coming out, especially. I don't sleep so much that they can't even keep me asleep on anesthesia. I had an endoscopy done once and I woke up in the middle of it and bit through all the fiber optic cables. It was crazy.

And it's like every time I had to been put under anesthesia, which was a couple of times, I've always woken up in like the middle or the end. I don't know. They always had to like put me back or give him more or he's waking up. Like, you know, like that's so scary. Yeah. You might have a gene known genetic mutations that get passed on that can cause that issue where the anesthesia just doesn't really bind very well to its receptor because you have a variation in the genes. So definitely make sure if you have future surgeries, if you ever have to go under, make sure your anesthesiologist knows. I do. Good. They know.

And now they're always looking at me like, is that something? Times more. I've had, I've been put on the three times. But after the first time when I first had it and I bit through, first of all,

they was mad because I probably broke their million dollar equipment. But that's how awake I was that I was able to bite through it. And yeah, it was pretty crazy. But yeah,

I don't want to have that gene though. Can I just get that gene up? Can I just pass it along? Because I think that's what's keeping my ass awake. Now, what do you say when even though you're having problems sleeping, but then you're always tired as you always want to lay down and not be so motivated? Again, my 20 year old, she has the same sleeping problem, but when she comes home from, she's in college and when she comes home, all she does is lay down

and she's always seeing how tired she is, but she can't get to sleep. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's a, it's a tough thing because normally the drive when you're sleep deprived, your brain is going to drive you to sleep as much as possible. We see something called a rebound effect. And we kind of spoke about this earlier where you'll go so many days where you're not able to sleep. And then your brain basically just has to force you to sleep for an abnormally long time to recover from that. And then it starts the cycle all over again. Sleep really does affect motivation because it affects your focus and tension. It affects your memory. It really affects your mood. So it affects the area of your brain called the

amygdala, which is responsible for regulating your mood. And it's also the area of your brain that responds to stress. And we also know that people who are chronically sleep deprived are more prone to depression, which depression completely kills any motivation or any energy you have, not just mentally, but also very physically as well. So it's really hard to find that motivation to do your homework or your work. So what we would really focus on is first getting a full assessment for her to make sure that we know exactly what is going on with her sleep. Is it just insomnia? Is it something else? There's over 80 sleep disorders and a lot of them look very similar. So we absolutely have to make sure that we know exactly what is

going on before we make any attempts to treat the person with the sleep issues. And then we can kind of go from there. And it would really focus on adjusting behavioral issues, getting them on an appropriate sleep schedule, helping them better understand how their lifestyle and behavior actually affects their ability to sleep at night. And then, you know, trying to instill those changes in the long term. Now, I'm going to say, Dr. Chelsea, you crushed me a little bit, right? You gave me all the hope in the world and then you took it back when you said there's over 80 sleep disorders and they all look alike.

And I'm like, you know what? Everything I got is going to look like everything else. Well, some are a lot more common than others. So, I mean, there are some that are so exceedingly rare that I will never see them in my lifetime. And then there are some that are super common. So insomnia is the most common, closely followed by sleep apnea, which affects 11% of women, probably more than that. And 20 to 26% of men, again, probably more than that. But that's the best estimate we have now. And like we were talking before, some sleep disorders can cause other sleep disorders

to develop. So we also see a lot of overlapping issues as well. Restless leg syndrome, super common. Narcolepsy is pretty common. And we're also seeing it more in children as well. And then it's, you know, we all know that mental health can cause sleep issues and vice versa, right? Sleep issues cause mental health issues. Do you refer people to therapists and to other treatments if necessary? Yeah. So the unfortunate thing about a lot of mental health issues is they almost all have a sleep component. So if you have a mental health disorder, you are naturally

predisposed to things like insomnia or sometimes people even oversleep. So a lot of people with depression sleep too much. The other issue is that a lot of the medications that you go on for these mental health disorders can also cause problems with your sleep. Sometimes they can improve sleep. Other times they can make your sleep a lot worse. Now, when you have a mental health issue, and you're not sleeping very well, that sleep deprivation over time compounds and it can actually make the symptoms of your mental health issue much worse too. Because sleep affects the areas of the brain that control things like your neurotransmitter release, how you deal with stress, and your emotional regulation as well. So it is a compounding snowball issue where it, you know, if, if you have a mental health issue and you're not sleeping well, it's both are becoming worse over time because they feed into one another. Now, is it recommended that you see two specialists, someone for your

mental health and then someone for your sleep? Yeah. Oftentimes if you have chronic insomnia and you have depression, anxiety, any number of those mental health issues, hopefully your therapist or your psychiatrist is also recommending that you see a sleep health professional as well to deal with that. Mine's dead. Shame on you. You're prescribing me Ambien and I might not even need it. I think we, unfortunately, our medical system isn't amazing at talking to one another. So I think we have an issue with collaboration in medicine where it's very segmented where, you know, your therapist will exist in that world and then the sleep specialist will exist in their world and they don't really overlap or talk to each other. I think it is becoming a little bit more common,

but it's definitely something that's lacking in our system for sure. It's funny. It sounds like you just described society. It's in the medical world, but it's in life too. We just started talking to each other. We're definitely starting to see movement in that direction. But like anything else, it's super slow. You know, it's going to take some time. Now, before we end things, and sorry we went over. She was like, they came late and then they're going to take more of my time.

No, no worries. Is there anything that you wanted to share with our audience that you didn't get to share because we made you our personal doctor for a second? Yeah. So, you know, there's a ton of really great resources online if you have any questions about sleep or if you'd like to learn more of anything we discussed. So the American Academy of Sleep Medicine oversees all sleep medicine and sleep science in America. And then there's other similar academies in other countries. So go on their website and all you have to do is a quick search, insomnia, sleep apnea, sleep hygiene, whatever topic you're interested in. And there's just a wealth of information. You can also reach out to me at any time. My company is called Wesper.

That's W-E-S-P-E-R. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions at all. I'm more than happy to help. Like you said that, you know, we are a top rated podcast, right? They're going to come to you. I'm sending them your way. I'm going to send you an email. I need to know. But I had a question and I forgot it. That's what I get for being silly. I had like a really good question and it's gone. If I remember it, I'm going to email it to you, right? Because it was important. It is gone. See, there go my mind. That's because I mixed that night quill and that dacronamide.

That's what I get. The trick is you have to stop thinking about what you forgot. That's where your brain goes haywire and it can't remember. So you just kind of let it go. And then it will come to you randomly when you're doing dishes or something. If you got a trick to stop thinking, I need to know what it is. You know, I am going to try things. Okay, so you taught me a lot today, right?

But you also taught me that I feel like I give up too easily because you're right. You know, like meditation, you know, I was annoyed with myself because I was like, I'm over here meditating about like, Oh, it'd be real cute if I got this meditation room. And then I gave up on it. And then it was like, I even tried guided meditation. Right. And then I'm like, I wonder what his name is. Did he say his name was Frank? It's baby steps, right? It's like any other behavior. It takes a month, sometimes longer to get it to stick. So you just have to keep with it. Okay. I remember what my question was. There you go. There you go. You good. Okay. Everybody reach out to dr chelsea you know save me and she was like come on for you forget your question but no so there are always people in this world that don't think they have a problem right or they don't recognize the problem or they have bigger problems and they don't see these problems what would would you say to get somebody, like you did to me, thinking about like, I need to contact a sleep specialist. Like, what would you say to people

to help them understand that sleep might be a big part of their issue? So sleep, let's think about it this way. Okay. We spend a third of our life sleeping, right? It's a long time to dedicate to something. Obviously, it is crucial. Otherwise, we wouldn't have to have our head on a pillow for eight hours. We know that in the long term, the longer you neglect your sleep and the longer your sleep issues are, the higher your risks are for various chronic health conditions. So there's a big correlation with chronic sleep issues to cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia, Alzheimer's disease. More recently, we figured out that there's a big component with cancer as well, and also mental

health as we kind of touched on earlier. So you have to look at sleep as a part of your wellness routine. It's just as important as eating healthy and exercise. If you don't prioritize sleep, all of the other good things you do for yourself are not really going to matter all that much because you're not allowing your body to recover and repair itself every single night. So making sleep a priority and making those lifestyle adjustments to ensure that you get good sleep, or if you're somebody who has chronic sleep issues and you've tried everything and nothing is working, reaching out to a doctor or a sleep specialist is absolutely crucial. And I realize it's really, really hard because again, we live in a crazy society. We have so much going on with our lives. It's really, really hard to see the big picture and make sleep priority, but you will be so much better off for it.

See, it was a good, it was a good forget. It was important for me to remember, but thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for being our personal doctor for an hour. That's why this show exists, right? It's like I was tired of paying my $80 copay. That's all I said. Get the podcast and invite people on and talk about me. But I do want to say one message to all the people that tell me,

I'll sleep when I die. You're going to not sleep and die before you want to. Right, Dr. Chelsea? You better get that sleep and forget that saying. Yeah. Do yourself a favor. And you don't expect your sleep to improve overnight. It takes time to make any big adjustments in your life. So baby steps, you know, do try changing one thing at once, making small little adjustments. And then in the long term, hopefully you'll build enough behaviors and changes that you'll see a real long lasting effect. Well, thank you so much for your time. Of course, we're going to list your contact information below.

Since you said we could reach out to you. I'm going to let everybody know what it is. And then also the organizations you talked about. Thank you so much for coming on. Crystal, any last minute words? You were amazing. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much.

This is like, I learned some things too. She was like, Michael, shut up. I got some questions too this time. Yeah, no, I'm happy. It's my absolute passion to educate people about sleep and just help people understand about, you know, what sleep does and why it's so important. Right. And it's crazy. We're on season three and this is our first time having a sleep specialist.

I don't think we ever have. Yeah, we haven't had one. So that's amazing too. But it gave me a lot to consider. I'm definitely going to email you. I need some recommendations. Please do. Please do.

Shout out to Dr. Chelsea. And then hopefully I'm going to have you back on and tell you, I sleep, girl. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Let me know how it goes for sure. I definitely. All right, guys.

Until next week, peace, love, and blessings. Bye. Bye. And with that, we're wrapping up another episode of the Fucking Feelings Podcast. Thank you all for tuning in and engaging in another intense, and perspectives to help you handle those fucking feelings. So set a reminder on your calendar, grab your headphones, and join us every week. And if you're interested in exploring more ways to deal with life's stresses, make certain to tune in to our sister podcast. Trauma is expensive. Dive deep into discussions on managing trauma, building resilience, and fostering healing

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that discussing feelings is never a sign of weakness, but a display of courage. Stay brave, stay strong, and keep feeling those fucking feelings. Until next week, take care and keep the conversation going.