How Much Sleep Do We Really Need? How To Sleep Better and Why Sleep Is So Important!

Today Dr. Tom talks about SLEEP!

In this episode Dr. Tom talks about some benefits for good sleep and some strategies that we share with our clients to help them get a better nights sleep. 

Dr. Tom will touch on why it's important to stay on a sleep schedule, how exercise can improve sleep, how blue light glasses can help, and why spending time outside will actually help improve sleep. 

Remember sleep is one of the most impactful points of your health that you can focus on!

Transcript

Tom Padilla: 0:01

Hello and welcome. You're listening to uncut the podcast about how to stay surgery free and live a healthy lifestyle. I'm Dr. Tom Padilla, owner of the doctors of physical therapy. It's a clinic that leads the US and helping adults over 30 to avoid surgery and drugs and live an active, healthy lifestyle. If you're looking for ways to maximize not only the years in your life, but the life in your years, you're in the right place. We are committed to delivering information that will help you live life today, and for many, many years to come. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of uncut My name is Dr. Tom Padilla, your podcast host and today we're talking about a really important health topic. This is a topic that over 70 million Americans have an issue with, if you're not optimized in this thing, you have increased chances of injury, you have poor recovery, you have increased susceptibility to chronic disease to mental illness, and overall decreased quality of life and well being obesity, depression and an increase in pain. What is it, I'm talking about your sleep. In particular, I'm talking about your ability to get into a circadian rhythms. So there are multiple circadian rhythms in our body. And the sleep wake cycle is the one that most people think about when they are referring to circadian rhythm. And that regulates a lot of the systems from our metabolism to the ability to regulate blood sugar and cholesterol. Really, circadian rhythm is kind of the key to being able to have an improved immune function be able to heal when you're healing from an injury, be able to modulate pain, it leads to better cardiovascular health leads to better cognitive function that leads to better ability to learn whether we're talking about learning things cognitively or even motor skills. So if we're talking about like youth athletes and athletes that do not sleep enough, as they're going to practices, they will have a harder time learning motor skills and will fall behind their peers. In your everyday workplace of the adult, you know, you're not retaining information as well, you're not engaged in meetings or at work, and you're just overall experiencing a reduced quality of life due to this. And this is probably one of the number one things that we need to optimize when it comes to recovering from injury and living a long lasting healthy life with solid tissue function where we are not susceptible to injury as we try to increase the amount of stress that our bodies can actually handle. Today we're going to talk about some of the benefits of correct sleep of good sleep. We're going to talk about a few strategies that we recommend to our clients here at the doctors of physical therapy to get a better night's sleep. Overall, we are not sleep experts, we are not licensed in sleep. But we do have simple tips and tricks. If you are experiencing a real sleep disorder, it is important to get help to go to your physician and ask for resources, do a sleep study, ask for resources to help you get a better night's sleep to identify why you can't sleep because this is hands down one of the most impactful points of your health that you could focus on. Alright, so let's get into some of the strategies that you can use to help yourself get on a better sleep schedule. Number One strategy is to during the day, seek out sun. A lot of us go from house to car to office, maybe your office has windows, maybe it doesn't. Back to car back to house and don't spend more than the 30 seconds it takes to get from the car to the office actually in the sun. It is important to have exposure to natural daylight especially early in the day because it helps reinforce the strongest circadian cues. So that light helps you to wake up to be alert and refreshed and that sunlight is what cues your mind and body to stay awake. The second thing is to try to get on a consistent sleep schedule. Go to sleep at the same time every night, wake up at the same time every day. If you're unable to get to sleep at the same time, on one or two nights of the week. You still want to try to wake up at the same time the next day to make sure that you're still maintaining the best rhythm that you can. When you vary your bedtime or morning wakeup time it can really hinder the body's ability to adjust to that stable circadian rhythm. The third thing that you can do is get daily exercise. So intense exercise 75 minutes a week. Moderate intensity exercise 150 minutes a week has really been shown to a increase your ability to sleep, but also be even if you have not had the optimal sleep, it has been shown to allow you to maintain a high level of alertness and awakeness throughout the day despite not having that sleep. So it does enable you to be more engaged and then you can catch up on your sleep the next day. The next thing is avoid caffeine past 2pm. A lot of people don't know this one, caffeine has a half life so that caffeine lasts in your system until if you have it at two, it lasts until 10pm. So it has a half life of about eight hours. If you go to bed around 10, you're still your brain is still going to be awake for one to two hours before you actually start experiencing any sort of progression into RAM, which is the deep sleep where you actually start to heal and repair tissues as well as where you solidify cognitive functions. So if you learn something new that day or you hadn't experienced actually start with solidifying those functions in the brain if you are drinking caffeine past 2pm. And that's one of the reasons that you can't go to bed at the same time every night. That is an important tip. The next thing is to avoid alcohol right before bed, especially wine, a lot of people will drink a glass or two of wine before bed. And that's all well and good. We all understand that the need to relax after after a busy or stressful day. But if you do this on a regular basis, what you may start to notice is you wake up in the middle of the night much more frequently. Oftentimes, this can be related to a blood sugar crash. So you drink the wine before bed, your blood sugar spikes up, and then somewhere around 2am. In the morning, your blood sugar goes down. So you wake up, you're a little bit sweaty, your heart's beating a little bit faster, a little bit hot, those are the signs that you're experiencing a little bit of a sugar crash from the wine, and a lot of people have a lot of trouble getting back to bed after that. The next tip is there's a lot of research around blue light glasses. If you wear glasses, you can order glasses with a blue light tend to special blue light filter that you use in the later hours of the day. And even if you don't wear glasses on a regular basis, you can just get lenses that filter blue light and don't have any sort of magnification in them. What the research has shown is that that blue light keeps your mind awake similar to caffeine for several hours after you have actually stopped engaging in whatever screen time you're engaging in. So it could be the phone, it could be the computer screen, it could be the television, all these forms of electronics give off blue light, which does stimulate your brain to a high level of activity. So you want to limit that because it can interfere with your circadian rhythm. Dim the lights, put down electronic devices leading up to bedtime for a couple hours, or keep electronics out of the bedroom and away from anywhere you sleep so that you're not tempted. Also consider either using a blue light filter on your phone, or just investing in some blue light lenses to enable you to still maybe get some of that screen time but also filter that light out at the same time. The next tip here is to keep naps short. A lot of people like to nap throughout the day or even on your weekends. And when you do nap, all you really need is about 30 minutes. And you can get really refreshed off of that when you start to go past 30 minutes, it can really alter your sleep schedule, because it makes it more difficult for you to get tired, so your bedtime gets pushed back. So it throws your sleep schedule entirely off kilter. So what are the benefits of going through all this effort to get on a good sleep schedule, limit your caffeine past 2pm Stop drinking wine before bed, and making sure that you get to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every day. Well, so there's an improvement in tissue healing. So anytime you have any sort of muscular strain tendon strain, getting good night's sleep can rapidly increase your ability to heal that tissue. If you've got any sort of chronic back pain or hip pain or issues like that going on both the pain can affect your sleep and your sleep affects your pain. So it's a vicious cycle. So finding good sleeping positions that don't irritate your pain so that your pain doesn't wake you up. And then getting on these good sleep habits so that you can actually sleep through the night would be the best approach. It improves your pain modulation. So when you're fatigued and tired and you haven't gotten a good night's sleep, your pain receptors are hyper sensitized. So instead of your body being able to modulate your pain and keep it at a lower, more manageable level, you experience everything at a much higher level. It can improve your cardiovascular health, as well as cognitive function learning and memory. One interesting study that I found actually studied vaccinations like so for the flu vaccine. And they took two groups of people and one of these groups of people, they made them sleep deprived. So for six nights, they limited them to four hours of sleep, and group B got seven and a half to eight hours asleep. And what they found was that the group that got seven and a half to eight hours of sleep had 50% More antibodies that they produced with the vaccine than the than the fatigue group. So it does absolutely have a big impact on your immune function. What we do know on immune function is if you sleep while you eat well and you exercise, these are all the things that would keep you healthy and prevent you from ever being extremely susceptible to any sort of virus or infection of other sorts. So sleep a big part of that triad so you sleep well eat well I exercise you Even with just that, you're going to see a myriad of improvements, lower stress levels, just a ton of benefits. So I can't stress enough that if you have identified through this podcast that you have poor sleep hygiene and that you do not have a great circadian rhythm, that you start taking steps towards some habit building good habit building one step at a time, just get up at the same time every day and start with that for 14 to 28 days. And just get in that habit before moving on to adding another thing because for a lot of people, it does come down to effective building of habits and not feeling overwhelmed by having to do all these things at once. So maybe you just start with limiting your caffeine past 2pm, three to four days a week. And as you start to notice that you feel better on those days, you might feel that sense of accomplishment and have more motivation to actually move on to going without caffeine past 2pm On every day. And then pick up the one more tip at a time. Pick the lowest hanging fruit for you start to get on a regular schedule or get some blue light glasses. Hands down. This is one of the best investments that you can make towards the longevity of your ability to be active and healthy and mobile and continue to live your life every single day to the fullest. So that is all I have for you today. I hope that you took some good actionable solid tips and were able to identify areas in your life that you might be able to improve your sleep to get those benefits that we talked about. If you did enjoy this podcast, please like us subscribe, share it with someone leave us a review so that we can find more people and until next time, get out there and live life today.