YOUR MINI RESOLUTIONSLEEP BETTER • WEEK 6

View this post with graphics in your browser

Good morning and welcome to the FINAL week of our SLEEP BETTER mini resolution!
 
We hope you’re still trying one of our curated sleep tips each week and tracking the hours spent in bed each night.
 
We couldn’t conclude this mini resolution without addressing trends and miscellaneous tidbits of interesting information surrounding sleep.
 
Today, we’re talking about short sleep genes, sleeping pills and coffee naps!




CCP helps you stay on track!
 
Use our log to to track your progress toward our mini resolution. This month, we encourage you to try one sleep tip per week. Log which tip you selected and the result(s) you experienced.
 
For questions or assistance, email your Motivated Mondays Coach Michele McCambridge:
 
[email protected]

But first… to recap our Sleep Better Mini Resolution:
 
We reviewed the critical nature of sleep to brain health as it relates to preventing cognitive decline and staving off neurodegenerative disease.
 
We addressed these multi-layered concepts: the need to fall asleep with relative ease, defined as sleep latency, which is influenced by sleep pressure (the importance of staying asleep for most of the night) to complete sleep cycles within our sleep architecture (defined as sleep quality). Both prior points influence sleep efficiency (time in bed vs. time spent sleeping) to avoid sleep debt (the difference between hours of sleep needed and hours slept).
 
We did a deep dive on the Circadian Rhythm (CR)—the body’s biological clock overseeing sleep, behavior, hormone levels, body temperature, digestion and metabolism. The primary driver of the CR is exposure to the right light at the right times and can be supported by eating within a time restricted window of daylight hours.
 
To achieve all the above, we provided a list of tips and suggested trying at least one a week to determine if it might influence your sleep quality.

Now onto sleep trends and tidbits…

Short Sleep Genes
 
Can you imagine sleeping only 4-6 hours a night and waking up feeling refreshed, without suffering the negative physiological consequences of sleep debt? It is estimated that only 3% of the human population encodes for one of the known three “short sleep” gene mutations (DEC2, ADRB1 and NPSR1, plus SIK3, which is found only in women).
 
In addition to not requiring sleep to feel refreshed, short sleepers have been found to have Type A personalities—driven, ambitious, positive, outgoing and optimistic

Polyphasic Sleep
 
Historians believe that monophasic sleeping (sleeping in a single block of time) didn’t become the norm until the 17th century. That notion combined with erratic schedules and the need for productivity have led to a trend called polyphasic sleep whereby sleep is broken up into bursts over the course of the day (think single sleep cycles spread out over the course of the day)—much like an infant or animals in the wild.
 
While this trend has many proponents, scientists agree the current research on groups of people who inadvertently follow this style of sleep because of their chosen careers (shift-workers, healthcare workers, emergency responders, etc.) is compelling enough to advise against this style of sleep.

Sleeping Pills
 
Oftentimes when people report difficulty falling asleep, they resort to sleeping pills. However, plainly and simply, sleeping pills are a crutch, allowing the user to mask a deeper physiological or psychological problem as the source of their difficulty falling asleep.
 
Ironically, sleeping pills don’t actually provide people with more or deeper sleep. The net gain in sleep, depending on the brand of sleeping pill, is roughly 20 minutes. In actuality, sleeping pills provide sleep amnesia, where the individual forgets they haven’t slept. Sleeping pills can lead to “parasomnias,” whereby people walk, drive, eat, and do other activities while sleeping—all of which can be very dangerous.
Sleeping pills also interact adversely with a long list of over the counter or prescribed medications.
 
Moreover, reliance on sleeping pills is not without long-term health consequences, such as memory problems, depression, hypertension, hormonal fluctuations and weight gain, just to name a few. You may recall from week one that one study places the risk of developing dementia for sleeping pill users at 80%—so high that sleeping pill use is under consideration as a modifiable risk factor for dementia.
 
Worse yet, sleeping pills generally don’t fix the underlying cause of sleeplessness, and rebound insomnia is usually inevitable.
 
It is a good idea to have a chat with your concierge physician if you are using sleeping pills more than just a few times a year.

Dreams
 
As discussed, we really don’t know why we sleep. We just know we need to catch those Zzz's to stay alive and healthy. Unfortunately, we know even less about why we dream! There are more theories in existence about why we dream than we can count.
 
We wanted to re-share this interesting piece of trivia about dreams: Dreaming occurs during the REM stage of sleep and is also called “paradoxical sleep” because the brain is very active, but the body is essentially paralyzed. Why is that? Probably so you don’t act out your dreams and injure yourself or others!

Alternative Napping
 
Stress/Fear Naps
Most people tend to find sleep difficult when under stress. However, there is a small subset of the population that fall asleep when stressed. Scientists don’t completely understand these “fear naps,” but if this is you, we wanted you to know you are not alone!
 
Coffee Naps
Taking a long road trip? Staying up late to study? Enter the coffee nap! It takes roughly 20 minutes for the caffeine in coffee to kick in and get us going. So, the coffee nap process is to have a cup of coffee, lay down for twenty minutes, and then awaken refreshed and ready to go!

That’s all on our Sleep Better mini resolution for now. We hope you maintain your better sleep practices and continue to get good rest for the long haul! Feel free to contact us with any feedback or for assistance!