As a doctor I often end up
talking to people about sleep; about how important it is, how truly critical it
is to our health, and in talking about it I see how many people have abnormal
sleep patterns. It is one of those
chicken and the egg issues; is it their comorbidities affecting their sleep or
their sleep affecting their comorbidities?
I usually don’t have the answer for that, other than that many people I
see who are struggling with their weight also have
abnormal sleep (ok my friend over at Go Maleo,
I’m just waiting for you to blog about this!).
Anyway, sleep is critical, there is no debating the evidence for that:
if you don’t sleep at all you will die (in the short term) and if you don’t
sleep much you will definitely die sooner than you should (in the long
term). So why, when I am
knowledgeable on this subject do I personally suck at taking my own advice? Probably for whatever the same reason most
people tend to lack insight about some of the things that negatively affect
their life the most (it would take a lot of psychological theory to delve into
this and it is not the point so I’m just going to gloss over the “why” right
now and move on). Anyway, the point is,
I don’t sleep as much as would be healthy.
I’m not the only one you know! Our whole society is burning the candle at
both ends, you can read all about it all over the internet I’m sure! Somehow that makes me feel better, that I’m
not the only one, but in the end I really know better than to fall back on a
group mentality like that. I have read a lot about this and I have gone to
lectures given by doctors who specialize in sleep medicine (that’s right, there
is an ENTIRE FIELD OF MEDICINE DEDICATED TO THE TOPIC) and it is pretty clear
to me that I have probably shaved 5-10 years off my life expectancy by shorting
myself on sleep in a chronic fashion.
That means if I was going to be average and make it to 75 or 80 I’ll now
be lucky to make it to 70. I better get
crackin’ on some of my life goals because 70 is just around the corner!
I could blame my career (damn you medical
school and residency!) but the reality is that I was the kid under the blankets
reading books with a flashlight past my bedtime and then waking up at 5:30 am
for swim practice long before my profession got a hold of me. Recognizing you have a problem is the first
step they say. Personally my next step
is always “data collection.” It’s just
my nature to want to fully analyze the problem before I work on the solution. So 2 months ago I started using an app called
Sleep Cycle.
Sleep
Cycle works by sensing your body movements in your bed at night (you lay your
phone near your head – I don’t even want to think about my increased brain
cancer risk right now so don’t go there!).
If you’re moving a lot it puts you in the “awake” category and if you’re
moving less it puts you in the “sleep” category and if you are completely still
you are in the “deep sleep” category. I
can’t really speak to the validity of the methods of this app because while
body movements are part of your sleep cycle I don’t think this method alone can
really say what sleep state you are in (unless they also make an EEG app and
little electrodes pop out of your phone and attach to your scalp). But in the morning you get a nice little
graph showing you your sleep cycles based on your movements throughout the
night. It ends up that, like most humans,
I have 90 minute sleep cycles, which doesn’t really surprise me. What did surprise me is how little I have
been sleeping!
Now,
you might say, “but you just said you have never slept that much” and yes, I
know that is true, I said that! But when
I actually looked at the hard data that was showing me what time I went to bed
each night, what time I wake up each morning, how much sleep I get total and
what the relative “quality” of that sleep is and then look at a graph of those
numbers (with averages as well) it makes the situation look much more dire.
As a fun side note, it has an option where
you can add notes about your day and then correlate them to your “rating” of
how well you slept. For example you can
click “drank coffee” or “stressful day” and then the next morning it will give
you a frowny face, a “meh” face, or a smiley face so that you can rate your
night of sleep and it will then correlate those factors over time with your
opinion of your sleep quality. Again,
not hard science there, but kind of a fun little correlation tool for personal
use.
Using
that part of the app I have discovered that I feel like I have slept better in
the morning if I have green tea at night before I go to bed. So, let me emphasize, this is CORRELATION not
CAUSATION. I am not saying green tea
helps me sleep, but that somehow the two tend to happen at the same time. If I had to guess I would actually say that
when I have green tea before I go to bed I tend to sit and meditatively drink
my tea and relax at the same time ,which, if we’re looking for causation, seems
more likely to be the underlying cause of the improved sleep quality.
Another
fun little feature of this app is that it has an alarm clock in it that is
supposed to wake you up at the natural point of being “most awake” in your
sleep cycle. You give it a window of
time (I have mine set to 30 minute window) and it notices when you start having
“wakeful” body movements and the alarm goes off at that point, avoiding your
“deep sleep” time. This works great if
you have a somewhat flexible schedule or if you’re ok with potentially waking
up 30 minutes before you really need to be awake. I really like this feature so far although I can't really tell how well it works because I have small children
who are serving as my true alarm clocks.
I do think I have had fewer or those really really groggy awakenings you
sometimes get from an alarm when it wakes you out of a deep sleep by using this app as my alarm clock.
Moving
on. I collected the data. I have numbers. NOW WHAT? If I was sitting down with myself
in my office I would say: make small
changes, set achievable goals. And this is where it gets hard for me, and hard
for everyone who tries to make behavioral changes (because if it was easy we
would have all done it already, right?) the actual change part is so painful! I honestly love sleep and I am fortunate to
be a really good sleeper once I get there, so again, you would think it would
be easy to do more of something you love to do!
But I also like getting shit done, especially with my level of daily
anxiety. I have become accustomed to
having more time in the day to do the things that I feel are important and if I
spend more of that time sleeping, I will have less time. The thought of having less time in the day
may just throw me into a panic attack right at this very moment! I know I need to shift my paradigm; what needs
to be done all comes down to perspective, but again, those big shifts in
thinking are hard and so I’ll try to refocus on the small stuff. My first goal is to try to get at least 7
hours of sleep a night for the next 4 days; small and achievable. I have noticed, through this sleep cycle app,
that on the rare occasion I do get more than 7 hours of sleep, that I tend to
choose the “smiley face” when I wake up.
This is not going to be easy, but more smiley faces has got to mean
something good. I’ll let you know how it
goes!
