The Quest for a Good Night's Rest
Thanks to everyone who listened to the first episode of the Podcast. The first official episode was released this past Monday and reached as high as #64 in the Apple Podcasts Fitness category.
The next episode will be available on Monday, April 1 and will feature a conversation on golf and tennis fitness, an introduction to Pilates, the essentials to a well-stocked pantry and more. The podcast is available on most platforms, including Apple, Spotify Amazon, iHeart and others. Don’t miss it.
Over the past couple of weeks, my sleep quality has been a little off. It started with us moving the clocks forward for daylight savings, which for whatever reason, impacts my sleep cycle for several days. That, coupled with some later than usual activities and travel have also contributed to my sleep woes. It’s not that I’m not sleeping at all, but for a good while, I was falling asleep, staying asleep and waking up feeling energetic and ready to tackle the day. Now, my sleep is inconsistent and on the days when I’ve had a terrible night’s sleep, it impacts my mood and my motivation.
The CDC recommends that adults ages 18 and up should be getting around 7 hours of sleep per night. And in a Joint Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society, they suggest that getting less than 7 hours of sleep a regular basis is associated with adverse health outcomes, including weight gain and obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke, depression, and increased risk of death. Sleeping less than 7 hours per night is also associated with impaired immune function, increased pain, impaired performance, increased errors, and greater risk of accidents.
If you fall into the less than 7 hour category, you are certainly not alone. It is estimated that as many as 1 in 3 adults get less than the recommended amount of sleep every night. It’s not like we’re not trying either. In the United States, Americans spent $65B on sleep aids, which includes everything from pillows and mattresses to sleeping pills and medical devices. And globally, the sleep aid market was valued at over $430B and growing. What’s worse is that sleep is not like exercise where we can at times, will ourselves through a workout. Staring at the clock in the wee hours of the morning while not being able to sleep can be an incredibly frustrating experience. So why do we have so much trouble doing something that should come naturally and perhaps more importantly, what happens to our bodies when we sleep?
Sleep Troubles
I’ve immersed myself (as much as one can who isn’t a doctor or scientist) in learning more about sleep science and the importance of a good night’s rest. I came across Matthew Walker’s Master Class on Sleep, as well as his book titled, “Why We Sleep, and while I found them to be interesting (and would recommend reading or watching either), it’s not like they contain some magic bullet that will suddenly make you fall asleep if you’ve struggled with it. But I do think that having trouble falling asleep can be boiled down to two categories; medical reasons or things we have less control over and environment, or things we do have control over.
One of the better articles that I’ve read recently is this Better Health piece, which among other things, describes several medical conditions that can impact the quality of your sleep. These include:
Obstructive Sleep apnea, nasal congestion or snoring, for example, individuals can stop or limit their breathing during sleep. This can cause a person to wake or interrupt their normal sleep cycle.
Insomnia. Insomnia causes problems in initiating and maintain sleep throughout the night
Restless Leg Syndrome
Bruxism (grinding your teeth).
Chronic pain
Mental health (e.g., anxiety and depressive disorders). These can be highly co-morbid with sleep problems
Nocturia - Waking up multiple times during the night to get out of bed to urinate. This can disrupt normal sleep patterns
Diabetes. Fluctuating blood glucose levels can disrupt sleep
Substance abuse. medication, alcohol, illicit substances and addiction.
While suffering from any of the above conditions is certainly no picnic, there is, at the very least, an identifiable reason for not sleeping, which may be treated with medications, sleep appliances, therapy, and rehabilitation. Again, I am not suggesting that people suffering from a medical condition that is impacting their sleep quality is better off than the person who has no idea why they aren’t sleeping, but it does provide for a path forward.
It’s the things that we can control that I would suggest are the most important in establishing a consistent sleep routine. Just as with exercise and nutrition, the first step in attempting to fix sleep issues is to make it a priority. I mentioned on the podcast last week that I thought that sleep was the glue that pulls everything together. While there is still a lot that isn’t known about what is actually happening during sleep, there is plenty that is known:
The brain stores new information and gets rid of toxic waste.
Nerve cells communicate and reorganize, which supports healthy brain function.
The body repairs cells, restores energy, and releases molecules like hormones and proteins.
For me, prioritizing my sleep meant making some lifestyle changes to help promote better sleep.
Avoiding alcohol and caffeine - while alcohol initially acts as a stimulant, it’s classified as a depressant. It may make you fall asleep faster and even enter deep sleep quicker, but it can disrupt your overall sleep cycle when consumed to excess. Caffeine is a stimulant and should be avoided at least 6 hours prior to going to sleep.
Setting a bedtime routine - I pretty much do the same exact thing every evening. Once I’ve settled from work and dinner, I set my agenda for the following day. This ensures that I’ve emptied the tasks from my head and it tells my body that we are getting ready to go to sleep.
Sleep environment - While I have gotten better at being able to sleep while away from home, there is nothing like sleeping in your own bed. Keeping your room cool and dark is ideal. If you need to fall asleep to a little white noise, a fan will work just fine. It’s important to set up your ideal sleeping environment to give yourself the best possible chance of falling asleep.
Go to bed and wake up at the same time (roughly) every day - My goal each night is to BE ASLEEP by 10PM and to wake up each morning at 5AM. This means that I need to have completed my routine and be in bed no later than 9:30PM each night. And on the weekends, I modify my schedule slightly, so that I am asleep by 11PM and up no later than 6:30AM
Sleep Tracking
The famous management consultant, Peter Drucker, coined the phrase, “what gets managed, gets managed.” While I wouldn’t call sleep tracking a necessity, I do think that it can help provide insights into not just how long you’ve slept, but whether you had high quality sleep. It can also provide insights into whether you should be working out more or less intensely.
I wear an Apple Watch pretty much all day and night (I do need to charge it from time to time, but it’s almost always on my wrist). When I wear my watch at night, the sleep tracker app I use is tracking my heart rate, breathing rate, body temperature and movement during the night. When it’s time to wake up, I get a gentle tap that increases in intensity if I don’t wake up and has the added benefit of not disturbing my wife with a loud, audible alarm. Now I certainly don’t need somebody to tell me that I slept like crap, but when I combine these data points with my exercise, I can actually see fluctuations in the level of intensity of my workouts.
Here’s a great example. Look at my sleep the day before daylight savings compared with my sleep the day after daylight savings.
That’s a pretty significant difference. It also impacted my exercise that day. I will typically start the week with a shorter run (30 minutes), but I tend to run on the faster side (less than 8 minutes per mile). On that Monday, I ran 8:20. My next run that week was on Thursday, when my sleep schedule was stabilizing. My pace was more in line with my expectations as that same 30 minute run was done at a 7:47 clip, more than 30 seconds faster than my earlier run that week.
Sleep tracking also paves the way for reporting a “readiness” score. Now these scores differ from app to app, but the main data point behind your readiness score is heart rate variability, which is typically measured in milliseconds and measures the amount of time between heartbeats. If you’re tracking your sleep, your watch, ring or other device will be able to establish a baseline HRV and report whether your HRV was better or worse than your baseline and will typically provide a score in the form of readiness for exercise and may even suggest what you should be doing on a given day in terms of your workout intensity. Again, I use this as a data point, not a decision making tool, so while some mornings my HRV may be on the lower side, if I feel well-rested, I may proceed with my workout, but perhaps at a slightly lower intensity.
In summary, I’m sure I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know. Sleep, in my opinion, is right up there with exercise and nutrition (along with your mental well-being) as something that is vital to your long-term health. It absolutely needs to be prioritized and can take a lot of effort to get it right. But I can tell you that it’s worth the effort!