Sleep Deficit

I have a book called Smart Medicine for Healthier Living, and one section of the book talks about how to determine if you are suffering from a “sleep deficit”. When I read it, I couldn’t help but think that most of us are suffering from a sleep deficit based on the criteria presented. The book said that quality of sleep is something to pay attention to, and if you are experiencing any of the following, you may have a sleep deficit:

• Healthy sleepers generally take about 20 minutes to fall asleep. If you are not getting enough sleep, you may fall asleep in 5 minutes or less.

• If you wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night or toss and turn, you may have a sleep deficit. If the alarm clock jars you awake, you are not getting enough sleep. You should awaken naturally without an alarm clock, and feel well-rested upon awakening (if any of you actually wake up at the proper time each morning without an alarm clock, please e-mail me your secrets!).

• If you find yourself nodding off during the day, you may have a sleep deficit. People who are getting enough sleep will feel alert, rested, and will find it almost impossible to nap during daylight hours.

Anyone else just self-diagnose a sleep deficit?! I guess the lesson is that we ALL need more sleep, and it should be a constant priority in our lives.

In addition to melatonin and magnesium, valerian root extract can be helpful for those who don’t sleep very well. Valerian root is a mood-balancing herb that acts as a sedative. It calms the nervous system when someone is stressed or anxious, and studies have shown that it can be just as powerful as prescription drugs used for insomnia. A proper dose would be about 300-500mg taken 1 hour before bedtime.

That wraps up sleep week – hope you guys learned something and will make the effort to get a touch more sleep at night! It’s so important for long-term health and overall well-being, and will make you much happier on a day-to-day basis.

Melatonin

Yesterday I talked about the importance of sleep, some common causes of insomnia, and a few nutrients that can benefit those who are having trouble sleeping through the night. Today I want to focus on a hormone that is critical for proper sleep: melatonin.

Melatonin is a hormone that is produced by our pineal gland, located in the brain. Although many don’t think of it as one, melatonin is actually an extremely powerful antioxidant – more so than vitamin C, vitamin E or beta carotene. It has the ability to prevent oxidation reactions, which can eventually lead to health issues such as heart disease, cancer, and more. Melatonin also stimulates the immune system; helps with production of estrogen, testosterone, and other hormones; supports reproductive health; and can even slow the growth of existing cancers.

The most commonly understood role of melatonin, however, is to regulate sleep. It is secreted in response to darkness at the end of each day, and these hormones are what help slow our bodies down before bedtime. When daylight hits our retina as the sun comes up in the morning, neural impulses cause melatonin production to slow and we naturally begin to feel more awake. While lightness and darkness both play extremely important roles in melatonin production, there are other things that influence it as well:

• Eating regular meals helps keep your body in sync with the rhythms of the day. A fairly regular routine, including time of day meals are eaten, will strengthen melatonin production.

• At nighttime, as melatonin production begins, digestion slows. Eating a lighter meal at night and waiting a couple of hours between dinner and bedtime can help with proper melatonin production. If you happen to eat a large meal right before bedtime, melatonin production will actually slow or stop the digestion process, causing digestive discomfort and difficulty sleeping.

• Avoiding stimulants such as coffee, soda, and other energy drinks will help support and protect your melatonin production process.

• Late night exercise or other forms of intense activity can actually delay melatonin production at night. The best time to exercise for those who have insomnia is in the morning light.

Supplementation with melatonin can be very helpful for those who are not producing enough on their own. There are many reasons someone may not be producing enough melatonin, including poor diet, blood sugar issues or hormonal imbalance. Melatonin supplements can be taken by both adults and children who suffer from insomnia, and there are very few side effects. They are also used to ease PMS symptoms, boost immunity, prevent memory loss, and support those who have heart disease, cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. Supplements should be taken within 2 hours of bedtime, and should sustain you throughout the night without making you feel groggy in the morning. If you do feel groggy, you are taking too much and should reduce your dosage.

Note: Although there are not necessarily toxic levels of melatonin, some people should talk to their doctor before taking it. Pregnant or nursing women should avoid taking melatonin, as well as those trying to conceive, as it is known to act as a contraceptive. People with severe allergies, autoimmune disease, lymphoma, or leukemia should also avoid taking melatonin. Finally, melatonin supplements can suppress your natural production of melatonin, so if you do not have difficulty sleeping I don’t recommend taking melatonin supplements or it will throw your natural rhythms off.

The Value of Sleep

Most of us love doing it but don’t get enough of it. Although much about sleep is still a mystery to us, one thing is certain: we need it. Lots of it. And if you don’t look like this girl every night – sleeping peacefully, calmly and effortlessly – then you may benefit from a little nutritional advice when it comes to sleep.

Things like impaired sleep, altered sleep patterns and sleep deprivation can significantly hurt mental and physical function, both in the short-term and the long-term. One statistic I read says that about 1/3 of all Americans experience insomnia on a regular basis, with about 10 million people using prescription drugs to help them fall asleep (Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, Murray & Pizzorno). That’s shocking! Or, maybe not...

The most common causes of insomnia are depression, anxiety, grief and tension. However, there are also compounds in certain foods, drinks and prescription drugs that can interfere with sleep. Usually, it’s a combination of psychological factors and something in the person’s diet that cause the insomnia.

A lack of calcium and magnesium can really affect sleep. It may not prevent someone from falling asleep, however it can cause them to wake up after a few hours and have trouble falling back to sleep. Calcium has a calming effect, and magnesium helps relax the muscles. The magnesium helps calcium become absorbed, and when taken together they can improve sleep for some people.

There are some other evening habits that can improve sleep for many. Eating right before bed is not good. As I’ve mentioned before, your body doesn’t love multi-tasking. So, when you eat right before bed you are asking your body to make a decision: digest, or sleep? If it chooses to digest, your sleep will be restless. If it chooses to sleep, you may wake up a few hours later with an upset stomach. So, allow yourself about 2 hours after dinner to digest your food before you jump into bed.

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid, meaning it cannot be created by our bodies and must be obtained from food. It’s a precursor to serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter that converts to melatonin, which helps us sleep. I’ll talk more about melatonin tomorrow, but the point here is that we all need to include foods containing tryptophan in our diet on a regular basis. Foods high in tryptophan include oats, dates, bananas, figs, nut butter, tuna, turkey, whole grains, yogurt, eggs, fish, chickpeas, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds. Oh, and let’s not forget chocolate! (But, unfortunately, chocolate also contains caffeine, which can impair sleep…).

Over the next couple of days I’ll talk more about the things that can help you obtain better quality sleep. It’s so important, and sometimes really small changes can make a huge difference.

Eating Before Bed & Your Digestion

Some of you are nurses and work long days, get home late, and are starving. Others are night students and after a full day of work and class, you need to eat something before bed. Maybe you just tend to work straight through dinner and eat something when you get home late at night. We’ve all found ourselves in this situation at one time or another. So what should you do? Eat then sleep? Will it affect your digestion? Will it affect your sleep? Which foods are best?

When you sleep, your entire body is resting. If you try to sleep on a full stomach, your body becomes confused. What should it do? Digest, or sleep? It’s tough to do both at once, and going to bed immediately after eating will likely cause interruptions in both digestion and sleep. Remember when I talked about the fight or flight response? Well, it applies here. Your entire body focuses on one thing at once, sometimes at the expense of others. If your body is focusing on digestion, your sleep will be less than perfect, and vice versa.

I know from personal experience that if I eat a big dinner right before bed, I always wake up a few hours later. Sometimes I wake up thirsty and have to chug two glasses of water – a sign that my dinner was too high in sodium (this happens mostly when I have eaten out rather than at home). Other times I just feel like I have a big lump sitting in my stomach. It helps if I get up and walk around a bit to get the digestion moving again, but I hate to do this at the expense of my sleep.

One key component of digestion is excretion of anything that is not absorbed and utilized by the body. Therefore, expect to be woken up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom if you eat right before bed. If you don’t get up to go to the bathroom, you may still feel full or bloated in the morning. Breakfast may not be the most appealing idea, and skipping breakfast can lead to nutrient imbalances throughout the entire day. This is a pattern we should all try to avoid, because it creates a body out of balance and weakens immunity.

If you must eat something before bed, try to avoid sugars and other carbohydrates, including grains, ice cream, processed foods and alcohol. These will spike your blood sugar, which makes it difficult to relax, unwind and fall asleep. This can then lead to dramatic drops in blood sugar, and you may even wake up a few hours later feeling hungry or out of balance again. Alcohol in particular inhibits your body from entering the deepest stages of sleep.

Instead, eat something that is easily digested and won’t mess with your blood sugar, such as veggies dipped in hummus, a small bowl of soup, or some nuts and seeds. Sliced apples dipped in a nut butter would be a good snack, as would a few pieces of cheese or some brown rice with cooked vegetables. Avoid foods that tend to make you feel bloated or gassy (common ones could be anything containing dairy or gluten). Also, chew slowly and thoroughly, because the enzymes in our mouth are the first step in proper digestion. When food enters the stomach not fully chewed, our stomach must work harder to break it down and indigestion can occur.

I recommend bringing a snack to work or school with you. This will help you avoid the situation of coming home and being both exhausted and starving. Even if you just keep some snacks in your car, eating on your drive home is better than eating right before you get into bed. I do not recommend stopping at a drive through or a gas station to get food on your drive home… but things like dried fruit, nuts or snack bars are easy to keep in your car (all-natural snack bars with minimal ingredients are best, as some of the more processed bars contain unhealthy sugars and oils). Just keep a soft cooler in the back seat and reload it each week. Be sure to keep some waters in your car too.

If you are able to eat several hours before bed, be sure to include some protein in that snack or meal. The tryptophan in protein breaks down into serotonin, which makes us feel calm, relaxed and in control. When we don’t get enough tryptophan in our diet, serotonin levels drop and this leads to depression, anxiety, insecurity, hyperactivity, insomnia and pain. Naturals sources of tryptophan include bananas, leafy greens, meat, pineapple, avocado, eggs, sesame and pumpkin seeds and lentils. Tryptophan is also a precursor to melatonin, which is stimulated by darkness and regulates our sleep cycles by causing drowsiness. Some people even take natural melatonin supplements to help them sleep at night.

The bottom line: If at all possible, bring some healthy snacks to work or school and try to eat a few hours before bedtime. If this isn’t possible, eat a small, healthy snack that is low in sugar and carbohydrates right before bed. Plan on having a large, healthy breakfast first thing in the morning to help replenish your body with nutrients and energize you for the day. Good luck!