By Debbie Gardner
dgardner@thereminder.com
Sleep. It’s something we all crave, and fear when it’s illusive.
It’s also a topic that’s made headlines on everything from its impact on how children learn to the way it can affect aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
This past spring, Stanford University’s Healthy Aging 50+: The Science of Healthy Living seminar hosted a segment on the new frontiers of sleep. Prime was there as a virtual participant while a trio of experts in the field sorted through the facts we know and the recent hype.
Why you need sleep
It’s no wonder there’s so much attention paid to sleep – or the lack of it. According to information on the website of the National Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases and Stroke, sleep is “as essential to survival as food and water.” (https://tinyurl.com/43ue4j5p).
Without proper, quality sleep, the website stresses, “you can’t form or maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn and create new memories, and it’s harder to concentrate and respond quickly.”
Sleep, the Institute notes, is crucial to brain function, including how nerve cells communicate with each other. It also performs a housekeeping function for the body, helping to clear away the toxins that accumulate during the day. And though we know sleep affects every part of the body from the heart and lungs to mood, metabolism and disease resistance, according to the Institute “it’s biological purpose remains a mystery.”
The experts weigh in
“We’re learning new things [about sleep] every day,” Jamie Zeitzer, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science (sleep medicine) at Stanford University, told seminar attendees. He added that a lot of the recent studies on sleep have been using “scare tactics to get [people] to get more sleep.”
Fellow panelist Cheri Mah, an adjunct Stanford lecturer with a focus on the effects of sleep on elite athletes, said part of this stems from the newness of the research into the importance of sleep. “The public has only become aware of sleep over the past five or 10 years,” Mah noted, adding that the study of sleep is truly in its infancy, being “only 50 or 60 years old” as opposed to research into nutrition and movement.
Wearables are another new tool that are upping interest – and the hype – about sleep, said Christine Walsh, associate professor of research at the University of Southern California at San Francisco Aging Center. “Watches and Fitbits gamify sleep,” Walsh observed. “You didn’t sleep well last night, let’s get you better sleep tonight.”
And they also lead to sleep anxiety, according to Zeitzer. “Wearables track you sleep stages, but they can be totally inaccurate,” he said.
Are you sleep anxious?
A bad night’s sleep can send anyone into a tizzy. That’s especially true now that there’s so much attention being paid to the importance of sleep and how much sleep we all should be getting.
“The best way to improve sleep is not to think about it,” Zeitzer shared. “Getting four hours of sleep is not good [but] becoming too aware of it, it crosses over into a self-fulfilling prophecy and you get bad sleep.”
Walsh said studies that question whether poor sleep contributes to cognitive decline just exacerbate sleep anxiety for some people.
“The thought is that some proteins associated with neurodegenerative decline may be associated with sleep loss, but we don’t know,” Walsh said.” We’re beginning to think there may be signals within our sleep patterns or sleep disorders [like sleep apnea] that may suggest you are more likely to develop a neurodegenerative disease, but it doesn’t mean the sleep issue is causing neurodegenerative disease.”
Zeitzer said handling sleep anxiety and sleep disruptions comes down to mindset.
“If you wake up for an hour between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. it’s not great, but if you are still getting enough [total] sleep, there’s nothing pathological about it until you begin to worry about it,” he said. ”When you wake up and it makes you anxious, when you go to sleep and it makes you anxious … what is worse than getting an insufficient amount of sleep is getting an insufficient amount of sleep and worrying about it.”
However, there are times when it’s prudent to address poor sleep, according to Mah.
“You are going to have a poor night’s sleep here and there and that’s OK, you are going to be able to get things done. But if it happens over several nights or weeks, that is the time to have a conversation with your primary care doctor or a sleep physician,” Mah said.
And, Zeitzer said, know yourself. “If you only sleep four hours a night, what happens on the weekend or a day off … do you still sleep four hours? [If so] than you are at that end of the [sleep duration] spectrum,” he said.
Tips for getting those ZZZs
All three experts concurred that good sleep hygiene can help improve the quality and quantity of sleep at any age.
Walsh said that for many people, meditation can help calm the mind and promote better sleep.
Medications, Walsh said, can also affect sleep and contribute to sleep disturbances. She said that in some cases the timing of medications can interfere with a good night’s sleep, and adjusting when medications are taken can help solve some sleep disturbances.
Putting electronic devices such as a cell phone out of reach while in bed – “It’s not ideal to blast yourself with blue light before sleep” – Mah said, is another way to improve sleep quantity and quality. In addition, Walsh said avoiding late-night news programs and getting sufficient bright light early in the day are additional sleep-promoting habits. Walsh added not to discount naps as a way to lessen sleep debts, as long as they occur early enough in the day to not disrupt nighttime sleep.
Mah, who specializes in helping elite athletes improve their sleep habits, also suggested breaking down sleep gains into small, achievable goals.
“Have a goal of duration, have a goal for quality of sleep and have a goal in terms of the timing of sleep,” Mah said. “It’s all about small changes, even if its five minutes to start a wind-down routine.
“If you start to see benefits or success, you might be willing to do 10 minutes,” Mah continued, “It’s all about the small changes over time that will help you to stay in terms of having good sleep practices and approaches.”
