5 Minute Facts - Sleep

This is episode 159 of the Empowered Team podcast. Psst. The zenith is coming. The most incredible life changing retreat in Sayulita, Mexico. That's right. The zenith is coming. To learn more, head to www.theempowered.ca zenith. Learn more. It is life Chang. Welcome to the Empowered team podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now, your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider. Beautiful. Okay, welcome everyone, to performance power. We have five minute fun facts today. Say that very quickly. Five minute fun facts for sleep. Ok. And this is something that affects all of us. I am sure. We have lost some sleep at some time or another and it makes us hurt in some way or another. So, number one, we spend one third of our lives asleep. Go figure. Who wanted to do that math? We spend one third of our lives asleep, Whereas cats spend 2/3 of their lives asleep. And we are the only mammals who willingly delay sleep. That must mean we're some sort of special. So we're the only mammals who willingly delay sleep. That's number one. Fun fact. Number two, the sensation. Has anyone ever felt this? Where you're falling asleep and you're halfway between sleep and awake and you do this jerk or your leg kicks or you flail your arm and that is called. That has a name, a scientific name. It's called the hypnic jerk. The hypnic jerk is that kind of thing that you feel when you're just drifting off and you don't quite get there. You get snapped back. So that's the hypnic jerk. This is number three. So whether you're married or not, if you're single, you may take solace in the fact that 1/4. 1 in 4 married couples sleep in separate beds. Apparently this is due to being able to sleep better. I don't know, but one in four married couples sleep in separate beds. Number four. This one's fun. Bats sleep 20 hours a day. So when we have to get our seven to nine hours, our little snapshot of sleep in our day, bats are sleeping 20 hours, whereas giraffes. Giraffes are sleeping two hours a day. Takes a lot of eating all the time to keep a giraffe going. All right. And number five, I've got a bonus one here too. But number five is 12% of people, very few people, 12% of people dream in black and white. Do you know what you dream in? Do you dream in color or do you dream in black and white? Not only that, People who are blind from birth, so not becoming blind, but if they've been blind from birth, they dream more in emotion, sound and smell. Isn't that an interesting one? So emotions, sound and smell, you remember in your dreams how you feel, but that's how people who are blind from birth. And this last little part of the dreaming, Fun facts number five, is that people who, or all of us, within five minutes of waking, we've forgotten 50% of our dream. So whatever dream we had within five minutes of waking, we'Ve forgotten 50% of our dream. This last little question here is our bonus question. Does anyone know how long it takes or it should take to fall asleep? The scientific term for this is called sleep latency. And there's a window of time when we go to bed and we close our eyes and we're about to go to sleep. How long do you think it's the best window for us to fall asleep? Pop it in the chat if you have an idea of what that might be. How many minutes? Lynn says 10 to 15, Tracy says 20. Put a few more in there. These are pretty close. So the answer is actually 10 to 15 minutes. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Nailed it on the spot. So 10 to 15 minutes is the ideal sleep latency. That's your time to fall asleep. If we're falling asleep when our head hits the pillow, which many of us do, if we're really exhausted, we're not getting enough sleep, or maybe we had a really busy day, mentally or physically, if we fall asleep when the head hits the pillow within, say a minute to three minutes, that's too low of a sleep latency time and that means that we're not getting enough recovery somewhere. So especially if people have sleep apnea, they're not sleeping enough hours, the quality of sleep isn't there, or the day was really demanding for several days in a row, we'll often see our sleep latency go down. Ok, so I have all sorts of sleep information coming out of my brain. I figured I'd give you some fun stuff because I've created a small mini course, a video mini course on Sleep for Achievers. I've created a free PDF handout as well, and I've done a podcast on Sleep for Achievers. But the mini course is going to be free for our team members. So I'm going to make sure that our team members, the Empowered team, gets that mini course into our membership, so that'll be available for our team. However, on the topic of sleep, we want our best sleep sleep quality over the course of seven to nine hours. So for those of us who believe that we can keep rocking it and crushing it with six hours or five hours or six and a half hours every night, chances are we cannot. There's a very, very small percentage of people who can manage less than seven hours a night for a consistent basis. So if you have sleep questions, bring them on now because it's all bursting out of my brain. And then we'll open it up to any other health, performance, nutrition training questions that you have going on. So what do you have for the sleep questions? Pop them in and pop any questions that you have in. I'll just start with the sleep questions. So fire them away. On that flip side, while you're popping your questions in the chat. On the flip side of the sleep latency, there's another thing called sleep inertia, and that is the beginning of the day when you're waking up. Sleep inertia is that feeling like you can't wake up. It's that how long does it take for you to feel awake right away? And that would be called sleep inertia. If we're getting enough sleep, we can wake up in the morning and feel refreshed and feel fairly energetic, even if it's taking a moment for us coming out of sleep. But if we're dragging with that sleepy feeling for a long time throughout the day, that is a long, that's a sleep inertia. Okay, so. Oh, amazing. This question comes right in on that topic. We're synced, our minds are together here. So when you sleep for eight hours and you still wake up groggy, what would help with that? There are a few things. There are sleep stages and there are sleep cycles and we need to go through those in a night span. We're usually going through several 90 minute cycles. Getting to often most people will get that five cycles, four cycles in a night. Now what happens though when you're waking up groggy? Oftentimes we've missed either our rapid eye movement cycle or enough deep sleep cycles. And what that feels like if you're not monitoring it with a, like I'm monitoring it with this Oura ring. You can see this ring that I wear if you've, if you see in the video or a Garmin watch. But when I'm monitoring those things, you can see whether you get REM sleep, deep sleep, light sleep, whether you're active and awake. So if your sleep was restless, you're going to wake up groggy. If you didn't get enough REM sleep, that's kind of where you're dreaming. You will wake up groggy and if you did not get enough deep sleep, you will wake up groggy. If you were not relaxed enough, that means your heart rate variability or you are in your relaxed, your rest and digest nervous system, your parasympathetic nervous system. If you didn't get enough of that, that would put you groggy as well. So here are three things that I think would really help for this. Number one is count backwards from when you go to sleep by at least two hours and start taking conscious action. That is going to unwind your mind because most of the people who I coach, most of the people who listen to me are achievers and have a lot going on. Smiles. So if you are achievers and you have a lot going on, it is going to take something to start to turn the dial down on your brain and your body before you go to bed. So if you are watching a TV show that gets you really fired up like the news, probably not a great idea. If you are working on something that requires a lot of creativity and and really intense brain activity, you're going to have to turn that down a couple of hours before bed. If you are eating close to bed, I will get a report on my recovery stuff that says did you have a meal really late because it looked like your heart rate dropped later in the night. So that is because if I was eating, my body had to do a fair bit of work to digest that food and, and it wasn't digested enough before bed. So you usually want a buffer of about two to three hours before you sleep from your last meal that will help your sleep quality. So those will be some things turning down the brain activity, stopping work screen time and cutting down the screen time and then watching the food, making sure you're not intaking food right before bed. Give it that two to three hour buffer depending on the size of the meal. Now before I go on to the next question, are there questions related to what I just answered with that particular question on the waking up groggy. Any other questions on that one? Okay, so the next one is do fluctuating hormones affect sleep? The answer is yes and the answer can be massively so. It can be the kind of thing where for women going through a monthly cycle or women going through perimenopause or menopause, what happens when our estrogen levels are dropping, progesterone levels are going up sometimes what that feels like if you are in perimenopause or menopause. Sometimes what that feels like is that you wake up in the middle of the night like you are wide awake and wired. One of the things happening with the drop in estrogen and the increase in progesterone, we also as women in that zone, get this spike of adrenaline. And so what that feels like in the middle of the night, your brain might feel like you're running, you might feel like you're sweating, you might feel like you've got all this energy and you can't quite fall asleep. Now the two things that I've found that not only in research, but also personal experience that can help with those hormones and help with those symptoms, those sweats and the sleep issues, those two things for me personally and in research has been stress management and reducing sugar intake. Those two things make the biggest difference for me personally. So if you have yourself or a friend or a family member going through really challenging times sleeping, and it's hormone related, then I would really do a check on the sugar and I would probably try and add something in like meditation or specific ways of managing what the stressors are, depending on what the stressors are. So is there a couple of nods for that feeling in the middle of the night of wide awake and wired as though somebody's giving you a shot of adrenaline or caffeine or something like that? Yeah. Okay. And the other practices, what I will call the sleep hygiene practices, will also really help that some of us too have to avoid caffeine from about 11am onward. Caffeine has a really long half life, meaning like just to metabolize half of it, it takes a lot of hours. So for some people, they're fine drinking caffeine into the 4pm 2pm afternoon. My dad drinks it probably till 8 at night. However, a lot of people have to have that one cup in the morning and cannot consume caffeine later in the day. Otherwise it will affect. And the only way to really discover it for yourself is go off a caffeine for a week or two weeks at a time and figure out how that affects your sleep. Specifically because it is a stimulant and it will affect your hormones a little bit too. So that is something to keep aware of. Next question that is still regarding sleep. Why do I feel more tired after I sleep eight or nine hours, then when I sleep less? Okay, so most people, you will find that if you sleep less. So say for instance, you got six hours of sleep one night and then the next day you are Feeling fine, you are still driving really hard. And then the night after that, you sleep really hard at maybe eight or nine hours. And then you are waking up the next day feeling like, oh, run over by a truck. What you're feeling down there is the lack of sleep from two days ago. You following? That's what's going on. That's if you had a low night's sleep. Or what you're likely feeling is if you had too many sleeps where you just didn't get enough because we can't catch up on sleep, we get into sleep debt. I'm going to qualify that statement. You can catch up on sleep within a really tight window. If we've been losing sleep for one week, two weeks, three weeks, you can't catch up on that. But if you lost some sleep a day or two days, then you can catch up a little bit there. You've got about this small number of hours that you can catch up on. But then you're just into a stress cycle. Now here is the second thing. When we are usually losing sleep, we kind of force the gas pedal to keep going. Most of us do like, oh, I am tired, but I have got to keep going. So it might be caffeine or it might just be pushing ourselves. And what that puts us into is what is called a sympathetic drive. It is the nervous system that is like our go, go, go. When we are in our sympathetic drive, we work hard, we push hard, we do all the things when we're in our parasympathetic nervous system, we are resting, we are digesting, we're relaxing. We probably feel cozy when we rest on the couch. That is likely what you're shifting into when you've gotten the sleep. And that's where you're feeling just a little more draggy. But the key what the best case scenario is, is that we've got the drive, but we also train ourselves to relax. But what likely is happening for you is that you've driven hard and then you crashed and then you're kind of forced into that parasympathetic because you've gone so hard. Are you following me with that one? I know that I've gone a little sciency here, but that is a little more of a descriptive way of the science that that happens and how we shift between nervous systems. If you are not getting enough of that resting, relaxing, recovery. This is massive for recovery. Parasympathetic nervous system. If you are not getting enough of that, you are going to start to have other symptoms come in you are going to have the headaches, you are going to have greater stress. It will affect your hormones. All of the things we need a balance between our push drive and our pullback recovery. Just like training, just like all of you have experienced, experienced in physical training or sport, it is the same thing. We drive hard, but then we need the recovery in order to get the benefit and the continuation of what we want to do. Noticing that that pattern happens over the last 15 years. Yes. Not related to hormones. Hot during the night, that it wakes you up only during times of high stress. Always happens during times of stress. So I'm going to suggest here, obviously I don't know this for sure and I haven't done, you know, some sort of physiological assessment. But what that sounds like is that hard sympathetic drive, the stress is leading into it, really pushing it. And then you find that you are running hot. My clients, I have a client who just said this to me last week running a construction company. Go, go, go. Trying to get back into his exercise. And what I was coaching him on were breathing techniques to slow him mechanically via breath to slow the brain and then slow the nervous system. So I was doing the nasal breathing with him to slow the breath, to switch from one side of the brain to the other side of the brain, the left side to the right side and back and forth so that he can mechanically slow his brain, mechanically slow his breathing and emphasize getting into more of the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and recovery nervous system. So he wasn't running hot. And these achievers like ourselves, we tend to be hard drivers. And that's what it sounds like. So if it's not hormone related, if it is really intense stress related push and driving and then you're running hot at night, then that's probably one of the scenarios. The other thing I would suggest there too is that from an environmental standpoint for your sleep, you want to have dark, you want to have cool, and you want to have your hands and your feet warm. This is why the people who wear socks to bed and warm their feet up to go to bed, it helps them fall asleep because somehow when our hands and our feet are warm, it allows our brain to cool cool and our core temperature to cool. And that helps with our falling asleep and it also helps with our quality of sleep. So you want to have a cool environment with the ability to stay warm. So your hands and feet sounds counterintuitive, but that's what's happening when we have warm hands and warm feet. Our body has the Signals to say, yes, you can cool. You can go into that sleep stage and, and it's all good. So what I would suggest as well, on the mechanical side of things, the environmental side of things, is the warm feet, warm hands, cool room, dark room, and then that should also help with that scenario as well. Ok. How does our body heal during sleep? Our sleep is amazing. I have to share this because I love the cool little things. We have an area of our brain called the hippocampus. And this is the only area in our brain that we produce new brain cells. We are able to learn new things and get new brain cells. And this hippocampus, this area of the brain actually plays out skills or things that we've learned. So say you're learning a new swim skill, or you're learning a new motor control skill, so something like a tennis swing or even linguistics, you're learning something new. And then if you learn something new and have a period of relaxation, then your body, your brain hangs on to it more. And then this hippocampus plays it backwards for some reason, nobody knows why, but it plays it backwards and then sequences it forwards again. Now, some people might be smiling with this because you might realize times where you've either woken up or you've been really working on something and it starts to come together, your brain is putting it together also. When we sleep, our body has a chance to physically go through these recovery repair processes from all the micro trauma from physical damage. So physical damage, our sleep time is a key time for flushing through new cells and getting rid of old cells or cells that are dying or ones that are waste product from say, physical work that we've done. So not only are we getting the new cells in, we're clearing out the old, we're getting out the waste product. And the same is going on with our brain. In our brain, when we sleep, we are also checking all the connections that we made during the day and some of them are faulty. And those faulty ones get discarded so that the next day you know how when you had something big coming at you, you either learned something or there was a big emotional thing coming at you or a big day coming at you. And then you got sleep, you slept on it, and the problem might have been solved by the next morning, or you might have woken up with a new perspective and felt like you had the answers. That is what is happening in our brain when we sleep. It is so, so powerful. So losing our sleep, if there is something to fight for, not only for body weight, when we are low on sleep, stress hormones are up. We have a hard time losing maybe excess weight. So body weight, ideal body weight. Sleep has to be there if we are stressed. We need our sleep. All of these health parameters are brain recovery and learning. Our neuroplasticity, growing our brain, our recovery. Physically. Sleep is powerful. Powerful. Ok, so that I think can address the heels during sleep. Let's fit in one or two more questions on anything. It could be sleep related as well, but anything that will serve you and your performance right now. What do you have any other questions? What do you got going there? Beautiful. Okay, I'm going to add one other one. One client that I talked to last week, their comment was that they have a hard time falling asleep without something like watching the tv. They want to watch TV before bed. And I used to be this way very much, but I swapped it out for reading. And there were two reasons for that. One was that the screen time doesn't matter whether it's a television or a computer or a phone. The rays, the light that is emitted from that screen, it basically signals our brain in the wavelength of the light. It signals our brain to stay awake. So even if people wear blue blockers, even if people wear darker glasses, sometimes what happens with that is that people end up using more screen time because they've got the glasses on. So they figure they can stay up later, but it impairs sleep quality. So when he's saying I really want to watch TV or do something. So I did two things. I cut out the screen time. So if I watch TV there was a cutoff time. I had to cut that time off at least an hour before I was going to fall asleep. So I'd make sure that I stopped watching TV or any computer an hour before falling asleep. And I swapped it with reading. The reason with the reading is that I wanted to be intentional on what is going into my brain right before falling asleep. Because we're in a specific wavelength in our brain and, and at that time, right before sleep and right after waking up, our brain is very suggestive to new information. So if I was watching tv, I figured that I could, and this is shown in research, if I was very intentional on my meditation, my mantras, the information I'm reading, then that is supporting my brain as I fall asleep or as I wake up. So before bed, it's either going to be reading for me, something that is really pertinent to me, or it's going to be meditation or both. And then when I wake up in the morning it might be meditation right off the hop first thing in the morning or a journal intention going into my journal what I'm training my brain to work on first thing. So that might be one that serves you in terms of right before bed needing something to unwind instead of wine or instead of tv, you might want to try something like tea that's non caffeinated, not too close to bed. Reading, meditation or One of the best things is if you have the ability to see sunset before you go to bed. Those particular rays on your eyeballs tell your brain that it's time to go to sleep. So those are very circadian rhythm synced with seeing the rays of light from sunset and even sunrise in the morning. It'll really help your sleep cycles a lot. I hope this serves your sleep. I hope you can utilize our mini course that's coming up. If you're a team member, you will get it for free in our membership and I will be fielding any other questions along the way and we'll do this again next month. Have a beautiful, beautiful day everyone. Bye. If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team Podcast, you'll love being on the Empowered Team. The Empowered Team runs year round. It is our group coaching and accountability program where we take mindset and physical performance concepts and break them down to usable action steps that optimize results. To learn more about our Empowered Leadership coaching for business, our custom online physical training plans, and of course the Empowered Team Group coaching, head to www.theempowered.ca empowered learn-more. That's www.theempowered.ca EmpoweredLearn.