Tricks to Getting Better Sleep for Athletes Ep 21

Even how you shape your day from the moment you wake up is going to shape your ability to sleep at night because there's sleep processes and then there's also circadian processes which we can use to improve our sleep.

Welcome to the Find Your Edge podcast. Get ready to dive into all things training, nutrition, recovery, and more. Whether you're a new or experienced endurance athlete, a weekend warrior, or someone who just wants to improve your health and fitness, this podcast is for you. I'm Kris Newport, founder, head coach, registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, and certified personal trainer with The Endurance Edge and The Fueling Edge. With more than 20 years experience in the fitness industry, 18 years in multi-sport, and over 10 years as a sports nutritionist, I'm speaking with athletes and experts about key actionable steps you can take to reach and sustain peak performance and health. Let's do it. All right, welcome back to the Find Find Your Edge Podcast. I am your host, Chris Newport, and I am here with Dr. Katherine to talk all about sleep and performance. So Dr. Katherine, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm really glad to be here. This is a topic close to my heart because I think we all want to perform well, whether it's physically or cognitively. You know, it's all important.

I agree. And I'm, I'm glad that you mentioned the cognitive part because when we think of performance, oftentimes we only think of the physical aspect, but performance is far more than what the body can do. The brain is so involved in all of that. So first, before we jump into things, give me a little bit about you and your background and how you got into this.

Yeah, sure. So my name's Dr. Katherine Darley. I'm a naturopathic sleep specialist, and I'm in Seattle. My work has been treating patients here in Washington State, and then I also do a lot of educating other healthcare providers about how to improve sleep. Unfortunately, sleep is not really included in much of the medical school curriculum. So it's an area that we can grow our understanding and really help serve patients and people in all walks of life.

Fantastic. So let's get to kind of the obvious, I suppose. Why is sleep so important? Not only from, like we already mentioned, the physical aspect, but also the cognitive aspect. Tell us about that. And, and just full disclosure, Dr. Katherine and I have already recorded a show and our audio was all kind of monkeyed up, so We're on a roll. She and I are— we're gonna get down to it, get to the good nitty-gritty. So tell us about the 5 domains, which I know nobody knows about. So yeah, go for it.

Yeah, so the thing about sleep is that it's important in the way that it shapes our days, right? That if we could all sleep however we wanted to, maybe minimize our sleep and still have a perfectly spot-on day, then maybe we would. But unfortunately, how we sleep shapes our days. And I think of it in these 5 domains. You've got performance, both physical performance and cognitive performance. Later on, I hope we can talk a little bit about those specifics of physical performance. The cognitive performance is really everything from simple memory tasks, like me remembering that your name is Chris Newport, right? To really complex problem solving. How do I take, you know, 20 research papers published on sleep every day and integrate them into my knowledge of sleep? And how do I translate that into information that's useful to someone in 5 minutes, right? So that's really complex cognitive work. And everybody does that kind of complex problem solving in their lives, right? Then the second two domains I think about in terms of health. You've got your physical health and your mental health. Physical health, sleep is going to play a role in hypertension, in diabetes, in arthritis, and all of those really main chief complaints that we see in medical offices. And then there's the mental health, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, all of those are shaped by sleep. And if you don't sleep enough, the anxiety, the depression, the panic is going to be worse. And then the fifth domain that I think about is your emotional intelligence and your ability to get along well with others. Things like, if I'm sleep deprived and I arrive home, I glance at my family members, I can't in that moment take in whether their face looks happy or angry. And think about how many times you walk into a room and you instantly have a read on kind of the emotional tone, and you can respond appropriately. But if you're sleep deprived, you're not able to respond appropriately. And that's going to have potentially an impact on your relationships long term if you're not responding to those nonverbal cues appropriately.

So it sounds like if you're a little moody, maybe you haven't gotten enough sleep.

For sure, for sure. Moody and just not receiving all the information from the other people around you.

Okay, so we see why sleep is beneficial. We've got all of these different aspects that it can benefit physically, mentally, emotionally, Walk us through, if you would please, what happens both in preparing for sleep and during the sleep process. And I know this is probably a pretty long answer, so buckle up.

It is a long answer. So I want to start with sleep and the sleep stages. So we have 4 sleep stages: REM, which Stands alone. REM is rapid eye movement sleep. You've all heard of it, I'm sure. In REM sleep, there's a couple things going on. One is the brainwaves during REM sleep are most similar to when we're waking. And that's why we can have those really complex story-like dreams. REM sleep is particularly important for memory consolidation. If you learn something one day, but then you have a sleep-deprived night, you're not going to remember as well the next day what you learned previous. And that's partially due to REM. And then the other thing that REM does for us is it helps us keep emotionally even keel. We have more REM sleep towards the end of the night than we do towards the beginning. Then the other class is called non-REM, and that has stage 1, 2, and 3. Stage 1 sleep, we don't want to have a lot of. It's just really kind of transitioning from wake to sleep. Stage 2 sleep, we actually spend about half of our night in, and it also has a function for learning. And then stage 3 sleep is particularly important for athletes because stage 3 sleep is when we have 75, 80, 85% of our total growth hormone secretion is during Stage 3 sleep. And so growth hormone helps us recover physically from whatever exertion we've had the previous day. Stage 3 sleep will happen more towards the beginning of the night than the end of the night. And it's also called slow-wave sleep or deep sleep. This is the type of sleep that's really hard to wake up from. You know, if you get woken up at 11:30, 12:30, couple hours after you've gone to bed, you may have a really hard time getting with the program because your brainwaves are just so slow, such high amplitude, so different from what they are when you're awake. It can take about 20 minutes to get fully functional after waking up from stage 3 sleep.

So is that if we enter stage 3 sleep when we're napping and we have a really tough time waking up, is that because we've been woken up in that stage or can you touch on that? Naps and perhaps the benefit of those?

Yeah, I love that, Chris. That is exactly right. So we cycle through all of these sleep stages about every 90 to 110 minutes. So about every hour and a half or a little more. And therefore, you want to take either a short nap, 30 minutes or less, or you want to take that full hour and a half sleep cycle where you've gone through all the stages and you're back to light sleep. Because if you do wake up at that 45-minute, 60-minute point in the nap, you're likely to be waking up out of deep sleep, which will have you feeling groggy and, you know, questioning whether it was even worth it to take a nap because you don't feel so great when you wake up. And naps do improve both cognitive performance and physical performance for about 4 hours afterwards, so they can be a really good performance-enhancing strategy if you want to, you know, shape your lifestyle around having a nap. But the caution is not to have it be a 45-60 minute nap.

It sounds like— I think the Spanish, right, have their little siestas.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, sounds lovely. Okay, so we've got these different stages of sleep. We really want to make sure that we're getting that stage 3 sleep, how can we set ourselves up for success here? Is there a certain way that we can design our environment or a certain way of winding down? So walk us through that.

Yeah, sure. So I think about sleep and sleep health in terms of having a sleep-healthy lifestyle because even— well, I'll talk about wind-down time and focus on that, but Even how you shape your day from the moment you wake up is gonna shape your ability to sleep at night because there are sleep processes and then there's also circadian processes, which we can use to improve our sleep. Starting about an hour or two before bed is a good time to start winding down and kind of setting the stage for a good night's sleep. One of the things that people have heard about, and patients tell me, you know, they've heard this before, but didn't necessarily believe that it could really make a big difference. The light exposure that we have in our built environment is so, so different from what human beings have historically lived in. And it really does make a difference in your sleep quality. Quality. We have this hormone called melatonin, which is nicknamed the hormone of darkness because it is secreted only when we're in dim light. And in kind of historic light conditions, human beings would be in dim light for an hour or two before going to sleep, and their melatonin would start to rise. When melatonin is higher, it helps us fall asleep. So melatonin would be somewhat elevated before people got into bed. Now, since melatonin is suppressed by bright light and blue light, our melatonin isn't allowed to rise until we're actually in bed. And so it can take longer to fall asleep. So the recommendation is to dim the lights in your home for the hour before bed.

So I know you're talking about light specifically, but what about like phones, TVs, iPads, even things like, you know, Kindles and that kind of thing? Does that all count?

It does all count. Yeah, Chris, because I think the analogy to think about or just the situation to latch on to is think about if you're camping and it gets dark, you only have like firelight or candlelight, right? And those are a very different light spectrum than the blue light that our electronics are giving off. And it's actually the blue light that suppresses our melatonin more than those warmer yellowish-reddish hues.

Is this something that, like our ability to produce melatonin, is that something that changes over our lifespan, or is that something that's sort of set from—

It does, it does change, yes. So children have much higher levels of melatonin than seniors do, and it does decline pretty much from age 20 on. Year by year, your melatonin secretion will decrease.

So I know I see a lot of people who are taking pretty large doses of melatonin, and at least in my practice, I've seen 5 milligrams, 10 milligrams, even more. And of course, if people aren't sleeping well, they, they assume, well, I just need to take more. So touch on your supplement strategy, or perhaps, um, strategies that you take before going to melatonin as it relates directly to a melatonin supplement?

Yeah, so that's a good point. Research has not shown that higher doses of melatonin work better for sleep than lower doses, or what we would call physiological doses, which means they're more in line with what we find naturally in young people. So I don't think there's any indication to use a 5 or 10 1 milligram over a 3 milligrams. Physiological dosing would be a 0.3 to 3 milligrams. And I think that's the best documented to work in terms of melatonin. And then there are a lot of other supplements. Of course, you know, you and your listeners know that you do want to double-check with your own healthcare provider to make sure that the supplements are right for you, given your health history and other compounds you may be taking and whatnot. Some of my other favorite ones is L-theanine. L-theanine is a compound found in green tea, and it actually is very calming. I think about this particularly when people have maybe a sense of being wound up or a little anxious as they're heading into bedtime, And then it's also been found specifically in boys with ADHD to help because folks with ADHD can have fairly restless sleep. And so it helps with that specific group.

I'm glad you brought that up in terms of obviously consult with your health— healthcare provider as it relates to different supplements and what are going to be good protocols for you. And then of course, mentioning L-theanine and green tea, of course, green tea has caffeine in it. So, you know, L-theanine is going to be extracted from that green tea, but tell us about caffeine and its potential impact on sleep.

Oh my goodness.

Caffeine.

Don't we all love our caffeine sources?

And chocolate too, right? Which is one of my favorites. And that's like my bedtime favorite, which of course has a little caffeine in it. So, right. Yeah. So that, but tell us about it and why it might impact our sleep.

Our caffeine doesn't necessarily love us back as much as we love it, right? Mm-hmm. So the thing with caffeine is that it can be active in the body much longer than we typically think. It can be active in the body for greater than 8 to 10 hours. And of course, there's gonna be individual variability with it. Caffeine is definitely a performance-enhancing drug, and if you use it very sparingly with the intention of enhancing your performance, that can work well. It's when you are habituated to it, you're taking caffeine really regularly, it gets less effective for promoting performance. And I've had a few cases where people were very sensitive to caffeine. One that comes to mind was an early 50-year-old professional man. He was having a single cup of coffee at home about 7:00 AM, and then he was having a coffee break at work and having a latte or something, not like the triple shot or anything like that, but just a simple latte at about 10:30, 11:00 in the morning. And when he cut those out, he actually slept better. And in no way would I think of that as excessive intake of caffeine. So what I recommend people to do both with caffeine and also for alcohol is if you think that may be having an impact or you want to find out how much of an impact on your sleep it's having, what I recommend is withdrawing from all caffeine, all alcohol, or all alcohol for a week or 10 days. See how your sleep responds. And then you're gonna be in the driver's seat where you'll have the information, right? And maybe you decide, you know, yes, I'm gonna go have that fun Sunday coffee gathering with my friends and family, but on a regular workday, I'm gonna really minimize the caffeine. Or whatever. And the same thing with the alcohol, right? Sometimes people's sleep is very sensitive to alcohol. And then if you find that out by doing a little controlled study, right, you can then have the information to prioritize as you wish, right? Some nights you're going to prioritize your sleep by not having alcohol. When there's a birthday or a celebration or 4th of July or whatnot, you're going to go ahead and have some alcohol, just knowing, okay, my sleep might not be as good this night.

Some definite great tips there, because that makes me think of how alcohol affects our body temperature. How important is body temperature during sleep?

So our core body temperature— this is core body temperature as opposed to more surface body temperature, which is what we're measuring with our home temperature devices. When our core body temperature is dropping, we're going to feel sleepy and fall asleep and sleep best. And then when our core body temperature is rising, we're going to wake up and feel more alert. So the natural pattern is that our core body temperature starts to drop several hours before our bedtime, and it starts to rise a couple hours before we wake. Alcohol, to get back to your question, alcohol will actually drop our core body temperature a bit, so it actually can help people fall asleep. But then as the alcohol is metabolized, our core body temperature will bounce back up, and so that is why Often people will say about 2 or 3 hours after falling asleep, I wake up from the alcohol. So the recommendation, Chris, is not to have alcohol within 3 hours of bedtime. You want it to be processed through your system by the time you hit the sheets.

And that also makes me think of hydration, you know, alcohol being dehydrating. And then here we are going into sleep not very well hydrated, does that affect our sleep at all? You know, because I know a lot of people will restrict their fluids before bed because they don't want to wake up and go to the bathroom. How do you handle those types of situations?

I think about the dehydration and the alcohol more in terms of inflammation, actually, that when our brain— when we're dehydrated then we're not clearing toxins and whatnot, like the metabolic byproducts of the alcohol. We're not clearing those, and so we're increasing inflammation, and increased inflammation can cause a person not to sleep as well. That's, that's what I think about with the link between alcohol and hydration and sleep.

Okay, yes. All right, so all fantastic tips. I want to go back and revisit our, our environment. We talked about light exposure and trying to minimize that, starting that sort of wind-down process at least an hour before bedtime. Give us a little bit more about our environment. What should our bedroom look like or be like? What should our sheets and perhaps even our mattress feel like? Are those things that are— are those things important too? Even our pajamas.

In our pajamas.

Yeah, yeah.

So those things are super important, and I'm glad you asked that because I think, you know, all of us as adults, we, we learned things in our training program, right? Whatever kind of education we had to do for our, our work. But then there's things that we learn on the job, right? And one of the things that I've been really struck by working with people to improve their sleep is that sometimes we just accept or we're just so used to our sleep environment that we don't really question, "Oh, is this sleep environment part of the problem?" And so I love for people to do kind of a bedroom check and make sure they've got all these features in place. For one, it really should be very dark. I know I talked about the light, but one thing I didn't say is If you hold your hand out arm's distance and you can see your fingers wiggling, that is actually enough light to suppress your melatonin. So the system is very sensitive, and you really want your bedroom to be pitch black. One of the things I've really enjoyed doing house calls is when I do a house call, then I can see people's bedroom, right? And people usually want to show me their sleep space. And one of the things that's been really striking is how many people have a skylight over their bed. I don't know if that's a national trend or just here in Seattle, but that's not a good idea for sleep. So, you know, whether or not you can have a shade design for it, you know, it might be tricky, but you really want your bedroom to be dark. If you need to have a light available for safety. You know, if you need to get up in the night, do have, you know, a little bedside lamp that you can turn on, but have it be with a dim bulb and more of a yellowish-hued bulb than a blue one. Does that make sense? Yeah.

So this is not our— this is not the opportunity for like the special LED lights. This is like old school, non-LED lights, right?

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Oh, tell us about sheets and, uh, jammies, because I've, I've always gotten that question about, you know, should my sheets be light? Should my— should I have warm jammies on? Should I not sleep in anything? So what, what are some tips there?

Yep. So you want to be cool when you're sleeping. The ambient temperature should be 65 or cooler. And then you want to make sure you're not getting too hot. So I like people to use natural fibers in whatever sleepwear they have and in their sheets and bedding and whatnot rather than synthetic. The synthetic can hold the heat more. And then I'm also a fan of having several lighter weight blankets rather than one thick duvet so that you can kind of moderate them by the seasons and whatnot. I think that's a really good idea. With mattresses, people usually are comfortable in what they kind of grew up with, whether it was a softer bed or a harder bed. And, you know, it gets tricky when people are sharing the bed, right? Because one person might prefer soft, one person might prefer hard. You can get really high-end expensive beds that have different sleep settings. You can also do really simple, inexpensive hacks by, you know, getting an egg carton foam and putting it under one side of the bed to make that side softer. Doing those other kind of simple, you know, $15 kind of solutions also can work for people.

That's a great hack. I love that. Very cool. So we've talked about how sleep can benefit our emotional health, our physical health, our performance, our emotional health. We've talked about how to set up our ideal bedroom. We've talked about caffeine, alcohol, melatonin, even some other supplements. So let's, let's kind of tie things all together. If you were to give us 2 to 3 tips that we're absolutely going to walk away with, and these are the things that are super important, what would be your tips?

I would say, one, get enough sleep. The most common sleep problem is people simply not spending enough hours in bed. And one tip is if you're waking up to an alarm, whether that's a mechanical alarm or a family member or even a pet waking you up, If you're being woken up, that means you haven't gotten enough sleep. So first of all, get enough sleep every night. The second tip would be to get light in the morning. That helps actually suppress whatever melatonin is still on board in the morning, and it increases and moves earlier your nocturnal melatonin. So it will help you fall asleep early. The specifics are 20 minutes of bright outside light within the first 2 hours of waking. That makes a huge difference. And then the last part would be that, you know, really working on your sleep environment— dark, cool, quiet, not looking at the clock in the night, those things.

Great tips. I love that. And Your first piece about getting enough sleep, is this 6 hours? Is this 8 hours? Is this 10 hours? Is there a general range that you see with a lot of people?

Yeah, so for adults, we do think it is around 8 hours that people need, but I want to point out that this is a bell curve. So 8 hours is kind of the median. We think it's only about 3 to 4% of people who truly do fine with 6 hours. And it's also on the other end of the spectrum, about 1 to 2% of people who are healthy, completely healthy, but they just need 10 hours. And so I like to make the analogy between sleep need and how tall you are. Neither one of them should be an area of judgment or trying to be different than you are. It's just kind of your set point. And so if you are a person who has a set point of 9 hours of sleep, and that's just what you do best with, I think it's good to honor that. Unfortunately, most people restrict their sleep somewhat during the work week, and then some try to catch up, quote unquote, on the weekend, and that just doesn't work. You end up with poor performance for those 5 nights that you're sleep deprived, or after those 5 nights of sleep deprivation, and your performance just never fully recovers, even with 2 nights of getting adequate sleep.

Wow, great tips there. Dr. Katherine, tell us about what you might have in the pipeline here.

So I'm developing a course that people can take that guides you through the 7 main pieces of getting healthy sleep. It's going to be self-guided so that you can do it at your own pace. I think one of the things that I see with folks is that maybe they are doing 2 or 3 of these pieces, but I think of it as a bicycle wheel, that if you only have 2 or 3 spokes in it, your bicycle wheel isn't going to go very well, right? You need to be having all 7 spokes working at the same time. You need to have all of these 7 principles of healthy sleep working at the same time. So, Chris, I wanted to give a few specific statistics about sports performance just to help people really understand how this could impact their athletic performance because I know that's what people are really working with you on. Would this be a good time to kind of wrap up with those statistics?

Yes, we, we love science. Bring it on, Dr. Katherine. Let's— what do you got? Okay.

So this is just so interesting. The physical performance I talked about, I mentioned when we talked about the 5 domains, but there's actually now a growing body of research looking at different sports performance and sleep. They found that in basketball, shooting improved 9%. When the athletes got 10 hours of sleep. So a 9% improvement in your shooting is amazing, right?

That's hugely significant.

Yes, right? And all you have to do is spend a little bit more time in bed. No more time training, but just getting that sleep. They found that swimmers are faster off the block because their reaction time is just so much improved with getting adequate sleep. And I think, you know, you probably know, your swimmers know that the person who's off the block fastest often is the person who wins the race, right? And then in tennis, we see that tennis players who are getting 9 hours of sleep increase their accuracy of their serves from 36% to 42%. So that's about a 6% improvement in the accuracy of their serves just by getting 9 hours of sleep. So, you know, that's just a few of the statistics from the whole sports performance and sleep literature. And I just kind of chose those to show how vast the impact is in several ways on several different sports. And, you know, you can look up your sport and sleep and maybe there'll be some statistics there.

I, I totally agree. I think, um, kind of reminds me of how many different recovery tools are on the market, from compression hose to foam rollers and all of these different devices that propose to help us recover faster. And at the end of the day, absolutely nothing can touch sleep. It is the most powerful recovery tool. And you just supported it with all those statistics right there.

Yeah. Awesome. So go forth and sleep well and get the benefits.

Great tips, Dr. Katherine. Thank you so much. Sleep specialist and expert out in Seattle. I am looking forward to your course. We will let everybody know when that comes out. And everybody, thank you so much for listening to the Find Your Edge podcast. Be sure to leave us a review or reach out at info@theenduranceedge.com to let us know what you want to hear next. Dr. Katherine, thank you so much for all of your tips, and we look forward to hearing about your course.

Thank you, everybody. Hope you found this useful.