The Real Reasons We Have Trouble Sleeping

guess what your brain takes out the garbage at night so if you're not getting good deeper store to sleep you can't clean the brain [Music] [Applause] welcome to the doctors pharmacy I'm dr. Mark Hyman and that's pharmacy plen ffar ma CY and welcome to this special episode called house call and it's about sleep today and we are gonna get deep into sleep but we're not gonna put you asleep I hope and I'm here with my good friend colleague and partner at the ultra Wellness Center in Lenox Massachusetts dr. Todd Lapine who I've known for decades we work together at Canyon Ranch over 25 years ago and he's been involved with functional medicine longer than I have which is a long time and I really respect him he teaches all over the world is one of the leading felt leaders in the space of functional medicine and welcome to the doctors pharmacy Thank You Marc alright so this this house call today is about sleep which is a big problem is you know I I think we have an epidemic a big problem yes tell us how prevalent is this and what's going on with our sleep it is you bring up a really good thing so you know most people when I ask you know one of the questions I ask miss you know how do you feel yeah I know where's your energy level a scale of 1 to 10 and you know do you wake up refreshed and a lot of people are not waking up refreshed so I think what's happened is we're living I'm refreshed I've had my coffee yeah exactly and I'm actually gonna talk about coffee and how actually coffee works on interrupting that that's that thing that triggers sleep which I'll get to I'll get you later wait wait are you gonna take away my coffee time yeah no no I will not I love my kava it teamed up this morning it's a it's a legal drug that got me through medical school my medical training but anyway I think what we have in the modern society is a disruption of our sleep/wake cycle hmm so when you look I always prevalent like 70% of Americans have sleep issues right absolutely yeah so we have into our bodies are natural sleep-wake cycle and that natural sleep-wake cycle is part of how we are as animals so when you look at most animals you know what happens at night time the Sun Goes Down what do they do they go to sleep they're not on their iPads they're not on their iPhones they're not on their computer than on their television you know the light bulb and they're not raiding the refrigerator all right my cats running around at night looking for mice well if they're nocturnal right yeah yeah so I think that yeah in my opinion where my experience is artificial light at nighttime I think is a big is this or the elephant in the room and for people that have had sleep problems one of the easy things that you can do that can help to fix that is to have a blue blocking lights glasses yeah yeah I actually have them I do too absolutely so when you look at the look goofy but you sleep good right exactly yeah and this it's actually in the medical literature and these LED lights have a very high blue spectrum and blue light is that type of thing that sort of wakes your body up and it suppresses melatonin so melatonin which we can measure we can measure that easily in patients is the hormone of darkness so one of the times when I'm seeing patients not only do I measure their sex hormones their adrenal hormones but I also measure their sleep hormone which is their melatonin at night maybe yeah at night so you actually you can check it in the morning and you can also check metabolites of melatonin and your melatonin levels tell you whether or not you're getting enough darkness so you can take melatonin and as you get older our bodies produce less melatonin but the thing that you can do to boost your melatonin is not expose yourself to light at night and without candles Rebekah candles not candles yeah exactly locker glasses yeah yeah candles actually work quite well yeah they do what the the LEDs on screens and although you know all lights now they're not no more incandescent light so what about the you know the sort of night sort of setting on the computer iPad I just it doesn't cut the mustard yeah it's not it what if you wear the glasses yeah when you use this green yeah if you and you'll know they work because when you were the the real ones that really cut out 99.9% of the blue like you you can see I did the other night I was tired by put my glass on and my blue bar glasses I got from true dark and you go to true dark calm and you you put the glass on and I watched my movie on my computer in bed and I was like no my kind of mess with my sleep a little bit but it was like fine I guess had a great deep sleep yeah wow this is really amazing yeah I mean whatever you're gonna do with computer whatever it's not gonna look normal but you will sleep a lot better and I do that myself and I actually this is where it were it really hit me about the the effect of light is that was in New York City one weekend and I was giving a lecture and it was you know was a Friday night and I was I was lecturing the next day and I'm walking down you know just what are you doing New York you walk down Broadway so I'm walking down Broadway is about 10 o'clock at night I did it for a couple hours so it was like 11 12 o'clock oh yes and you know lights on the lights on Broadway like I could not sleep that night yeah and that's where it really hit me is like oh my god this is I mean this was obviously real real bright LED lights but it was phenomenal I just could not fall asleep Wow not stay asleep that's incredible and that sort of got me down that path of really understanding light so light is a big problem light pollution light pollution yeah I mean there was a book every two years ago called lights out yeah which describes the advent of chronic disease and obesity with the lightbulb yes how that effects are it's the break cycles how it affects our circadian rhythms how directs our hormones note affects our metabolism which is something you know I don't think about exactly that's especially in traditional medicine we never learned about light exact but now you know there there's we may be I mean and one of the best things that you can do and I try to do this as often as I can is early in the morning exposing yourself to light so darkness tells you to go to sleep light tells your body to wake up hmm and exposing your eyes without X even without glasses to the Sun I'm really a Sun worshiper not this sort of you know state you know Sun gazing it's very very powerful for your blind but your sleep yeah right [Laughter] but exposure to light shortly after you get up is one of the things that helps to synchronize your circadian every morning my wife and I we we get up and we take the cats for walk around the yard yes our cats go for a walk they're well trained Burmese cats and we literally walk around and get the sunlight and be up in 20 minutes out there just walking around the yard and it's just so nice to get that sunlight in the morning exactly yeah and that and you want to do it relatively early twenty thirty minutes of getting up and exposing us to the sunlight is very very helpful for synchronizing your body clocks so so that's one reason that people having so many sleep issues and what are the reasons people have sleep issues other than the light pollution sometimes give me medications medication side effects some of the people are taking these stimulants so so I'm tired so here your doctor gives you Ritalin or adderall and then that is a stimulant and I sort of keeping you up um excess amounts overuse of caffeine or having caffeine too late in the day you know some people are very caffeine sensitive and you know they can't have any kind of tea or coffee yeah most people in general I'm gonna say that you know if you have one or two cups of green tea coffee and it's early in the day it's not gonna affect your sleep to the half-life of coffee it's about six hours so in six hours half of its out and then another six hours a quarter of it there's nothing that are new exactly exactly nothing after noon exactly and most people it's not gonna affect them in alcohol so alcohol is a big one in fact I was talking about a case so I had a patient who was you know eating late at night that's another one's another one another one and that actually I think also affects sleep also because when you're sleeping you don't want to be digesting you really want to be in a fasting state one is gonna interrupt your sleep and two it's gonna make you fat yeah exactly storing instead of metabolizing that's how sue Moses right the sumo the sumo diet well that's how sumos get fat they eat and go to sleep okay that was actually I was actually a chapter in my book my one of my first books ultimate albums called the sumo wrestler diet because the the sumos have a recipe for knowing how to put weight on right so and it was a it was a simple patient came into me and they were eating late at night it was like 8:00 anywhere between 8 to 10 o'clock at night and they were having a couple of glasses of wine you know which you know that sounds ok well it was a combination of eating late at night and those two glasses of wine or alcoholic drinks and very commonly especially as you get older maybe after 4550 you'll get what's called insomnia so the alcohol term it relaxes you whatever but when it wears off the brain wakes up and I started to experience this myself when I started turning 4550 and so I'm very aware of it so any patient you drink wine in the morning a drink wine in the morning exactly happy hours it at noon no coffee or wine after lunch yeah so so one of the things that you do with patients is you know get them aware of their circadian rhythm or their sleep-wake cycle the importance of light in the morning darkness at night and then also get them off for maybe two months of get them off of all alcohol and all caffeine and sort of see where their baseline see where their baseline is and then it's for them to decide how much and how often and when to have those those things which you know that a good cup of coffee is pleasurable a glass of wine is pleasurable but too much too late is not a good thing yeah hey everybody's dr. Hyman thanks for tuning in to the doctors pharmacy I hope you're loving this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from and I want to tell you about something else I'm doing which is called marks picks it's my weekly newsletter and in it I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health it's all the cool stuff that I use and then my team uses to optimize and enhance our health and I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter I only sin at you once a week on Fridays nothing else I promise and all of you do is go to dr. Hyman com forward slash pics to sign up that's dr. Hyman calm for size pics P IC K s and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer now back to this week's episode and there are other things that can sort of often chart a little that people don't think about but I had severe mercury poisoning and that really interrupted my sleep so insomnia can be related to heavy metals and toxins for example it can be related to thyroid problems I've low grade low thyroid function that can be a sleep disruptor hormonal issues I don't see menopause there's another one young male menopause but even like blood sugar issues people who are diabetic or pre-diabetic they can get hypoglycemia and all the night that wakes them up they get night sweats and hot flashes so there's a lot of reasons people have sleep issues that are are you know biological that you can fix and even nutritional factors low magnesium and and other factors can be really a big big issue exactly yeah and in turn you says because there are some people who will have a very big cortisol response at nighttime so cortisol is the adrenal hormone surge over your get-up-and-go hormone we're supposed to have cortisol rising as we wake up and there's called as a test that we do called the course all awakening response so how much does your cortisol rise as you as you get up well there are some people that will have problems with cortisol secretion at nighttime when it should be really really low and that's another thing that I think this is is the important thing that interrupts people sleep is excess amount of cortisol stress hormone at nighttime yeah that's what my wife yells at me for reading a Cova 19 News at night before bed oh you're right you want you don't want to be watching scary things and stimulating things get your adrenaline up before you go to bed yeah and I think I think you know often we we live a sleep disruptive lifestyle yeah so we eat late we drink we have lots of lights we engage in stimulating activities before bad 24/7 news email before bad we we don't do things to wind down just having a simple sleep hygiene routine you know I I'm really reduce about this but you at least an hour maybe even two hours before you turn everything off you maybe I take a hot bath with Epsom salt I put lavender drops in there because lavender actually reduces cortisol levels to the lavender essential oils I've made my room completely black I have a blackout shade even though my shades earplugs if you need them if you live in a noisy area yeah I use it when I travel luboc or glasses there's a lot of a lot of ways to structure your environment so that it's really good make sure the temperatures right you just there's another another clinical case I had this older gentleman who he was had a whole bunch of different kinds of problems it had probably a little bit of early Parkinson's mild sort of slowing down he's in his late 70s and he on his own you know was was found out that when he turned the thermostat down from 70 degrees to 64 degrees he slept so much better yeah and again that's the other thing is what what happens to animals at night time they were actually out in nature and guess what we're animals too that's true we're actually designed to be out in nature yeah and and that that lowering of the temperature also I think is very very good for inducing sleep and I actually think this is my own sort of theory is that when you take the warm bath and then you go to bed in a colder environment that shift of the temperature eventually helps me I just get very relaxed when I do I mean the best sleep I had in years was I was doing back and just came with my daughter last year in Utah in the middle of winter and you're climbing up so the exercise and get out of the hut while you're sleeping in an unheated hot in a sleeping bag and it's like 30 degrees what do you think but you know you got your hat on really I just live like a baby and and my wife and I have this is a common debate you know she has you had a comedy skit about this house you see that how do I go to bed in a winter coat with a hat on and I'm like and so we figured out this solution which is a really cool thing called the chili pad and it's a it's something you can buy which you put it's filled with water it's like a water that goes through it and it cools it so I don't like an air condition of water and I can have like 64 on my bed and she can be like 75 on the other side and like it's the best and I and I use that and I sleep great because in New York on an apartment the the the radiator was on I couldn't control the temperature would you open the windows to cold yeah so I had this thing it was like the best invention ever and they have ones with different size so you can like switch it for the guys with yeah girl so it's it's really important to get the temperature right so there's all these really simple hacks and there's in the show notes to this podcast there's gonna be articles that have a lot of these things in them so I think it's really important people to to kind of think about how do they optimize your sleep because why is sleep so important and what are the cons quences of chronic sleep deprivation sleep deprivation is obviously that one of the things is that if you have sleep deprivation you get angry and irritable hmm you're very irritable it actually affects the amygdala part of the brain the primitive part of the brain that's a sort of fighting kind of thing so when you see people are chronic America sleep-deprived is that the issue here yeah yeah our so hosta might even have the the POTUS might be sleep-deprived oh well we know he is yeah yeah you could very well be and so when you don't get good restorative sleep and you know they say that you know seven to eight hours is ideal there are some people who need more or a little bit people who would need less but most of the time you want to add I asked my patients when you wake up do you feel like your batteries are charged do you feel refreshed that's really I think the key thing and also looking at patients how quickly can they fall asleep it's not how much time you're in bed it's like can you fall asleep relatively easily I had a patient the other day was like it takes me two hours fall asleep oh my god why is that okay then you got to go down the laundry list what are you what are you doing at night that may be impairing that and then you just you just need to have that good good sleep hygiene is its key it's so important I think and you know we know chronic sleep deprivation affects your mood causes depression it affects your risk of for example dementia Hey oh yeah your brain can't clean itself exactly usually you just brought the next the next thing and the danger of that is that what we found out is that our bodies our brains are about two percent of our entire body weight but they consume 20% of our energy in the body so they're highly metabolically active which means that they also produce a lot of metabolic waste yeah exhaust based exhaust yeah and the garbage and guess what your brain takes out the garbage at night so if you're not getting good deep restorative sleep you can't clean the brain there's a whole system in the bottom in the brain called the glymphatic system which is the lymphatics of the brain yeah that allow you to take those metabolic toxic waste products out of the brain and what happens is they sort of open up at night as you're sleeping and if you are not getting good sleep you're basically not not taking the garbage out of your brain just like there's no toilet in your brain yeah you know what for what exactly so yeah this is really important it so you get you get increased risk of brain inflammation increased risk of dementia increased risk of depression your your cognitive performance goes way down yeah which is striking you know I remember the study I saw of sharpshooters like basically you know snipers yeah uh and there you know accuracy was like 99% when they were awake with eighty hours sleep and then seven hours maybe it was like 97% yeah and in six hours like 80% five hours was like 50% it was like a coin toss or they're gonna hit the target or not exactly and then also the sleep deprivation is worse than alcohol you're actually more mentally impaired with sleep deprivation and you are being drunk yeah I get that for sure and I think I think we have we have to understand that sleep is not a nuisance or a waste of time it's it's something to be cultivated and optimized and it's critical to your health your immune function we're now in this age of kovat 19 and sleep is one of the best things you can do to make your immune system more resilient so making sure you enough sleep an interesting how to create the structures free to sleep well and then you know for those people who are not getting better on the sleep front he'd been trying all these cool techniques and things we talked about whether it's the blue blocker glasses or getting their their sleep hygiene right or me maybe me be using a chilly bad and their temperature right all this stuff if you're not getting better there may be other reasons for it and that's where in functional medicine we dig deep we find heavy metals and thyroid issues gut issues and yep and and nutritional factors that may play a role in sleep disruption so yeah and the other thing you which and this is something that's probably not on the radar of most doctors and even also integrative doctors is EMF so if anybody's gone camping when you're camping out in the wilderness guess what you are not around electro yeah that's what happens you tile so it didn't have any EMS around exactly yes yes so so and when you go out can't can't actually going camping for a week will help to reset your circadian clock and I also believe that when you're camping you're earthing you're grounding and you're actually on the ground literally and you also are not surrounded by EMFs and I do know that EMF Safed our bodies in many many ways and I just done all hype it's not hype at all I mean our body measure an EKG we're measuring electrical signals of our heart we're measuring an EEG we're measuring electrical signals of our brain so our brains are our bodies our bioelectric beings and we interface and inter interact with energy signals whether it's light sound or EMF vibrations and without question they can affect our physiology yeah there's been evidence that EMF exposure can predispose towards more autoimmunity and I do know that that when you sleep and you ground yourself you will sleep better my theory is I think it's related to the fact that when you're in a building you're around a lot of EMS yeah my wife got wind of this in New York City she got one of those oh yeah detectors yeah and it you know it has this score on it and you can see the green light is okay yellow caution red is severe danger in our apartment in New York it was severe danger all the time yeah and then we brought it close to our phone or other things that would order the Wi-Fi it would like kind of explode and she decided she wanted to protect us and she basically created a Faraday cage around our bed essentially got a special kind of cloth that blocks the electromagnetic frequencies a special grounding sheet she hung it over our bed and if you go in there you can't make a cell phone call you can't get on Wi-Fi you're like it's literally blocked everything out which is really amazing so we started using that in New York because in New York there's so much you know I'm going anybody's router and you see you know there's hundreds of Wi-Fi yeah and and I without without question I mean it's not like you can draw a blood sample get a urine sample to check EMFs it's it's one of those things where you need this special device and I you know if this is not boudu stuff this is not whacko way crazy stuff this is real stuff our bodies are affected by luck I know some people have more sensitivities absolutely just like everything you know people are more gluten sensitive people get more EMF sensitive but I have there's a wide variety of people respond but if you're struggling these are the kinds of things to think about so and you think you know what a psych dieters do now nowadays to treat refractory depression they use pulsed magnetic field to the brain that's that's an energy it's an energy signal right they don't even know how it works they just do it it's like they used to do ECT where they would you know I carry a paralyzed you and then this is more and more modern version exact it's a more modern version exactly and uh but it really shows you that our bodies have an interaction in some type of complex energetic fashion with our body hmm yeah it's so important I think I think we see so many people struggle with sleep they don't prioritize sleep they don't understand how to get their bodies to sleep they don't understand what their bodies require and all the things we talked about from dietary things whether it's you know getting off of sugar and starch but I have some people do what we call the 10-day reset which is like a lot of patients love it and and what's amazing is the report I'm a sleeping better you get off alcohol you get up caffeine you get off sugar you clean up your diet and all of a sudden your your hormones start being regulated properly your brain chemistry and your neurotransmitters start getting regulated and back in balance and you start to sleep better and you feel better and more energy and it's like wow I knew that all these things were connected and then the other thing this is a very important thing is and this ties in with the coffee because you and I enjoy a good cup of coffee the interesting thing about why how coffee works is that coffee blocks adenosine receptors and you were talking earlier about ATP so the fuel of our body is ATP adenosine triphosphate so there's three phosphate groups attached to this molecule and as we go throughout the day ATP gets integrated into ADP which is two phosphate molecules and then two adenosine monophosphate and then to just plain-old adenosine as our bodies and the more you exercise guess what the better you sleep the reason for that is our body has a buildup of adenosine so as our bodies go throughout the day we're active get more adenosine great the adenosine will slowly build up and then in certain parts of the brain that triggers the sleep mechanism coffee yes what if you look at the structural molecule the caffeine fits into the adenosine receptor so that's why it prevents us from feeling tired okay so I just got this new expresso machine there's anybody in the market for a new expression so we can have my decaf is that okay yeah so that's that but you know again you know caffeine can definitely and actually there's actually some interesting about with with coffee intake epidemiologically you know a couple of cups of coffee actually have preventive effects for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's hmm so it's not it's not all bad not all bad so in the one the one thing I was goes in the timing if the dose in the timing like anything and and the other thing that's really I think important with coffee is to make sure it's organic cuz that's one of those highly sprayed things like strawberries you don't want to eat out there in less organic coffee is one of those things you just don't touch it unless it's sort yeah very important yeah and there's some great companies out there they do this purity coffee is a great one I encourage people check that out and I think I think you know we we are a society of sleep terrified people we we think sort of lack of sleep as a badge of honor I certainly learned that in medical school we don't learn how to prioritize sleep how to practice sleep hygiene how to identify the things as a practitioner of how to help people sleep we give the medications and sometimes medications can be helpful but they they really do create a vicious cycle and a problem you know yeah exactly you're totally done like in fact there was no there was an article recently that came out with the chronic use of these benzodiazepines having increasing your risk for Alzheimer's so the sleep medications things you know like try Islam and ambien and those types of things when you use them chronically there's actually been an association with increased neuro degenerative conditions even some of the anticholinergic which are also names for so you really yeah you want to use them very carefully and judiciously and there are some patients you know that you know may have some esoteric sleep disorders things that we don't quite understand it may need chronic use of those things but by and large those things are to use for a brief period of time and then you there's a lot of other things that you should have in your toolbox you know the trailer we do that if you wanna center we use melatonin we use magnesium we'll use things like gaba glycemia mean glycine we'll use herbs like valerian flower hops and and we often see real improvement with these just simple treatments you had a patient who was really struggling with sleep and I gave him one of the formulas we use here at Delta Wellness Center and it had melatonin and a bunch of herbs valerian this that and he said I'm sleeping great and it's really simple he said I think I think we we need to to really focus and double down on our sleep I think people are struggling with sleep out there there is a way through there is a way out there's a lot of great ideas and our show notes and come with this podcast I encourage you to if you're interested in struggling we'd love to see you at the ultra Wellness Center we're doing virtual consults now so we can see anybody any from anywhere in the world dr. Lapine myself dr. lesbo Hamm George Papanicolaou it's an incredible team we have nutritionists health coaches we have you know really great team physicians assistants so we really can help you navigate a lot of this and figure out you know what's what's underneath so if you're not getting better with the typical stuff it's time to sort of look towards the functional medicine doctor to get help and we'd love to see you here at the ultra Wellness Center so any last thoughts Todd I'll just end with a quote by Shakespeare to sleep perchance to dream I there's the rub you know and that's what we need to be doing is be getting good sleep and also one of the questions I ask my patients is do you dream yeah see we're not dreaming you're not getting good sleep and I see that you have your array on so yeah so a nice color and and you can actually the Delta sleep which is where your body really restores itself that's a deep restorative sleep which you can look it should compare notes here competitive I got three hours two hours I get more deep and more ram and it's like out is how I feel different temperature makes a big difference when I drink alkaline on my Harvey doesn't drop down it's really interesting yeah and some of these tools that we were talking about that that give you a little bit of feedback as far as how your body's responding can be very motivating I'm so great so yeah so there's lots of great tools well put the resources for things like the chili pad and or ring and true blocker true true dark light box glasses all that's going to be in the show notes we'd love you to take advantage of the things that are gonna help you and get better so if you love this podcast we love for you to share this with your friends and family leave a comment we'd love to hear from you subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next time on the doctors pharmacy Thanks [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 101,371

Keywords: mark hyman, dr. todd lepine, sleep, can’t sleep, sleep disorders, ultrawellness center, alcohol and sleep, doctor’s farmacy, caffeine sleep, blue light, oura ring

Id: KZ5aTqvi2b4

Length: 29min 9sec (1749 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020