9 sleep myths, busted by a sleep doctor
9 sleep myths, busted by a sleep doctor
7:07

9 sleep myths, busted by a sleep doctor

Wellness
In some ways, I think his blue light filters a little bit like putting filters on cigarettes. Because the bigger issue is that this blue light, the bigger issue is how do you feel about going to sleep. [MUSIC] So, you may have a tendency to be a morning person and you may have a tendency to be an evening person and that is a very real thing. Younger people think of a shift when they go through puberty to be more of an evening person. And after age 50, there's a biological shifting, that makes it harder for us to go to bed later than we used to. So there's real biology to this. Having said that, these are just tendencies and they really dominated the end by our motivation. So if you're truly motivated to get up early you will or you can think of the bed on fire just you really want to do that or not. So you Tennessee's about your destiny. So you cannot you can become a morning person out of habit, but you're not going to change the genes in you that make you prefer evening versus morning. Point him you think about the amount of sleep is first What do you wake up feeling refreshed? [ And that's what really matters over over than any particular hours asleep. But in terms of the hours of sleep amount, usually we recommend between seven to nine hours of sleep. That's where it should be. Now if you find that as you've gotten older, you need for sleep is increased. Let's say when you're younger person you got by with a seven and a half hours but now you need eight or nine so tired Then something about the quality of your sleep. [MUSIC] I'm old enough to remember my sleep being effected by reading a good novel. A page turner. Right we would say if a book's interesting. And now it's not just a book. Now we're looking at something a lot more dynamic. A lot more interactive. So if you're some body who says gee I can't sleep because I'm worried that I didn't check an email. Then checking that email before going to bed will lower your anxiety. And help you sleep better. [INAUDIBLE] hand, you somebody who says tomorrow is gonna be an awful day cuz I got to finish work. And I got more bad use of my email that email actually disrupted your sleep. So it's not just the device itself. We're gonna be feeling safe, comfortable and loved. That's what you want a bedtime. A sense of safety. Looking at those electronics provides you with a sense of fact that it's helpful and if it's interrupting that that is bad. [MUSIC] There's real science behind the issue of the blue light inside our retina, which is how we see things. For a long time we thought, well, there are these rods and cones that mean photoreceptors. And then they realize that there will be special little photoreceptors in there that had one purpose. It just tell you when they don't occur when did the light come on, and the there's they are specifically sensitized to blue light. If you're getting a lot of light in the evening it tricks the brain into thinking that it's a long summer day you should stay awake and if the there's less blue light that it's the night is approaching and it's time to sleep Because we're diurnal creatures, having said that, in some ways, I think his blue light filter's a little bit like putting filters on cigarettes. Because the bigger issue is not this blue light. The bigger issue is how do you feel about going to sleep? We've had insomnia in our world way before there were any cell phones. [MUSIC] So let's say you normally sleep eight hours a night. If for whatever reason you had to be up all night, right? How can the reasons that we have to stay awake sometimes. So, the next night, are you going to sleep 16 hours in a row? No, you're not going to do that your body will not let you do that you may see maybe 10 hours in a row. Maybe it may take three to four or five days to make up that one day of lack of sleep. The people by the way Get jetlag. So the circadian system is trying to predict dawn and dusk is not gonna allow you to sleep that long. 16 hours may not be safe to be attacked by predators. So you cannot make up a two day weekend to sleep you've lost over a five day work week. Yes, you can make up some of it but you're still gonna have some degree of sleep debt. [MUSIC] And the real question is, how long does caffiene last? There's a lot of reasons how caffiene can influence how it affects us, but in general caffiene last longer than you think. Give us about six hours, so if you plan to go to bed at midnight. We haven't coffee three o'clock is okay. But if you plan to go to bed at eight o'clock at night or nine o'clock at night, and that's cutting it too close. [MUSIC] The way to remember this as far as temperature is that people will fall asleep before they freeze to death. That's the way to remember it. So we tend to select to sleep in cool environments, and it's hard to sleep on a hot summer night. If you're thinking you want to be comfortable, is a home marketing now of sleeping materials that are cooler that's [UNKNOWN] the heat and there is a whole industry of how [UNKNOWN] beddings and mattresses even mattresses that have electronic [UNKNOWN] to them, to make them much cooler. But the whole idea is to make a little bit colder. Little bit cooler, a cold, cooler, you wanna be comfortable. [MUSIC] It's above bad in the sense that something's interrupting your sleep. What I really don't like is any kind of snooze button. I think snooze buttons are as an example of technology that people invented. But nobody really found out that it makes any sense Because normally when you're dreaming is at the tail end of the night, the tail of the night is our dreaming sleeping when you use a snooze button. What you're really doing is you're telling your brain, hey, I'm letting you know that I'm gonna wake you up later. So I've dropped your sleep. And when you drop somebody sleep, they don't start dreaming right away with light sleep first. So you kind of treating that light sleep For dreaming sleep, which is I think a bad deal. So what I really need people to do is to whatever you decide, like devise a ringtone a noise is that means I'm stopping my sleep and get up at that moment, hitting the snooze button. I think it's just dragging it out and it just makes you angrier. [MUSIC] I like the idea that people are measuring sleeping as a means to making making sleep a priority in their life. Right? It's like saying, what needs something to count how many steps I've taken, right? Well, it just means you're you're making exercising a priority in your life or you have some device to measure calories, it means you're making nutritional burden your life. So, in that way, it's a good thing because you're saying I want to track where I'm at. On the other hand, there is people who obsess, as you said, over these things and there's actually a medical term that's come out called orthosomnia. Orthosomnia is people who have trouble sleeping because they're measuring their sleep. If I go to bed thinking I have to do something, I got to track something and make a track it is by staying awake to see if it's working. So how do I sometimes inadvertently make myself more awake by tracking my sleep or worrying about it.I tell somebody if the. No matter how many hours you sleep, you're still tired, it's the quality of your sleep. The nice thing about the field of sleep medicine, it's matured to a point that the vast majority of our patients get better. So if you're somebody who's not sleeping well, and your doctor tells you hey, I'm tired, and your doctor says they're tired too, you're choosing the wrong doctor. If you think you're not feeling refreshed when you sleep, ask to speak to a board certified sleep doctor, cuz almost all of our patients will get better.

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