Lab 046: Do Not Disturb Part II

I'm TT and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify.

This is Dope Labs.

Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science, pop culture, and a healthy dose of friendship.

This week, we're continuing our new year series with the second part of our sleep episode. In part one, we talked about why sleep is so beneficial for our health. We went through the multiple stages of sleep.

Today, our deep dive on sleep continues and we've got a lot to cover, so let's just go ahead and jump into the recitation. Okay, so what do we know? Well, we learned a lot in the last episode. I think there's no denying sleep has major health benefits memory pruning and consolidation. It's good for your immune system, your cells, your muscles. I mean, everybody needs sleep, that's just the gist of it.

Yes, And quality sleep basically means that you're getting about seven to eight hours a night and going through all the stages, especially delta, so that's deep sleep, and that's where you have those slow brain waves and not getting enough sleep push you at higher risk for all kinds of things like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and cancer. But Strangely, the same thing goes for if you're getting too much sleep, like over nine hours, that's also not good.

So what do we want to know?

So we know that people aren't really getting good quality sleep, but I want to know the reasons why. So what are common sleep disorders and other things that are keeping people from having long sleep and deep sleep?

Yeah, and if we're seeing this disparity in sleep, what are the psychosocial factors, so our beliefs or how we behave that are associated with it?

And then I want to know what are some things we can do to improve our sleep?

And you know, on that road to sleep improvement, is it okay to take medication or over the counter of sleep aids.

I'm afraid to know the answer. Let's jump into the dissection. Our guest is renowned sleep expert doctor Jiardane Jean Louis, who is currently the director of the brand new Translational Sleep and Circadian Sciences Program at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

At the end of Part one, we started discussing these sleep disparities within communities of color. Not only are these communities not getting in enough sleep, they also take longer to fall asleep and they wake up more routinely during the night. And we also know that not getting enough sleep can have some really serious health effects like cardiovascular disease and dementia. So we really wanted to dig into some of the environmental and psychosocial factors that might be

Is working on a study right now funded by the NIH to examine just that.

So what we are looking at now is what are some of those environmental factors that are causing what we call sleep deficiency or poor sleep, or what are some of those socco social factors that are associated with poor sleep. I can't give you a falling so yet because that study is ongoing, but I can tell you what we figur're going to see. We're going to see that in mignaritis communities, we have high level of noise, high level of light pollution, high level of air pollution in the light.

Where you live can have a huge effect on your quality of sleep for all of these reasons, noise, air, and light pollution, and even lack of green space.

Folks while don't not normally go to the park, they have no access to green space, the steep quality is much lower and the stip diusion is also much lower. So green space, as you may know, is good for both physical healf as much as psychological helf.

High levels of light pollution also disturb sleep.

But how light can be a good thing, brightening our homes, keeping streets well lit and safe for driving. But like any good thing, there can be too.

Much of it. Light pollution is excessive use of artificial light, and that can have adverse effects on your health.

If you live near a big city and don't see a lot of stars, that's due to light pollution. If you go out of the city and you're further away from artificial lights, you'll be able to notice the stars more. All the lights in the city, all the lights from buildings, factories, billboard and street lamps, they give this effect called skyglow. It sounds pretty, but it's not good for you.

Light pollution is a very important factor. A lot of people don't realize this. Life is very important because light regulates all of our hormonal cycles. So as our eyes are exposed to light on a daily basis, it regulates what we call the square gas. Many nuclears wish in terms regulate melotonin by the temperature corossoal and the light. What we find in for instance, is that we should have a high level of exposure during the day and almost no exposure at night. For some Black forks is

And there are other environmental factors that affect sleep too, including noise, traffic, and air pollution.

But environmental factors aren't the only things that affect sleep. Doctor Jean Louis explained that psychosocial factors also play a large role in sleep quality.

We're also thinking about some of the psycho social factors. There's a paper that came out that showed that if you happen to be asking black and white in terms of insomnia symptoms, and we're looking at perceived racism, you'll see for black folks those which do we port in samia symptoms, many of those were associated with perceived racism.

But for some people, the reason they aren't getting good quality sleep isn't just environmental or psychosocial. Many people also have sleep disorders.

There are eighty eight zero different types of sleep disorders. We have all kinds of sleep disorders.

A that's a lot. Eighty I thought it was insomnia, sleep apnea, that's it.

That was it.

I don't know. Eighty Then we all got it.

We have to Everyone has restless leg syndrome. I have heard of that. Okay, so that's three yeah, yeah, I mean I know that on the right scale. I'm just telling you. That's all I know.

Okay, okay, let's start with the first one that I think we all know. Insomnia.

Sleep quality really simply means if you go to bed for seven hours, how much sleep do you actually get. If you get close to seven hours, you'll have high se quality. If you have five out of seven, that's possely quality. In other words, anytime you're spending less than eighty five percent of your bedtime sleeping, you have post quality. And that's how we diagnose in somnia. By the way, if it's less than eighty five percent, you are at wish for having insomnia.

Record scratch, Zakia, you are having insomnia.

I like to count when I got in the bed and when I got up. You're telling me that.

All those hours rolling from one side of the bed to the other. On Instagram and all the corners of the internet. My friend is in every corner of the Internet.

I'm reading everybody's newsletter at two am.

That's insomnia.

Hmm, I just call it informed.

Actually, those are my educational hours, my office hours.

Getting my continuing medical credits at that hour.

Okay, my friend is trying to get another doctor a degree. But the KIA it sounds like you're not alone because doctor Jean Louis says a lot of folks experience this on some scale.

Almost everybody had experiences at one point in their life. Perhaps it's start quatic insomnia. It's short term. I mean it sense that you're anxious about any event that happened in your life. It lasts for a couple of weeks, it goes away, but it doesn't become a chronic problem because most of the time we resolve whatever the issues may be and then we get back to schedule.

This short term insomnia is also called acute insomnia and usually passes in a couple of weeks, But for those with chronic insomnia, which can last for months or longer, it can really adversely affect your health and quality of life.

It's hard to say exactly what causes chronic insomnia. Sometimes it can be caused by other medical conditions like anxiety or depression, and sometimes insomnia can be the result of side effects from other medication like antidepressants or stimulants. Insomnia is also more common with aging.

Insomnia can also be caused by other sleep disorders, like sleep apnia.

Sleep openiz is a condition where people go to bed and they just stop breezing. Why is that? Essentially the excep suit on the upper airway puts pressure under thought, which makes it more difficult for them to breathe. Sometimes they stop gaving completely, sometimes they stop breathing partially. So dependent upon how much occlusion you have in the upper airway you hear the person snaw.

Doctor Jean Louis compared it to a garden hose. If you're water in your garden and somebody steps on the hose, you'll see that water is barely coming out of the hose or it just stops completely. That's exactly what's happening to the upper airways for someone with sleep avenue.

So that foot on the hose is the occlusion all the way down, no air only down a little bit. That water's just trickling out.

So essentially you snow because the brain realizes it's not getting enough oxygen, therefore send a signal to you saying that you have to wake up now and make the effort to breathe. So when you hear somebody snaw, what you're hearing is that the most of the upper areay are vibrating. The vibration is what we hear as a snowing episode. Snowing in fact, suggests that you're in deep sleep. Nothing could be further from the truth. Snowing is in fact an education that there's something is wrong.

This blew my mind because so he's saying that snoring is your body waking you up because you need oxygen. Your body's like, hey, it's like the rumble strip when you on the highway, wake up, you veering off the road?

Yes, the rumble strip oxygen. Yes, Well, they need to stop making those cartoons that are teaching us that the deepest sleep is when you snore and you see disease.

That's exactly how I felt. I was like, but in the cartoons, all the cartoon dogs and cats that were in deep sleep or snoring, I feel wid too. I feel tricked.

Yes, a little bit of snoring all right, But if you're snoring NonStop every night, that might be a problem. You might need to get that checked out.

And doctor John Luis said that for some people with really severe sleep apnea, they might wake up up to three hundred to four hundred times a night.

I'm not sleep long enough for three hundred to four hundred times a night. That is wild something wake me up three hundred times in the night.

That thing gotta die during eight hours of sleep. That's like every one to two minutes. Oh and based on what we know about the sleep cycle and sleep duration, that is not going to feel good when you wake up in the morning.

And it's not just about getting a poor night's sleep. Doctor Jean Luis says if sleep apnea isn't diagnosed or treated, it can lead to a greater risk of heart attack or stroke.

The next disorder we're going to talk about is narcolepsy.

The third one we talk about would be nocolepsy. You may have heard about this so often. It happens when somebody happens to be in their elite teens early adulthood. Not Colepsy essentially is a very huge problem.

Narcolepsy is a chronic neurological disorder where the brain is unable to regulate sleep wake cycles. People with narcolepsy will often feel really drowsy throughout the day, even if they wake up feeling well rested, and they can experience sleep attacks where they just fall asleep instantly. Can you imagine how scary that would be.

This is a really serious condition. I know we talked about me loving sleep and being able to fall asleep really easily, but this is another level. This is not the same thing.

Now, you do fall asleep really quickly, I do. It's like you press up button.

I feel like I could close my eyes just like this. I'm like, m sleep is right around the corner.

Yeah, you just are treading very closely to the alpha beta line whatever that was, from awake to sleep. I feel like you're always I'm alright.

S aright there.

Essentially, some of those people experienced what we call ncollectic attack. If you happen to be at a club, you having a good time, you're cracking jokes, if they become emotional to your wows.

This triggers that Typically a person enters ram sleep about sixty to ninety minutes into their sleep cycle, but people with narcolepsy enter ram sleep much faster, more like fifteen minutes after falling asleep.

And Narcolepsic can be caused by a lot of different things, but one of them is the absence of hypocretan, which is a chemical that promotes wakefulness and regulates rims sleep.

There's one more sleep disorder that doctor Jean Luis talked about restless leg syndrome.

The fourth one I would talk about is west less leg syndrome. We just a problem that happens most of the time when somebody gets to be older.

Restless leg syndrome is exactly what it sounds like, a sleep disorder that causes an irresistible urge to move the legs. Is especially prevalent at night. So that's just for sleep disorders.

And doctor Jean Luis said that there's over eighty that's a lot of issues that can prevent a good night's sleep. Insomnia, sleep apnea, and narcolepsy are some of the most common sleep disorders. And when we come back, we're going to talk about circadian rhythm, our body's biological clock. We're back and we're in week two of our New Year series. Next week the series continues with a lab on the

So we've talked a lot about things that can cause poor sleep, whether it's environmental or cycle, social factors, or sleep disorders. And later in the show, we're going to talk about actual treatments and tips for getting better sleep, but first we want to zoom out a little bit and talk about the importance of sleep in the context of our body's biological clock. Last week, doctor Jean Louis

Doctor Jean Louis is really talking about our brain activity in the context of a twenty four hour cycle called our circadian rhythm. When we're awake, our brains have certain functions and activities just like when we're asleep.

And circadian rhythm is really nature's clock. Plants have it and animals have it. This twenty four hour cycle dictates everything from sleep to wake cycles, to hormone levels, body temperature, and much more so.

How does that work exactly? When our eyes are exposed to light, it gives our bodies certain cues.

The particular cells in our eyes in the retina that pick up that signal, they call them the retinal ganglion cells. So if you're thinking about what the eyes are actually doing, they do two things really. One is that they form an image of the environment, and that goes to the back of the head, the cortical cortext where we begin to appreciate that we are looking at a car, we are looking at a house, and the light. Light does something else. It regulates what we call the super chaves

So really our circadian rhythm controls our lives. That light that doctor Jean Louis is talking about that causes the pineal gland to secrete melatonin also regulates our hormone levels. So without light dictating our circadian rhythm will be all over the place.

This also means that when we're not absorbing enough light at the right time, our circadian rhythm and as a result, our health can be compromised.

So we can imagine what's going to happen is that as we get older, some of these cells in our eyes begin to degenerate, begin to die. For instance, if you ask me about why do we have to get a dysfunction among blacks mostly than white, it may be because the weight of glaucoma is much higher in among blacks.

Glacoma occurs when there is increased pressure in the eye that keeps you from being able to see properly. So if you have high blood pressure, you're more likely to have glaucoma.

And that makes me think about nocturnal hypertension, which we talked about earlier. Our blood pressure is supposed to drop during sleep if you're not getting enough sleep or getting good quality sleep, So getting into that delta area, your blood pressure is going to stay high, and that's nocturnal hypertension.

So if you have glackoma, the cells that are supposed to picking up the signal from the light begin to degenerate. Therefore you're not able to synchronize your SCN as well as your would which when you can't synchronize, believe of melaltnin. So that's one of the reasons why you see all of those sleep problems among black box simply because we tend to develop black coma and a much higher with COMPA in all the groups. So that's the mechanism really by which light has an influence on the biology.

And sometimes a deficiency in light comes from external factors. Like there's just not enough of it. During the winter months, as the days become shorter and the sun sets earlier and earlier, it can affect our circadian rhythm. The sun is retiring at three pm.

Okay, therefore we're not suppressing melaton as we should. If we have excess amount of metal tonin in the system, especially if you happen to be a female, then you might experience some level of side.

SAD is seasonal effective disorder, and it's a type of depression that happens during a specific time of year, usually the winter.

It's a spectrum. Some people feel a little bit down, a little bit moody, a little bit aggravated. All the people are just completely aggravated.

It can't function and at that point, you know, And we talked about this a little bit in Lab seventeen fall back when we talked about daylight savings time.

Oh yeah, that's right.

Is it saving time or saving time? I got to go back to that lab.

It's saving no, no ass. And so I've actually heard of people buying lamps that are supposed to mimic on light to help combat ZAD. So I'm curious about how that works.

Light therapy does in fact help and to some degree exagernous melotony. Melotony you're taking to have regulate your cirkainin profile. You can buy a light box and put it on the top of your desk and get about thirty minutes every morning. It would have regulate your circainity rhythm much better.

But if you're thinking about light therapy, remember not all light is created equal, not all light exposure is good.

There's some indication that there's a particular gene in our eyes what you call pur jeans and cryptochom crypto cooms a preferentially respond to blue light. And what do we know about the tablets and the cell points what kind of light do they emit?

Blue?

So if you are instead of dulling the minds, so to speak, instead of soothing the brain, so to speak, you're exciting the mind. You're exciting the brain. You realize instead of taking you about fifteen to two minutes fall sleep, it's taking you about an hour. So similarly we used to tell people before tablets, do not have a TV in your bedroom because it's going to excite the brain. You don't want to arouse yourself, you want to soothe the brain.

I feel like there are so many things that can keep us from getting a good night sleep, So let's talk about what can actually help. What options do people have to improve their sleep.

I've heard things like taking melatonin, but are there other options when it comes to medication and are they effective and safe?

People take sleep aids mostly because of insomnia. If you're taking sleeping pills under the guide of our physician who knows what he or she is doing, that's fine. You could take some medication for a couple of weeks, that's perfectly fine. But in the long run, where we see is that you build so much toxicity. Sleep medications can in fact destroy your liver and eventually it will kill you.

Doctor Jean Louis also said that sleep aid should not be used if you have sleep apnea, which we talked about earlier on in this episode. With sleep apnea, you already have a problem with your airways staying open enough to be able to get oxygen for you to breathe. When you take sleep sedatives, this can further reduce your muscle tone.

Which means it's even more difficult for you to breathe. So if you have sleep atm here, you're taking sleeping pills, you can actually kill yourself, so you have to be very careful about this.

Well that's out for me. What about melatonin?

You could do over the countermeletonic. Unfortunately not all of them are good. You really want to talk to somebody who knows about this, or ask the farmacist very specific question about this. Has it been tested? Has there been the trial done on this? If the answer to those question is no, don't do it.

So the bottom line is you need to talk to your doctor. We're not giving you medical advice. And so what if you don't want to take any medication, whether it's prescribed or over the counter, Are there any alternatives?

There is this methodology or method or poetry called cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia that I like. There are no negative side effects at all. A lot of people don't want to do it, the behavioral stuff, the cognitive stuff, because it takes a little longer. If you go to do CBTI, it's gonna take you back two to four weeks to begin to feel all massive is improving, Whereas if you take some medication tonight, you're gonna get the

Aside from medical and pharmaceutical help, there are definitely other things we can easily do at home to improve our sleep. Some things could be to improve of our environmental factors, so maybe blackout curtains or a noise machine, limiting screens in the bedroom.

Meditation and breathing exercises are also really great for helping you get to sleep.

I definitely use a white noise machine, and I listen to playlists on Spotify. There's a podcast that's White Noise and it runs eight hours.

I do similar things. I have blackout curtains in my room. Sometimes I listen to the Peaceful Piano playlist on Spotify, or I'll listen to this podcast called Sleep with Me that is hosted by this man who I don't know his name because I always fall asleep in the middle of everything he's saying.

He's talking.

I don't know how he does it. He's talking, but it will put you to sleep.

Audible had something like that, and I used it during the early stages of the pandemic because I don't know if you remember, but your girl was up okay, and there's somebody like reading these books? Did he have one? I didn't fall asleep to Diddy, But there are a bunch of different people just reading different things, and they were reading stories that really went nowhere, So you fall asleep.

Yeah. I think that's the same tactic with the guy on the Sleep with Me podcast where I think he's just rambling, but I can't make it ten minutes and I am gone.

Well, Keisha, who's our mutual friend, put me on to some sleep meditations, which are like breathing exercises you can do, and I found those to be really effective.

Send those to me.

This is a very good point. Breathing exercises, if you do that the right way, meditation, if you have the patience to do that, these are the actual best treatment for insamia, in fact, for anxiety, for depression. But again, we happen to be living in a world or society where people want to quick fix. You may not have to learn how to meditate. That might tip me six months. No, I don't have the time for this. You may not have to do breathing exercises every morning every night. Can

I think considering last week's lab and this lab, it just really shows you how complex sleep is. That's just sleep on its own, you know. Eighty disorder still blew my mind. I don't know about you.

Over eighty over eighty Yeah, And I think that one of the things that is a big takeaway for me from this two part series is that no two people are sleeping the same, but we all have the same goal of trying to get into deep sleep, and so we really all need to be making that a priority for ourselves, which is why I think it's really great that we have it a part of our New Year series, because this should be something that's important to everybody, because,

New Year, more sleep, And another part of this that I just still can't really grasp the weight of is how much of your sleep affects your entire life and how much of it you can't really control. It depends on where you're born. Are you born in an area with a lot of light pollution. Are you born in an area with a lot of noise? Are you living in an area with high air pollution? You know, so you don't have access to green space where plants are

So what we are doing really is we go into the barbershop, the beauty salons, and the churches where we actually engage people directly. So we talked to them about what sleep really is. So we have to make decision about how to improve their sleep health. So on occasion somebody who said, you know what, I can only do seven hours? I think I need more. Then you be into oscar. How long does they get fall asleep? Well it takes me about an hour? Whoah, about an Now

Okay, And so then you know, when you consider all of these pieces, we layer on these other factors that are remnants of our society. Right, So, who's in these areas where that's most likely to overlap, who's working jobs that don't allow them to have sleep at night when it's actually dark outside? And what does that mean for your overall health? And so folks who are not getting a lot of sleep are probably experiencing way more health

With you guys, so Zakia, what's your one thing?

My one thing this week is a paper in behavioral brain research and it's from a group at Bengarian University. In Israel and they put a goldfish in a tank and it has a tracking system that allows the goldfish, based on where it moves in the tank, to explore regular terrain and they see that the goldfish can navigate towards different goalposter, you know, like different colored paper that they put up is really cool. There's a video and the title of the paper was from Fish out of

No One thing this week is not really a thing, but it's an idea. You know, twenty twenty two started and everybody was really excited to be completely done with twenty twenty one and hoping, you know, we're turning a corner. And there's been some new variants that come out with coronavirus, and it's so discouraging and deflating because a lot of us have been working really hard to stay safe and social distance as much as we can, but still trying

That's it for Lab forty six and part two of our sleep series. I am so ready to start practicing some better sleep habits tonight. Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and tell us what you thought about this lab, or give us an idea for a lab we could do later in the semester. We like hearing from you. That's two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight.

And don't forget there's so much more for you to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheat sheet for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter check it out at dope blastpodcast dot com. Special thanks to today's guest expert doctors jar Don Jean Louis.

You can find him on Twitter at g Jean Louis.

One our credits this week are being read by one of our longtime listeners and now friend, Emery Price.

Dope Labs is a Spotify original production from MEGAO Media Group. Producers are Jenny rattlet Mast and Lydia Smith of Way Runner Studios. Editing and sound designed by Rob Smerciak, Mixing by Hannis Brown. Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugira from Spotify. Executive producer Gina Delback and creative producer Candice Manriquez Wren. Special thanks to Shirley Ramos,