Hey fam, Hello Sunshine.
It's well on this Wednesday, and we have sleep scientists, doctor Rebecca Robbins here to help us enhance our sleep quality, which ultimately means improving our overall health and well being. She's revealing the best time to go to bed and whether it's possible to catch up on sleep after a late night. It's Wednesday, July twenty fourth. I'm Danielle Robe.
And I'm Simone Boyce and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, laugh, learn and brighten your day.
Simone talking about a bright day, I have to tell you the only way I have a bright day is when I sleep well.
Are you a good sleeper. I'm a legendary sleeper. I grew a reputation in college for being the girl that could fall asleep anywhere. Like I could fall asleep in the middle of a party and wasn't. I wasn't like drunk or anything.
I just want what do you mean sitting on a couch?
Oh yeah, totally. I fall asleep in movie theaters, Broadway shows, and I'm a voracious consumer of pop culture. But I will fall asleep if the environment is right at the temperatures right, the pillows are soft. Yeah, I can fall asleep anywhere. How about you.
It sounds like you and I could win an Olympic gold medal in sleeping. I'm wondering if we can institute it as a sport.
Sleeping would be a great sport.
Honestly, if I don't get a good night's sleep, I feel it in every single way possible. I crave sugar, even caffeine doesn't help. I get headaches. I know that I'm not going to have great ideas or be creative like my grammars off in emails. From the little things to the big things. It affects my whole life.
To be honest, I know the importance of a good night's sleep, like I know that this is essential for us. However, I have just had to push through a lot of times, pushing through a work schedules, working early hours as a reporter, or being a mom of two under two. Like, the reality is, there are sometimes when I just haven't been able to get in a good sleep pattern, and I
find myself just surviving. So I want to learn some tips and some science based information to really get the most out of my sleep, which is why I am so excited to chat with our guests today doctor Rebecca Robbins, who is a professor researcher who anchors her sleep research in the science of circadian rhythms.
I actually quit a job one time because of my circadian rhythm. You and I both know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night for work, so that's when I learned about it. A circadian rhythm is basically the physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow our twenty four hour cycle.
So TLDR, it's our internal clock.
Yeah, And a big part of understanding that internal clock has to do with chronotypes. So a chronotype is our natural inclination for sleep preferences and the timing of other activity throughout the day like eating, sleeping, working. And each chronotype has an animal assigned to it. So there's the bear, the lion, the wolf, and the dolphin. And we both took the quiz. I can't wait to find out what you are, Danielle.
I know same. I love a quiz.
This is fun me too, Okay, So here's the breakdown of the four animals. So the bear follows the sun. It rises with the sun, it sleeps when the sun goes down, so pretty straightforward circadian approach. The lion is a morning person. They love an early start. They also love turning in early. The wolf is a night owl, and the dolphin is a light or inconsistent sleeper. They're always tired and they have trouble falling and staying asleep. Which one are you?
I didn't even have to take this quiz to know what I am. You could have just said that, and I know that I am the bear. My ideal wake up time if I don't have an alarm, is seven am. My ideal bedtime is around eleven PM. And I feel most most creative, most inspired, and energetic mid morning to mid afternoon.
You know what's so funny about this?
Though?
The quiz will give you sort of characteristics that go along with your behavior, and mine says likely to avoid conflict, aspires to be healthy and happy, and takes comfort in the familiar.
Is that true?
Oh?
My god? One hundred percent true? And I love that.
It also gives you other famous bears, So we have Lebron James, Serena Williams, and Jennifer Lopez, who famously talks about loving sleep.
I feel so similar to that.
Oh you got some good ones, you got some good famous friends in your category. Okay, so I am actually the lion chronotype, and I gotta be honest, this kind of surprised me. My ideal wake up time, according to this quiz is five am. My ideal bedtime is nine pm. I'm an early riser who wakes up bright eyed, often falls asleep easily. That part is definitely true. My big question with the chronotypes is do they change as we get older, because I feel like I've lived different chronotype
personalities in different seasons of my life. But as far as the lion, which is apparently what I am right now, I'm most productive in the early morning, overachiever, prioritize health and fitness, seeks positive interactions, and is optimistic but practical.
Okay, this is so you. I don't even have to ask you if this is you.
What I think is funny is they've all these Meyers Briggs personality tests and we've been missing this chronotype test.
This one's it.
Maybe this is the one the truth teller of them all. And if you want to take this quiz and find out whether you're a bear, a lion, a wolf or a dolphin. We're going to drop it in our show notes.
I can't wait to get into chronotypes and sleep quality and so much more with doctor Rebecca Robbins.
So a little background on her.
She's a sleep scientist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on circadian health, and she's been published in Sleep Health, The Washington Post as well as The New York Times. She's also the co author of Sleep for Success, a book on tools and techniques
for how to get good sleep. So after the break, we're getting into chronotypes, sleep quality and all of the questions about sleep that you want answers to.
We'll be back with doctor Robins.
Doctor Rebecca Robbins, Welcome to the bright Side.
Thank you so much for having me.
We're really excited to chat with you. Simone knows I am a sleepy girl. I love sleep, I value it so heavily in my life, and I'm so excited to chat about how we can maximize the quality of our sleep today.
What is the wildest fact you know about sleep?
The biggest thing that always does my mind about sleep is just how rich and complex it is. I think the biggest myth number one is that we fall asleep, our head hits the pillow, and we enter this kind of monolithic stage of sleep. But all of our evidence points to the contrary that sleep is in some cases a highly active process with tremendous amounts of activity in
the brain and the body. And then the most fascinating is what happens in the brain during sleep, and in certain stages of sleep, such as rapid eye movement sleep, we are almost as active, if not more active in terms of our brain activity than we are during our daytime, which is wild.
To your point, doctor Robbins about brain function. What happens to our brains and our bodies when we don't get enough sleep.
When we're falling short of our physiological biological sleep needs, so many things fall off the rails. When we're not getting enough, good quality sleep, we're less able to regulate
our emotions. The research has shown that the kind of emotional powerhouse of the brain is just more engaged when we're sleep deprived as compared to well rested, So you're more reactive, more likely to snap at loved ones, So mood is one of the first things, but unfortunately that can rear its ugly head if gone unchecked over time, and for that reason, we see a strong bidirectional relationship
between poor sleep and mental health concerns. We also see a host of benefits to our heart health from our sleep, and when we're not getting enough sleep, we've shown that increases our risk for hypertension and cardiovascular disease because there's so much activity that's going on in the brain in this certain stage of sleep, and we're finding that that activity has a really important implication for our ability to retain memories, to take them from short term things that
you learn today and integrate them into longer term storage. We're also more able to achieve insight that light bulb going off. We see more of that after a night of sleep that's allowed for enough sleep and enough rapida.
I'm of mid sleep, doctor Robbins.
A lot of your research and approach and philosophy around having quality sleep comes from understanding our circadian rhythm. So can you talk about the evolutionary purpose behind the circadian rhythm and why that's the key to getting good sleep every night?
Great questions about circadian It's Latin circa das or about a day, and it refers to physiological processes that operate in an approximate kind of twenty four hour rhythm, where some cells are firing during a certain period of time and then retiring or resting during other times. And it turns out that almost every cell of the body does this. Now that serves us from the standpoint of our evolution
to not have to be on all day long. The strongest input to the circadian rhythm is sun light exposure blue daylight spectrum light that helps our internal rhythms match themselves to a twenty four hour day. So sleep is one such circadian rhythm. There are times during the day where we're asleep and times where we're awake. That's the reason we can't keep different sleep schedules from one day
to the next. Some people say, oh, I fall, say some nights at ten pm, the next night two am, the next night eleven pm, and then nine am, because I'm.
Desperate for sleep.
But if you're keeping different schedules, you're limiting your internal circadian rhythm's fundamental ability to know when it should be tired and secreting the related sleep hooromone melatonin and when.
It should be awake.
And that's why one of the most important recommendations not only getting enough sleep, but consistency of sleep is as important, if not more than getting enough sleep. But how does this work in practice?
Because in theory, I get it, and parents know this better than anybody because they practice rituals and routines for their children's sleep schedules. But in my adult life, I don't know if my schedule allows me to go to bed at the same time every night.
Danielle, I fundamentally believe that you can have your cake and eat it too, because if you understand that, okay, consistency matters, then we could talk about your daily routine. One of my first questions I like to ask is what's the earliest wake up time? If you have a six am workout class, you've hit your target wake up time for the week.
And I know that staks.
I'm not gonna, you know, say get out of bed at five am on a Sunday, but meet me halfway. So if you're saying, okay, six am is the earliest time that I have to get out. So the vast majority of adults need between seven and nine hours, and we can talk about how to find your personal sleep need in a minute. If you give yourself ape, you're generally setting yourself up for success. But then at another thirty minutes because we need to power down and unwind
prepare for sleep. And so if you can do that mental mouth of okay, earliest wake up time, count back eight hours, maybe at a buffer of twenty minutes, and then you've hit your target fall asleep time. Now that's really important because I think as a society we're so focused on our alarm block when we're going to wake up, we sometimes lose track of our fall asleep time. And let's be honest, what are we doing at night? It's all you've had a long day and you're watching Netflix,
and suddenly you're like, what's one more episode? I might be the price of a little little bit. But one of the worst things kind of related to this is sleeping in. Some people say, oh, I sleep in for two, three four hours on a Saturday or Sunday morning, but unfortunately you're throwing that internal circadian rhythm completely out of whack. And being mindful of these principles allows you to say, look, it's Friday night, I'm going to go out, and I'm
going to enjoy it. And after that fabulous night out, you're going to be like, I made some great memories, I had a great time, And try to get up as close to the normal time as possible. If you're exhausted in the afternoon, take a nap and that won't hinder that circadian rhythm and the fundamental kind of ability to know when we're tired for a primary sleep episode. Naps will help you pay back that lost sleep and that sleep debt and then get you back on track the next night.
So sleep debt is a real thing. That's not just something we tell ourselves to feel better.
Sleep debt is a real thing.
And if your biological need for sleep is closer to seven or closer to say eight hours, and then every night the past week, you've been falling short of that biological need. But we're all at a different place along that continuum. So the best way to figure out where you are is find a time, maybe it's on vacation when you can kind of get back to neutral, go to bed it with plenty of time, give yourself plenty of time, and then after a couple of nights, if
you've been sleep deprived for weeks month. It's going to take time to get you back to baseline. But once you're there, really finding yourself in a consistent, healthy sleep routine, and then if you can really answer truthfully, I feel great, You've probably hit your physiological sleep need and do your best to meet that night in and night out.
There was a study from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine where they discovered that centenarians, so people that are over one hundred years old or above, slept an average of seven point five hours a day, including naps. And I am obsessed with longevity. I'm hoping to be like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and planking when I'm ninety something years old.
So for years I have been thinking about these centenarians, and I always say this quote to myself that sleep is the secret of superheroes, and you know, I put those centenarians in the superhero category.
Love it.
Aside from sleep studies, how does a person at home evaluate their own sleep quality? Are there any specific markers that we can look out for on a day to day basis?
This is a really great question.
I think that sleep trackers that are increasingly low cost and accessible are a great way to get some insight into just how much did I sleep last night and how was my sleep quality? And sometimes that can be surprising. You can wake up and be like, I feel okay, but wow, I did not get a lot of sleep.
So awareness is everything.
Sleep trackers can help with that, but the oldest school, lowest cost method is how did you feel when you woke up? Do you feel energized? The second time to ask yourself that question is the afternoon, because if you are sleep deprived, you're going to feel the impacts of sleep deficiency the most, simply because of this midday dip and alertness that we all experience, facilitated in some ways.
By media, heavy lunch, but also not getting enough sleep the night before.
Doctor Robbins, there's so much information online these days about sleep and how to improve the quality of your sleep. So we're hoping to cut through the noise for our bright side besties and bring them your expert opinion. Do women need more sleep than men?
This is one of our myths.
There is a small difference that we see in sleep duration, but this is one of our things that is sleep experts. We're trying to debug because there been a couple things slanging around the internet about this.
Women do not need hours more sleep than men. It's moments.
It's like twenty minutes, is what I read? Is that is that accurate?
A little bit less? I think it's closer to seven.
Oh. Interesting.
So unfortunately, this disparity we do see in sleep between gender is sleep quality. So women report far worse sleep quality than do men. And that's the issue that's important I think to draw attention to, because why is that the case? Women typically wear two hats, one inside the
home and one out. Even in the most seemingly equal marriage or partnership, women generally children more, childcare responsibilities of household responsibilities often shouldered above and beyond professional obligations, and so therefore those factors cut into the time that they
would be able to sleep. The other aspect is women typically are managing the smaller tasks in a household of scheduling doctor's appointments, calling the plumber, checking an insurance bill, and those things then eat into sometimes the time that we would be able to sleep, but also can increase worry, worry for children, for pets, for the people for whom they provide care, and not worry can really loom large in terms of difficulties falling asleep and maintaining sleep as
compared to men. So women face a much greater risk for those insomnia like symptoms doma, and that's the disparity I'd love to highlight, not the duration.
Yeah, that's great, Thank you so much for that insight.
How about sleep aids like melatonin, magnesium or tart cherry juice?
Are those effective at all?
Now? Just be wary that the store shelves are ripe with products, gadgets, gizmos that offer the promise of a good night's sleep, because that's the holy grail. It wouldn't be so nice to take one of these and drift off in the most peaceful sleep and wake up refreshed. So just be mindful as a consumer that these companies will often make claims it might not necessarily be backed up by science, because at the end of the day, the secret to getting a good night sleep is behavior change.
It's stuff that's not glamorous, but it's keeping a consistent bedtime schedule. It's making time for safe, making time for exercise, being mindful of when you're eating. One of our key recommendations the Internet and fasting literature actually came out of a circadian biology laboratory when that whole air area of the literature talks about just restricting the time that you spend eating in a typical day, and there are different
ways to do it. Some people try to delay breakfast as long as possible and are able to start eating at twelve pm and then stop eating at maybe five or six pm. Other people prefer an early breakfast and are fine having their last meal at four four thirty, So that is one thing to try. The other recommendation is trying to just not be eating in the three hours before bedtime. Sometimes that's a little bit easier for people.
So there's a lot of individual preference within this, and then also what works for you and your family.
On the subject of sleep aids. What are your thoughts on edibles, because they're very popular right now.
There is not a lot of good equality scientific literature on connabinoids. To be honest, I know they're widely used, but the literature is just pretty farce on these, or if there have been studies, a lot of them have been sponsored by edible companies. So the bottom line is we just have a lot of good science on some of these components. So I will just say, you know, talk to a medical provider. There is a time and
a place for some of these. I think in a perfect world with all of this, kind of the umbrella of sleep aids is thinking about these as really good bound aids, things that can get you to a place where then you're able to implement healthy sleep strategies, building in time to relax and unwind, keeping a consistent sleep schedule.
Those types of things.
I want to ask you about power naps. There's this running joke in my circle of mom friends that something happens when a man becomes a dad. He just automatically becomes a napper. If he was an apper before, he's an even more consistent napper now that he's a father. So I'm really curious about if there are any gender differences when it comes to capability for napping and just the effectiveness of napping overall.
I love talking about napping, and the research really is kind of awesome on dapping. Some research recently for my colleagues at Harvard Medical School and MIT Road they found even moments seconds in a nap can allow you to wake up, be refreshed, more creative, more able to achieve insights and kind of solutions to problems, thinking creatively and how to solve them fascinating. The bottom line, when it comes to napping, if you're open to it, the afternoon is the best time.
There are two strategies.
If you are exhausted, and I'm talking you got three four hours, your new mom and new dad, I've sleeped the night before, and you are wrecked and you really need to recover, then the ninety minute nap is great. The kind of classic Spanish siesta is wonderful. Ninety minutes allows you to get enough sleep to get back to mutual after a night of really poor sleep. But if you're not particularly sleepy, but you're just dragging in the afternoon, you're not as creative as you were in the morning.
You're underperforming.
You're looking at your computer screen, You're like, what have I done for the last hour? Close your computer, lie down, and set your alarm for twenty minute, and worst case, you've got a couple minutes of sleep within that worst case right, or you just switched off your brain for twenty minutes and weren't stimulated the entire time. So all of those are great things.
We're learning so much, but we have to take another short break. We'll be right back. We're back with doctor Rebecca Robbins. Doctor Robins, this is going to be the most difficult question of the whole conversation because it's so hard to synthesize all of the research into one answer. But if we all walk away from this conversation today and make one change to improve the quality of our sleep, what would be your recommendation.
I think one of the first easiest things to do is to start small and think about the time that you're falling asleep. Now, whatever that number is, subtract fifteen minutes, and now set it all on your phone, a relaxing alarm for that time tonight, and whatever you're doing, pull yourself out of that activity and go do something relaxing.
Start the process moving towards bed. Turn off the lights, light a candle, read a book, take a warm shower, and create little mini rituals that you could potentially sustain
most nights before bedtime to help your body understand. And I think that starting small, being a little bit more mindful about falling asleep at a consistent time, being mindful of the things that we do before bedtime can then be like a gateway drug right into some of the other things, because then that gets you just a little bit further towards understanding just how powerful it is to wake up and feel energized.
I started doing this ritual because I have a hard time having a routine at bedtime, and I started just saying thank you before I go to bed, which is I think maybe like an easy prayer, right, and then I go through the list of what I feel thankful for that night, that day, and it's helped me fall asleep more quickly. I've noticed sometimes I fall asleep in the midst of my thank you.
I love that so much, Danielle.
There's actually research on that a gratitude practice before bedtime
is associated with better sleep outcomes. And it's so powerful because there's just a lot of bad news out there right now, and I think our lives are very different than they were even ten or fifteen years ago, and so sometimes all of these things that we've been exposed to can hit you because all day long you've been reacting, and then suddenly your day comes to a halt, and all of that noise around you can really loom large and seem more scary, uncertain, upsetting than maybe it would
otherwise be. And so mindfulness practices are so powerful for all of those reasons before bedtime, and whether that's gratitude journaling or just even meditating on the things that you're grateful for like you do Danielle, or simple breathing technique four seven eight breath technique is one of my favorites. Inhale for four through yer nose, bold for seven, and then excel slowly for eight through your mouth, and suddenly you've taken control of your emotions, of your heart right
and better prepared for sleep. That took thirty seconds.
That's so much better and cheaper than a twelve step skincare routine.
That's way better.
Practicing these exercises kind of trains you for falling asleep. Because falling asleep or free from cares, from worries, it's hard in today's world, but these breathing exercises give you the tools to reach that state, or at least something close to it.
Doctor Robbins, thank you so much for sharing your time with us.
Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Doctor Rebecca Robbins is an Assistant Professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a sleep scientist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, Giada dal Laurentis, celebrity chef and Food Network veteran, is here to talk about taking risks and embarking on a new chapter.
Listen and follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Simone Boye.
You can find me at Simone Boice on Instagram and TikTok.
I'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's ro Bay. We'll see you tomorrow. Keep looking on the bright side.