I recently sat down with John Gildea to discuss his view of how our sleep impacts our health. In this conversation, we cover a preverbal smorgasbord of topics including; blue light, ideal room temperature, ideal sleep time, Ashwagandha and the best withanolide for sleep, sleep supplements, and how alcohol and blood glucose impacts sleep.
Transcript:
David:
Hey everybody. It's David here and John, and we're going to talk today, some about sleep. And so, in last week's blog, we talked some about sleep and four benefits, ProHealth benefits of sleep. Today I just wanted to chat with John about his view of sleep and health, and then some of his hacks. How does he get good sleep because he does have. Would you hold up your [watch]? He has the Charge 4 Fitbit. So he monitors his sleep every night. I have one too, but I'm going to have to actually talk to you after this because mine does not register. It rarely registers my sleep. So anyway, don't know what that's about, but yeah. So John, talk to us about your view. You know a lot about health. What's your view on how sleep fits into health?
John Gildea:
It's probably, to frame the conversation. One of the things that we say all the time, I sit down with somebody that has health issues is one of the key things you want to do is make your day day and your night night, and those are very key distinctions of circadian rhythm, where your day has to be active in sunlight, and then in your nighttime, you want to be, have a transition time where you're starting to slow down and then ramping down your life. And there's a lot of things that float down into that. During the day we're more sedentary than we used to be. Yeah, fight that, get outside, get into the sun, get outside, move around, get your heart rate modulating, going up and down. Get outside and sweat. So all those come into play. And if you're tracking your own sleep, you can see pretty easily that in the days where you're very active, your sleep will be equally deep on the other side of it. So that's sort of a important framework.
John Gildea:
Another, I think important one is that that nighttime is a time to repair. So as you, one of the activities that happen during the daytime is you're eating during the daytime. And so an important counterpart to that is not to eat close to nighttime. If your stomach is full of food, it's going to very negatively affect your sleep. So all of the systems are in repair, but that's one that seems to have a pretty big effect on sleep is you don't want all your blood going to your stomach and trying to digest stuff while you're sleeping. Because a lot of the natural things that are happening while you're asleep are opposing that. So melatonin that is produced at night is an insulin, basically. So that's part of the induction of a fast at nighttime, so you're supposed to be slowing down your metabolism and insulin and epinephrine are things that work kind of against that.
John Gildea:
And so just like during early morning, in order to wake up that epinephrin and your cortisol rises to raise your glucose and raise your awareness, how awake you are. At nighttime, you want the opposite. You want to start ramping down, slowing down, darkening in preparation for your sleep at night. So that you're not fighting your own hormones. So those are kind of the big things. Blood pressure reduces at nighttime while you're asleep. So that's called nocturnal dipping. And so a lot of the repair work of the capillaries that having high blood pressure during the day and exercising and doing all that sort of thing. At nighttime, those capillaries are being repaired as the blood pressure lowers.
John Gildea:
And yeah, there's a lot of different things that are going on during sleep. And so the hacking that goes on when you're trying to hack some of these systems is we're going to think that that switches is when you're very excited, excitable, just slowing down at nighttime, turning off your computer earlier, getting decreased your blue light. So probably the first hack is blue blocking glasses. A few hours before sleep can really help, trying not to have screen time right before sleep. Or if you do, you have that nighttime switch that turn into blue.
David:
Yeah Apple products it's called night shift on your display. What's the issue with blue light?
John Gildea:
Yeah so blue is the wavelength of light that is excitatory towards your circadian track. So, those, what are some famous, to the groundhog. You track how long your day is in terms of the season by number of hours that are a blue light here, your eyes see. And so you track your seasonal changes by the amount of blue light that's felt during the day. In morning, there's a set of receptors in your eye. I forget the name of them, but you have to get a certain number of lux light for five minutes or so in order to make that transition of your brain activity in the morning, a lot of people in the winter have seasonal affective disorder. The way to counteract that is to get bright light first thing in the morning, you'll saturate those light sensors that are in your eye and blue seems to be directing, that blue light is what constrains your pineal gland in neural hypothesis.
John Gildea:
And so a lot of the things like migrations in birds and migrations in the animals like beluga whales, that's one of the biggest pineal gland, that they're very in tune to seasonal changes so they can migrate correctly. Yeah so all those together are really important. And your pineal gland is also involved in sleep and hibernation too. So in the winter time some people get a little more sluggish because your pineal gland is saying that it's winter time. Some people put on weight in the winter time, no matter what you're doing, that's basically seasonal changes in your hormones. When I'm lifting a lot in the fall, as I'm approaching winter, I can put on muscle mass more easily. So there's a lot of seasonal things that happen, but the day and night stuff is really important. So we haven't talked about dopamine or serotonin.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:08:04]
John Gildea:
... talked about dopamine or serotonin or the delta wave sleep, so the different sleep cycles are really important. Biggest one is, during deep sleep, you get delta wave activity which are wavelike activity that goes throughout your whole brain, and it's the only time that you can move your lymphatics in your brain. Normally, lymphatics is moved with muscle contraction, but because your brain is encased in a skull, you can't move your lymphatics from movement, or not very much, anyway, so all of the lymphatic movement and drainage of the interstitial fluid of your brain is done during sleep, so if you're missing that sleep stage at nighttime, you're not detoxing your brain. Your brain is stewing in its own juices, as it were. Very important to get that sleep.
David:
[crosstalk 00:09:02] delta.
John Gildea:
Yeah.
David:
And then, so coming back to night being night and day being day, and so you will do blue block glasses, just limit screen time. If you're on your screens, make sure that they have the nighttime mode, which the Apples night shift. I think Windows 10 has one as well. And then-
John Gildea:
Exercising in the day.
David:
And then day. Exercise during the day and also get exposed to sunlight.
John Gildea:
Yeah. For sure.
David:
And so there's not... Even if it's a cloudy day, can you go outside and that would be enough?
John Gildea:
Yeah. Part of the entrainment for your day and night is the infrared light. They go right through clouds, so... You're also tracking the infrared as well. All the wavelengths are involved, and usually, of course, you're tracking that with vitamin D production and skin tinting, but all of them are tracked, and so... especially if you work inside and are more sedentary, purposeful just getting outside and moving around during the day is very important for circadian rhythms.
David:
And then, in your bedroom, do you minimize lights and stuff like that? Do you have your nightlight that you grew up with in there?
John Gildea:
Yeah. We only have red lights, and they're dim, and we've had to block some of the blue things that are on some of the electronics.
David:
[crosstalk 00:10:56]. Yeah.
John Gildea:
Yeah. And-
David:
I go into my kitchen at night, and I don't need to turn on the light because all the electronics are just bright.
John Gildea:
Yeah. Glaring.
David:
... yeah. Everything's just a cold blue.
John Gildea:
Yeah because the LEDs for the blue light are bright and cheap. That tends to be... A lot of the white light you have is very blue-light dominant. And, scheduling towards the evening, I try to switch off the lights that are LED based or fluorescent based and turn on lights that are incandescent. That light spectrum of incandescent lights is closer to evening light, you know red shifted. And then... We don't have actually blackout lights in the room because my wife really likes to wake up to the sun.
David:
You mean the shades?
John Gildea:
Yeah. The block out shades. So we haven't done that. That's a battle, but...
David:
Let me just say the blackout shades are awesome.
John Gildea:
Yeah.
David:
Especially if you live in the city and you have a city light that comes into your window at night.
John Gildea:
Yeah.
David:
They're necessary.
John Gildea:
I'm a hot sleeper, so I'm on the hot side, so I tried to wear the masks and I sweat, so that doesn't work for me.
David:
Yeah. Speaking of temperature, what's the ideal temperature [inaudible 00:12:29]?
John Gildea:
Yeah. It's definitely cool. So that's kind of getting into some other hacks. Magnesium at night. So one of the ways that, if people have trouble sleeping, we usually suggest is to take a hot bath right before bed and magnesium sulfate, or Epsom salt, bath to get magnesium and sulfate, and also being warm when you get into bed. You want your head cool, feet warm, and the whole room cool is the best way to do that. I think ideal is in between 60 and 70 degrees.
David:
So like 65.
John Gildea:
Yeah, 65 would be ideal. And then, for some people, having socks, some form of socks helps. Wool is a very breathable material that's temperature regulating. Wool is good if you're going to have a cover, a little cover. Most people have cotton sheets on their skin with a thin wool blanket on top of that, better helping to regulate temperature. Yeah, so cool room is another one. And then I guess we can talk about some of the supplements [inaudible 00:13:57] that are known to work. Ashwagandha is a very good one, very well studied. There's lots of papers just on straight ashwagandha. There's a little bit of controversy about whether it's the withanolides. [inaudible 00:14:14] water extract, but there's a paper suggesting the delta wave part of sleep is from the water-soluble portion of it. The withanolides more coincide with depression. So that mood part also has to do with sleep, so dopamine and serotonin are also very involved in sleep. So I think it's probably both and possibly a mixture of those two compounds would be best.
John Gildea:
And then lots of other ones, GABA is the opposite of a stimulatory. It's more of the calming portion of the brain that makes your brain slow down, so anything that activates GABA. Glycine is another one that does it. There's lots of things, 5-HTP helps you produce more melatonin and more dopamine, more serotonin
David:
5-HTP is derived from tryptophan, so tryptophan is an amino acid, and if you're like me, at Thanksgiving, after you have the turkey, you're just like half comatose. The urge to sleep is high.
John Gildea:
Yeah.
David:
And that's tryptophan.
John Gildea:
Yeah, tryptophan. And then other big ones are, of course, melatonin and then the whole basis of your nighttime hibernation has to do with insulin, so lowering your glucose helps, and-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:16:04]
John Gildea:
... your glucose helps, and that is a big one in the area of lowering your blood sugar, so that you get more of a deeper deep sleep when you're blocking insulin. Insulin is what makes glucose go into cells. If you have less circulating glucose... A bad combination is to eat right before bed, so your glucose stays high, and then you're blocking your insulin, and then your circulating glucose stays high all night, and you end up with what are called AGE, good acronym, advanced glycation end products. AGE, yeah.
John Gildea:
[crosstalk 00:16:51] sugar [inaudible 00:16:52] and damaging cells during the time when you're supposed to be recuperating.
David:
But a nightcap right before bed is okay, right?
John Gildea:
Yeah. I think alcohol is processed by your body exactly the same as glucose, very similar. You get uric acid induction, and that's probably how it affects you is it's simulating having these little sugar blips right before bed, like having a high fructose corn syrup drink. But I do think some of the ill effects of having a drink is... Like if you're having beer, that's glucose and carbohydrates, and then some of the fancy drinks have a lot more sugar in it than you probably realize. Just do shots and do it a couple of hours before bed.
David:
Edit. Edit! If you're going to drink, yeah. Because-
John Gildea:
[crosstalk 00:18:01].
David:
... yeah. Actually, I was being a little sarcastic. And so yeah, drinking before bed actually screws up everything, and so I wouldn't recommend that. But yeah, socially, if you're out at a party, make sure two to three hours before you go to bed that's stopped.
John Gildea:
Yeah. A dry wine.
David:
Yep. The old-
John Gildea:
... get a little bit of the resveratrol.
David:
The older vines, so... And there are actually online companies now that sell very low sugar... They measure it, and so that's a thing now.
John Gildea:
It's not very much alcohol, so you know, you push that number of hours beforehand, two hours before bed, and have a lot less of an effect.
David:
So no drinking. No eating right before bed. So we're formulating a supplement to be released this fall, maybe this month, and so, John took the kind of beta version of that, and can you just share some of your experience, John?
John Gildea:
Yeah. My current situation is not an ideal one. I have some pain in my shoulders that... It's a long story, but it's having effects on my sleep, and so I've been having trouble sleeping more, mostly because of pain, but surprisingly, when I took the sleep formula, the amount of deep sleep that I was getting was pretty dramatically... I don't want to say numbers yet just because it seems too dramatic, but I could really feel the lack of sleep affecting my daytime awakeness and pain levels, too, so it's kind of like a snowball thing. You have pain, and then you don't sleep as well, you don't feel as well, so you don't do as much, and then, you know, your day and night cycle... So that's a chronic problem for a lot of people. As you're getting older, you don't feel right, and you get into that cycle easily, but yeah. I definitely took it, and it had pretty dramatic effects on the amount of deep sleep I was having each night. But it was also affecting the number of times I woke up [crosstalk 00:20:38]-
David:
Because of [inaudible 00:20:38].
John Gildea:
... yeah, the pain going down made me not wake up as much. So they're kind of interrelated that way. Inflammation has a lot to do with pain threshold. How well you sleep has a lot to do with inflammation. There are all kinds of interrelated... and as a scientist you always want to know what's the direct cause, but moving in the right direction is kind of the idea that you should follow. Track what you can and always keep moving in the direction of improved health is beneficial. You know, if you can't isolate what exactly it was.
David:
Yeah. Exactly. And then how much time before you'd actually put your head onto the pillow would you take it? What's the ideal time to take a sleep supplement?
John Gildea:
I was doing a half hour before sleep, and so that's generally a good idea for melatonin unless you really have your circadian rhythms out of whack. In that case, you want to go even earlier if you really have trouble slowing down or you get that surge at nighttime. You're the night owl person. There are people that are... the early birds and the sleep-in people. And teenagers [inaudible 00:22:07] that they need more sleep and pretty dramatic effects of letting teenagers sleep in a little bit longer than usual has huge benefits. [inaudible 00:22:27] sleep [inaudible 00:22:29] sleep, and that was a really interesting part of the read. In school systems where they just pushed back school by a half hour, there was snowballing effects-
David:
[crosstalk 00:22:45].
John Gildea:
... to where there were actually less deaths [inaudible 00:22:47] in the school system because they're more awake when you're driving.
David:
Yeah.
John Gildea:
It was very interesting to see how it kind of snowballed in lots of ways that were not predictable.
David:
Do you have access to that paper?
John Gildea:
Well, it's in books, so I could look up the study through the book. A famous sleep scientist. I should know his name off the top of my head [inaudible 00:23:17].
David:
Yeah. I was reading a study. It was a 2012 study [inaudible 00:23:24] earlier than that. On twins and looking at the amounts and times they slept, the duration, and there's a decrease [inaudible 00:23:36] mortality risk of 24% if you slept less than 7 hours [inaudible 00:23:43] increase by 7 hours [inaudible 00:23:45] slept more than 8 hours. So that seemed to indicate to me that there is... at least from a population standpoint. Everybody's different... but sleeping too much actually is not always beneficial.
John Gildea:
Right. Right, right.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
David:
... actually is not always beneficial.
John Gildea:
Right. Right, right. Yeah, I think most teenagers are trying to study and stay up, whatever they're doing, so in general, sleep [inaudible 00:24:11] just a little bit longer [inaudible 00:24:13]. I know that hospital visits is one of those things statistically when you look at the whole United States, how important sleep is, is during daylight savings, when you lose an hour of sleep, the number of hospitalizations goes up, the number of heart attacks goes up, [inaudible 00:24:34] sleep is very clearly... the majority of people are sleep deprived. Subtracting an hour of sleep is generally not a good thing. It shows up in all kinds of statistics.
David:
Yeah. I want to wrap it up by talking about sleep meds, pharmaceuticals. [inaudible 00:24:57] that, if you are regularly taking a pharmaceutical to help you sleep, there's increased... Your mortality risk increases 30%. Wow. [inaudible 00:25:18] read it [crosstalk 00:25:20]-
John Gildea:
[crosstalk 00:25:20].
David:
Yeah. I can't back it up right this minute, but I wanted to ask you what you know about that.
John Gildea:
I haven't read too many papers on the sleep side effects, but I know it's a common side effect of pharmaceuticals in general. You have to be [inaudible 00:25:36] you're sensitive to pharmaceuticals. That's one of the ways that it shows up. In fact, part of my other life is working a lab where we're developing a lot of automation, so a lot of engineers developing systems, and one of the systems that we developed was a sleep monitoring system that just goes on your bed, and they're put into nursing homes. And the first thing happened that we noticed was, if you are taking medication and then you skip your medication, you can, in one day, tell by your sleep patterns changing. And so that was... all the impetus that was taken needed to put that particular sensing technology into a bunch of nursing homes, because it alerted the staff that they're skipping medication, you know, either purposefully or forgetfully.
David:
Their sleep is improved. They have not taken their medications.
John Gildea:
Right. But it's a change, so they could detect [inaudible 00:26:52]. Yeah, so both taking and skipping one while you're taking it can have effects on sleep, so it's not too surprising. Usually messing around with the hormonal systems in your brain... those are always tough ones to mess around with. The serotonin reuptake inhibitors affect depression, but you have to really watch people that are going off of them because your suicide rate goes up dramatically. So messing around with serotonin in pharmaceuticals, you should take that really very seriously. Sleep is one of the things that you should probably monitor if you're going on to one of them or off one of them.
David:
And berberine... we've talked about this paper that's on our website, with berberine in the mouse study increasing serotonin 30% and dopamine 25%... and that's a lot!
John Gildea:
Yeah.
David:
And so [inaudible 00:28:09] should you be monitoring if you're taking those medications or ... excuse me, nutraceuticals, this plant-based medicine, chemicals... What about those? Same issue?
John Gildea:
Yeah, so in the case of berberine... It's been around so long. I don't know of the big side effects of that, but for sure, if you're... like taking lipoic acid, anything that changes your blood sugars, if you have known problems with insulin resistance or diabetes, you may have to adjust your meds, and that's a for sure doctor question.
David:
Yeah.
John Gildea:
So if you have problems in sugar or if you're taking meds for depression, it would be a good thing to run past your doctor [inaudible 00:29:05] if you have unknown [inaudible 00:29:09] definitely talk to your doctor if you're on those types of [inaudible 00:29:16].
David:
All right, John. Well, thank you for joining us. And we're on Instagram. We're on Facebook. Feel free to follow us there. And then if there's a link below with papers or anything, feel free to click it to read those. All right, thanks so much, guys! Have a good.
John Gildea:
[inaudible 00:29:34].
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:29:40]
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