Day 25 Get Your Rhythm On---Circadian Style
I want you to know that through this journey of sleep, I am sleeping better than I have in years. I am sleeping through the night, actually waking up to an alarm, and rarely getting up at all to use the bathroom (more later). I occasionally do not sleep my allotted eight hours, but I can immediately figure out why, in fact I can predict almost 100% of the time before I go to bed that my sleep will not be what it needs to be. It usually has to do with what I ate, what time I ate, or how much I ate or it could be what time I went to bed or what I did before bedtime. I know all of that may sound confusing, and it was confusing to me, until I got in tune with how my body works under different circumstances. So I resolve to do better the next night, knowing that it is VERY important that I try with everything in my power not to let it happen again. So I am continuing on this journey, training myself so that it will become natural and I will make wise decisions instead of just taking sleep for granted and assuming that it is not a big deal. It is a big, big, deal.
This circadian rhythm is very simple, yet very involved when it comes to how it controls our bodies. I am going to do my best to give you the facts as simply as I can. This is difficult at times, because not all sleep experts agree on all specific points. So I have combined all I've read into some basic principles that I think is a good explanation. I'll just say it makes sense to me and works for me. Feel free to do your own research and share with me what you have figured out. The disagreement stems from the terminology of certain words such as phases, cycles, stages, how many stages, the length of the phases or cycles, etc. But I have concluded that there are no perfect patterns especially when it comes to setting a time on each stage, phase or whatever, that will fit every person. Even the sleep doctors agree on that one. To that I would say, look at the circadian rhythm, learn how to get YOUR amount of allotted sleep in a continuous non-waking pattern, and then let God worry about making sure that your body is getting what YOU need during each cycle.
It is a little harder to accomplish this since I am retired, because I have choices as to where, when and if I sleep. It would be much easier if I had a regular job schedule that dictated my life. But I am determined that I am not going to let the simple fact of retirement rob me of getting what I need---sleep based on my circadian rhythm. This is even more important to me at my age, when sleep because I am retired, doesn't seem to matter. So I could stay up late, sleep in, take naps,---all of which messes with my circadian rhythm. If that was the only issue--just sleep in general--- then it might not be that bad. But when the circadian rhythm is off it causes health problems, and that is what I want to avoid in my old age. So I wondered, what in the world was a circadian rhythm ??Whatever it was, I was ready to "GET IT ON".
Circadian rhythms are physical, mental and behavioral changes that follow a daily cycle. Circadian cycles also determine our eating habits, but we are concentrating on sleep on this blog. The circadian sleep cycles respond primarily to light and darkness in an our environment. (We talked about that on the melatonin blog. Day 24). A sleep rhythm is a 24 hour cycle. Now in the perfect world, you might think that everyone's circadian cycle should be the same when it is based on night and day, but the problem is that it can be changed by external factors, as simple as sunlight and temperature (more later). And since we can control our environment, it is definitely not the same for everyone. So this is why we should cooperate with God on getting this right. It is our internal body clock that tells us when to sleep, rise, eat---regulating physiological processes. Now as we age, the gene activity in our brain changes. If you are old enough, you would recognize this from the fact that you see older people waking up earlier in the morning than when they were younger. Or they might go to bed earlier at night. And you may also see that they seem to need fewer hours of sleep than say a child or teenager. But I found out that this fewer hours of sleep that I talked about needing, can be accelerating the aging process, not in just old people but in people of all ages. So you could be young but act like an old person or have the bad health of an old person. This lack of sleep in older people---like me, can cause depression and lack of cognitive performance and bad moods. (more later). That's what I am all about. I don't mind getting old or even dying, I just want to be healthy, in my right mind and HAPPY when I die.
I first had to figure out if I was sleep deprived. So to do that I had to determine what constituted a good night's sleep. I had read that if you miss an hour's sleep that you need, you would probably be o.k. But if you missed two hours of sleep that would probably be a whole cycle and there would be negative effects to that. One statistic shocked me. When the time changes each year it affects the mortality rate. When we lose an hour in the spring, heart attacks go up 21%. When we gain an hour in the fall, heart attacks go down 24%. That really got my attention, so I had to learn more about these "cycles". Sleep effects every organ system and every disease state. A group of people were exposed to the flu virus. Some had good sleep habits and some were sleep deprived. Of these people who were purposely exposed to the flu virus, almost twice as many people who were sleep deprived got the flu. Research also shows that the more sleep deprived a cancer patient is, the faster the cancer cells multiply. So, a good circadian rhythm, which keeps sleep in balance, is what we want. When it is out of balance our body does not react well. So what are these stages or phases and how do they occur? Now as I said there is disagreement with some of the specific points in the following, that I think God takes care of, but all sleep specialists agree that sleep patterns are a "dance". You actually bounce back and forth during the night among the stages. So I picked one particular pattern and went with it for an explanation for me. As I said, feel free to do your own research if this does not make sense to you. I was not as concerned about the "dance" as I was with what was happening during the various stages and what it meant for me as an older person who I knew was out of rhythm.
Stage 1 is from the time you close your eyes to sleep until you fall asleep---usually within ten minutes. (If it takes you a lot longer than this, there are issues which we will talk about later). You are in light sleep, your eye movements slow down, but you are still somewhat alert and can be easily awakened. You might noticed that some people call this a "catnap."
Stage 2 --during this time you are still sleeping fairly light and the brain waves slow down. If it last more than a few minutes, you might call this a "power nap". Your muscles may jerk like you are falling, during this stage. I am going to tell you the reason one doctor said he thinks this occurs. Since I am a creationist I think this is hilarious, because there is absolutely no "proof" of this---it is simply a theory. He said that back in the day when humans were animals and slept in trees, we had to have perfect balance so we would not fall from the tree. So the leg movements that we had to make to keep from falling were sometimes "jerks", and today the jerks and the sensation of falling is still in our genes. Don't fall off your chair laughing.
Stage 3 and 4--are called "deep sleep", and for some reason these two are usually combined and I can't figure out why unless they think that stage three is "light" deep sleep and stage four is "heavy" deep sleep and things could be different in your body if you woke up during stage three than it would have been if you woke up in stage four. I could never find a clear explanation as to why these two were combined. I know it is all determined by the brain waves and their patterns, but it is still a little unclear to me. That is a project for you, if you care. This is when your brain waves slow down and you have no eye movement or muscle activity. It is harder for you to wake up, and you are going into deeper sleep---some even say your muscles "freeze" and you cannot move them--- and this is when your body repairs muscles and tissues, stimulates growth development, boost your immune function and builds up energy for the next day. When the repairing for that cycle is complete, you go into the next stage called:
REM sleep--Rapid Eye Movement sleep (some call this stage 5). This occurs after the other stages, and usually occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep. This is where dreaming takes place.The average adult dances through 5-6 cycles a night with never going back to stage one (unless you wake up), with REM sleep is increasing up to an hour during it's stage, as the night goes along. REM sleep contains the learning and memory function. This is when your brain consolidates and processes information from the day, before it can be stored in long term memory. If you are having problems with short term memory, you are not getting enough REM sleep---which occurs mostly during the last third of the night because as I said REM sleep gets longer each cycle. So even though repair takes place during stage 4, you are going through additional shorter times of stage fours and longer phases of REM sleep. Confused enough? So if you are waking up around 2-3 in the morning and cannot go back to sleep, you are disrupting the REM sleep and it is affecting your memory. And you are definitely out of rhythm!! And it is causing health problems and worst of all MEMORY problems.
So how do I know how much sleep I need and how can I get it? A cycle last between 80-120 minutes, but on an average of 90 minutes. So for general purposes you go through five cycles. So five times 90 is 450 divided by 60 minutes, equals 7 and 1/2 hours. That is the minimum. But maybe your cycles are a little longer, and that is why most doctors round this out and say, you need eight hours of sleep at night. Now we know at different ages, you need different amounts of sleep. Babies need LOTS of sleep---they are growing and need lots of growing sleep time. Let them sleep!! I know some baby advocates say put your baby on a schedule and wake them up to feed, diaper, whatever to keep them on a schedule. I totally disagree with that theory, just in case you care. I think this is because it is convenient for the caregivers. I trained students to get jobs in day care centers, and I spent a lot of time supervising them in the day care setting. I knew it was all about the care givers schedule and not about the health of the children. But that is another story that I will probably not cover in a blog. But it is not just babies, children, too, are growing and go through growth cycles---they need lots of sleep. Teenagers need more sleep than adults. Something interesting I read. One school system outside of Philadelphia decided to do a study based on the amount of sleep vs. SAT scores. Their SAT scores for the district was hovering around 1300-1400. They decided to change their school start time 30 minutes later. They then tracked the scores and they went up to the 1500-1600 range. Can you see that sleep is important and it is important that we see that our children get good sleep?
Because of the length of this blog, I am going to cover other aspects of sleep and how it affects our health, so I am going to end by giving you some general guide lines about how to reset your circadian rhythm. So here are the baby steps with which you can start.
Go to bed the same time every night and get up the same time in the morning. This means seven days a week---no sleeping in on the weekends with the rational that you are catching up on lost sleep. There is no such thing. If you enter the ballgame in the third inning, you cannot make up the first two innings. They are over---move on and start with inning one the next night. So let's say 10 pm to 6 am is your eight hours. I know this could be different for you, but you are smart enough to figure out what eight hours would be---or maybe 9 or 10 hours if you have children. Actually most experts agree that women need 10 hours of sleep. (more later). Now if something happens that your get in bed by 11pm, still get up at 6am. I know this is only seven hours, but for some reason this same wake up time is very important in setting the circadian rhythm. My video sleep doctor even said if you get to bed at 5am in the morning, still try to get up at 6am or 7am at the latest. Weird? right? Then as soon as your alarm goes off, (I know this depends on several factors), expose yourself to 15 minutes of natural night--direct sunlight, not artificial light---in other words, outside. This begins to set your internal clock. Just go out on the porch and have a cup of warm lemon water. Then you are ready to go about your daily duties. You are just taking steps to get your body in rhythm.
For those of you who might be serious about your sleep patterns, your circadian rhythm, and your melatonin production, here is a way to take a stress free vacation and jumpstart your journey of putting your body into balance. This study by the University of Colorado was done on a group of healthy Boulder residents. They sent the group out camping where there was no artificial light at all, especially at night---no cell phones. After one week of camping without artificial light, there was no circadian disruption and the melatonin levels normalized 100%. Sounds peaceful to me. Or you can get your house totally black, go to bed when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun comes up---and lose your cell phone for the night. (more later).
All the above sounds good and achievable, but for me it is a journey. I could not pull it off very quickly. I started, but I constantly had to remind myself of the importance of good sleep. Mine had been messed up for years. In the next blog I will tell you about the sleep journey I am on and the adjustments that I am still having to make that seemed at first ridiculous to me. But I am determined that God's ways are best and I will share some secrets I have learned in the next blog. I am a living testimony that since I started thinking this way I am in the best health I have been in ----in literally years. I am down fifty pounds from my highest weight ever. I have more energy than I have had in years, and I am happier than I have ever been in my life. It is a journey that I will never stop. I am nearing 70, but God is not finished with me yet.
I want you to know that through this journey of sleep, I am sleeping better than I have in years. I am sleeping through the night, actually waking up to an alarm, and rarely getting up at all to use the bathroom (more later). I occasionally do not sleep my allotted eight hours, but I can immediately figure out why, in fact I can predict almost 100% of the time before I go to bed that my sleep will not be what it needs to be. It usually has to do with what I ate, what time I ate, or how much I ate or it could be what time I went to bed or what I did before bedtime. I know all of that may sound confusing, and it was confusing to me, until I got in tune with how my body works under different circumstances. So I resolve to do better the next night, knowing that it is VERY important that I try with everything in my power not to let it happen again. So I am continuing on this journey, training myself so that it will become natural and I will make wise decisions instead of just taking sleep for granted and assuming that it is not a big deal. It is a big, big, deal. It is a little harder to accomplish this since I am retired, because I have choices as to where, when and if I sleep. It would be much easier if I had a regular job schedule that dictated my life. But I am determined that I am not going to let the simple fact of retirement rob me of getting what I need---sleep based on my circadian rhythm. This is even more important to me at my age, when sleep because I am retired, doesn't seem to matter. So I could stay up late, sleep in, take naps,---all of which messes with my circadian rhythm. If that was the only issue--just sleep in general--- then it might not be that bad. But when the circadian rhythm is off it causes health problems, and that is what I want to avoid in my old age. So I wondered, what in the world was a circadian rhythm ??Whatever it was, I was ready to "GET IT ON".
Circadian rhythms are physical, mental and behavioral changes that follow a daily cycle. Circadian cycles also determine our eating habits, but we are concentrating on sleep on this blog. The circadian sleep cycles respond primarily to light and darkness in an our environment. (We talked about that on the melatonin blog. Day 24). A sleep rhythm is a 24 hour cycle. Now in the perfect world, you might think that everyone's circadian cycle should be the same when it is based on night and day, but the problem is that it can be changed by external factors, as simple as sunlight and temperature (more later). And since we can control our environment, it is definitely not the same for everyone. So this is why we should cooperate with God on getting this right. It is our internal body clock that tells us when to sleep, rise, eat---regulating physiological processes. Now as we age, the gene activity in our brain changes. If you are old enough, you would recognize this from the fact that you see older people waking up earlier in the morning than when they were younger. Or they might go to bed earlier at night. And you may also see that they seem to need fewer hours of sleep than say a child or teenager. But I found out that this fewer hours of sleep that I talked about needing, can be accelerating the aging process, not in just old people but in people of all ages. So you could be young but act like an old person or have the bad health of an old person. This lack of sleep in older people---like me, can cause depression and lack of cognitive performance and bad moods. (more later). That's what I am all about. I don't mind getting old or even dying, I just want to be healthy, in my right mind and HAPPY when I die.
I first had to figure out if I was sleep deprived. So to do that I had to determine what constituted a good night's sleep. I had read that if you miss an hour's sleep that you need, you would probably be o.k. But if you missed two hours of sleep that would probably be a whole cycle and there would be negative effects to that. One statistic shocked me. When the time changes each year it affects the mortality rate. When we lose an hour in the spring, heart attacks go up 21%. When we gain an hour in the fall, heart attacks go down 24%. That really got my attention, so I had to learn more about these "cycles". Sleep effects every organ system and every disease state. A group of people were exposed to the flu virus. Some had good sleep habits and some were sleep deprived. Of these people who were purposely exposed to the flu virus, almost twice as many people who were sleep deprived got the flu. Research also shows that the more sleep deprived a cancer patient is, the faster the cancer cells multiply. So, a good circadian rhythm, which keeps sleep in balance, is what we want. When it is out of balance our body does not react well. So what are these stages or phases and how do they occur? Now as I said there is disagreement with some of the specific points in the following, that I think God takes care of, but all sleep specialists agree that sleep patterns are a "dance". You actually bounce back and forth during the night among the stages. So I picked one particular pattern and went with it for an explanation for me. As I said, feel free to do your own research if this does not make sense to you. I was not as concerned about the "dance" as I was with what was happening during the various stages and what it meant for me as an older person who I knew was out of rhythm.
Stage 1 is from the time you close your eyes to sleep until you fall asleep---usually within ten minutes. (If it takes you a lot longer than this, there are issues which we will talk about later). You are in light sleep, your eye movements slow down, but you are still somewhat alert and can be easily awakened. You might noticed that some people call this a "catnap."
Stage 2 --during this time you are still sleeping fairly light and the brain waves slow down. If it last more than a few minutes, you might call this a "power nap". Your muscles may jerk like you are falling, during this stage. I am going to tell you the reason one doctor said he thinks this occurs. Since I am a creationist I think this is hilarious, because there is absolutely no "proof" of this---it is simply a theory. He said that back in the day when humans were animals and slept in trees, we had to have perfect balance so we would not fall from the tree. So the leg movements that we had to make to keep from falling were sometimes "jerks", and today the jerks and the sensation of falling is still in our genes. Don't fall off your chair laughing.
Stage 3 and 4--are called "deep sleep", and for some reason these two are usually combined and I can't figure out why unless they think that stage three is "light" deep sleep and stage four is "heavy" deep sleep and things could be different in your body if you woke up during stage three than it would have been if you woke up in stage four. I could never find a clear explanation as to why these two were combined. I know it is all determined by the brain waves and their patterns, but it is still a little unclear to me. That is a project for you, if you care. This is when your brain waves slow down and you have no eye movement or muscle activity. It is harder for you to wake up, and you are going into deeper sleep---some even say your muscles "freeze" and you cannot move them--- and this is when your body repairs muscles and tissues, stimulates growth development, boost your immune function and builds up energy for the next day. When the repairing for that cycle is complete, you go into the next stage called:
REM sleep--Rapid Eye Movement sleep (some call this stage 5). This occurs after the other stages, and usually occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep. This is where dreaming takes place.The average adult dances through 5-6 cycles a night with never going back to stage one (unless you wake up), with REM sleep is increasing up to an hour during it's stage, as the night goes along. REM sleep contains the learning and memory function. This is when your brain consolidates and processes information from the day, before it can be stored in long term memory. If you are having problems with short term memory, you are not getting enough REM sleep---which occurs mostly during the last third of the night because as I said REM sleep gets longer each cycle. So even though repair takes place during stage 4, you are going through additional shorter times of stage fours and longer phases of REM sleep. Confused enough? So if you are waking up around 2-3 in the morning and cannot go back to sleep, you are disrupting the REM sleep and it is affecting your memory. And you are definitely out of rhythm!! And it is causing health problems and worst of all MEMORY problems.
So how do I know how much sleep I need and how can I get it? A cycle last between 80-120 minutes, but on an average of 90 minutes. So for general purposes you go through five cycles. So five times 90 is 450 divided by 60 minutes, equals 7 and 1/2 hours. That is the minimum. But maybe your cycles are a little longer, and that is why most doctors round this out and say, you need eight hours of sleep at night. Now we know at different ages, you need different amounts of sleep. Babies need LOTS of sleep---they are growing and need lots of growing sleep time. Let them sleep!! I know some baby advocates say put your baby on a schedule and wake them up to feed, diaper, whatever to keep them on a schedule. I totally disagree with that theory, just in case you care. I think this is because it is convenient for the caregivers. I trained students to get jobs in day care centers, and I spent a lot of time supervising them in the day care setting. I knew it was all about the care givers schedule and not about the health of the children. But that is another story that I will probably not cover in a blog. But it is not just babies, children, too, are growing and go through growth cycles---they need lots of sleep. Teenagers need more sleep than adults. Something interesting I read. One school system outside of Philadelphia decided to do a study based on the amount of sleep vs. SAT scores. Their SAT scores for the district was hovering around 1300-1400. They decided to change their school start time 30 minutes later. They then tracked the scores and they went up to the 1500-1600 range. Can you see that sleep is important and it is important that we see that our children get good sleep?
Because of the length of this blog, I am going to cover other aspects of sleep and how it affects our health, so I am going to end by giving you some general guide lines about how to reset your circadian rhythm. So here are the baby steps with which you can start.
Go to bed the same time every night and get up the same time in the morning. This means seven days a week---no sleeping in on the weekends with the rational that you are catching up on lost sleep. There is no such thing. If you enter the ballgame in the third inning, you cannot make up the first two innings. They are over---move on and start with inning one the next night. So let's say 10 pm to 6 am is your eight hours. I know this could be different for you, but you are smart enough to figure out what eight hours would be---or maybe 9 or 10 hours if you have children. Actually most experts agree that women need 10 hours of sleep. (more later). Now if something happens that your get in bed by 11pm, still get up at 6am. I know this is only seven hours, but for some reason this same wake up time is very important in setting the circadian rhythm. My video sleep doctor even said if you get to bed at 5am in the morning, still try to get up at 6am or 7am at the latest. Weird? right? Then as soon as your alarm goes off, (I know this depends on several factors), expose yourself to 15 minutes of natural night--direct sunlight, not artificial light---in other words, outside. This begins to set your internal clock. Just go out on the porch and have a cup of warm lemon water. Then you are ready to go about your daily duties. You are just taking steps to get your body in rhythm.
For those of you who might be serious about your sleep patterns, your circadian rhythm, and your melatonin production, here is a way to take a stress free vacation and jumpstart your journey of putting your body into balance. This study by the University of Colorado was done on a group of healthy Boulder residents. They sent the group out camping where there was no artificial light at all, especially at night---no cell phones. After one week of camping without artificial light, there was no circadian disruption and the melatonin levels normalized 100%. Sounds peaceful to me. Or you can get your house totally black, go to bed when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun comes up---and lose your cell phone for the night. (more later).
All the above sounds good and achievable, but for me it is a journey. I could not pull it off very quickly. I started, but I constantly had to remind myself of the importance of good sleep. Mine had been messed up for years. In the next blog I will tell you about the sleep journey I am on and the adjustments that I am still having to make that seemed at first ridiculous to me. But I am determined that God's ways are best and I will share some secrets I have learned in the next blog. I am a living testimony that since I started thinking this way I am in the best health I have been in ----in literally years. I am down fifty pounds from my highest weight ever. I have more energy than I have had in years, and I am happier than I have ever been in my life. It is a journey that I will never stop. I am nearing 70, but God is not finished with me yet.
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