Sleep Cycles

I have found that learning about the different cycles of sleep it has helped me to understand my symptoms of sleep apnea and to identify when I have or have not been having a good nights sleep. Unfortunately, I believe, that while a CPAP is essential to maintaining your health if you have OSA, it is like so many other conditions that you might have to take medications for - you feel better, but it is not a cure, just management of the disease. There are 5 stages if sleep: Stage 1 is about 5-10% of our sleep time and Stage 2 is about 30-50% of our sleep time. These are the lighter stages of sleep. Stage 3 into 4 is what is considered our deep sleep. it accounts for 20-40% of our sleep time. It is also called our slow wave sleep. There is no rapid eye movement, our heart rate, breathing and blood pressure all decrease. Many experts feel this is the time our body takes to restore itself physically. The last and final stage of sleep is REM sleep or Rapid Eye Movement sleep. It accounts for 20-25% of our sleep time. During this time our brain activity is very intense. Dreams are experienced in REM sleep. Experts are not sure why our brain activity is so intense, but it may the way our body restores our mind or psyche - it's like cleaning out all the bad garbage we don't need. I think of some of the dreams I have had where I finally got to be friends with someone who I had wronged or say goodbye to someone who is no longer living.... I DO believe dreams help us stay sane! The odd thing about REM is even though our brain is intensely active, our bodies are paralyzed. If you have ever been suddenly awakeed from this sleep cycle from a loud sound, like a police siren, you may have noticed that your body feels like a dead weight! You have been like paralyzed and it is hard to get your body to respond quickly to the whatever it was that awakened you! 1 sleep cycles of all 5 stages takes about 90 minutes. So there are about 4-6 cycles per night. As it gets towards morning, we have longer periods of REM than when we first laid down to sleep at night. You also come out of REM quicker as the am hours approach. Since dreaming takes place in REM and REM is longer towards morning, you will sometimes remember your dreams you had right before waking for the day!

Myths or Excuses

We all have excuses for why we aren't sleeping well or getting enough sleep. Here are some common ones: *You need less sleep as you get older...Wrong!! You still need the same amount of daily sleep. We tend to have more nightly waking episodes as we enter our golden years, so we need to take naps during the day to get our needed amount of sleep. *Alcohol helps you sleep better...Wrong!! Alcohol actually keeps you from getting into a deep sleep. *Snoring is harmless...Wrong!! It may be an indication of an underlying problem of OSA *I can get by on 5-6 hours of sleep...Wrong!! You can for short term buy eventually you will start to aquire SLEEP DEBT and it will affect your daily performance at work or school. *I can learn to get by on less sleep...Wrong!! Same reason as above! *Falling asleep during the day is a sign of laziness...Wrong!! It is a sign of a physiological need for sleep. *Napping is a bad habit...Not Necessarily. Not if we are truly needing sleep and our naps do not interfere with our night time sleep routine. You can't sleep more than your body needs. If you continue to nap, it is because for some reason your body needed it. *How I sleep doesn't affect the rest of my health...Wrong!! Sleep is essential to healthy living as much as diet and exercise!

Gone too long.

It has been almost 6 months since I have posted here. It has been way to long. I started a new job - which was more overwhelming that I ever thought it would be and just when I was getting settled in, Fargo/Moorhead had the worst flooding event of our Red River than we have ever had before. It has taken the many of our friend and even the whole city a while to get back to normal. All I can say is that this is the first week where I feel like I am back to doing the regular things I did before the flood. I am excited to continue the blog. I have been on treatment now for a year for OSA and there are some things to talk about concerning on going treatment. Stay tuned!

Good Video to view on You Tube

Light's Out - Dying for a Good Night's Sleep

T.S Wiley and Bent Formby, PhD are the authors of "Light's Out-Dying for a Good's Night Sleep". Their view is that, as a nation, Americans are sick because we don't get enough sleep. I want to take this post to highlight some points from this book that I really think are great. It isn't talking about sleep apnea - just sleep, or our lack-there-of. The book's focus is that our lack of sleep, not lack of exercise and poor diet, is what leads to heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer. The book is rather technical and you almost get a sense the authors think there is a goverment conspiracy behind the push for increased carbohydate intake in our nation. However, if you take some of what is presented with a grain-of-salt, the book does talk about hormones that are regulated in sleep which affect our appetite. It was a light-bulb moment for me. It was an understanding of most of my life of trying to loose weight! So here I go! I will try to give you the hormone connection to sleep and sugar in a nutshell.... "Light's Out" starts out with trying to convey an understanding of where humans have come from...cavemen/nomads scrounging for food. We would have summer, where food is abundant and humans would store up fat for winter, and then there was winnter. Winter was a time of sleeping, eating what little variety of food could be stored or hunted, and making babies. As we have progressed, we have taken those long winter naps our bodies long for from caveman days, and made it perpetual summer with our bright flourecent lights that are on all winter long. Because we have light (and TV and computers and sports events, etc) we stay up too late at night and have shortened our night's sleep to way less than the 9.5 hours that would be optimal for humans. The main hormones the book talkes about are cortisol, serotonin, melatonin, prolactin, leptin and insulin and how they function in the sleep cycle. Melatonin and prolactin are produced during sleep and are very important antioxidants. When we don't get enough sleep, these two hormones aren't allowed to function how they are supposed to and we loose out on their faboulous antioxidant properties. The authors stongly feel this leads to the manifestation of many different diseases. It's a complicated cycle, let's start with serotonin. Serotonin is a hormone that is released in respose to cortisol. Cortisol is also a hormone. It is high when we have too many stressors in our life. It doesn't have to be bad stress either (divorce, death of a loved one, moving, empty nest) it can just be the busy stress of coming home from work, quick eating supper, going to the kids basketball game, coming home for a quick shower. When Cortisol is high, serotonin is high. When we sleep our serotonin gets converted to melotonin during the night. Melotonin is good - it helps us fall asleep and stay asleep. If we have too much stress and therefore too much serotonin and don't sleep long enough at night so all that serotonin can gets turned into melotonin then we have left-over serotonin in the morning. If this chronically takes place, it can lead to high serotonin levels and depression. It helps to keep serotonin low by getting enough sleep. Melotonin helps us fall alseep and stay asleep. This is important because when we sleep, and not until we fall into a good sleep, prolactin is produced. Prolactin is an important hormone because it controls our daytime appetite. It affects the hormone leptin which regulates our carbhydrate cravings. If we go to bed too late, we cannot get all our prolactin produced in a short night and we continue to produce prolactin into the morning. This excess prolactin will suppress the hormone leptin. If we low levels of leptin - we crave carbohydrates!!! Our bodies think we are under stress and that we need to take in energy for a "fight-or-flight" response. Hormone cycles are difficult to understand, but can you see the picture I am trying to convey? We continually shorten our nights. We have work deadlines, children's activites, shopping to do, housekeeping to do and all this leads to more stress and longer days. Longer days mean shorter nights! Less sleep, more stress->high cortisol->high serotonin->not enough time to process all our serotonin into the antioxidants we need in melotonin. Less sleep-> delays the processing of the prolactin we need from during our sleeping hours into the morning hours->suppressed leptin->carbohydrate cravings->high intake of carbohydrates->excess carbohydrates decrease the effectiveness of insulin causing us to store our excess carbohydrates as fat.->high insulin levels->stress on our body->high cortisol.... One big cycle with a good's night sleep right in the middle!!Whew!!! That is a lot of info! This book definitely goes to the extreme of trying to get their point across, but I want you to take this with you today: Sleep is a good thing. Sleep is a biological need. It helped me to read the technical cycles of hormones in this book. I have tried to be more conscious of my bed-time since I read this book. If I need to be up later, I try to keep the lights low and the tv off, or the sound low. I try to not be at the computer or watching tv right before I go to bed, so my mind has a chance to slow down some and prepare for sleep. I sure don't get in 9.5 hours a night, but I try to shoot for 8. I still feel like I am recovering from so many years of lack of sleep due to the sleep apnea that 8-9 hours of sleep is great for me. Maybe I will not need quite so much after I have repaid some of my sleep debt. I can say this for sure : When I have a short night sleep or several in a row - I do find that I am looking in the cupboard for snacks. If I had a really long, restful night's sleep I can adhere to a lower carb lifestyle easier. I recommend this book to read. Just remember to not take everything they say to heart - the authors do tend to be a bit extreme!