Tag Archives: sleep

I’m sorry to foist this on you, but my experiment in preparing for a 7-hour time zone shift prior to our cruise is pretty much consuming my waking hours. And my sleeping hours, too, come to think of it.

This week was really rough on me. The good news is that I got into a rhythm of waking up at 4am as opposed to my normal 7:30am routine. But that was leaving me sluggish and pretty much wiped out during the day, even when I took a nap around noon.

It really had me perplexed because it was only 12 years ago that, following my first wife’s passing, I was on a regular schedule that had me getting up at 4:30am, working out on a treadmill and weight machine in my basement for an hour before showering and going to work. And I would feel physically fine and cognitively alert the whole morning (I had to be as I was a clinical psychologist on an acute care inpatient unit). Then I would take a nap in my office at noon and finish out the day, even putting in an extra hour or two at times.

So why was this so difficult? It appears that our circadian rhythms get a little cranky and less flexible as we age, but I didn’t think the difference between being 59 and 71 would have such a dramatic effect. Apparently, it does on me.

My new routine has me waking up at 4am and immediately walking for half an hour at a brisk pace. I moved my workout to first thing after waking up because I found I was too tired later on in the day to convince myself to do it.

Luckily for me, the new management company for our apartment building is renovating. They are painting the hallways a lighter color and changing the lighting so that it is like daylight out there…and early morning light is exactly what is called for when trying to fool your sleep-wake system into re-setting itself.

So my morning exercise of walking the halls (where 1 lap around is about 200 yards) is serving a dual purpose. If the hallways weren’t so fortuitously bright, I’d probably have to buy a light box and sit in front of it for a while after waking up. Thank goodness I lucked out and avoided that fate!

After my walk, I sit down with my computer, turn the brightness up full, and do The New York Times crossword puzzle, Spelling Bee, Wordle and Nerdle. It’s about then that Sally wakes up and I make her coffee and my tea to initiate our normal morning ritual. By then, the sky is starting to brighten and it feels like things are almost back to normal.

Sally is not all that enthusiastic about my attempt to prepare my body for Athens. Her natural rhythms would have her going to sleep around midnight, but she also likes to go to bed when I do, so my new hours have thrown a major monkey wrench into her routine. She reminds me that we went to Paris a few years back (6-hour time difference) and really didn’t do anything to fend off jet lag and neither of us can recall any severe effects. She has a point.

By 11am, I’m getting groggy and thinking about taking a nap. It takes me a while to appreciate the fact that I’ve already been up for 7 hours and I’ve worked out, so napping at 11am isn’t such an off-the-wall idea.

I’m eating dinner a little earlier than before (around 5:00pm instead of 6:30pm. After all, it’s not just your sleep but your hunger/digestive rhythms that need to adjust, as well.

Bedtime is the biggest problem. Early to bed means I can’t watch most of the Phillies games in the playoffs. Bummer! My compromise has been to get in bed around 9ish so I could at least watch a few innings. But that only left me the potential for 7 hours of sleep and, with the usual time it takes to fall asleep and the usual number of nighttime awakenings, I was only getting about 6 hours of actual sleep…and that just wasn’t enough for me, even with a mid-day nap.

So on Wednesday of this week, I moved my bedtime back to 8pm…and it worked like a charm! I got a good 7 hours of sleep and I felt fine the rest of the day. Now I know that I need to lock-in 8 hours in bed, no ifs, ands or buts!

As of today (Friday), I’ve got just 7 more days available to adjust. I’ve picked up half of the 7-hour transition I’ll be making, leaving a 3½-hour difference. I know I won’t be able to get all the way there, but I think I’d like to transition 1 more hour before we board the plane. That would be a 7pm bedtime and 3am awakening. Somehow, doing that never made it onto my bucket list!

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When I was growing up, my mother valued her children’s sleep above all other bodily functions. When I was 12, I used that to my advantage when I wanted to play hooky from Hebrew school by staying up late the night before and then pretending not to wake up the next morning when she called me.

In college, a had a fierce bout of depression and found myself sleeping 12-16 hours every day. My therapist told me it was a defense mechanism whereby I tried to escape from reality. It sounded plausible at the time.

I used to wake up most nights at 3am. My best guess was that it was a little bit of residual trauma from when I was 6 or 7 and I was startled awake by the phone ringing. It was the hospital calling to tell us that my grandmother had died. My mother jumped out of her bed, wailing and crying hysterically. I glanced at the clock in my room and saw that it was 3am. Just recently, I learned that about 35% of us habitually wake up at 3am…and a related trauma is not a prerequisite at all.

In my early 30s, when I was the executive director of a performing arts center, I used to doze off in my office every afternoon. I fought it for a long time in the belief that I shouldn’t  be sleeping on the job, but then I decided, screw it! As soon as I’d start to get drowsy, I would buzz my secretary and ask her to hold my calls, lean back in my chair and nod off.

My afternoon napping habit never left me. When my first wife and I ran a B&B in northeastern Pennsylvania, I would retreat to the rope hammock hung between a pair of birch trees or lie down on the porch swing on most days in the late spring, summer and early fall. Those were the best naps of my life!

Fifteen years later, as the staff psychologist on an inpatient behavioral health unit, I took my nap a little earlier to coincide with my lunch break. Without my asking, our director sent out a notice that staff should not disturb Dr. Braffman during lunch unless there was an emergency and a patient was in crisis. Now that’s how you value nap time!

In graduate school, I learned about the 4 phases of sleep. Later studies revealed that you cycle through these phases 4-6 times every night, and that you can dream at any time, not just during REM sleep. 

New research published last month reported that there is a noradrenaline cycle that wakes you up as many as 100 times during the night. The awakenings are measured in milliseconds, so you are unaware of the vast majority of them.

Although we appear quiescent while we sleep, there’s actually a lot of important business going on under the hood. It’s the time when we consolidate memories and new learning and replenish our available stores of vital neurotransmitters. If you don’t sleep well or long enough, you’re going to have cognitive problems the next day, e.g., brain fog and you’ll be prone to making a lot of mistakes.

Another critical function of sleep is to clean up the chemical detritus left over from your brain’s daily activities. There is a whole separate network in your head that performs this task, running in parallel with the neural networks with which we are all so familiar. It’s called the brain’s glymphatic system.

It’s hypothesized that your brain’s ability to clean up the daily messes that it makes plays a critical role in preventing dementia. One way this might work would be by removing beta amyloid that is created as part of an immune response like a fever. 

What I haven’t been able to find anywhere in the literature, though, is a description of the magnitude of this cleaning power. Can your brain completely clean house every day? Is there enough residual power to clean up festering messes that overwhelmed the system on earlier occasions? In other words, is it destiny that our brains eventually be overrun with chemical garbage? Or can we chip away at accumulations of waste products until all our neural pathways are functioning again? Or is breaking even on a daily basis the most we can hope for?

We don’t know the answer to those questions yet, but we do know that somewhere between 7-9 hours of restful sleep on a regular basis helps tremendously. And naps are good for you, too (thank you, lord!), so long as you don’t overdo it to the point where they start to affect your nighttime slumber.

The impact of consistently high-quality sleep on your brain’s health can not be overstated. If you aren’t sleeping well (i.e., less than 6 hours each night), you might want to consider implementing some behavioral changes now that will reduce your risk of dementia by 30-50% later on.

To sleep better, lay off the alcohol in the evening and no more caffeine after 12 noon. Set a fixed schedule for going to bed and waking up. Stow your electronic devices about an hour before bedtime. Make a list of all the things you want to do the next day so you don’t lie awake thinking about them. You might want to do a meditation/relaxation/deep breathing exercise just before bedtime. Make sure your bedroom is dark and the temperature is somewhere in the 60s.

If you do all of these things and still have trouble sleeping, it will be well worth your while to get evaluated. There are a range of products out there—both natural and pharmaceutical—that can offer you support, if you need it.

Pleasant dreams!

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