I blogged about my purchase of an eye mask for sleeping here.
I like it. No more being bothered by the hall light, the bathroom light, and the lights in other family members’ bedrooms when their doors are left open.
But it turns out that I’m not just doing this for the sake of family harmony. Sleeping in the dark is also good for my cardiovascular health. This week, I read that nighttime artificial light exposure is a big risk factor for developing cardiovascular diseases among adults older than 40 years.
Nearly 890,000 women and men wore wrist bands that collected data on light for more than a decade. Compared with the half with fairly to very dark nights, the 10% with the brightest nights had nearly a third higher risks of developing coronary artery disease.
This risk of heart attack, stroke and other heart failures, including atrial fibrillation, was high even after adjusting for the well-established cardiovascular risk factors. These include physical activity, smoking, alcohol, diet, socioeconomic status, polygenic risk and even sleep hours/interuptions. The women studied were slightly more prone to the effect than men.
Published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the study strongly suggests that, in addition to current preventive advice for heart health, getting a good night’s sleep with no light at night is a useful strategy for reducing cardiac and vascular diseases.
My beloved and I have both been struggling to get a minimum viable amount of sleep. Our brains betray us. Our backs hurt. Our dog Lucy is hyper vigilant and wants those 4 a.m. snow removal folks to know SHE SEES THEM.
We’ve limited caffeine to the morning. We are abstaining from alcohol. We stick to our wind down routine.
In bed, I pop my bite guard in my mouth and snap my CPAP on. Michel dons his eye mask with earbuds to listen to a bedtime meditation.
We have smart lights that go to warmer hues at night.
We have separate duvets, his is heavy and mine gossamer thin. I still sweat.
And our mattress needs replacing. She’s lumpy. Turns out foam mattresses don’t last longer than 5 years and she’s around 7?
So off we went shopping to find a queen size mattress. Our house is nearly 100 years old and the narrow staircase couldn’t accommodate our queen platform so we have a last minute rickety frame that came in a slim box.
We went in with a plan but somewhere along the line Michel started eyeing split king beds with mechanical frames.
I spoke in French to him cautioning that it would be easily triple the price of just getting a queen mattress.
We had done our research and knew we needed a hybrid mattress with coils and foam so that it would last.
We shared with the sales person that we had an older house.
He showed us some regular mattresses and I knew my budget was gone when we tried a half split king bed. It’s split at the top to allow each person to adjust the upper angle and the bottom moves as one.
I’m promised that the mattress is cooling. I forgot to mention the thrice nightly lather of sweat thanks to hot flashes.
The salesperson promised the mattress arrives in a box no bigger than a twin. The mechanical frame folds up, again into a twin sized package.
We switched to French for honest budget conversations then back to English with the salesperson.
I hope a non-lumpy, bigger bed with better temperature regulation will help me get more than my current average of 6 hours a night.
I go to bed between 9:30 and 10 pm. I get up between 6 and 7 am. I am awake several hours each night.
I will give it a month and let you know how the new bed works out!
A bed with lots of pillows promises a sweet, sweet night of sleep.
There’s a certain irony in when I’m writing this post.
You see, during December and January when I’m writing daily ‘Making Space’ or ‘Go Team’ posts, I occasionally forget that I also need to write my regular Tuesday post.
And that’s what happened today.
The irony comes in because this post that I’m writing at 10:41PM on Monday is about how I’m trying to do a better job of winding down before bed. Obviously I do a better job on some days than on others.
Like a lot of people with ADHD I often end up, trying to cram a lot of stuff into my evening and I sometimes find it hard to switch out of doing mode and start getting ready for bed.
But I do know that a good wind down routine helps me to switch modes and get ready to rest so I’ve been working on that.
Last week I mentioned that I have found that evening is a good time to do yoga.
And that practice has become a key part of helping me wind down for the evening.
However, I’m now ready to add something else to my routine, but I haven’t quite figured out what that is yet.
I thought about adding journaling, but it’s all too easy for me to either slip into writing a lot or avoiding writing because I don’t want to write a lot.
I don’t want to add more exercise because that will wake me up again.
I already read once I get in bed so that wouldn’t be extending anything.
The obvious thing to add is meditation, but I’m finding myself resisting that for some reason.
And the only other thing I can think of is to do some sort of drawing before I go to sleep.
But if I decide to do that, going to have to figure out something specific or related to draw each evening, so I don’t get caught up in a decision loop.
Quick question: Does this type of thinking happened to everyone or is this an ADHD thing?
Obviously, the next step in this process is to start experimenting and I had planned to start that experiment this evening.
But now that it is 10:55PM, I think the experiment will have to wait till tomorrow night.
I’m just going to do a short yoga practice, get my pyjamas on, and tuck myself into bed with my book.
Khalee thinks I am foolish for staying up just to do yoga. I tried to argue that she was doing downward dog just a second ago but she’s having none of it. Image description: a photo of my dog in profile as she sits on my bed. The photo really only shows her from the collar up and shows one of her paws. Khalee is light haired and medium sized and is lying on a blue blanket with some pillow in the background. Her head is raised slightly off the blanket so she’s not in full rest mode.
In my view, medical research gets a lot right. We have good evidence that, for instance:
ultra-processed foods contribute to health markers that are linked to a variety of serious illnesses (like cardiovascular disease, some cancers, and type 2 diabetes)
developing and maintaining social connections of all sorts helps us maintain wellness and address issues in our own mental and physical health
sleep is a magical elixir that rejuvenates us and prepares us for the daily lives we want to lead (okay, the study didn’t use the words “magical elixir”, but they should have)
Here’s what Unsplash thinks healthy living looks like:
Unsplash endorses eating huge artichokes and hanging upside down more than experts, but hey…
We also know that some health claims are absolute nonsense, like:
sleeping with a bar of lavender soap in your bed will NOT help treat or cure restless leg syndrome ( Dr Mehmet Oz said this)
(fill in the blank) vitamin supplement NOT will cure (Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson, COVID, etc.) medical condition (Oz promoted a bunch of these, too)
Using coffee as anything other than a delightful morning beverage is a BAD IDEA (the Cleveland clinic explains why, if you must know)
Virtually all advertised weight-loss products are BOGUS (trust me on this)
Yeah, no to all these things. Thanks, Markus Spiske for Unsplash.
Let us now return to that magical elixir, sleep. Sleep feels good, does good, is good for us. Check, check, check. But what about its sweet cousin, the nap? Surely that delicious sleep snack must be a positive contributor to our lives, right?
Longer naps, greater intra-individual variability in daytime nap, and higher percentages of naps around noon and in the early afternoon are associated with greater mortality risks.
What?! Nonononononononononono!
Well, Prevention magazine thinks these scientists may be on to something. In this article, it asks the following scary questions:
Whoa. But don’t worry, Imma answer all these, one by one.
First, do some nap patterns increase our risk of death? No, not really.
The study looked mainly at the timing and variability of naps taken by older adults in the UK. It found oh-so-small increased risk for those who took naps at different times of day, for those who took longer naps, and for those who varied the length of their naps (which averaged 24 minutes daily).
BUT (and it’s a big but)…These results varied by gender (men seem more affected than women), by what time people arose in the morning, what time of day they tended to take their naps, how much they slept in general, and how much physical activity they got during the day. See this study for more details. And they failed to show any clinical association, just a small statistical one.
So napping isn’t really associated with death. Okay, one down.
Second: why would napping be associated with death? It’s not, not really.
Some sleep patterns reveal underlying problems rather than cause them; sleep apnea and chronic insomnia, for instance, tend to be symptoms of a variety of health conditions that carry their own mortality risk factors. But we already knew this. One of the study authors conceded this:
“The napping and mortality relationship is complex and may be influenced by adverse or protective lifestyle factors (e.g., nutrition, physical activity, substance use), nighttime sleep patterns, and underlying sleep disorders, medical comorbidities, age, as well as sex and gender-related factors.”
HAH! Told you. Second one done away with.
I told you so. Such sweet words.
We are now in the napping-is-not-deadly-blog-post homestretch. Prevention asked, timidly, how can the napping-death connection be broken? Easy. See below.
Just get some exercise. Any kind will do. Walking, jogging, shuffleboard, bike riding (outdoors or in), swimming, dancing, playing with friends and family, yoga, strength training, etc. Why does this help keep napping from killing us? Because the adverse napping pattern (not napping itself) is often a symptom of known risk factors (like drinking or unprescribed drug use) and known medical conditions.
So, once more with feeling: it’s not the napping, folks. I mean, if you want to optimize your napping patterns, feel free– there are lots of articles (like this,this, and this) offering tips, which may or may not be true.
I hope you enjoyed this post. Now you must excuse me– it’s time for my nap…
I am trapped in the body of a theatre kid and have the work schedule of a swim club kid.
On the left, a swim club kid with sharpie “tattoos” that say “talk to the flippers” “eat my bubbles” and “I kick ⬇️” from a swim club mom blog. On the right, a theatre kid sings in an article from Kazoo Theatre
Almost 60 years ago, Mom put me in morning kindergarten to try and break me of the habit of sleeping late. Early morning classes and a full career of early morning meetings (plus getting kids ready and out the door to school before my workday started) hasn’t entirely broken my of my night-owl ways.
I am really struggling to get enough sleep, especially with sore muscles, arthritis pains and three cats who demand late night or early morning cuddles. I rarely fall asleep before 11 pm, and sometimes have to be in my lifeguarding chair for 5:30 am swim practices.
When I try to go to bed early, it’s not unusual to wake up 4-5 hours later and be unable to return to sleep.
I know some ways to improve my sleep hygiene: I already broke out the winter duvet so my bed is comfy. I’m reading magazines before sleep instead of looking at my phone, though I do need to move my Duolingo practice to earlier in the day. I am trying to remember to hydrate more throughout the day instead of suddenly feeling the need to drink a litre of water out before bed; that one is very much a work in progress.
What are your best tips to get enough good quality sleep at the times you need it?
The internet is full of advice for how to get more sleep, better sleep, deeper sleep, delicious sleep– you name it, the internet has a to-do list for anything related to sleep.
Don’t even get me started on pillows. Nap dresses have been well-covered by Sam here.
It turns out (unsurprisingly), that modern medicine has been working on better understanding sleep for a long time. I came across this 1925 article (reprinted in JAMA– The Journal of the American Medical Association) that offers us some useful observations about sleep. Here are some of them:
The state of sleep is NOT like being under anesthesia or in a faint (in case you were wondering).
Pulse rate and blood pressure drop during sleep, but do not cause sleep; rather, it’s the other way around.
To wit: “if the drop in pressure were causative, then reclining, being a position favorable for loss of tone, should lead to a more pronounced pressure drop than that of the semierect position, being more conducive to sleep.”
Sleep is sometimes peaceful, but other times we have active dreams and nightmares.
To wit: “the conception of sleep as a period of quiescence and recuperation has thus to be qualified by the contingency of disturbed sleep with active calls on the nervous system, the heart and the blood vessels.”
And here’s their conclusion, which no one can argue with:
In other words, what is true of many factors in life seems also to apply to sleep: most sleeps are good, but some may be far better than others.
Who needs the internet when researchers were hard at work explaining sleep to us a century ago?
Sleep well, dear readers…
Thanks, Sinetta Leuen from Unsplash for the sleeping person. We’ll be very very quiet…
One of the older posts I often go looking for was one I wrote about placebo sleep.
What’s that you say?
Studies show that getting a bad night’s sleep is bad for you, but knowing about it makes it worse. People who were told that had a bad night’s sleep, whether or not it was true, did worse on a series of standard tests. The reverse was true for people who were told they had a good night’s sleep.
So, the good news is that I have been sleeping pretty well most nights over the past two weeks.
The bad news is that I’m not sure why.
I don’t think Pinky and the Brain are pondering my sleep habits but they can feel free to give it a go. Image description: a GIF of the cartoon mice named Pinky and The Brain from the cartoon of the same name. Pinky is a tall slender mouse wearing a bathrobe and sitting down and The Brain is a mouse with a disproportionately large head who is standing up. The Brain is asking Pinky a signature question “Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?” In the show, Pinky would always reply with a nonsensical answer like “I think so, Brain, but if they called them sad meals then no one would buy them!”
You see, about two weeks ago , I accidentally started a very poorly structured experiment with my sleep.
I had had a migraine that lasted several days and I decided to switch out my pillow to see if better neck support would help.
And that same day, I came across the information that people with ADHD often also have a problem with histamines that affects their sleep.*And apparently taking an allergy pill before going to bed can help them sleep better. Since I already take an allergy pill every morning, I decided to try taking them at night, just to see.
And, as I was getting ready for bed that night, I accidentally knocked the medical tape I occasionally use to tape my mouth while I sleep. I first read about this as a sleep/anti-snoring trick in James Nestor’s book Breath and, yeah, it sounds weird but it can be really helpful.
It was only when I woke up the next morning, after a great night’s sleep, that I realized that I had conducted a very poor experiment.
These kids are more effective scientists than me. Image description: three kids, one with long red hair, one with long black hair, and one with an afro, are doing some sort of science and the kid in the middle is looking on a microscope.
Sure, I slept well, but was it the pillow? The allergy pill? The tape? The combination of all three?
I had too many variables!
If I was seeking a grant or hoping to publish my findings, I would be laughed right out of sciencing.
Luckily, I was just trying to get a good night’s sleep and there were no governing bodies or juried publications involved.
I guess the sensible thing to do would be to start over or to cut out variables and see what happens.
But I don’t want to take the risk and end up sleeping poorly again so instead I am keeping up my little ritual of rolling my pillow, taking my allergy pill, and using the tape.
So, what’s the conclusion to this experiment?
Something in that combination of factors seems to be helping me sleep.
Or maybe the effort to set myself up for good sleep helped my brain decide to sleep?
Or maybe it was all a coincidence and I fluked into some quality sleep?
Look, I’m clearly not a scientist – I have too many variables, I didn’t use a control group, and frankly, there is no scientific rigour being applied here – but I am a person who is willing to seek a variety of solutions to an issue I’m facing.
And since this combo seems to have helped. I am declaring it a non-scientific success.
I think I’ll leave the sciencing to the scientists and just go take a nap.
I wonder if Donald is waking himself up with his snoring? Image description: A GIF of Donald Duck sleeping and snoring
*Is this true? I have no idea. But since I was already taking an allergy pill daily, I figured there was no harm in trying. And after that first night, it occurred to me that, all along, I had been taking my 24 hour pill in the morning and then, at night when it was losing effectiveness, I was going to sleep in a closed room with Khalee – my dog and my main source of allergens! Even if the histamine thing isn’t true, it’s probably a good idea to take my allergy pill at night.
One Very Good Thing that’s happened after knee surgery is that I am sleeping like sleep is my superpower again. Before surgery, I was waking up three or four times a night with knee pain.
A sleeping kitten on a gingham blanket
Just check out these numbers. They’re from my Garmin watch. My average sleep duration is 8 hours and 4 minutes. I feel like a sleep rock star.
Oh, but it does turn out that I lie about my sleeping hours. I say 10 pm to 6 am, but that’s off by about an hour. My actual hours of sleep are more like 11 pm to 7 am. Fine!
A year’s sleep in graphs
I wake up most days feeling pretty rested. But there is one thing I can no longer do. I used to be able to have the occasional night where I slept a lot less, say five hours instead of eight, and everything would be ok. Twenty years I go I could still pull the occasional all-nighter. No more! Now if I even miss a few hours sleep it takes a few days to recover. I can’t just power through. I’ve always liked my sleep. Now I need it.
Another good thing about my sleep is that it’s pretty consistent. I might be deluded about what that time is but it does look like I regularly go to bed and get up at the same time.
A recent story in the New York Times talked about the heart health risks of inconsistent sleep.
“New research affirms what doctors have long advised: Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day for big health benefits.”
“Researchers examined a week’s worth of sleep data from 2,000 adults over 45 and found that those who slept varying amounts each night and went to bed at different times were more likely to have hardened arteries than those with more regular sleep patterns.
People whose overall sleep amounts varied by two or more hours from night to night throughout the week — getting five hours of sleep on Tuesday, say, and then eight hours on Wednesday — were particularly likely to have high levels of calcified fatty plaque built up in their arteries, compared with those who slept the same number of hours each night.”
You may associate today with doom and gloom thanks to the Ides of March, but did you know it is also World Sleep Day? Now that’s a holiday I can really get behind.
I used to be a very good sleeper. I was able to fall asleep quickly and sleep through the night without any difficulties. When I was younger I would be able to function on minimal sleep or string together a few hours here and there to be able to keep a fun social calendar. These days I roll my eyes if my friends want to stay out past 8pm. I’ve always been a night owl but I now need a long time to unwind from any sort of activity before trying to fall asleep.
It’s easy to think about sleep from our individual perspectives – we know how much (or how little) we sleep, thoughts or circumstances that keep us from sleeping, and all sorts of data around our own sleep patterns. But the World Sleep Society has collected data on the impact of sleep across different cultures and countries. Their 2024 theme for World Sleep Day is “Sleep Equity for Global Health.” They state:
“Sleep is essential to health, but measurable differences in sleep health persist across populations across the world, creating additional burdens and reinforcing health inequities.”
While I don’t love linking sleep metrics to productivity and GDP loss it may be a critical component toward equity across regions and countries. This link instead brings me back to The Nap Ministry’s framework of “Rest is Resistance,” which we’ve written about before (Tracy, Martha). They state:
“We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue.”
It may not matter which approach you take, so long as you “celebrate” World Sleep Day by getting some rest. Some ways you could enjoy the day include taking a nap (my personal favorite), practicing good sleep hygiene, or attending a community sleep-in or sleep awareness event.
Which way(s) will you recognize World Sleep Day this year?
Amy Smith is a professor of Media & Communication and a communication consultant who lives north of Boston. Her research interests include gender communication and community building. Amy spends her movement time riding the basement bicycle to nowhere, walking her two dogs, and waiting for it to get warm enough for outdoor swimming in New England.
