Drew (00:01.166)
you
Drew (00:19.63)
podcast where we explore the dynamic connections between sports, physical well -being, and personal growth. Hello and welcome in to the third episode of the More Movement podcast where we explore the dynamic connections between sports, physical well -being, and personal growth. My name is Drew Moore. I'm a student physical therapist at OSU Cascades in my third year of the program. About to be out this joint pretty soon here.
six months. But again, who's counting? I certainly am not. But did you miss me? I'm back with another episode of our lessons that we've learned from sleep. And today we have a litany of things that we need to cover. So let's not waste any more time and let's get on into it. So on the docket for today, we're going to be covering
sleep quality versus sleep quantity, intermittent sleep, which kind of have a, now it's a funny story, we'll call it. At the time it wasn't very funny. But you know, whenever you look back on things, they always seem a little bit more humorous when you're not stressing out about that certain thing. In addition to intermittent sleep, we'll be talking about sleep supplements such as melatonin, Mary Jane, alcohol,
magnesium, tart cherry fruit, and of course, we will be talking about relationships. And that'll be how we polish off this series on sleep. So let's get into it. So like I had mentioned before in the previous episode, waking up throughout the night to go and use the bathroom is completely normal. Even if you do it every night, wake up at three in the morning during the witching hour,
and go use the bathroom. Not sure why it's three in the morning and suspiciously is that 3 .33 every morning. That's also kind of weird, but that is completely normal because you know your body just metabolizes certain drinks or products in a way that you know just makes you have to use the bathroom at a certain time and that you know could be a sign of nocturia if it gets
Drew (02:44.135)
above a threshold of about two times the night that you're waking up to use the bathroom. And if it gets to that point, then that is when you should contact one of your either physical therapists, because I know you guys are all out there loving seeing your physical therapist, or talk to your PCP and they can take care of that for you in terms of putting you on some medications that will help with that and or going to
pelvic floor specialist and they'll have some suggestions for strengthening those muscles that'll help prevent you from using the bathroom during the middle of the night during the witching hours. And it's also one of those things where you kind of want to hit it early because you want to make sure that you're not going down a pathway that's going to be detrimental to your sleep. And as we know by now, this is episode three.
If you don't know, now you know. If you don't get enough sleep, it's not going to be looking really good for you down the road there. So...
This is your warning.
Drew (03:58.765)
Anyways, like I was saying, waking up in the middle of the night is completely normal because everybody does it. Every 90 minutes, we all go through our sleep -wake cycles and that last part of our sleep -wake cycle is wakefulness. So when you do reach that 90 minute, roughly, mark of your sleep, you wake up, but it's to a threshold that we're still technically unconscious, but we wake up enough to where we're
readjusting in bed or, you know, moving our body around or, you know, shoving over our partner because they're hogging all the blankets and hogging the bed and you're sleeping on the edge of the bed when you have no room and you're cold because, you know, you got no covers and then all of a sudden you're hot because then she turned on the fan or on the heater and, you know, you got all the blankets back because you just went through fighting a war against her and her unconsciousness.
But we're not gonna get into all that. Moral of the story is you adjust your body every 90 minutes to make sure that we're not developing any pressure injuries, which is kind of interesting how the body subconsciously is able to do that. Otherwise, if we're in a position laying down or, I mean, really in any position for too long, as we know by now, you're gonna be at risk for pressure injuries. That's one of the reasons why they always say, you know,
Always try and readjust your body every 30 minutes or so if you're at work. Ideally, you do it in less amount of time than that, but you know, got to concentrate on what you're doing unless you have ADHD like some of me and my people out there. You know, you got to readjust every maybe one minute, two minutes or so. But yeah, so the ideal amount of time to be asleep is
hitting that 85 % mark. So when you go to sleep, they say, you know, get eight hours sleep or whatever, right? You get, you're in bed, you get in bed and you're asleep and you're like, oh, yep, I, you know, went to bed, got eight hours of sleep, but I'm still kind of tired. Why is that? Well, like I've mentioned before, just cause you're in bed, just cause you're asleep doesn't mean you're getting that same quality of sleep.
Drew (06:24.27)
And things that I mentioned before are or can be the reason why you're not getting that sleep quality. That being the train that's driving by or the partner that's doing dishes in the middle of the night. That one was actually me. I do dishes at odd hours of the night. But, you know, these little things.
You know turning the light on or having somebody drive their WRX down the road revving their engine Richie I'm looking at you there's these little things that that can cause you to wake up and disrupt your sleep and you may still technically be asleep, but your subconscious is gonna be awake and it's gonna be alert because they're looking out for danger and Because back in the day way way back in the day that
could have been a predator, that could have been something that would have caused us to need to go into fight or flight and then dip on out of there. So ideally, we're hitting that 85 % mark. And for our statisticians or mathematicians out there, if you're getting eight hours of sleep, you're probably only actually gonna be around maybe
Seven hours or so of sleep. I mean you can go down to like six six hours and 40 whatever minutes but in actuality you want to be around that you know eight hour mark that way the amount of sleep that you're actually getting is going to be about seven and a half and that kind of shakes down because You know, you're like I said before you're subconsciously waking up and
every 90 minutes and readjusting a little bit here and there, or maybe you're even getting up and using the bathroom. So then that's going to take you roughly another 15 minutes to go back to sleep. Because as you know, as we know, I should say, it takes about 15 minutes for most people to fall asleep. So you take that time. And then you add in the time when you got up and use the bathroom in the middle of the night at 333 AM, because of the witching hours and you know, all that.
Drew (08:49.934)
devilish stuff out there. And then that's another 15 minutes, so we have 30 minutes right there. And then you're waking up every 90 minutes or so for maybe, you know, a couple minutes here and there, readjusting, maybe fighting a war against your partner. And all of a sudden you're already at like 45 minutes right there that you were, you thought that you were sleeping or you thought that you were in bed. But turns out you actually missed out on 45 minutes of sleep.
Even though you technically got your full eight hours. Leading you to be groggy the next morning and drinking even more caffeine when you wake up. Now moving on into intermittent sleep.
I laughed because this was something that I had heard about and I was going based on the fact that, you know, you can, you can sleep and take your nap and stuff and then be rejuvenated, revitalized and ready to conquer the day, right? And so I was like, okay, look, this is me talking to myself. Look, Drew, we got this exam tomorrow and you're not ready.
So, what we're gonna do to get ready is we're gonna do this intermittent sleep. All right? And it's based on this study that was done way back in the day. It's called the Uberman schedule, not to be confused with Huberman schedule, which I don't think he has. Well, actually, he probably has a schedule of all of his optimization stuff that he does, but.
not affiliated, not associated. Anyways, the Uberman schedule is a schedule based on intermittent sleep where you're sleeping for 20 minutes at a time and you're trying to capitalize on those little peaks of energy that you can get back from taking those quick little naps, right? And some of the studies showed...
Drew (11:08.398)
that it can be beneficial for productivity and well, really just productivity because all the other data that they collected from the study showed that it didn't have really any good results for anybody at all. So me being me, I was like, productivity is all I need. I don't need memory. I only need to remember it for a little bit. And...
It was for biomechanics too, which is my jam. So I was like, yep, we're about to do this. All right, so I set my alarm clock. I ended up doing 90 minutes instead, because I was like, well, what's the point of doing 20 minutes? I want to get my full sleep cycle. Might as well do the full thing. So I do it. I go to bed. And this is my bright idea at 11 PM. I'm like, OK, I'm going do this.
wake up and then I'll study a little bit more, about an hour, and then I'll go back to sleep another 90 minutes, wake up, and then I'll just repeat this cycle. As you know, the 90 minute thing with you're only supposed to study for about an hour before you lose focus and so on and so forth. I'm trying to get all of my things together here, all right? I was desperate at this point. I didn't really study enough as much as I should have for this exam.
And I was like, I gotta do something, otherwise I'm SOL. So, desperate times, call for desperate measures. That's how we ended up here, where I was only able to do this one time. And I woke up and it was 1 .30 in the morning. And I was like, okay, gonna go study. So I woke up, studied a little bit. Then I went back to bed, another 90 minutes.
Or at least what I thought was going to be 90 minutes. And then ended up waking up to a call from our administrator. And he's like, Hey Drew. Yeah. Hey, how's it going? Yeah. You had an exam this morning at 8 AM. I was like, yeah, yeah, I do. He's like, it's nine 30. And I was like, Oh, and I said a couple of other.
Drew (13:33.262)
choice words and I was like, oh, sorry. And then he's like, I completely understand. I would have said the same thing too. Shout out to you. But at this point I was like, this is it. It's over. You know, they're going to kick me out of the program. And I had a good run. I had literally only been there one quarter and it was already over. And I'd have to tell my friends, my family, why'd you get kids out of school? Well,
I missed out on my sleep and I did a pretty trash job of time management and planning. So I was up late trying to study. I tried this Uberman schedule and it failed miserably. Well, one, because I did it incorrectly, but then two, because I just, I planned very poorly for the situation. And here we are today getting kicked out of PT school.
because I had slept through an exam. However, they decided to keep me, which was oh so beautiful and oh so nice. And at this point, I'm going into this exam. I'm sweating bullets. I'm anxiety through the roof. And for those of you that know me, know that my anxiety is typically very low. And so like, yeah, anxiety through the roof, go in,
I bomb the hell out of this exam. I absolutely, I could not have done worse on this exam if I tried. And it's crazy because this was in biomechanics and biomechanics is my jam. I think once I got below a 95 on one of my biomechanics exams and the one time was this time and
I can only chalk it up to the Uberman schedule.
Drew (15:38.19)
All of that to say, I would not recommend intermittent sleeping. The only type of intermittent sleeping that I would advise would be not even technically intermittent sleeping, but just a nap. Because that is actually shown to have great productivity enhancements and improvement in memory following a, I think once you learn something,
If you take a quick nap or, you know, even go to sleep, that had been shown to increase your ability to recall whatever it was that you had just previously learned. It's kind of interesting. As opposed to doing it the way I did where you're trying to, you know, study and then sleep and then study and then sleep. I was trying to do it in the most scientific way possible, but clearly.
that was not possible to do.
But here we are, nevertheless. Made it through. Did the thing. Kind of. Well, we did the wrong thing, we'll say. Moving on to supplements for sleep. So, ironically, the first topic we're going to be talking about, or supplement, I should say, that we're going to be talking about, is going to be caffeine. Now, let me make one thing clear. Caffeine...
does not give you energy. Okay? Caffeine does not give you energy.
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the way that caffeine works is that it binds to a receptor that ends up blocking adenosine. No, what is adenosine you might ask? I'm so glad you asked actually. Adenosine is a metabolite that builds up throughout the day that is what we know to be as sleep pressure. And that is essentially what ends up making us sleepy.
So when you have caffeine, it blocks that receptor that adenosine binds to. And so we don't perceive our tiredness anymore. And so at that point, that caffeine is blocking that signal and we're, you know, chilling at whatever level we're at at that point in time when the caffeine blocks the signal, blocks the receptor. The only problem is...
once caffeine has run its course and it's, you know, fading out into the distance there, into the background we should say.
The sleep pressure is still there. The adenosine didn't go anywhere because caffeine doesn't act on that. It just leaves it alone, blocks it, says you can't go in here like the Kimba Matumbo. And it just overflows the system once the caffeine leaves. And that's why we get that crash. That's why we are chilling. We're going. We're doing the thing. We're studying super hard. We're working at our job and everything.
all of a sudden that you know 12 o 'clock hits or that 2 o 'clock hits and you're just dragging ass at that point. So this is one of the reasons why Heberman so famously says be sure to wait one hour after waking to maximize your caffeine intake. Basically all that really means is it doesn't necessarily have to be
Drew (19:31.416)
one hour after you wake. It's mostly just to optimize or I guess time up the
normal cyclical cycle that you have of cortisone and melatonin. And as we talked before, it ebbs and flows, yin and yang kind of thing. And we have a dip of energy that we go through during the middle of the day that everybody knows. That's why some cultures capitalize on this by taking a nap in the middle of the day. Us Americans, we're just dumb, honestly.
We just don't do that. And so what we do instead is we're like, we're tired. You know what we'll do? More caffeine, more coffee. Yeah, yeah, let's do that. Starbucks, let's go to Starbucks and get our $10 coffee and our $13 muffin. Don't ask me how it works. That's just the prices. But we do that. And then we're running in a never ending cycle to where...
We're just essentially trying to hold off adenosine as long as we can instead of maximizing it at the right time. So if we can have the caffeine hold us through that afternoon window, then it can be a beneficial thing to where we're able to go through that ebb and flow and also still be able to not have as steep of a crash or not crash at the wrong time, so to speak.
until at least we get home. And like I said, fighting that never ending battle of staving off adenosine. One of the things that you can look for in caffeine or in a caffeinated drink is L -theanine. L -theanine has been shown to help reduce anxiety as well as be more of a, I don't want to call it a sedative because it's not a sedative.
Drew (21:38.126)
But essentially what it does is it allows you to come off the caffeine a little bit slower and not crash as quickly. I'm not going to get into all the nerdy details of how that happens because that could be a whole another episode in and of itself. But if you have anxiety when you drink caffeine or if you notice that you crash throughout the day after drinking caffeine,
Look for L -thionine in your caffeinated product. But as always, talk to your PCP. Not me, because I am not a doctor. Just not yet. But also, when I do become a doctor in six months, I am not a medical doctor. So, so don't talk to me about these supplements. But I can give you advice on them. Just can't prescribe them. Anyways.
Moral of the story is with caffeine, if it is affecting your sleep and you notice that when you wake up in the morning that you are still kind of groggy, kind of lackadaisical when you wake up in the morning, you want to make sure that you can either adjust when you're having your caffeine, so maybe have it a little earlier on in the morning and not at 5 p .m. before you go to bed.
Or what you can do is try a different type of caffeine. Doesn't always have to be coffee. It could be matcha. It could be green tea, which is basically the same thing. It could be a chai, you know, it could be water or it can literally be like a juice smoothie kind of thing. So like blueberries mixed with like some pineapple and you know, some other fruits.
that you could toss in there. Maybe some ginger. But yeah, you know, find alternative routes to using caffeine. That being said, caffeine is not the devil. So don't hear what I'm not saying. Caffeine is not the devil. But it can be if it is affecting your sleep. Now I know there's some people out there where they're like, yeah, I drink caffeine at 9 p .m. and I'm able to go to sleep right away. So I...
Drew (24:06.766)
I drink straight coffee whenever I want to and I'm good. That's great for you. But that's kind of not the best thing to do because it's also a sign that your tolerance might be kind of high. Because the more you introduce something to your body, the more the body adapts to it, right? The more you exercise, the ideally the heavier weight you're able to lift.
depending on the kind of exercise you're doing, the more you run, the longer you're able to run, so on and so forth, you get the point. The more you introduce a certain type of drink to your body or food to your body, the body adapts to it. And ultimately, when it comes to caffeine, the more caffeine you have or the more often you drink caffeine, the more your body gets used to it. And when your body gets used to something,
when it comes to a supplement or a food or drink or whatever, we metabolize it a lot quicker and thus making it where it essentially decreases the half -life in our body. So the original half -life or the normal half -life of caffeine is about five to six hours, meaning that if you have a cup of coffee at 12 o 'clock, then you're
you know, go about five hours or so. And in five hours, say you have a hundred milligram cup of coffee there, have a hundred milligrams then, and then you're down to 50 milligrams. And then you go to about 10 o 'clock and you have down to 25 milligrams. Now for some people, you're chilling. That's fine. 25 milligrams, nothing. And you can go to sleep just fine. But for some people, that might be too much for people. And you're going to be
tired but wired because again caffeine doesn't give you energy it just holds off the adenosine that makes you tired. So that being said make sure that your caffeine intake is the appropriate amount for what your tolerance is and also if you're able to hold off on drinking that caffeine later on in the day.
Drew (26:32.142)
it can help increase your sleep quality. Just because you're able to drink caffeine later on at night doesn't mean that you should. And typically, it's not because of the caffeine that you're falling asleep quickly. It's typically because of the sugar or other additives that are in the drink that are making you fall asleep quicker. So if you're drinking cowboy coffee and you're straining it through your teeth,
You might be up for a while, as opposed to, you know, if you're putting a lot of sweetener in there and everything else. I don't drink coffee, but whatever else you guys put in your drink, that could be what's allowing you to fall asleep a little bit quicker.
However, by doing that, you're also increasing your neural activity before you go to sleep and you're not going to be able to get a good night's sleep because your brain is just bouncing off the walls with all the sugar that you just added to your drink and or because of the adenosine that's being blocked off and you don't have enough sleep pressure to allow you to stay asleep and you wake up at 3 .33 in the morning during the witching hours and you still wonder why.
I keep on waking up during the witching hours. It's not because of the skeletons in your closet. It's because you had that cup of coffee from Starbucks. 5 p .m. 6 p .m. 7. Maybe you're one of those 9 p .m. people. Don't be that person. Moving on to alcohol. So alcohol is one of those things where...
Some people are like, yeah, I have a glass before I go to bed and it helps me sleep and helps me go to bed for a longer period of time. And or I feel more restored when I go to bed. But that last part's a little bit more rare because when people indulge in an adult beverage before they go to sleep, it doesn't allow the mind to completely come down.
Drew (28:45.934)
off of the stimulation that it was just given. So even though alcohol is a sedative, which can help you fall asleep faster, it's not going to allow you to stay asleep, or at least it's not going to allow you to have good enough sleep quality to where you're going to be rested and restored when you wake up the next morning.
And those people that tell you, yeah, I've been doing it for 35 years and I'll do it for 35 more. No. Those people are, I hate to say it, but they probably won't be doing it for much longer. They've been doing it for 35 years because again, as we know from previous episodes, how important sleep is and how it can be detrimental to your life.
and it can cut lives short. Especially if you're doing it with alcohol in a manner that isn't, I don't want to call it not safe, but it's not recommended.
Not only does it affect your sleep cycle and your cognition and your brain, it also affects your liver because your liver is going to be, it's supposed to be in rest and digest at this point, right? However, it's working overtime, but it's not getting paid overtime to do the metabolizing of the toxin that you just put in your body. Thus, not only is it
working overtime, but also it's keeping you awake because of all the sugar that was in the drink that you just had like we talked about before because that sugar is going to also keep you up.
Drew (30:44.078)
And now you have two problems on your hand because now you have liver problems because your liver has been poisoned too many times. And also your body hasn't been able to recover from all the poison you were giving it because it hasn't been able to get a full night's sleep or it hasn't been able to get a good quality night of sleep.
So while it can help with relaxation and maybe a little bit of reduced anxiety in some studies, because it is a sedative.
It can also be detrimental to your health and it is one of those things that.
can really be...
held off if you need to. Like if you feel like you need to have a drink before you go to bed and you feel like you want to have a nice glass of wine before, like with my dinner before I go to bed, try and do it one to two hours before you go to bed. And that will minimize the sleep, or that will minimize the
Drew (32:13.068)
impact that it has on your sleep. Now it's still going to affect your sleep, but it'll be minimized, like I said before. And some of those impacts that it does end up having on the body, other than just the liver, is also the fact that, well, it's a diuretic. So going back to the very first thing I said, you're going to have to pee more, you're to be waking up more. And when you ask,
Your doctor, hey is this normal that I wake up seven times to go use the bathroom? They're gonna first ask you, well did you have anything before you went to bed? Yeah, yeah, I usually have like three glasses of wine before I go to bed. Usually takes off the edge and helps me go to bed. Well, first let's start there. Now, now, now. Don't hear what I'm not saying. All right. If you're indulging in a adult beverage every once in a while,
It's not going to be detrimental to your longevity. But as we know with our mathematicians and statisticians out there, all these add up over time and can, or I should say may, impact your overall health and wellness in the short term and in the long term. So...
Please drink responsibly. And again, if you have any questions, please refer to your PCP before participating in indulging in an adult beverage. Moving on to marijuana, Mary Jane, hashish, the Kush, the ganja, the sticky icky icky, whatever you want to call it. Marijuana is...
One of the new trendy things to be taking before you go to sleep has an alternative to taking melatonin, which we'll talk about next. And the research is there that it does, or it can or may help increase, or I should say decrease the amount of time that it takes somebody to fall asleep. However,
Drew (34:41.006)
There's a similar situation when it comes to alcohol is also present with marijuana.
And that is the fact that it is a sedative and it'll put you to sleep for sure. Like it will knock you out. But your brain is still going to be active while you're supposed to be sleeping, which kind of defeats the purpose of sleeping. So that's why sometimes when you have somebody that either relies on CBD or THC to fall asleep,
or alcohol or whatever to fall asleep. They wake up and they're still tired. So then they go and take their caffeine. That way they can stave off their tiredness or they think that they're getting more energy from their caffeine. And then you just keep on going in this cycle. When you take a drug like alcohol or marijuana before you go to bed, it's going to keep the brain active.
and it's not going to allow you to get into those deeper stages of sleep, which we should know by now are vital for your health. And in particular, the stages of sleep that you're not getting to is going to be REM sleep, which is why sometimes you have folks out there that either don't remember their dreams or they have just some wild ass dreams.
And that's due to this being affected. Now...
Drew (36:30.318)
the devil's lettuce is not the devil because it does have some benefits and that being that there's a few studies out there that have shown that it's able to reduce some of the body temperature and that can be beneficial before we go to sleep because as we know our bodies have an easier time falling asleep when it comes to
sleeping in a colder environment as opposed to sleeping in a warmer environment, which is why they always say 68 degrees is the optimal temperature to get your full night's rest or whatever they say nowadays. I think that's the way they say it though. And while you're sleeping at that 68 degrees, it kind of helps if your body's able to just get there sooner. Sometimes,
in some cases with some folks and some studies, it has shown that THC or CBD can be that medium that helps you get there. And that is probably one of the reasons why it does have some validity in helping with sleep. The only problem is, again, the sleep quality of what you're getting during those eight hours of glorious sleep.
are not going to be as restorative as they would be if you were able to go into those REM sleep and also stage three deep sleep as well. So what happens when you're not able to get this full night's rest of sleep is you have what's called a rebound effect. And that rebound effect is essentially where your body doesn't get to go into that REM sleep.
doesn't get to go into that final stage there. And the body knows how much REM sleep it's supposed to get on a night to night basis. And when it doesn't get that, it makes up for it in different stages. So it'll either cut some stages short, so that way it can get to that stage, or it'll make a stage go longer. That way you run into it at the right time. But then it'll cram in.
Drew (38:58.798)
a longer session of REM sleep. That way you're making up for it in the places where you missed it. Now, are you able to get back 100 % of your REM sleep that you missed? Of course not. But, the body does a pretty good job of compensating for all of our flaws and you get a pretty decent amount back. However, if you keep on going through this cycle, it makes it harder and harder.
for your body to make that change because then it starts to think, hmm, maybe this is how it's just supposed to be. Maybe I'll just stop and maybe I'll just leave it how it is and see what happens and let the rest of the body adapt because I'm done. And sometimes the body does that and we have sleep problems and that's how insomnia starts and or that's how other types of diseases occur.
But moral of the story with alcohol and marijuana is that it can be beneficial in allowing you to go to sleep sooner, but it can be detrimental to your overall health if you're not able to go into those deeper stages of sleep because your brain is still active while you're on said drugs.