Sleep Experts Debunk 13 More Sleep Myths
Sleep Experts Debunk 13 More Sleep Myths | Debunked |
Let's address this statement:"Hitting snooze will give you extra meaningful rest."Hitting the snooze button can disrupt your sleep cycle rather than provide meaningful rest. When you hit snooze, you typically fall back into a light sleep stage, which isn't restorative. It can lead to grogginess and sleep inertia when you finally wake up. It's generally better to aim for uninterrupted sleep rather than fragmented snooze-button sleep.
Hi my name is johar denjongui i'm a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and my work focuses primarily on circadian and sleep health and i'm rebecca robbins i'm an instructor in medicine at harvard medical school an associate scientist at the brigham and women's hospital in my research i designed behavioral interventions to give individuals the tools to improve their sleep and their health and today we're making an effort to debunk some common myths about sleep it's better to be a morning person than a night owl so one isn't better than the other we do have in our society both night owls and locks there's no question about that both of them do very well in terms of their own personal livelihood the difference is that for a person who happens to be a morning person because of their society structure they tend to do much better we have sayings like the early bird gets the worm and unfortunately that's to the detriment often of evening people they really live in a morning person's world and often are forced to work on a morning person's schedule so what we hope to see happen is that people become aware of the kind of person they are if you happen to be a morning person do know that your performance is going to be much better in the morning if you're an evening person your performance is going to be much better during the evening hours sleeping positions don't matter now wrong sleeping positions absolutely do matter we all believe it or not spend most of our time in one of three positions most people are side sleepers the next most common is your back and the least common is sleeping on your stomach the key thing when it comes to sleeping positions is to make sure that your spinal column is aligned and you are supported over the course of your sleep at night in your preferred position i would only add that if you happen to be somebody who has positional sleep apnea the position in which you sleep does matter because if you are sleeping in a supine position it's more difficult for you to breathe therefore you snore a little louder and your bed partner may not really appreciate that now pregnancy is a time where your sleeping positions also really matter during pregnancy you want to make sure you're comfortable and ideally on your side so that the belly isn't compressing down on top of you and the baby's protected but the key thing for pregnant people is you want to be comfortable in whatever position you take make sure that you are supported with lots of cozy pillows the q4 jet lag is not sleeping all night one of the common things that we hear people say is often you know i'll just stay up all night and i'll cure jet lag and of course that's not a cure for jet lag you're just sleep depriving yourself so significantly that of course you will fall asleep at any time the next day there really is no cure for a jet lag but you can cope with some of the consequences by making sure to walk outside in your new time zone as much as possible get natural light exposure if you're traveling east do not wait until you get there and try to slip the part of yourself you can start to prepare ahead of time so if you're going to be going to paris you know it's about five hours away so what do you do you begin to shift your schedule progressively maybe four or five days before so that by the time you get to paris you're already in the paris time zone and try to avoid alcohol sometimes that can interfere with your ability to get healthy sleep avoid any type of stimulant even if a few days you'll adjust naturally hitting snooze will give you extra meaningful rest this is actually a myth hitting the snooze bar is one of the worst things you can do because what you're doing is you're robbing yourself of some of the best sleep in the second half of the night is when we have most of our rapid eye movement sleep and that's where we get a lot of the benefits cognitively of our sleep so if you're hitting your snooze bar one or two or three or worse more times you're interrupting some of that really valuable sleep when it comes to the standpoint of our cognition stiff fragmentation is really not good because it leads to all kinds of psychological problem as well as physical problem if you have stick fragmented then you are more lucky to have cardiometabolic dysfunctions and your mood is not as positive as it should be instead of hitting this news bar the best thing is to sleep as late as you possibly can you have to go to the office at eight o'clock and it takes you an hour to get ready set your alarm clock for seven o'clock and commit to not snoozing get up at seven o'clock and go about your day so if you find yourself having a heat distance button it tells you you really need to have a much longer period of sleep so you may have to think about your lifestyle and see how can you incorporate more sleep in your daily routine napping makes up for lack of sleep at night napping is an interesting concept in our field it does have its merit it also has some of its drawbacks the ideal duration for a nap is actually about 20 minutes so it's quite short so make sure to set an alarm so you don't sleep too long which will cause you to wake up groggy and might affect your sleep that night if you've already had your seven hours which is your core sleep needs there's no point trying to do more in fact if you're trying to do more you could develop insania because of that taking melatonin will make you fall asleep immediately it's not going to be something that knocks you out right away melatonin we call it a neurotransmitter it's secreted in the brain it's associated with the transition to darkness in our environment and ideally melatonin is a naturally occurring process but melatonin can also be taken exogenously or as a supplement if you're taking short active melatonin substances it's highly recommended you do that about two to four hours before bedtime certainly not right before you go to bed it takes a while before it becomes effective most of the melatonin that's available over the counter isn't highly regulated so unfortunately we don't know its purity the other key thing is many people take far too much so often you go to the drugstore and you see 10 milligrams 20 milligrams of melatonin that's far far too much much smaller doses are important you really want to talk to your physician make sure that you pick the right type of melatonin for the problem that you're having if you pull an all-nighter sleep as soon as possible now hopefully you're not pulling all-nighters because again sleep is so important night in and night out but if you did get a night of either very insufficient sleep or maybe no sleep at all this is a myth in some ways because we don't want to just binge sleep as soon as you're absolutely able to what you want to do is actually get back to your normal routine as fast as possible so that means maybe trying to push through the day and wait until your regular bedtime maybe taking a nap in the afternoon if you're tired but trying to get back on your normal schedule as soon as possible not necessarily sleep as soon as possible that's an excellent point i would only add that if you happen to be a young person that's really true a couple of days before you're back on schedule if you happen to be an older person in your 60s and 70s it could take you up to a week to recover so you have to think about what am i doing do i have to do that because there's a price to pay particularly if you happen to be an older person dreams only last for a few seconds now dreams don't only last for a couple seconds they can be a couple seconds they can be a couple minutes and they can be longer we all dreamed four to five times a night and it happens predominantly in rapid eye movement sleep we believe about eighty percent of dreaming takes place then you could have a dream episode that lasts about five seconds and when you're recounting who actually took place during the night you feel as if you had this dream for like two three hours you could also have a dream that lasted ten minutes and then you feel it really should have been about five seconds it has to do with the emotional content of the dream and in fact most people remember their dreams because of the things that they see if you see the loved one die in a car accident you're going to remember this there's no precise duration of dreams we know less about their kind of quantity and and length but what we do encourage is to have fun with your dreams talk to a loved one maybe keep a dream journal if you snore you have sleep apnea now snoring is one of the most common symptoms of a condition called obstructive sleep apnea which is life-threatening but the snoring doesn't necessarily mean that you absolutely have this condition many people snore and are completely healthy so essentially snoring osteopathic is really a mechanical problem that is because of the excess suede on the upper airway you put too much pressure on your throat therefore the airway collapses either fully or partially that's what snoring really is it's you making effort trying to keep the upper airway open but if that snoring is coupled with excessive daytime sleepiness or if you've ever been told that you wake up over the course of the night or stop breathing or gasp for air those could be signs of sleep apnea sleep apnea is a very serious problem some people can actually die in their sleep this one is critically important to our sleep physician we do not want one more person to die of a heart attack or a stroke because of a problem they could have fixed so you really have to understand if that cardinal symptom of snowing shows up talk to a physician and make sure that you don't have sleep apnea and if you do we can actually help you breathe better sleep better therefore have a very productive and long life insomnia means you can't fall asleep it's partly true partly not so true if you happen to be somebody we can't fall asleep fast enough then you have what we call sleep onset insomnia which is true but you also have the other one which is that you fall asleep okay but you wake up multiple times where the nanny can you cannot go back to sleep that's the main insomnia now insomnia is best treated with a healthcare provider and there are pharmacological treatments but they're actually behavioral treatments that are incredibly effective and that's called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia so if you're not sure what to do we could contact with civilization they'll be able to guide you if you can't fall asleep anywhere and at any time it means you're a good sleeper now this most definitely is a myth believe it or not it actually takes time to fall asleep the hallmark of a healthy sleeper is actually what we call sleep latency or the time it takes you to fall asleep of about 15 or 20 minutes if you're falling asleep right away it generally is a sign that you're not getting enough sleep a good sleeper really is a person we can function throughout the day not falling asleep and inappropriate circumstances most people need about seven to eight hours of function optimally but the fact that somebody might be a short sleeper five six hours if they're functioning absolutely during the day they can go home and spend time with the family walk the dog play with the cat then that person is a good sleeper but if you find that you're sleeping five hours when you're at work you fall asleep you can't function properly your mood is not what it's supposed to be then you need to get a bit more sleep more sleep is always better now this is a myth more sleep is not always better because in addition to getting sufficient duration when it comes to sleep consistency is critical so if you look at maybe sleeping in or extending your regular sleep times well beyond what you typically keep then that's going to throw your internal biological or circadian rhythm completely out of whack so instead of sleeping in on the weekends or maybe binge sleeping the ideal thing is to get onto a schedule and try to keep it as close to monday through monday as possible what we don't want people to do is to feel i have to sleep eight hours if you're physiological for seven then that's perfectly fine if it's sick that's perfectly fine the question is is it optimal for you nightmares and night terrors are the same now these two things are distinct a nightmare is of course a disturbing dream and a night terror is actually something that we call a parasomnia which refers to abnormal behavior that occurs during sleep but it largely happens in children and does generally go away around puberty now there are similarities with these two things but the one difference is that a night terror can be very disturbing for the person who isn't sleeping to observe in a sleeper anyone experiencing night terrors is thrashing about violently and so it can be a little bit disturbing to watch nightmares tend to be a resultant of things you have been exposed to during the day if you had watch a horror movie some of those meditations can carry on during the night episode if you happen to be under significant stress you're not doing so well at work all of those can cause nightmares one exception is the environment we find experimentally when we manipulate the temperature so we put sleepers under a heat blanket so we can make sure that they're nice and toasty we actually see that their sleep fragmentation increases and the reports of nightmares as well so make sure that your bedroom is on the cooler side we generally recommend about 68 degrees fahrenheit for an optimal sleeping temperature those sleep means we talk about maybe there are more but at least for now we know these are the ones that are counterproductive to our health and well-being let's all have a good night's sleep are we ready all right you've got to pull it off should we eat both do you want some of these.
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Neurologists Debunk 11 Brain Myths
It seems like you're presenting some common misconceptions, so let's clarify each point:"We only use 10% of our brains."nothat's not true that's very not true actually hi i'm dr santoshi bilakota i'm a clinical assistant professor in neurology at the nyu grossman school of medicine i'm dr brad kamitaki i'm a neurologist and assistant professor at rutgers robert wood johnson medical school and today we'll be debunking myths about the human brain the bigger the brain the smarter the creature size actually does not matter when it comes to the brain because there are creatures out there with bigger brains than us but probably not as complex your brain is really determined by your body proportion right so when you think of like a big brown bear that's way bigger than us their brain is going to be bigger but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are smarter than us we don't know that for sure because it hasn't been fully studied but we've seen that in instances such as chimpanzees they do have smaller brains but we do know for a fact that chimpanzees are probably as smart as we are certainly it's not the size of the brain that matters but probably how complex it is and how well developed certain areas are certain areas in humans are for example our language centers are just much more developed than a cow or even a chimpanzee yeah that's important in determining intelligence rather than the size itself and also how do we measure intelligence that also becomes tricky because not everyone is intelligent in the same way non-cognitive factors also play a role like what's your social intelligence what's your emotional intelligence all of that i think is very complex and really difficult to measure iq tests are always an accurate measure of intelligence so this is false there's so much that goes into intelligence normal intelligence tests might measure things like executive function or planning verbal skills reading skills things like that but it's only an approximation of what you can do and highly influenced by the conditions of the test how you're feeling at the time of the test your educational level it'll be nice to say that there's one test or one way that we can determine how intelligent someone is but there's so much that goes into intelligence that one test or even multiple different tests can't measure that very well so the popular iq test was developed in the early 1900s and it was a way to determine which french students were cognitively delayed so we could offer them better resources that got adopted in america at stanford where for all the reasons brad laid out it doesn't take all of those things into account so i think although it is nice to say hey i am smart i did well on an iq test really don't think that means too much neither of us were born being doctors right we had to learn and develop those skills under many years of training i think that education is the best way to kind of make that happen education very broadly that might not necessarily be school for everyone definitely some people are savants some people are prodigies it's really hard to say what determines that they might be better at certain things but not necessarily good at others we're all individuals we all have different talents and different aptitudes for different things so iq tests just kind of measure your intelligence in that one specific area not how overall intelligent you are we only use 10 of our brains so this is not true we actually use all of our brain not all of the time but most of the time we're using some percentage of her brain this myth came into fruition i think in the early 1800s where people were trying to figure out why injuring different parts of the brain caused disabilities in people so a bunch of psychologists came up with the theory that we only use about ten percent of our brains versus people who are smarter who use more now we simply know that that is not the case we know that because we have something called a pet mri and a functional mri study we have the frontal lobe which we use for a lot of different purposes motor function language function executive functioning or planning activities behind that our parietal lobe here which is our sensory cortex in the back of the brain we have the occipital lobe which is our visual processing center and then here on the side we have the temporal lobe which is involved in memory language comprehension on the left side so to give you an example if you are reading something you're going to be using your temporal lobes for comprehension you're going to be using your frontal lobes for comprehension you'll also be using the back of your head where your visual cortex sits because that's where information from your eyeballs travel and your body kind of makes sense of it that way and then also if we take the brain apart a little bit we have our brain stem over here which is kind of our lizard brain it's our primitive brain that controls things like level of arousal breathing respirations heart rate blood pressure we have some deep motor functions here in the brain as well another part of the brain that we have is our cerebellum kind of on the bottom which is also involved in motor control and motor planning in doing one task you could be using multiple parts of your brain but you're not using everything at the same time video games rot your brain so this is a myth video games in and of themselves don't actually rot your brain it's something that i definitely heard a lot when i was younger from my grandma my mom a lot of our literature has shown that video games especially the ones that focus on team building on solving riddles solving puzzles building strategy are actually pretty good for you they actually do build up those centers of your brain especially when you're a child you know games can be used for other purposes for example our colleagues in surgery when they do scopes they practice those skills with things like video game simulators looking at the trials no one has actually defined what too much video games is every literature study that i've looked at quotes between 12 hours to 90 hours a week is okay i feel like 90 hours might be a little excessive but i think in reality the bigger signs of someone withdrawing from social activities and wanting to just stay at home and play video games and they'd prefer to do that then do other things that's more of a red flag i always say everything in moderation like if it's affecting your social life if you're just stuck in front of the tv all day that's not good psychologically memory gets worse as you age so this is false in fact there are some types of memory that improve as you get older for example things like semantic memory your vocabulary reading procedural memory for example people that are very good at musical instruments like can play the piano often will retain those skills some people will notice some changing memory that's often things like episodic memory which is kind of our memory of recent events episodic memories basically like the who what where and when so where did i put my keys where did i park my car those kind of things do tend to decline and i think a lot of it is because we just aren't as focused on things it's not necessarily something that's pathological or suggests dementia not everyone will get dementia but that risk does increase as you get older right now we don't have any medications or treatments that can prevent someone from getting alzheimer's disease there are some environmental risk factors that if you address can prevent you from getting dementia or at least prevent your memory from getting worse so some of those things include just general health eating healthy foods taking care of your heart moderate exercise making sure that you stay healthy cardiovascularly which is also going to help your brain left brain people are logical and right-brained people are creative i think this myth came from the 1800s when as neurologists are trying to figure out different functions of the brain they discovered that the left side of our brain and most people is dominant for language verbal memory whereas the right brain was much more of our visual spatial functions but there's no structural brain difference in people who are more logical or versus more creative rather it's more their environment the way that they were raised in neurology when we talk about brain hemispheric dominance we typically are talking about language and verbal memory dominance where does that live and for most people that's on the left side of the brain so if you're right-handed about 90 of the time you're going to be left hemisphere dominant which means a lot of your memory and speech production and understanding comprehension that kind of stuff is going to sit on the left side of your brain whereas if you're a left-handed it can kind of go both ways so i think the reality is we say that someone is left brain dominant or right brain dominant and it doesn't really mean that one person is more creative and the other one is more logical these are just talents and sort of skills that people develop whether inherently or through their personalities but it really has nothing to do with the side of their brain that they use more you can't prevent a stroke no that's not true that's very not true actually you can definitely prevent a stroke how to do that is by really addressing all the factors that could result in a stroke we know very clearly that things like high blood pressure smoking high cholesterol diabetes unfortunately increase your risk for a stroke which is basically when there's sign of blood flow going to your brain because of a blood clot or bleeding in the brain there's no quick and easy fix again it's about maintaining your cardiovascular and brain health over time so that you never get into a situation where a stroke will occur if you do ever have symptoms of a stroke and we often tell people this fast mnemonic so facial droop arm weakness slurred speech or language problems and then t is time call 9-1-1 and get to the hospital right away emergency medicine physicians can give you plot-busting medications to break up the clot that's causing the stroke so there's things that we can do to address it and prevent it from getting worse and i think there's a misconception that stroke is an old person's disease we know this isn't true anyone of any age can have a stroke the reason why you're going to have it is going to be different if you're older versus when you're younger but a big cause of stroke in young people is brain bleeds if you have a family history of aneurysm you should definitely get screened i think that's actually recommended eating fish makes you smarter so i actually don't know where this one came from but maybe it's like an immigrant household thing but i heard this a lot yeah yeah i mean in asian households for sure this is tricky because fish doesn't necessarily make you smarter but it is good for you and some fish more than others have omega-3s which we know are good for heart health good for brain health and just good for your overall body health so i think maybe that's why this one came into place but i don't think it makes you smarter what do you think yeah no i think it was my parents way of getting more efficient you do have to be careful about eating too much fish we know that certain types of fish have more mercury than others like tuna you don't want to overdo it i should add that fish is part of a mediterranean diet which we advocate for all of our patients mediterranean diets are diets that are rich in good fats like fish for example olive oils vegetables healthy grains and that is going to be helpful for stroke prevention it's going to be good for cholesterol for hypertension for diabetes all kinds of stuff so fish as part of a healthy diet is good for you but it will not make you smarter you can always trust your senses i'd say that's a myth our senses can play tricks on us and cause things like illusions or even sometimes hallucinations for example people with schizophrenia might hear voices of people talking that aren't actually there our senses are not 100 objective they're dependent on how well our brains and you know eyes ears are functioning at that time everyone is different my pain tolerance might be lower than rats or vice versa i don't think we have a really good neurological way of explaining why that might be that's still something that we don't fully understand also your senses can be a little influenced by emotions and memories i think if you see something that reminds you of someone the way you're going to react to it might be a little different i don't know if what i'm seeing is the same thing that everyone else is seeing like how can we ever it's like when they had that blue dress and the black dress and people were saying different things different sexes have different brains so no that's not true and i'm going to rip it again because that was funny i should start with saying that we're all born with the same brain regardless of what your gender identity is regardless of what your sexual orientation is there's really no structural differences so if a neurosurgeon was looking at two different brains they wouldn't know who was assigned male at birth and who was assigned female at birth there have been studies out there that have shown that those have been assigned female at birth might have more robust emotional pathways versus those who've been assigned male at birth are more executive thinkers we now know that that's not true as you get older if you've been exposed to different things how you relate to the outside world that's what develops the structures of your brain and the connectivity it has really nothing to do with what gender you were assigned at birth it's more nurture it's not necessarily nature and how you're made if you have a seizure you have epilepsy no i'm going to rip this a few times because i want to make my point what a seizure is is hypersynchronation of brain cells so what is that your brain talks to itself using electricity if something goes wrong with electricity in your brain you have a seizure basically when all of your neurons freak out and fire at once your body hyper synchronizes and we have a seizure seizures can be due to a lot of things not necessarily epilepsy which is a lifelong neurological condition you have to have multiple unprovoked seizures and that's the difference between a seizure and epilepsy also if you have epilepsy you have to take daily medication to keep your brain from having seizures so if you have had your first seizure of lifetime or if you're someone with seizures there are a few things that you should do one definitely get checked out by a neurologist there are tests that we can order that can be helpful for you one of them is an eeg we put stickers on your head look at your brain waves and see where the abnormalities are and the second one is the imaging that we have mris and pet mris are both used and if a diagnosis of epilepsy is made the most important thing for you to do is take your medications and lastly keep communicating with your doctor because you're not going to get to that period of seizure freedom unless you communicate with your doctor you only get one brain you're born with all the brain cells that you are going to have and it's up to you to take care of them there's a grain of truth in a lot of these myths but they're just not fully accurate just make sure that you do your research and take care of yourself
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