The Importance of Sleep for Optimal Health

Hi, Dr Minkoff, LifeWorks Wellness Center.

I want to talk to you about sleep.

Why is sleep important?

Now in my prior medical career, sleep wasn’t important, it was neglected.

As an intern, we were working 120 hours a week.

So every third night we’d work all night and then we’d work the whole next day till seven o’clock and that was just how it was.

That’s illegal now to do it but back when I was training that’s how it was and we really didn’t have a choice on it and I learned to sleep not much and I sort of thought that because my dad didn’t sleep much that that was okay and he would sleep maybe five hours a night and he seemed to operate fine.

So fast forward, I got a device about four years ago which is just this little ring, it’s called an Oura ring, o-u-r-a.

If you’re looking for one, it’s o-u-r-a-ring.com and it’s a sleep tracker and there’s other methods to track sleep.

Some watches will do it, some wristbands do it but they track sleep and they can tell you are you’re getting enough sleep or not.

So when I started to track my sleep and it gives you a score of how much deep sleep, how much REM sleep, how much light sleep and how long are you awake once you lay down and it can get all this information, it can tell you.

Most people need somewhere between seven and nine hours a night in order to feel rested and get enough sleep.

Now people who don’t get sleep, like they’ve got a blocked airway and they’ve got sleep apnea, they’re sick, they feel bad, they have all kinds of medical diseases, they can get overweight.

So we know that lack of sleep isn’t good and we need sleep ourselves, recuperate when we get sleep.

When I first put the ring on and I was doing my five to five hours and 15 minutes a night, my sleep scores were terrible.

So ideal is up to a hundred.

If you’re above 80 you’re doing pretty good and above 85 they give you like an optimal, like really good and I was in the low 50s.

I thought this isn’t good and so I decided I was going to do an experiment and see how I did with getting more sleep and so I forced myself to turn out the lights at 10 o’clock and to stay in bed until five.

That would give me seven hours instead of five or five and a half and it took a few months for me to do it but what I found is that my sleep score started climbing and my light sleep went down and my REM sleep and my deep sleep went up and I was able to dial this in.

I do take a supplement from BodyHealth called Sleep that helped.

My wife and I had an electrician come in our house and provide a circuit, so that in our bedroom there was no electrical currents when we sleep.

So there’s no lights, there’s no electricity but I found that that made a big difference and now I’m getting scores usually 85, 88, sometimes up to 90 almost every night and I’ve sort of dialed it in and it makes a huge difference because when you’re sleep deprived you don’t feel well, you don’t think well, you don’t make optimum decisions and it’s very hard on your health.

So I encourage people to get some kind of tracker so they can pay attention to it and there’s some little hacks that you can do, like cooling the bedroom is usually good for most people.

So make the temperature low, if you have television sets and devices with electricity in your bedroom, I would take them out.

If you have TV sets that you can’t move out, I’d unplug them because you want no electrical current in your body when you’re sleeping because it causes stress, it causes your nervous system to be on edge.

I found that I was sleeping half the time with my mouth open and I would wake up in the middle of night with my mouth just completely parched dry and I read this book a couple years ago called

Breathe, it was actually a New York Times bestseller and he said you got to breathe through your nose, you’re not supposed to breathe through your mouth.

So I put a piece of tape across my mouth every night when I go to bed and I don’t wake up with a dry mouth and it’s improved my deep sleep.

My wife and I have an agreement.

Nothing controversial after nine o’clock at night.

Okay, like don’t bring it up.

No, no media time like Facebook, Instagram, get off your phone.

For me usually after 8 30, I don’t I just turn it all off and then I have a routine where I’m trying to like I’m gonna be asleep by 10 o’clock.

I’m gonna wind down.

I find that if I go to bed at 9.30, I read a novel of some kind for a half hour or do a crossword puzzle, I get into relaxed mode, I fall asleep.

The one of the one of the things on the oura ring that they give you a red demerit for us if you fall asleep too fast.

So if you fall asleep faster than five minutes it gives you a red mark, it lowers your score and I find that a lot of nights I’m it says three minutes and I was out, so I’m I’m going to argue with them on that point because I think that’s good.

Anyway there are ways to look at this so that you can improve your sleep and that sleep is like a Holy Grail if you’re trying to get health and you don’t sleep, it’s not good for you.

So get your z’s, figure out for you what’s needed.

I’ve given you a few suggestions.

At the clinic we actually have a handout with here’s the list of stuff that you can do so you can improve your sleep and that improves your health, okay.

I wish you a good night’s sleep.

Hope this helps.