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Transcript
- 02:22 About Dr. Roger Washington
- 04:55 Getting Sleep Versus Getting Sick
- 10:27 ACCELERATED
- 16:20 Lifestyle Changes for the Workaholic
- 21:06 Common Illnesses from Insufficient Sleep
- 27:50 Sleep Habits
- 29:59 How to Determine if You’re Getting Adequate Sleep
- 32:55 Oversleeping
- 36:23 Sleep Beliefs
- 40:01 Sleeping Aids versus Sleeping Tricks
- 47:42 Second Wind
- 55:09 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today: Sleep Issues
- 58:59 More About Dr. Roger Washington
Wendy Myers: Hello and welcome to Live To 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and you can find me at myersdetox.com and you can learn about my healing and detox program at MineralPower.com.
Wendy Myers: Today, we have a special guest, Dr. Roger Washington. He is a Stanford Medical Doctor of Family Medicine Practice and he’s going to be talking about all the things that prevent us from getting good sleep, all the tips to help you get better sleep and very interestingly how prolong lack of sufficient sleep causes disease and how it’s probably one of the main underlying causes of disease today. So we’re going to be talking about the underpinnings of that. This is very, very interesting show.
Please keep in mind that this podcast is solely informational in nature. You want to contact your medical doctor before engaging in any treatment that we suggest today on the show. This program is for entertain purposes only or god forbid, the FDA come after us.
Wendy Myers: So I’m so excited. My supplement Liver Rehab is available on Amazon. I created a line of supplements called Bio Rehab. That’s the brand and the first product is called Liver Rehab. So please go to Amazon and take a look at it.
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That’s why I created Liver Rehab and spent several months formulating Liver Rehab. And it’s something I take with every meal. I think you should too. So go check it out at Amazon.com.
Wendy Myers: Our guest today is Dr. Roger Washington. He is a Stanford Medical School graduate and Academy of Family Physicians fellow.
Roger Washington has answered the question, “Doctor, why am I sick for 30 years?” And in his first book, Lack of Sufficient Sleep Matters, Dr. Washington decodes the root causes of illness he discovered in California’s Silicon Valley where sacrificing sleep is the norm.
Son of a nurse and hospital attendant and a father of teenagers, Jared and May, Dr. Washington chose the all-encompassing medical training of a family practitioner to become a more effective healer as well as to realize his passion for teaching the principles of illness prevention. Everyone who gets sick wants to know why and what they can do to prevent it from happening. And our guest today is a medical doctor who spent 30 years decoding the connection between stress, lack of sufficient sleep and the underlying true causes of illness.
Dr. Washington, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Roger Washington: Thank you, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background?
Roger Washington: Right, I’m a family physician. I’m a fellow in the Academy of Family Physicians. I graduated from Stanford Medical School and for the past 30 years, I’ve been practicing medicine in the Silicon Valley of the high tech region in California.
Wendy Myers: And so you practice family medicine in Silicon Valley where the tech industry calls or encourages innovation and entrepreneurial spirit over sleeping.
Roger Washington: Right.
Wendy Myers: So what do all your clients that were dot-comers have in common that led them to get sick?
Roger Washington: When I started off treating patients, like most doctors, I would focus on their illness. I would help them to get better, but my passion became to try to figure out what it was about their behavior. Was it stress? Was it exercise or a lack of it? What were about their attitudes could it be that might be contributing to their becoming ill over and over?
And what I learned as a result to talking to these can-do kinds of people here in the Silicon Valley is that there is a cycle of illness. And rather than it being stress as most people focus on or genes and germs, it turns out the most critical factor with regard to why people get sick when they do is the lack of sufficient sleep.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: In your book, Lack of Sufficient Sleep Matters, you illustrate how people will borrow energy by short-changing themselves when it comes to rejuvenating sleep. So how did you conclude that this is the single most important common cause of people getting sick?
Roger Washington: Well, as it turns out, it appears that when I interview people after their illness, they come to see me, I treat them and then they will follow up when we can talk about it. What I found is that the can-do kind of people that I interview talk about the fact that when they have something that there is a challenge or what most people consider to be stress and they make up their mind that they’re going to accomplish it, they’re going to get it done, something peculiar happens to them. They describe getting a sense of extra energy to get done what they need and what they want to do, they feel more confident, more creative. They have more energy to get things done. There’s a host of characteristics that happen.
But when I asked them, “Are you stressed at that time?” they said, “I’m not really sure what you mean by stress. I just have to get it done.” And not just the engineers, but single mothers, there are a lot of people. They tend to be the alpha people of the world who when they make up their mind that they’re going to get something done, they get extra energy.
But I don’t think it’s extra. I think what they’re doing is they’re borrowing energy from their immune system because there can be no such thing as extra energy. Energy is not created or destroyed. Does that resonate for you?
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Roger Washington: You’re borrowing energy by pushing yourself to get something done?
Wendy Myers: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Roger Washington: The peculiar thing about it was that while they’re pushing, that’s not when they get sick. They get sick when the stress is over or when they finish their challenge. In fact, even when people go on vacation, if it’s a very busy vacation, they’re not really stressed or when the vacation is over, that’s when they get sick.
So I thought if it was really the stress, then they should get sick when they’re in the middle of it. That’s not what seems to happen. Over and over, people get sick when the stress lets up. There are many, many examples of that. And then it helps to explain some of the conundrums, some of the puzzles that we see in clinical medicine when people get sick.
There are things like the blue death for example, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that.
Wendy Myers: No, no, no, I haven’t. What is that?
Roger Washington: Well, the blue death is what policemen and firemen call the situation because they wear the blue uniforms, the situation where when they retire after supposedly a stressful career, they retire in their 60s, they don’t live very long thereafter. You would think if it was the stress, then it should get them in the middle of it. No, it seems to wait until the stress is over. And it’s a puzzle. Why does it wait?
And there is another poignant example too that doesn’t involve policemen and alpha people. The idea is that very often a woman might be married to someone for let’s say 30 years and he gets ill with cancer. Now, she’s got to battle the cancer with him and she’s at his bedside. She’s there for 24 hours support. Let’s say he passes away. Soon thereafter, very often that woman dies.
And people say, “Oh, she died of a broken heart.” No, I think that she died because she lacked sleep and it’s the sleep that actually supports your immune system. And when you push yourself to get more done, you might feel as if you get more energy, what I call ACCELERATED, but actually the idea that you can get by with less sleep, no, you’re borrowing from your immune system. And when the stress lets up and you decide to relax, that’s when you see the results. And unfortunately, sometimes it can be fatal.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s really, really interesting. My grandmother passed away about two months after her spouse died. This is 30 years ago, but it was my father’s mother. She took care of him through a cancer illness and she died two months later.
Roger Washington: Oh, you can relate.
Wendy Myers: Absolutely, she was exhausted. I always thought she died of a broken heart. She died that she won’t be able to…
Roger Washington: People say that. People say that. I think it’s a little more complicated than that.
When people look at stress, they say, “Well, she was stressed,” but when does someone not have stress? If you’re married, you’re going to have stress. If you’re not married, you’re going to have stress. If you have a job, stress. No job and you have children, there’s always stress. And you can’t measure it.
So it’s not like you can tell someone, “You need to reduce your stress. If you don’t…” – it’s going to scare them. No, I don’t know that it’s the stress per se. I think it’s the response that some people have to stress by pushing themselves.
The single mom for example who has no other options, she has to do everything for her family, for her children. She feels obligated. And what does she do? She pushes herself and sleeps less. She feels ACCELERATED, I call it.
In fact, I’m not sure people understand this ACCELERATED idea, but anyone who’s ever had a second wind at night when you get that night owl experience. That’s what I’m referring to when I talk about ACCELERATED.
Wendy Myers: Okay, so you identify these are high risk traits of hard charging successful people that lead to illness that you identify in your book with the acronym ACCELERATED. Can you explain that a little bit more?
Roger Washington: Sure. For people to understand, it’s helpful to recall if you’ve ever had an experience in life where perhaps you became tired in the evening and when you have something you wanted to do like study for a test or go to a party or anything you wanted to do and decided to stay up instead of going to sleep. And then you get this second wind experience where you get more energy. When I talk to people about what they feel during that experience, I came up with the acronym ACCELERATED to describe all the characteristics.
So the A stands for they feel like their minds are more active and they feel more confident and more creative and they have more energy. And the L stands for they feel like they can get by with less sleep. Oftentimes, if they push themselves through lunch, they don’t even miss eating, so they can get by with less food. And the second E stands for entrepreneurial because they have this sense that they can put resources together in another way to come up with an outcome that they want to achieve.
The R stands for randy. I need an R, so I used the British term for things that are stimulating and somewhat erotic, but it doesn’t have to be erotic. It could just be stimulating or funny. In fact, what I tell to people is when you stay up late at night to watch the late night talk shows, they’re funny then. But if you tried watching them during the day, not so funny, but you are stimulated at night.
And the A stands for more articulate. People feel like they can express themselves. And the T is for titanic or strong. And the third E stands for entertaining and enthusiastic like a charismatic persona. Alpha people get this energy that they can lead people and people will follow them. And the D stands for more driven and determined.
In fact, when a person has this accelerated experience or this night owl experience if you will, it makes them feel – anything they have passion for, when they get the second wind, they have more passion for it. They love it more.
So for the people who are artists, that’s when they create. And for the mothers who want to have their house in tiptop shape for their families, that’s when they clean everything and come up with their exciting ideas. And entrepreneurs come up with these exciting ideas that are going to help them crush the competition and bring a new invention to life. People stay up and they feel stimulated. They call it their creative time. It’s their ability to [inaudible 00:13:15].
But what goes up must come down. And the next day, they feel out a bit. I call it CRASHED and BURNED, another acronym.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Roger Washington: The idea is that the next day, when they try to get up, they say, “Oh, I’m not a morning person.” But what do they do? They resort to drugs like caffeine and simple sugars to get them charged up.
I would say anyone who tells themselves, “I’m a night owl” and wants to give themselves that that’s the impression that that’s normal for them, they would then have to explain why the caffeine the next day, why the tiredness after lunch. Around here, we call it food coma. And in the evening, people get tired and want their “me-time.” They want to sit in front of the television instead of being with their families.
I don’t know that the night time, night owl experience is natural. I think of it more as an insomnia that we have as a defense mechanism. If for our ancestors for example, it was dangerous to go to sleep right at 8:00, 9:00 when the sun is down, we would have needed an ability to get more energy to survive the night.
And unfortunately, what people don’t understand about sleep is that when you get the second wind, you forfeit your deep stages of sleep, the sleep that supports the immune system, the sleep that the body releases what’s called the HGH, the human growth hormone. That’s why the baby sleeps so deeply so they can get their human growth hormone and grow.
But when we use the night owl experience, we forfeit it and we get the problem solving sleep where we dream and we’re easily awakened. So, people wonder, “Why do I sleep so poorly when I go to bed late at night?” What you’ve done is you’ve triggered the emergency response to help keep you have a form of insomnia. That’s why you can’t stop your thoughts.
Does that resonate? Does that help you to understand?
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And I have read that if you stay up past 11:00 that that mechanisms kick in and release a bunch of cortisol. So that’s why you want to make sure you’re asleep before 11:00 PM. But I’m sure for the other ones, that’s a little bit different timing. But then you kick off that survival mechanism and it keeps you up, it gives you that second wind and then you sacrifice quality sleep as a result.
Roger Washington: Oddly enough, my experience with patients is that second wind thing comes closer to 9:00 and by 11:00, people are wired. I call it fired up. The idea is that the people who are alphas, the can-do people, they seem to be more sensitive to the cortisol and the adrenaline that you mentioned.
It’s almost a matter of mind over matter. When they put their mind to getting something done, something happens to them and they get this extra energy. And in the evening if they put their mind to staying up, they will stay up and they will feel more energized and you can depend on them to not go to sleep. They will solve the problem that night.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So how can these people, these overachievers change their workaholic lifestyles and stop compromising their health?
Roger Washington: To change a lifestyle is a value. Remember when I said I talk to my patients not only about their behaviors, but I also had to talk to them about their values and their beliefs. So if a person’s belief system and their self-validation is around how much they can produce or how clean they can make their house or what plans they can come up with for their work or accomplishing some release or new invention, then that’s what they’re going to put first. And if you put that first, you’re going to compromise sleep. That’s the way it works.
It’s natural that when you do more, you need more sleep to be healthy. It’s intuitive that every parent knows that if their child has a very busy day, maybe he goes to the amusement park or the beach, that evening, the child tends to get drowsy earlier than usual as if they need more sleep to stay in balance with their health. I think it’s an intuitive idea that people should take a close look at.
What we do as adults is we do more during the day, but then we push ourselves instead of sleeping. We don’t give into it. If we got tired in the evening, we’d say, no, it’s too early to go to bed. And then what happens? We get that second wind and it feels so good that we are inclined to say, “Oh, it’s natural.”
I call it my Washington Sleep Loss Principle. What it means is that when you do more activity, whether it’s mental or physical, in order to stay healthy, you need to balance that activity with extra life-giving sleep, the HGH rejuvenative sleep. If you don’t, then you’re actually energy-borrowing and you’re going to run what we call a sleep debt.
So many people who get by with seven hours of sleep have basically chosen that as their value. They’ve chosen that as their preference. It’s mind over matter. They tell themselves, “I’m going to get seven hours” and they want to keep going. And their brain falls in line and it tells what to do.
But if you’re running a sleep debt, it’s going to catch up with you later. That’s why people haven’t figured it out yet. Even the conventional medicine doctors haven’t yet realized that it’s a result of sleep debt that people get ill later in life.
In fact if I could, I’d like to tell you one of the most interesting examples of it. I think it’s the story of Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, when he was a youngster, when he was in college, he said, “When I’m the President,” – not “If I become President” as most people might be inclined to say. “When I’m the President,” he made up his mind and he was one of the youngest governors ever of Arkansas and then he became one of the youngest Presidents.
And he only needed four hours of sleep. He outworked everyone. You’re not supposed to become President if you’re from Arkansas and you have this divorce and alcohol in your family. No, he outworked everyone using all the traits of the ACCELERATED including only needing four hours of sleep. He had the best doctors on the planet.
He wrote a big book after his two terms as President. He went and did a tour to promote his book. And then he did the Democratic National Convention which was the highlight and perhaps even the culmination of his political career. He was 57 years old. Within weeks, he had quadruple bypass surgery and he might have died had he not had the best doctors on the planet who are dealing with the illness once it showed up.
But my question is if the President of the United States can’t depend on the medical doctors and the conventions we have now to preserve his health and prevent him from getting sick, what help do the rest of us have?
I’m asking people to look at their own lives, to look where they are energy borrowers and to use what I call the sick questions in my book to help them realize. Do their illnesses when they get sick, do their headaches, do their flus come after a period of doing more activity with too little sleep and then when they slow down, is that when they become sick? That would be your warning. And I think Bill Clinton gave us a very poignant example.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So you’re saying that we’re borrowing energy from our immune system. So obviously doing this night after night after night is going to be really problematic. So what are some of the most common illnesses that you found in your research, common illnesses and diseases that are caused by this consecutive prolonged lack of sufficient sleep?
Roger Washington: There are many diseases that relate to lack of sufficient sleep, but let me tell you the ones that are interesting that help people understand how this process works. It’s the hangover.
So a person will have alcohol usually in the evening and what alcohol usually is a sedative. But for some people, they find it activating. And if you think about the characteristics of ACCELERATED, they become more talkative, they become the life of the party, they are having a great time and we all know that alcohol ruins the quality of sleep. No one ever passed out from alcohol and woke up feeling refreshed, so alcohol ruined sleep architecture.
So even though they pass out, the next morning, what I’m saying is that that’s when they become ill when they slow down as a result of the lack of sleep. And when the person wakes up, how do they feel? They feel as if the light is too bright, as if the sound of the clock on the wall is too loud. And the body is trying to drive them to get away from people, get away from noise, find some place dark, pull the covers back over your head and go back to sleep because that would be the antidote.
The idea is that the cause is lack of sleep and too much activity and the treatment would be to pay back your sleep debt that you built up.
But if the person got up too soon for whatever reasons and they were not in the position to be able to function, in fact the hangover is very much like the people who wake up after doing the night owl experience where they stagger to the coffee pot and everything bothers them and they’re little irritated until they have their drugs that help pick them back up and accelerated again.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Roger Washington: That’s one of the experiences that lack of sleep causes. The other idea is that lack of sleep triggers certain metabolic activities. In other words, insulin resistance, which is what causes people to become fat and eventually causes diabetes. Insulin resistance is the way the body responds to emergency in order for you to survive by becoming fat.
If we were pre-historic kinds of people and there were real life-threatening emergencies around us, it’s the fat people who won’t survive the longest. Insulin is the hormone that the body secretes as a result of insufficient sleep within a week.
Studies have been done to show that people who don’t sleep, their insulin rises, they become more insulin resistant and they get more body fat. In fact, all the people that you hear about who guide and exercise and then they lose a little weight and then it plateaus, it plateaus because the body is fighting that. The body thinks that there’s an emergency.
Imagine if you had less food and had to run around more, that constitutes an emergency and the triple threat would be to not get enough sleep too, now your body is going to trigger insulin resistance and it causes you to become diabetic, get high blood pressure, get cholesterol. In other words, pretty soon I think 10 years from now I hope at least, doctors will be thinking hat problems like cholesterol, diabetes, hypertension are triggered by things like lack of sleep and lack of exercise and the carbs that we eat. So I think that when people start to look at their own lives in fact where they became ill, very often we find it’s the lack of sleep in the period of time preceding the illness that caused it.
Wendy Myers: How long does it take for that whole process to occur? I’m sure for everyone it’s different. So how long does someone need to go with insufficient sleep before those metabolic processes begin happening that promote the blood sugar and insulin resistance, diabetes, et cetera, et cetera.
Roger Washington: There are some genes studies that suggest that one night of poor sleep causes changes in our genes to trigger the metabolic changes we’re talking about. In other words, the body is designed to adapt and survive and sleep is one of the things that we need. The only thing we need more than sleep is air. When you don’t sleep enough, it immediately triggers changes.
One of the studies that were done is depriving college students of sleep for a week and then checking their glucose changes and response to a meal. And you can see that there are glucose tolerance test changes within a week. But as little as one night, you can see the difference in metabolic changes and certainly on how a person feels. It’s just that we go on to denial and tell ourselves we’re still okay.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I definitely notice that myself. If I have one night where I just don’t sleep well for whatever reason, I notice the next day, I want to eat more like the insulin is lowering my blood sugar and that’s prompting me just without even being aware of it to eat more. And because of the insulin, I’m now storing fat and storing [inaudible 00:26:33]. It’s a vicious cycle, but very subtle.
Roger Washington: If you think of it that way, you recognize that lack of sleep triggers your body to go into an emergency mode. It goes into an emergency mode that night and gives you more night owl energy. It makes you feel more alert. It makes you feel more anxious. It makes you wonder what’s out there in the dark.
Small children lie in bed and think about what’s under the bed and what’s in the closet. They become fearful. And then they go to sleep. They’re back out in the living room, wanting to make excuses, “Can I have more water?” It seems insane. “What’s going on you?” Right, they’ve triggered the reflex by staying up too late.
And adults, we don’t lay in bed, thinking about what’s under the bed. We think about the big problems, the money, our jobs, our relationships. And we mistakenly think that those thoughts are what are keeping us up. No, those thoughts were triggered by you staying awake too long and triggering the emergency response of insomnia and night owl experience. And it’s so strong you are not going to shut it down just by thinking about [ship?] or relaxing your toes. It’s designed to keep you awake and it’s very powerful.
Wendy Myers: So what is the best time to go to sleep? What’s the best time to go to bed?
Roger Washington: When you first feel drowsy and the sun is going down, nothing could be more natural. Every mother knows. You watch your children, they have a big day and they start to feel a little tired and they yawn. “It’s time to go to bed.” And they’re going to protest, “But mom, it’s early.” And as soon as they lay their heads down, bang.
So the point is what could be more natural than listening to your own body? And when it tells you to go to sleep in the early evening and you start to feel a yawn, it could only mean one thing. Your body is not lying to you. It’s time.
If you are in tune, if you love sleep, if you love the way you feel in the morning when you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go without an alarm, no food coma in the afternoon, then you listen to your body. And if you exercise that day, it’s going to come early, isn’t it?
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Roger Washington: If you do big exercise, it will come even earlier. In fact, I’ve been telling this to my clients. If you want to lose weight, listen to your body. Go to sleep when you first feel tired after that exercise.
Think about it. Everybody’s giving credit to the exercise. You’re on that treadmill for what? Three minutes? What does it say, 400 calories? That’s not even a cookie. Is that supposed to make you lose weight? No, what it does is it makes you sleep better that night. Sleep is doing the heavy lifting and exercise is getting all the credit.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I have my clients that tell me they’re trying to lose weight and they wake up at 4:30 in the morning to get to the gym before they have to be at work at 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM. And I know they are shooting themselves in the fudge because you’re not going to lose weight by sacrificing sleep. It’s just the exact opposite of that. That’s why a lot of the chronic exercisers find that they are spinning in their wheels like a hamster on a wheel, just going, going, going and they don’t make any progress because they are sacrificing sleep.
Roger Washington: It’s so true. It’s so true.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So how can people determine if they are getting adequate amounts of sleep every night? You talked a little bit about the sleep debt. Can you talk a little bit more about the details with that? And when people sacrifice sleep, how long does it take to make up for that sleep deficit?
Roger Washington: Well, it depends on how long the person has been in sleep debt. For some people, it’s been life-long. But to help people understand this whole mechanism, I suggest that they look back on their own lives.
Perhaps when they come home from college or when they were young and they lived in their mom’s house and they knew they’d built up some sleep debt, intuitively they’d know they had not slept well the past few nights and they give themselves permission to get some sleep and they tell themselves, “I’m not getting up tomorrow.” That’s how it starts. It starts with the power of suggestion, the power of intention, what you believe.
And if you tell yourself, “Tonight, I’m going to get good sleep,” then the next day when you wake up, you look at the clock and say, “No, I’m going back to sleep.” And then you sleep more. And then you might wake up again because that’s the cycle, we wake up every 90 minutes or so. And we can go back to sleep. And then you don’t have a shred of doubt or shred of guilt when you’re 19 and living in your mom’s house and you sleep again. And then you might wake up afternoon and you feel great and you paid back your sleep debt.
The next night if you did it the same way, you wouldn’t sleep until noon. You might wake up at 10:30 or 11:00. That means you’ve been paying back some of your sleep debt. And the more often you do it, the better you will feel.
The people that go on vacation claim that they’re tired and they feel stressed because they’re at work. But if you ask them how they feel the first day of vacation, they’re not so great. Ask them on the third and fourth day of their vacation, after they’ve had a chance to pay back to their sleep debt, then they start feeling better.
The idea is that you give yourself permission to pay back your sleep debt and sleep all you can. The concept that people can sleep if they are lazy is not true. If that were true, we’d have people in jail sleeping their life sentence away.
You can’t sleep just because you want to. You have to need it. No one would go into a baby’s room and wake her up and say, “Oh, I think the baby slept too much.” No, that baby’s sleeping because she needs it. She needs it to grow. We don’t need it to grow as adults, but we need it for rejuvenation, to support our immune systems. We need it for the HGH release that keeps us healthy.
So the idea is getting as much sleep as you can when you can. So paying back on the weekends is one way of doing it or when you’re on vacation. But the idea is to give yourself permission. You have to value sleep and then your body will fall in line.
Wendy Myers: So is there any risk of getting too much sleep? Can you get too much sleep?
Roger Washington: It’s interesting you say that. There are people who worry about it. When I talk to them, they worry about it because they say, “Sometimes if I sleep more, it makes me more tired.” Is that the phenomenon you’re talking about?
Wendy Myers: Yes, absolutely.
Roger Washington: Okay. Let me say a word about that. When I ask people about their sleep experience, I’d have to remind them that very often, there has been sometime in your life where you told yourself to wake up at a certain time. You set the clock, it was important to you and a minute before the clock went off, you woke up, you looked at the clock, turned it off and took care of what you thought was important. That suggests you can control the way you sleep with your thoughts. There’s no doubt about it.
So my point is the people that wake up and said, “I slept too much and it made me more tired,” the real scenario was they gave themselves permission to go to sleep and sleep long. And the next morning, they woke up, they went back to sleep, they woke up again. Then their guilt kicked in. They looked at the clock, they saw it was 9:00 and they said, “Oh no, I have to get up.”
And the brain says, “Boss, you told us we could sleep in. We just woke up to make sure we were safe. Now, are you sure we need to get up?” “Oh, I got to get up. I can’t sleep the whole morning away.”And now, you’re just combobulated because you reneged on your original promise. If you did it the way we originally talked about where if you feel, “Oh, I could sleep some more,” then go back to sleep. Sleep as long as you can. Then you won’t feel tired.
Here in the Silicon Valley, we say if you defrag your computer, if you push that button, you have to wait until it’s over. You can’t just reboot it just because it’s been enough time. That’s what people do. They think they can renege on their promise to sleep in the morning because their guilt sets in. That’s why they wake up feeling tired.
My colleagues in Medicine say it’s because they woke up in a different sleep cycle. I don’t agree. I think that most people have had the experience that at least one time in their life, without guilt, they slept as long as they can. They did the natural thing and they woke up refreshed. No one can sleep more than you need. It’s impossible.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s a really good point because I always try to tell my clients to sleep for 8 to 10 hours a night. They just can’t even believe I want them to sleep that much because it’s so counter-culture to our “work until you drop” mentality in the United States.
But people do, especially if they’re not well, they have chronic health issues, they’re fatigued and they have been for years and even decades. You need to sleep more even if it’s 10 or even 12 hours a night. I have some clients that sleep for 12 hours a night and they feel very guilty.
Roger Washington: They shouldn’t.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I know. They need it. You absolutely need it. If your body is sleeping that long, your body needs it.
And I really like what you were saying about beliefs, your beliefs about sleep. I have a lot of clients that believe when they go to sleep, they’re not going to sleep well. They know that they are going to just repeat what has happened night after night after night that they’re going to go to sleep, they’re just going to lay there and they’re not going to be able to sleep, they’re going to have anxiety and they’re going to have a crappy night sleep just like they did the last two years.
Wendy Myers: Can you talk a little bit about beliefs in sleep?
Roger Washington: I have an expression that I learned from George Clinton. George Clinton in one of his lyrics said, “You gravitate towards that which you secretly love most.” And people who like walking around telling me and you about the fact that they wake up every night at 3:27, “I wake up every night at 3:27. It’s the most amazing thing, I wake up at 3:27. Yeah, sometimes not 3:27 exactly, but usually about that.” Yeah, of course, you’re going to wake up. You talked about that.
You can program yourself to sleep. The people that sleep well loves sleep. They don’t fight it and they’re confident they’re going to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed.
Those are three of the characteristics that Dr. Bill Dement characterized as the people who are the best sleepers. They believe that they’re going to sleep well. They know they’re going to sleep well. The people who walk around are not going to sleep well. Yeah, that’s right. You keep telling yourself that and that’s what’s going to happen.
So when I coach people about sleep, I say you have to change your beliefs. You have to change your values. Do you love sleep or do you like getting more done in the evening? You can’t have it both ways. You can’t trick your body. You can’t trick your mind. You gravitate towards that which you secretly love most.
And for those people who have difficulty sleeping or who think that you can sleep too much, what I do is I dare them. I double dare them to find people in their 80s and 90s wherever you like, go to your church, go to your synagogue, go to the grocery store. Find someone who’s 80 or 90 years old that’s healthy that tells jokes and lives in their own home and takes care of themselves and ask them about their relationship with sleep and you’re going to hear a love story of people who love sleep, people who make their bed in the morning and say, “I will be back,” because they have the mindset that sleep is good and they recognize what it does for them.
This relationship, most of us don’t have it here in the States because we have this other can-do mentality. It’s different in places like Europe where they have siesta. They honor sleep. Well, it’s not only the fact that they honor sleep. It’s also that they don’t honor trying to do more.
In other words, when you’re a waiter in France and you’re 18 years old, you’re going to be a waiter until you retire. You’re not going to own the restaurant. It’s not their ambition to do more and be the manager. No, they’re content with what life offers them. They have a different attitude about sleep and about life.
Whereas we are can-do kind of people that want to do more and we characterize it and get a validation from our achievement. Well, if that’s your value, it’s going to interfere with your sleep and it’s going to cost you your health.
I’m trying to tell people to go look at my book, look at the different colorful scenarios I described for people’s illnesses, things like urinary tract infections and migraines and gout and kidney and stones. All these diseases that people take for granted and think that it’s their genes or their stress or the germs that they are around, I’m telling people if you don’t honor your immune system, if you don’t honor your sleep, then you’re going to be susceptible to getting diseases in the future.
So I think that it’s hard to get people to value something differently. They have to decide for themselves what’s most important.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, some people if they are not getting quality sleep or they have the belief that they are not getting good sleep will resort to sleep aids. So let’s talk a little bit about that because there are millions of people being prescribed xanax or ambien or they’re drinking a glass of alcohol every night. They believe that they have to have that glass of alcohol to sleep good.
So let’s talk about how those medications actually prevent you from getting a good quality of restorative night sleep.
Roger Washington: Okay well, some sleep is better than no sleep. That’s always the case. But basically, there are two types of sleep.
There is deep rejuvenative sleep, the HGH releasing sleep, the human growth hormone. That’s the deep stages of sleep. It’s deep because we’re less responsive to our environment, we’re more vulnerable. It would take more to wake us up during that stage of sleep.
Parents are familiar with it when they carry their children up from the car to the bedroom and you can turn them upside down or put their pajamas on. They’re very deep into sleep. The idea is that human growth hormone is released at that time.
The other type of sleep is what I call problem solving sleep. That’s where we have dreams. That’s where we solve our issues, take our short term memories and put them into long term, things that we learned. That’s when we need to put it together so that we can use it for the future.
We tend to have the problem solving sleep after midnight. We tend to get our deep sleep before midnight. It’s critical to life and it’s critical health so the body knows to do the critical maintenance first.
And the idea is that very often, we miss our opportunity to go to sleep by pushing ourselves to stay awake for whatever reasons. And then we lay in bed with those anxious thoughts that I talked about earlier. And then we try to use different tricks to get ourselves to go to sleep, but even still we’re not going to get the best sleep we can.
Very often, people will try to use melatonin. Melatonin is designed to be weak. Melatonin is the natural hormone that comes out in the body at about 9:00 to help us go to sleep. But if there was an emergency, we can easily override it. And also if there’s light, we’re not likely to go to sleep with melatonin.
Other things that people do are to use things like alcohol as you mentioned. Alcohol, maybe a little bit of it, might help to ease our way into sleep if we have just a small amount. But more than two drinks certainly is likely, as it’s being metabolized, to ruin the quality of sleep.
Furthermore, the medications, sleeping medications like ambien and xanax, these are the benzodiazepines and the similar medications are all on the same family as the alcohol really. So they tend to help us to fall asleep, but they interfere with the architecture of sleep to some extent. It sacrifices some of the deep sleep and we get more of that problem solving sleep. But again, some sleep is better than none.
I suppose if a person uses a sleep aid rarely or maybe once a week or twice a week, they’re probably not going to get in trouble with it. But actually, you can become psychologically dependent on it as well as physically dependent on it. It changes the chemistry in your brain. It interferes with how you feel the next day. It is not a particularly good idea.
There are other ways to get in tune with your own body. I suppose if there was an emergency and you needed to sleep, you’re on a plane for example, those kinds of things, then maybe one of the sleep aids might be appropriate.
Wendy Myers: What about sleep supplements? I’m a fan of these just until people can’t get their sleeping situation resolved to maybe reduce their stress and get their head around that and improving their sleep environment and their sleep habits. I’m a fan of some sleep supplements that can be helpful, but melatonin is interesting because melatonin is used to help people fall asleep. That’s the key with melatonin.
A lot of people don’t make enough because they have gut issues or amino acid absorption issues and whatnot. But can you talk a little bit about the weak effects of melatonin? A lot of people think, “Oh, melatonin doesn’t really work for me.” What are some of the things that can interfere in supplementing melatonin and having it prevent us from falling asleep?
Roger Washington: Melatonin doesn’t work if you don’t want it to work. So the people who take melatonin and then go watch television until they get tired, they want to watch television, they don’t want to sleep. People that will take the melatonin and do a few more errands around the house, they don’t want to sleep, they’re fighting the melatonin.
So the idea is that the melatonin only works if you want to sleep and it’s safe to sleep and there’s no light. Melatonin can be helpful, but only under little circumstances. There are so many people who will take a sleep aid and what they want is they want to be hit in the back of their head and feel. They want to [inaudible 00:45:11]. That’s what they want, right?
They dread lying in bed with the tossing and turning. So they take the medication ambien if you will and what happens is they start doing things around the house. Basically what they’re doing is practicing fighting the ambien. Instead of taking the ambien and then learning what it feels like to start to get drowsy and then welcome it, embrace it, they fight it. That’s the main thing that prevents people from being able to benefit from the sleep aids they do use.
Wendy Myers: Melatonin is really weak. Isn’t it meant to be overridden? Isn’t the mechanism meant to be overridden?
Roger Washington: That’s right. The melatonin allows us to stay in the primary operating system. Melatonin comes out at about 9:00 in the evening and helps us to shut down. If however we have some overriding reason to stay awake, our body presumes that there must be an emergency. So it kicks in the emergency hormones that you alluded to earlier, the cortisol, adrenaline, the glutamates.
The glutamates are brain transmitters that are designed to not only keep you awake, but they’re designed to make you anxious and fearful and what if kinds of thoughts because those kinds of thoughts late at night for our pre-historic ancestors would have kept them alive because that’s the kind of thinking you need to have when there’s actually danger.
However, what people don’t understand is by continuing to do it over and over and over, these glutamates and cortisol and adrenaline, they stick around the next day. So it’s one of the common reasons why people have what some doctors call ANTs, automatic negative thoughts, ANTs. The idea is you start thinking bad thoughts for no reason. It’s the chemicals that are circulating in your body that make you feel that way. Does that help?
Wendy Myers: Absolutely, yeah. I have a lot of clients that say, “Oh, melatonin doesn’t work for me.” Get in bed. Go to the bathroom, do everything you have to do, take the melatonin and get into bed.
It also has to be liquid. I prefer liquid and you take sublingually because that’s when it absorbs. But you don’t really get a lot of benefit if you take a pill and take it that way. I prefer a liquid version of that. I find for myself if I take it and then maybe 10 minutes later, I have to go to the bathroom, the effects are not nearly as dramatic. It’s as if I just stayed in bed.
Wendy Myers: So in your book, you talk about why some people do their best work at night. Can you talk a little bit about this?
Roger Washington: The idea is that these are the people who consider themselves night owls and they get that second wind experience. They get the cortisol and the adrenaline and the glutamates and they have the ability to feel more passionate about the things that are important to them. And that’s when they have their energy.
So for three or four hours during the evening, between 9:00 and 2:00 or whenever they decide to go to bed, that’s when they feel like they get their best work done because the following day, they feel more what I call CRASHED and BURNED.
The idea behind CRASHED is that the next morning, when a person is crashed, the C stands for they feel crashed like they hit a wall. The R stands for feeling reclusive, they want to be left alone. The A stands for angry and a little bit irritable, that’s when people find themselves difficult in traffic or a colleague brings them a problem and they feel irritated by it.
And the S stands for a little bit sleepy because when a person is crashed, they don’t feel quite good and the sleep they get is not as good. The H stands for hunger because it gives you munches as you described and people start craving sugar because sugar will make you fat and it’s the most effective way to survive if you needed to have more calories.
The E is for feeling empty as if somebody pulled the plug in that afternoon food coma feeling. And D is for depressive, not in the sense of “I want to kill myself” depressing, but more like, “I really don’t have the full energy and motivation that I usually have if I come home from work and my children want to play and do something exciting and fun and one that would enrich their lives. I feel more like I want to sit on a couch and decompress because I don’t quite feel like myself.”
So the idea is that people get this accelerated feeling at night, but they pay for it the next day unless they use their drugs like caffeine and sugar that you mentioned earlier.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I wanted to revisit that concept again because I know there are a lot of people out there and I used to be guilty of this myself. I would feel at 9:00, “Okay, I could go to bed, but I want to stay up and work on my website.” That’s because I really felt that I did my best work from about 9:00 to midnight or even 1:00 AM if I was really on a tear working on a blog post. But it was taking a toll on my health. I could tell my adrenals were suffering and I just didn’t feel as well.
People get stuck in that cycle and that pattern where they are staying up late, doing whatever it is that they want to do, whether it’s to watch TV or read a book, whatever they’re doing. And I think it’s just really, really important for us to repeat that that’s not a good idea.
Now that I go to sleep, I’m in bed at 9:00 PM and usually asleep by 9:30, I feel so much better even though I feel like I am sleeping my life away. I feel like ultimately I’m more creative and more productive during the day as a result of my habit of making myself, disciplining myself to go to bed at 9:00 to 9:30.
Roger Washington: It’s a relative feeling, that’s right. It’s a relative feeling. People that feel like they’re not morning people, what they’re doing is they’re depressed and crashed during the day. They are dragging through the day, they’re going through the motions. They’re like a cranky kid that has more social skills so they can mask how they are actually feeling and they have the benefit of being able to take the drugs.
The idea is that when they’re not quite feeling full bandwidth during the day, by comparison, that three or four hours of feeling full bandwidth at night feels wonderful. So they have to ask themselves, “What am I really doing? I’m inflicting a different personality on my family, my friends, my children, my colleagues, the people that depend on me to make good decisions.” When people think of it that way, then you might be able to buy in. But first, they have to experience it. People have to look at how they’re ensnared in this cycle of increased accelerated activity and in crashed mode and the illnesses that it presents.
Wendy Myers: You worked with one of the top sleep researchers in the world and at one point, we talked previously and you were talking about the top four things that good sleepers have in common. Can you talk about that and some of these tips that people need to get a good night sleep?
Roger Washington: The idea is that Dr. Dement suggested that good sleepers have four characteristics and his idea was rather than saying what’s normal or what’s common for people, seven and seven and a half hour that people talk about. The fact that people who are older seem to sleep less, so then people will say, “Maybe people who are older need less sleep.” No, look at their health before you start saying that that’s a good idea.
What he said is that if you want to know how to sleep, then follow the examples of good sleepers. This is like the Suzuki Method. If you want to be a good violin player, listen to the best violin players in the world.
So what he said is that these people tend to get up the same time every day. They look forward to sleep. They go to sleep when they’re first tired and they’re confident. That’s the important part. It’s the belief. They are confident that they’re going to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, so they sleep well.
I think that if people decide that they want to be a good sleeper, they have to adapt that set of values. They are waking up at the same time because they listen to their body so they’re in tune with what their body needs. They go to sleep when they first feel drowsy. They make up their sleep debt. It’s usually eight hours. So they wake up about the same time each day.
And once again I suggest that if you find somebody who is old and healthy, you got to find someone who does it that way for whatever reasons.
Wendy Myers: So say someone that go to bed early right when they’re tired, they go to bed at 8:00 or 9:00 PM and then four hours later, they wake up in the middle of the night and they still have six hours before they have to get up at 6:00 AM or what have you. Is it okay to wake up in the middle of the night and get up and do something? Or should you just lie in bed and just tap it out?
Roger Washington: No, I don’t think there’s any reason to tap it out the scenario you described. There are six hours left before morning, they could easily get up. There are some people who described having creative hours during that two hours. They go back to sleep and have a set of what they call a second sleep, but they got eight hours total. That’s the issue. The issue was that they tried to stay in sync.
Very often what happens is if we decide that we need to solve a problem, that’s our love. That’s what we designate ourselves to do. It’s quite likely we might wake up in the middle of the night, having to solve that problem, we write it down and then go back to sleep the next morning to enjoy the fruits of our labor so to speak. So it wouldn’t be unusual. It’s not detrimental. The key is that they get the hours of sleep they require to pay back their sleep debt.
Wendy Myers: Okay, great, very good. I have a question I like to ask to all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Roger Washington: The most pressing health issue has to do with our values in our sleep because here in our country, we are spending more and more money every year of our gross national product towards healthcare and our health is not getting better. It’s not going to get better until we learn to value what’s important, to value sleep.
It’s important to produce things, to invent things. But also it’s important to stay in tune. When we see in the world, places like India, India has diabetes and now it’s become epidemic. It’s become epidemic in the cities.
You don’t go to villages in India and find diabetes because people in the villages live according to their body’s biological clock. They go to bed early, they get up early. They work hard each day. They eat the same food that people eat in the cities, but they don’t get diabetes.
The people in the cities are starting to adapt this can-do, get-more mentality and they sacrifice their sleep, they’re sacrificing their health because as we said, lack of sleep triggers insulin resistance for example.
But I am suggesting that lack of sleep actually deteriorates our immune systems. And when we slow down, that’s when we get sick. Too many people slow down when they retire and die, people in the military. I talked about the firemen and policemen. Too many people, when at the end of their project, that’s when they get sick.
For example, no one gets the deep venous thrombosis, the blood clots in the legs. No one gets those on the way to the big meeting on the East Coast. They get them on the way back when the meeting is over. They have to pull themselves together and go through this big project and they sacrifice their sleep. They get to the East Coast, they make the presentation, they get the deal or maybe they don’t get the deal, but they decided this time to relax. They get back on the plane, now they get deep venous thrombosis.
They tell women that if you have intercourse, you can get a bladder infection and they call it honeymoon cystitis. But yet, the woman knows she has intercourse many other times and doesn’t get a bladder infection. She doesn’t have it every time. “I don’t get it.” Well, the point is if you ask the woman on her honeymoon, what was her pre-wedding experience?
She was trying to micromanage every aspect of her perfect day and she was pushing yourself. She was doing her work. She was calling her mom on the phone. She was calling the event planner. She was taking every care of everything that had to be done. But then when she decided to relax and then she had the intercourse, that’s when she gets it, the bladder infection.
People have kidney stones. They say, “Doctor, how long have I had this stone?” “Well, from the size of it, it must have been there for weeks or even months, maybe years.” “Why did it hit me on Monday?” “A good question, maybe you’re stressed.”
Well, we don’t actually know, but when we look at the Sleep Loss Principle, it suggests that that person was pushing himself, getting by with less sleep. On Friday, they pushed themselves and through the weekend and then at Sunday night, they decided, “Oh, I can relax.” Then they got the kidney stone.
The point is that stress is not so much the issue. Trying to relieve people’s stress and talking more about meditation or exercise are good ideas, but the point is it’s hard to measure those things. If you look at my book and the Sleep Sick Questions, I call them, we look at your life before you became sick, very often you see that after pushing yourself and slowing down…
Wendy Myers: That’s when they got sick.
Roger Washington: That’s right.
Wendy Myers: So where can the listeners learn more about your book, Lack of Sufficient Sleep Matters?
Roger Washington: There are a couple of ways people can find out more. One is we have a website, SleepMattersTheBook.com and people can download one of the chapters. If it’s the chapter about ACCELERATED, it describes this can-do experience that the alpha people of the world have.
And so I invite people, your listeners for example, to take a look at these examples and see if they find themselves in this ACCELERATED kind of experience because it suggests that they will be ensnared by illness.
And of course, my book is available on Amazon and it’s called, Lack of Sufficient Sleep Matters.
Wendy Myers: Dr. Washington, thank you so much for coming on the show. That’s going to help so many people to get better ideas about how they can improve their sleep. I learned a lot in this podcast.
Roger Washington: Thank you.
Wendy Myers: I think there are a lot of details about sleep, little nuances people aren’t quite tuning into and it’s costing them their life, it’s costing them their health, et cetera. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
Roger Washington: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Wendy Myers: And listeners, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to myersdetox.com. You can learn more about my healing and detox program on my new upcoming website. It’s MineralPower.com. That will be up in about a month. Thank you so much for listening to the Live To 110 Podcast.
Roger Washington: Thank you, Wendy.
