Trouble Sleeping?

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Half of the world’s population suffers from insomnia even though we spend one third of our lives asleep. Sleep is as important to your health as water and food. Most men need seven and women need eight hours of quality sleep a night. During sleep, melatonin, a powerful repair hormone is secreted from the pineal gland in your brain. Growth hormone is also secreted while we are asleep. Children who go to bed late not only become very irritable and cannot concentrate in class, but also may not grow as tall as they could have. During our sleep, the brain gets a much needed rest and clears itself of toxic waste. During sleep two hormones that regulate your appetite and fat production are secreted: leptin which decreases your appetite and ghrelin which increases your appetite.

People who skip on sleeping may create an imbalance in the ratio of these hormones and so are more likely to over eat and accumulate fat.

When you can't get a decent night’s rest, the problem may be bad sleep habits. Here is how to repair your routine:
  • Go to bed and get up around the same time every day - even on weekends. Your internal clock gets used to a specific routine. Otherwise, you feel as if you have chronic jet lag.


  • Exercise for at least 30 minutes each day. Schedule workouts, especially vigorous ones, at least two to three hours before bedtime. Exercise can temporarily boost alertness.


  • Avoid eating a heavy dinner late at night. Not only do late dinners interfere with sleep, but you wake up feeling full and end up skipping breakfast, which slows down your metabolism. Breakfast skippers are four and a half times more likely to gain weight. You may eat a light snack of fruits and vegetables to gradually raise your serotonin and help you sleep, or add some protein so that you do not wake up in the middle of the night from hypoglycemia or hunger. Avoid simple sugars which are stimulating.


  • Keep the bedroom relatively cool– no higher than 70 degrees F- and well ventilated.


  • Do not obsess about not sleeping. Do not keep looking at the clock. If you are still awake 20 minutes after going to bed, get up, go to another room and pick up a book. Do not watch TV or use bright lights. Return to bed only when you feel that sleep will come easily. If it doesn’t, again, read, or listen to music in another room until it does.


  • Try to use your bed only for sleeping. Do not use it as an office, a place to take your meals, or even in place of a good reading chair. It is important for your brain to associate ‘bed’ only with 'sleep'.


  • Take a relaxing hot bath two hours before bedtime. Taking a bath immediately before bed increases alertness.


  • Build a before-bedtime ritual. Take a warm bath, read or put on snuggly pajamas. Tune out distractions. For instance, if noises bug you, earplugs may help. If early morning light wakes you, try wearing one of the eye-masks provided in airline toiletry kits.


  • Jot down some quick notes about your worries before bedtime. Tell yourself these problems won’t seem as hard to manage after a good night’s sleep. Promise to focus on the problems tomorrow when you have time.


  • A power nap of 30 minutes may be refreshing, but a longer afternoon nap may interfere with night sleep.


  • Avoid alcohol before going to bed. While alcohol has an initial sedative effect and may help you go to sleep faster, it has a second stimulating stage a few hours later where it wakes you or interferes with deep sleep due to a late adrenaline surge. Because of this, you wake up tired and not refreshed.


If you continue to have sleep problems, talk to your doctor. Many health problems, from depression to sleep apnea, can interfere with a good night’s rest. 10% of people who snore suffer from sleep apnea, a condition that causes high blood pressure. To get into the stage of deep sleep (REM or Rapid Eye Movement), you need about 90 minutes of uninterrupted sleep. People with sleep apnea wake up 10 times per hour, thus never get into the deep sleep they need and wake up tired. Depression can cause excessive sleepiness and weight gain or the opposite, insomnia and weight loss. While treating the cause of depression may allow you to sleep better, a lot of the Prozac-like drugs greatly disturb sleep. Exercise is best for mild to moderate depression and drugs should be reserved for only the severe variety. Inadequate sleep causes you to release less of the pleasure hormone serotonin in your brain; to compensate you try to increase those levels with foods high in refined sugars or by smoking cigarettes.

Caffeine addiction:
Caffeine is the most popular drink in the world. Just keep it under control. Interestingly, caffeine does have some benefits to the heart especially in females. Excitotoxins such as Aspartame in diet colas and MSG, often used as a taste enhancer should be avoided as they have been shown to cause brain damage which can be even more exaggerated with excessive caffeine. Abruptly cutting off caffeine may invite headache, exhaustion and mood swings, so go easy. Drink one less cup a day, switch from the super size mugs to smaller ones, add skimmed milk, or substitute low-caffeine alternatives such as green and white teas.

10% of people are very sensitive to caffeine due to genetically abnormal liver enzyme system. This abnormality is picked up using a relatively inexpensive intra-oral swab to screen for the most important genetic abnormalities or SNP’s- in the DNA. The P450 enzyme system is responsible in part for clearing caffeine from the body hence individuals with this deficit are very sensitive to coffee, colas, chocolate and all but herbal teas. Smoking cigarettes and eating hamburgers increases this enzyme, a term called enzyme enhancement, explaining in part, why kids eating hamburgers can tolerate the caffeine in their sodas.

Sometimes this test may reveal a genetic predisposition to breast or prostate cancer or a tendency to form excessive homocysteine leading to Alzheimer’s and cardiac disease. In about 10% of the people we may discover that their 2D6 cytochrome in the liver is genetically deficient, which explains why when we give them Codeine they do not experience pain relief but instead only get the side effects such as nausea and vomiting! In the near future we should be able to customize drugs that better suit your genomics, instead of conducting blind trials to establish the best and least harmful chemotherapy or the most effective and side effect-free pain killer for you.

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