Teen Sleep Secrets: Unlocking the Power of Sleep

Alison Bentley, guest · [03:35]The cat naps, or the power naps, as they're, as they're called, the kind of 15, 20 minute naps, it really depends on you as to whether you can do that or not. It's not an automatic that everybody can do it. So when I used to give talks on, you know, to fairly big audiences of people, I'd go, who can power nap here? And it'd be ten percent of my people who can power nap. So it's not an, an automatic that everybody can do it. So you're right. People who can't power nap have to sleep longer to get a benefit of the nap. They have to sleep more than thirty minutes. People who can't power nap do fifteen, twenty minutes, wake up feeling great. Okay. So if you can do that, the fifteen, twenty minutes is much better because it's a short, it's a light sleep. You just have that and, and obviously it takes less time. So you can have a quick sleep and, and you're good to go. Babies are power nappers of note. They can do twenty minutes easily. And, and some children can as well. And really importantly, it's, you can't put everybody in the same box and go, well, everyone can do this, right? No, they can't. They can't. So some people are going to have, find it harder to nap. Some people are going to find it harder to get a short nap. Some people can't get a long nap. And the best time to nap is after lunch. That is definitely. So the two, three o'clock in the afternoon slot. Partly because we're designed to nap, actually, at that period, and every Mediterranean country that has siesta takes advantage of that. So we all have a little dip at about two, three o'clock in the afternoon, based on the body temperature. So our body temperature takes another little dip there. So we all feel something. And how we feel depends on how bad last night was, which is what I was saying about why or do you need a nap. So if you have a good night's sleep, then after lunch, you'll just kind of get this, maybe I shouldn't do this hard project right now. Maybe I should just delete emails because you get a bit of a brain fog. You know you're not functioning well. And then usually after an hour, you're, you're fine to go. But if you've had a bad night, you can literally fall asleep doing anything at that point in time. So that is the best time to have your 90 minute nap would be one o'clock, two o'clock in the afternoon. That time is the best time to have the nap. Because it's really important that how you fall asleep at night has to do with how long you've been awake for. And the longer you nap and the closer you nap to bedtime, the harder it is going to be to fall asleep that night. So it, there are consequences to napping, that, that you don't necessarily notice. You know, anybody who's had small children know that you went through that phase of they can't nap after two o'clock in the afternoon, otherwise they only go to bed at nine. It's that kind of thing that, that we're talking about. So And particularly with the teenagers who may have difficulty falling asleep anyway, you don't want to add, you don't want to add to that.

Alison Bentley, guest · [10:06]So during the holidays, particularly, what they do is they stay up even later. So they'll stay up till one, two o'clock in the morning. Often if they're doing online gaming, friends from the US will log in like midnight, so our time. So, yeah, so they're kind of different continents are playing different times. So they'll stay up till two o'clock in the morning, go to sleep, and parents kind of go, shame, they're on holiday, let them sleep in till ten, eleven in the morning. And that's great for the holidays, but in a group of those boys, when school starts again, they can't come back. They're on another time zone, and so they're shifted. We call it delayed sleep phase syndrome because it's now a problem. They're going to bed at two o'clock. Getting up at six, there's your four hours. That's where the four hours come in. And more, more than that, when I speak to these, cause I see a lot of them around this time of the year, because after December holidays, yeah, after December holidays. Yeah. So I see a couple of them now. And when, when you speak to them, they, and I always say to patients who have difficulty falling asleep, like, are you sleepy? Like when you go to bed and they go, I'm not sleepy at all. Like I'm wide awake. And I go, when are you sleepy? Like, when do you know, oh, there's that sleepiness. And they go two, three o'clock in the morning. I've had patients where it's gone right through till five. They are sleeping from five in the morning through to three o'clock in the afternoon, so it can get really out, far out. So they only sleep here at two o'clock in the morning. If you wake them up at six, it's equivalent to you go to bed at half past eight, right? Let's say nine. Let's say nine. Let's say nine o'clock, right? It's equivalent to waking up at half past one in the morning.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [11:36]Yeah, I know, that's hectic. And say,

Alison Bentley, guest · [11:37]and I go to school, okay?

Gershom Aitchison, host · [11:39]Yeah, I get it. So

Alison Bentley, guest · [11:40]they wake up and their entire system is trying to sleep. Their blood pressure is low, pulse rate is low, gut is not active. just, they're just not, they, they literally feel physically ill, okay? There's no, they're not fit for learning. They're not, well, they're not fit for anything. They actually should be asleep, okay? And then they'll be at school, and then they will go through the morning, and then suddenly at about ten, eleven o'clock, they'll say, suddenly I feel hungry. And I go, yeah, that's when you woke up. You woke

Gershom Aitchison, host · [12:09]up, right.

Alison Bentley, guest · [12:10]That's when the gut woke up. They feel hungry, and despite the fact they've had no more sleep, they feel better, like they're more awake. Because they are awake. Does that make sense? So that you have a situation where the first three hours of school, they're not actually there.

Alison Bentley, guest · [18:15]Now, the reason why it's become a big buzzword is because of melatonin. Melatonin gets produced, so melat, so one of the forces that makes us sleep is how long you've been awake for. The main one is when is your sleep time, like where is it in time, which is, which is, which is whether you're a lark or an owl, and, and that drop in body temperature that makes you feel sleepy is driven by melatonin. Melatonin only gets produced in dim light. So if you don't have dim light, you don't produce melatonin. And the problem with technology now, so the TV was never a problem because it was yonder on the other side of, of the room. Room was dim, and TV was there, so you produced your melatonin. But if you have a phone, and what happened, the difference was that technology came here to the front of your face. Now the light was from there, moved here. And so if there's too much light, and you can measure the light in lux, so if there's too much light hitting your eyes, you will not produce melatonin. Okay. So melatonin you're supposed to produce about an hour and a half before you want to go to bed. So there's that 90 minutes. So you produce melatonin here, 90 minutes later, your body temperature drops, and that's what makes you sleepy. Okay. So that's how that works. So you have this hour and a half little window thing. So if you're not exposed to dim light, you don't produce melatonin, then you go to bed, aha, dim light, produce melatonin, but you only fall asleep an hour and a half later. So you get that delay in the sleep because you haven't been exposed to dim light.

Alison Bentley, guest · [35:58]So if you look at sleep and the, and the internal structure of sleep, most of your deep sleep happens in, so deep non-REM sleep happens in the first half of the night, and most of your REM sleep in the second half of your night. So the, and they're different. So the deep sleep is very much about physical restoration of the body, so you produce growth hormone and all the kind of repair that happens during that, and the growth that happens during the night. REM sleep seems to be much more about the brain. It's where you flush out the waste products, it's where you have a lot of creativity, whatever dreams are for, I'm still on the fence about that, I don't know what they do. But there's dreams, your brain is literally disconnected from the body, your body is paralyzed during REM sleep, so your brain can do whatever it likes with no consequences. Okay. So you can't act out your dreams. If you act out your dreams, that's abnormal. You can't act out your dreams. It's a really good thing. If you think about the last dream that you had, well, thank goodness I didn't jump out of bed and do that. Okay. So, so it's a, so the, the brain is completely disconnected and it can do what it likes. And so theories range from what your brain does is take your experiences during the day, open up the memory banks and go, this one fits there and that one fits there. Oh, look at that, that's interesting. And all of that gets into the dream, like what you've, what you've been doing. So, so that's what it does. Your creativity happens during REM sleep. so it's very much that intellectual kind of thing, but also at a very basic level, your brain is being scrubbed clean for the next day. Okay, so metabolically. Okay. So depending on where you lose the sleep, you're going to lose a particular type of sleep. Now, deep sleep is always protected because no matter what time you go to bed, you're always going to have that first. But it's this end. If you cut this end short, you're going to lose that REM sleep. And so you're going to lose memory, learning, creativity, that kind of stuff, and the biology that's happening during sleep. So that's why the, the link between insomnia and dementia is about that. If you're not scrubbing the brain clean enough every night, you're accumulating stuff. And that is one of the theories of dementia, is that you accumulate this amyloid protein and, and it causes, and the plaques, yes. And you're accumulating because you're not getting enough of this REM sleep to be able to flush out the brain.

Alison Bentley, guest · [42:34]And, and it's tiredness from the day, but it's maybe not the right time to go to sleep. So if you try to take that, so the worst thing that patients with insomnia do is they try to get that sleepiness at eight, okay? Then they wake up and they go, but I'm just going to stay in bed. And they end up with a sleep schedule, it's eight to six. Does that make sense? They're staying in bed from eight o'clock, because that's when the sleepiness is. Ten hours. But they're not sleeping.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [42:57]And I'm

Alison Bentley, guest · [42:58]going, you can't sleep for ten hours, right? And that's the biggest problem with insomnia is that people do that. It makes sense to them. They kind of go, well, this is when I'm sleepy. Makes sense to them, but then they're lying for four hours in bed, freaking out about their sleep. And that's where the, when we talk about the process Of developing insomnia, we often start with a precipitating event, something starts it, exams, death in the family, divorce, something starts this inability to sleep because you're super stressed. And then most people who have that kind of insomnia, it disappears and their sleep comes back. But there's a group of people where the insomnia continues and becomes chronic insomnia or insomnia disorder, and that is because they create all of this thinking and behavioral things and they change their sleep and they're trying to do this and they're trying to do the next thing, and all they're doing is lying in bed getting super anxious about their sleep. And that's what we call the cognitive behavioral model of insomnia, and then that's why we use CBTI to treat insomnia, because we get rid of that behavior, so the first thing we do is make them spend less time in bed, if they can't fall asleep, get up, go and do something to distract yourself to get that sleepy feeling again, go back to bed, and then the cognitive anxiety kind of changes once the sleep comes back.

Amy Dewes-Goulborn, guest · [44:16]Yeah. Can I take our conversation to studying and learning? Sure. Because I'm often the one to educate teenagers on not pulling the all-nighter because they think that'll work, but... So my specific question to you is to explain to them that sleep actually finishes the learning process and locks in what you've just spent hours learning. And that's a concept I'm bringing up daily because I didn't get enough time, I'd rather just study the whole night through, and then they blank out in their tests. Of course they do. So can you speak on that a little bit?

Alison Bentley, guest · [44:50]Sure. I was asked to do some talks on learning and memory and, and that kind of thing, so I looked up the literature, and in 1928, which is a long time, it's nearly a hundred years ago, there was a paper, wouldn't pass muster now, just two people that they did this research on, but they looked at, at people and they gave them a, something to learn. And then each of them did the same, the same thing twice. So they gave them something to learn, and then they either kept them awake for an hour or let them sleep for thirty minutes and assessed how much they remembered. And there was no question that they remembered significantly more if they'd had the sleep. Okay, so that thirty minutes of sleep, they remembered significantly more than if they'd stayed awake. So that's, that's where it started, and it's, it's well known now that, and you're absolutely right, there are three different processes to memory. One is putting stuff in, like you gotta Read the books. Okay. So if we take that as study, you have to read the books. Now, the really important things about reading the books is if you are sleepy, you're only taking in 30, 40% of what you're reading because you can't focus, you can't concentrate. It's an

Gershom Aitchison, host · [45:57]adaptive process.

Alison Bentley, guest · [45:59]You've got to just put that in. So if you are sleepy to start with, so this all-nighter thing, you're not, it's taking you much longer to learn. I mean, it just is taking much longer to put it in. 100%. So that's the first process. That's called, you know, putting it into the brain. Then you've got your sleep and your sleep, you're absolutely right, sleep hardwires everything. So part of the REM process and the memory function is that sleep hardwires those memories and so they're there. Okay. The third part of memory is recall. So you can only recall as much as you've hardwired.

Amy Dewes-Goulborn, guest · [46:33]Right.

Alison Bentley, guest · [46:34]So if you take in less because you're tired and you sleep a little, so you don't hardwire it, you might only be able to recall twenty percent of what the work was. Okay, so you just have to do the math. If you only input fifty percent and you only hardwire fifty percent, you're down to twenty-five percent that you remember. So the studying technique that I always recommend to, to students is that they study for an hour and a half, if they can, take a thirty-minute nap, wake up, have a cup of tea, study for another hour and a half, take a thirty-minute nap. If you have to, study for long periods of time, rather take naps because you then, you've then kind of banked it. Does that make sense? So you go, I've learned this, it's banked. Now I can move on to something else, and it's banked. So each time you bank it by sleeping, that's what you do. Not by resting, not by meditating, not by watching TV, not by going on your phone, by