Sleep Matters

Brad Cooper

Welcome to the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and wellness coaching podcast. My name’s Brad Cooper and I’ll be your host and today’s episode takes us through a topic that is absolutely core not only to our coaching but to our lives. Our guest today is Dr Amy Bender. Dr Bender is a senior research scientist at Calgary counseling center and an adjunct assistant professor of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary. She received her phd and masters of science degrees in experimental psychology from Washington State University specializing in sleep eeg. She is optimized sleep in numerous Canadian Olympic athletes, professional teams, and other peak performers. Her research interests stemmed from being an athlete herself. She is a hall of Fame Basketball Player, has enjoyed rock climbing and mountaineering, completed an Ironman, and currently runs after her three children who are all five years of age and under. She’s driven to help people optimize sleep, to enhance their wellbeing and their performance.

Brad Cooper

If you’re on twitter, you can follow it at sleep. The number for sport, I do follow her on twitter and love the stuff she posts. Really interesting research updates, practical advice, that kind of thing. We did have a few tech challenges with our now former podcast recording app. Going to be making a change on that right away, so if you’re listening closely, might notice a couple of spots where you think maybe part of that question or answer was missing. Fortunately, we were able to capture most of the nuggets and wow, Dr Bender had a lot of great stuff to share. Just a quick preview, she talks about the four, seven, eight breathing technique. It’s a way to increase the activity level of your parasympathetic nervous system, which when you’re trying to sleep, that’s a big deal. She mentioned something called the cognitive shuffle. I’ve read a lot on sleep. I’d never heard this before. I have now used it consistently. Ever since we did this interview, she talks about naps for athletes on competition versus standard training days. She talks about sleep with immunity, stress and a lot of other stuff. So with that, let’s get started with the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and wellness coaching podcast.

Brad Cooper

Dr. Bender, I really appreciate you joining us today. You’ve got this sleep thing dialed in and hopefully you can help us do the same for our clients and probably for ourselves too. So first question out of the gate, what drew you into focusing your research in your career on sleep and the effects of sleep?

Dr. Bender

Well, I was always a curious person. Even when I was little, I was always the one in class raising my hand and asking questions. And um, I told my mom at one point that I wanted to be a scientist. Fast forward a few years later, I at a job which wasn’t very mentally stimulating and my aunt who was asleep technologists at the time told me, you know, hey, come come to my sleep lab. I’ll show you what I do. And she showed me. I went there. She hooked up a patient with electrodes, you know, looking at the physiological activity of the brain, looking at breathing, looking at different leg movements and how that translated to the screen and the, you know, the brain waves throughout sleep and it, it just really caught my attention. I ended up calling every single sleep lab up, whereas living at the time, Spokane, Washington, and just tried to volunteer anywhere I could.

Dr. Bender

Ended up landing a job at Washington State University sleep and performance research center who was starting up a lab at the time and from that point I was working as the sleep technologist for a few years and felt that doing some really exciting stuff, working on different research studies, but in order for me to be able to answer my own questions, you know, I, I ended up getting a masters and a phd in experimental psychology. I did a postdoc working with elite athletes and sleep optimization strategies to improve their sleep and now currently in a totally different area working at Calgary counseling center as senior research scientist looking at mental health outcomes.

Brad Cooper

So specifically how is sleep quality, quantity, all iterations of that tied to mental health.

Dr. Bender

Oh, it absolutely is so connected you, you said it right there. Quantity, quality and timing of sleep is really important, so making sure people are getting between seven to nine hours of sleep, making sure the quality is good as well. So you could be sleeping nine hours a night, but if you’re, if you have an underlying sleep disorder that’s not going to be much benefit, uh, there’s not going to be much restorative benefits and then timing is important. So trying to keep a consistent sleep schedule and all three of those factors play a role in our mental health and our physical health.

Brad Cooper

What, what do you think it is that recently? It seems like the last five years sleep is, it’s not on the radar. It is the radar. I mean you, you see the studies with Igoudala for the warriors a few years back, you see a lot of this, even business journals looking into the importance of sleep. You go back a decade or two, it was a rite of passage that Oh, I don’t sleep, I don’t need sleep. I’m tough, you know, whatever. And nowadays it’s almost like if you say that you’re basically admitting you’re an idiot, why do you think that change? What, where’s that coming from? What? Any, any sense of that? Just from kind of a societal level?

Dr. Bender

That’s a great question. I don’t know if I have a good answer to that. I know that with athletes, if you look at the wind sleep started to become on the radar in athletes in particular. Do you know it’s been recent, I’d say the last 10 years and I think coaches starting to realize that coaches and athletes starting to realize that it’s not just about the training, it’s about what you do in the full 24 hours that’s going to have an impact on performance. So it’s not just about training, but it’s also about nutrition, sleep, stress management in general. And I agree. I mean I think the work of Arieanna Huffington, you know, the recent book of Matthew Walker are really getting the message out that sleep is important and really trying to change that idea that I’ll sleep when I’m dead. You know, if any high performance, high performers out there really need to be thinking about sleep if they want to perform at a high level.

Brad Cooper

Yeah, yeah. It’s so clear now. Okay, so let’s talk ms dot misconceptions here. Again, our audience is either those folks that are currently wellness coaches or they’re thinking about going into wellness coaching as a profession. What are some of the misconceptions that you think maybe they’ve either heard from clients or they’ve seen in the newspaper, magazine headlines, those kinds of things, but those don’t hold up to evidence based practice. What are some of those you can kind of walk us through here?

Dr. Bender

Absolutely. I mean we see it all the time where the research study is misinterpreted and recently I think there was one on. I just posted it recently on twitter, but it was that screens do not affect sleep and children and if you look at that study in more detail, you’ll find that, you know, a 30 minute difference from those who use screens a bunch during the day to those not using as much. So those using less screens, social media during the day actually got on average 30 minutes more of sleep per night and you know, to me that that could be clinically significant if you’re looking at an extra 30 minutes of sleep across the week and across a month per night, that’s going to definitely add up. And furthermore, I mean the study was correlational, so that’s one, I guess recent misconception that, that I could talk on related to, um, the impact of, of screens and blue light showing detrimental effects on our sleep.

Dr. Bender

Yet the headline is, is something quite different? Also, I mean, one thing I’m passionate about that I see all the time and especially there’s sleep coaches working with high level athletes promoting this is the whole sleep calculator. And so the way that works is you project when you need to wake up and you work backwards in 90 minute increments, which is typically what a non rem rem sleep cycle is, and then you work yourself backwards so that I need to go to bed at 11:30 PM instead of 10:00 PM because I’m going to be waking up in that 90 minute increment and that’s simply just not true. It’s false. I mean the more sleep that you can get, the better our sleep vary so much between individuals and even within our own night tonight variability. So if I’m stuck in an office all day and I’m not getting that light exposure, having those screens at night is going to impact my sleep more and impact my Melatonin, the hormone that makes me sleepy at night.

Dr. Bender

So that’s one tip that I think a lot of people are unaware of. I would say another one would be, I guess tips on trying to get back to sleep. So having a toolbox of relaxation techniques, breathing techniques to help those clients really try and get back to sleep. It’s normal for us to know wake up during the middle of the night, you know, one, maybe two times per night, but if that total is equaling over 30 minutes, night in and night out, there may be an issue going on. So different techniques would be the four, seven, eight breathing technique you breathe in for four seconds, you hold your breath for seven, you breathe out for eight and that activates the parasympathetic nervous system. The cognitive shuffle is another good one that I really like and so you think of a word, let’s say bedtime and you start with the first letter of that word, so be you think of, imagine all the objects that you can starting with b, so ball, baby bag, bus.

Dr. Bender

When you can’t think of anymore of any, move on to e and by the time you get to the end of the word, a lot of times you’re already asleep. But I would say too, that a lot of people don’t know that if you’re in bed for more than 30 minutes to get up out of bed and do a relaxing activity, ideally in low light conditions and then only returned back to bed when you feel sleepy again. So we don’t want to start to associate our bed with being awake. And so you really got to limit the time that you’re in bed, you know, working, doing, working on your laptop, checking emails. I’m laying there and not falling asleep. You really want to limit that time so that you started to associate your bed with being asleep. I have 30 kids so that can happen a lot where one of the kids will wake me up and I’ll try and I’ll try relaxing activity or try and do the cognitive shuffle, but I’m simply just not tired.

Dr. Bender

So in that case, you know, maybe it is a good idea to start work, but can you make up for that loss sleep with potentially a nap opportunity or can I get to bed earlier the next night? I really try and think of sleep need across the entire week instead of, you know, I have to get seven hours every night, you know, there are going to be, it’s realistic that you’re not going to get seven hours every night potentially. And so can I make up for that lost sleep across the week with either napping or going to bed early. So let’s run down the net path. The timing and the NAP is important. We want to time it between one and 4:00 PM, which is also in line with that kind of circadian dip and that alertness stiff after lunch. And then the other important piece is to make sure the nap is short in athletes who you would recommend more of a 20 minute nap on training and competition days, but then on a day off maybe get a longer nap so that longer sleep cycle in. Um, but for I guess the everyday individual, even a 15 minute nap is going to be beneficial on your productivity, your alertness and has been shown to be more effective than caffeine. So depending, hang on whether you’re an early bird, you want to shift that a little bit earlier. If you’re more of a night owl and you’re going to bed at 1:00 AM, you know, then you may want to. You could potentially nap at 5:00 PM. So you’re right, it does depend on your chronotype and your preference and your current sleep schedule.

Brad Cooper

Okay, good stuff. So the coaches, a lot of times they’re addressing something around the idea of stress with their clients. Is there any connection between sleep patterns or sleep tendencies in some of the stress, things that the coaches might be hearing or seeing.

Dr. Bender

We know that that sleep and sleep deprivation and sleep restriction can impair mood. So that’s one of the number one things that are facts. When we look at the research research wide, if the client is potentially getting sick a lot, we know that good sleep is linked with better immunity, a nutrition choices. So nutrition is a big one. If the client is craving carbs, fats, we know that that is linked with sleep deprivation and a sleep quality issue. So those. I guess those would be kind of the three big signs that there may be an underlying sleep problem going on.

Brad Cooper

Very good. So can you take us down the pathway of practical tips when it relates to this

Dr. Bender

During relaxing activities during the day, Yoga, those kinds of things, um, directly before sleep potentially writing a to do list. So a number of people, they have so much on their mind that you know, they lay down, they hit the pillow and they just keep thinking and worrying about all these different things that they have to do. So potentially having a to do list, having a piece of paper right next to the bed, right before bed, right on that to do list, shut the journal and put it away, can be helpful at improving sleep quality and to try and mitigate some of that, worrying a worry or a journal as well. So having a notebook, draw a line down the center, write down all of your worries and then how you could potentially solve those and do don’t do that right before bed because that could lead to some problems sleeping. But definitely trying to incorporate that a couple hours before bed and hopefully that that can help with the sleep quality, which will then help be able to manage the stress.

Brad Cooper

Okay. So how about the physical performance side? Any connection with sleep on that end of the spectrum?

Dr. Bender

A lot of what’s related to physical performance has to do with our perception of that and so we perceive the workout to be less challenging. When we get better sleep, we’re able to go further on a treadmill test. We’re able to lift harder and lift more weights related to that, and so much of the work on physical performance is actually related to our perception.

Brad Cooper

Okay. That makes sense. What if we look at life a little bit more broadly? Are there other ways that sleep or lack of sleep affects some of the things we do in everyday life?

Dr. Bender

Our decision making process becomes we take riskier decisions, and the crazy part about it is that we don’t even realize we’re taking those risky decision. So when they, when they study those people, their ratings of their decisions are similar to when they’re in a control group. And getting a perfect amount of fleet and so I guess that would be, I guess somewhat related to financial decisions and relationships that sleep really affects our cognition and our decision making capability.

Brad Cooper

Just so fascinating. Anything cutting edge that you want to share with the audience, things that you’re seeing out there that they might see in a headline or a newspaper article six months from now.

Dr. Bender

I just heard the other day actually, that they’re working on a kind of a blood alcohol breathalyzer version of a sleep deprivation. And so that was something new where I really surprised me that, you know, eventually potentially down the road we’ll be able to test someone and I don’t know the details so don’t ask me, but we’ll be able to test someone on their levels of drowsiness, you know, in a car based on this type of test.

Brad Cooper

Well, there’s no doubt that will definitely open up a can of worms, but it’s an interesting conversation. You know, you look at the data on car accidents tied to sleep, fatigue. It’s a lot higher than alcohol. So interesting at the least an inch conversation. Speaking of the can of worms, let’s talk a little bit about caffeine coffee. You were telling me a little bit about a study that was done showing 200 milligrams of coffee at seven. Eight am still influences your sleep that night. Can you talk a little bit about caffeine intake?

Dr. Bender

Coffee in the morning can impacts your slow wave sleep or your deep sleep even that night. So we’re talking many, many hours later and this was in individuals who normally consume caffeine, but they were off of it for two to three days. Um, so that definitely plays a role, but by the time they went to bed, they actually had the equivalent of a black tea still in their system from that 7:00 AM, 200 milligram, two cups of coffee type of scenario. There’s further research that shows that caffeine, it can work for awhile, but you know, once you’re in three days of sleep restriction, the caffeine doesn’t really affect you anymore. When we’re looking at reaction time and we’re looking at lapses of attention that caffeine can kind of wear off as you continually use it. And then when you look specifically at the athlete research, I think there’s some recent stuff from Nancy guest who looks at the Geno type of caffeine and what she finds is that the really slow metabolizers that caffeine can actually impair their performance on a cycling time child test.

Dr. Bender

So these are just things to be aware of. I mean, I know 90 percent of the population has at least one caffeinated beverage crew day. Um, so it’s, it’s out there, but it’s, can you. I would kind of lean more towards, can you period guys, the caffeine consumption, so potentially no decaf for awhile and then when you really need that, uh, when you really have that important meeting, you have that one event, you have that one time, a marathon that you’re doing, you know, maybe use it strategically in those types of situations. I guess think about your consumption. Don’t, don’t just continually consume it day in and day out. And for me, I, you know, I was in graduate school for a number of years and I would just continually consume the coffee. And just recently in the last six months or so, I decided to get off coffee and I went completely decaf and my life was miserable for those first two weeks. But as I, it is, it is, um, you’re so tired, you just want to have a copy of headaches, you have all those kinds of symptoms. But now that I’m to the point where I don’t need it and I don’t need it every day and I drink, I think you can replace, you can still have coffee, which I do. I just drink decaf. And so just being aware of, of how it can impact your, your mood, your performance and your sleep is something important for your coaches and clients to think about.

Brad Cooper

I think that’s great advice. I mean, it really comes down to what the coaches are addressing in all areas of the person’s life. It’s, it’s living purposefully, not habitually. You’re having coffee because you decided this is valuable to me on this day for this purpose. So that’s really the key, is maintaining that purposeful approach to everything that we do across all the topics that we’re coaching. Speaking of which, every once in a while a coach may come across the client or interact with a client who maybe are struggling with a sleep disorder, what do you recommend in that case

Dr. Bender

to not fix it on your own, but to seek help from a sleep professional is really, I guess, a good piece of advice and I would say for athletes that you’re working with. Um, I helped develop the athletes sleep screening questionnaire, which is a free tool available online and it’s not designed to diagnose people with sleep disorders, but it’s designed to flag people who may need further help. And so using that tool, um, can be beneficial in trying to identify those clients who may need a little bit of extra help from a sleep professional.

Brad Cooper

Very good advice. By the way, for those of you who would like to find that sleep questionnaire, you can google athlete sleep screening questionnaire, vendor b, e n d e r in the newest version was published in 2018. So easy access to that. She also recommended accessing the national sleep foundation website as a great resource for us. All right, so Dr Bender, any other final advice coaches might want to keep in mind beyond simply having their clients seek medical guidance?

Dr. Bender

You know, definitely seeing a, an accredited sleep lab. I’m a sleep physician who specializes in sleep or potentially a cognitive behavioral therapy, a therapist who’s doing work with insomnia would be kind of those those avenues you would want to go to.

Brad Cooper

Great Advice Dr. Bender, so appreciative people are gonna. Love this one and we’ll wrap it up everybody. I will be right back.

Brad Cooper

Did you get all of that? So many nuggets now. One of the resources you might want to enjoy as a followup to this podcast is Matthew Walker’s book. Why we sleep, we’ve actually linked to it and the catalyst coaching library. If you go to catalyst coaching institute.com, Click on the resources tab and then we broke it into three categories. You’ve got a health and wellness category, a coaching resources and a, uh, basically a business category. So look under the health and wellness category and you’ll see why we sleep or just google it. You’ll find it. Great Book really dives deep into a lot of the things that Dr Bender talked about today. Thank you. As always, for joining us here at the Catalyst Health and wellness coaching podcast. If you’ve got questions, you’ve got ideas you want to talk about anything related to health and wellness coaching, you can contact us at results at CatalystCoachingInstitute.com. In the meantime, thanks for helping those around you pursue what we’d like to call  #better than yesterday. Make it a great rest of the week and we’ll talk to you soon. On the next episode of the Catalyst  Health and Wellness Coaching podcast.