Insomnia and Sleep Issues with Dr. Michael Breus [Episode #413]
![Insomnia and Sleep Issues with Dr. Michael Breus [Episode #413]](http://mysolluna.com/cdn/shop/articles/Michael-Breus-Podcast-413-IG-Post-copy_a5079bb5-1271-4b43-a217-6bd7ff3a1b12.jpg?v=1780346700&width=1100)
Insomnia and Sleep Issues with Dr. Michael Breus
413Welcome to the Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder. Our goal is to help you be your most healthy, confident, beautiful and joyful! Our topics focus on health and wellness (physical, emotional/mental and spiritual), holistic nutrition, medicinal plants, natural rhythms and cycles, beauty, meditation, self care and rituals, spirituality and personal empowerment.
Feeling Good means we are healthy, balanced, peaceful, confident and joyful, right in the midst of our perfectly imperfect lives. Feeling Good requires us to tune in and nourish our whole selves, which is made up of the four Solluna Cornerstones: our food, our bodies, our emotional well-being and our spiritual growth. Feeling good naturally leads to also looking good, in a much more powerful way from glowing skin created from within, a beautifully healthy body, radiant energy, and a greater level of overall well-being and personal growth.
Every week, we provide you with interviews with top experts in their field to support you in living your most beautiful, inspired and joyful life, with a focus on physical health, wellness, meditation and spirituality and personal empowerment.
I’m your host, Kimberly Snyder, founder of Solluna, New York Times best-selling author and nutritionist. I’m so grateful and honored we found each other!
I am so excited to have my very special guest, Michael J. Breus, who is an award-winning medical writer, a clinical psychologist and both a diplomate of the American Board of Sleep Medicine and a Fellow of The American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Listen in as Michael shares the many issues that cause sleep deprivation, knowing your chronotype, and tips on how to get a good night’s rest!
- Michael shares his expertise on what causes sleep deprivation…
- What is the so-called sludge that is said to detoxify from your brain at night…
- Pharmaceutical drugs and the alternative to not sleeping, and how it detrimentally affects your health…
- What is blue light and how to reduce its effects…
- We discuss what is recommended for patients who have sleep issues due to anxiety and depression…
- What are chronotypes and its history…
- Why women need different sleep at different times in their menstrual cycles…
About Michael J. Breus
Dr. Breus has supplied his expertise with both consulting and as a sleep educator (spokesperson). For over 14 years Dr. Breus served as the Sleep Expert for WebMD. He also writes The Insomnia Blog and can be found regularly on, The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and Sharecare.
Dr. Breus has given hundreds of presentations to professionals and the general public. He has published original research and worked on grant funded projects and clinical trials. He lectures all over the world for organizations, hospitals and medical centers, financial organizations, product companies and many more. Dr. Breus has been in private practice for 19 years and recently relocated his practice to Los Angeles.
I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!
There are lots of ways to share your responses or questions about the podcast:
- Comment below
- Connect on Twitter: @_kimberlysnyder
- Follow the conversation on my Instagram
- Comment on my Facebook Page
- Ask a question: mysolluna.com/askkimberly
Be sure to Subscribe to the Podcast and follow me on Soundcloud, so you never miss an episode!
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE
You may be really intrigued by podcasts, but you may just know how to listen or subscribe. It’s very easy, I promise! To listen to more than one episode, and to have it all in a handier way, on your phone or tablet, it’s way better to subscribe so you never miss an episode!
Want to know what to expect from other episodes of the “Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder”? My passion is to inspire and empower you to be your most authentic and beautiful self. We offer interviews with top experts, my personal philosophies and experiences, as well as answers to community-based questions around topics such as health, beauty, nutrition, yoga, spirituality and personal growth.
The intention of the Feel Good Podcast is to well…help you really Feel Good in your body, mind and spirit! Feeling Good means feeling peaceful, energized, whole, uniquely beautiful, confident and joyful, right in the midst of your perfectly imperfect life. This podcast is as informative and full of practical tips and take-aways as it is inspirational. I am here to support you in being your very best! I have so much love and gratitude for you. Thank you for tuning in and being part of the community :).
LEAVE A REVIEW ON ITUNES
Listeners really respect the views of other listeners, so your response helps people find good material they are interested in! If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends and give us a rating or review. Many thanks in advance.
<❤️ FAN OF THE WEEK>
- 3 Natural Sleep Aids!
- Probiotics
- Detoxy
- Digestive Enzymes
- Feel Good Starter Kit
- Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
Michael J. Breus’s Interview
Transcript:
Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
Kimberly Snyder: Okay, hey beauties. Welcome back to our Monday interview podcast and I am super excited for our guest today, who happens to be a personal friend of mine. He’s amazing, his name is Dr. Michael Breus PhD. He’s an award winning medical writer, a clinical psychologist, and both a diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He is popularly known as the sleep doctor though, and he’s been on the Dr. Oz Show dozens of times. We actually met checking into the Dr. Oz Show. They put you in the same hotel, so we met in line a couple years ago and then we periodically run into each other. He’s fantastic, he has so much information on sleep. I cannot wait for you to hear about everything he has to say.
Fan Of The Week
Kimberly Snyder: All right beauties, before we get into our interview today with Dr. Bruce, I want to give a quick shout-out to our fan of the week and her name, or his name, hard to tell sometimes, is Mike Hills 1207, and he or she writes, ‘The title of your podcast is perfect. Since the first show I listened to that my sister shared with me, I keep going back to listen to previous podcasts and/or eagerly awaiting new ones to be posted. I’ve shared this with friends because I want to pass on the love and support you provide. Thank you for being my inspiration during my morning runs as that is when I dial in and it makes me happy for many, many miles.’
Kimberly Snyder: Oh Mike Hills 1207, thank you so much for being our Fan of the Week. Thank you so much for your beautiful review. I am so grateful for you being in our community. I send you a virtual hug wherever you are listening to this right now. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Share The Podcast & Write A Review on Itunes
Kimberly Snyder: And beauties, for your chance to also be shouted out as the fan of the week, please also just take a minute or so out of your day to leave us a review on iTunes. Super easy. I know sometimes it’s like we put off stuff, I know I do too sometimes, but maybe today is the day where you just take a moment, pop over there, leave a review, and from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much in advance because it really helps the show grow and helps people organically find the show, which is what we want for people to benefit from this information, it can really change people’s lives.
Kimberly Snyder: So thank you so much in advance and also a little reminder to please subscribe to the show, if you haven’t yet already. It’s a really great self-care thing to do for yourself, so you stay tuned in to motivation and inspiration and you don’t miss a Monday interview podcast or a Thursday Q&A podcast. All right, all that being said, let’s get right into our interview here with Dr. Michael Bruce.
Interview with Michael Breus
Kimberly Snyder: So Dr. Breus, thank you so much for being here with us today. It is exciting to have you.
Michael Breus: Oh, thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be here.
Michael shares his expertise on why there are so many issues with sleep today
Kimberly Snyder: Dr. Breus, I think I read somewhere recently that something like 50 million Americans have sleep disorders, which range from insomnia to sleep apnea, all these different iterations. Why are there so many issues with sleep today? Do you think it has to do with electronics and blue light and people being stressed, or is there some sort of physiological reason? What is going on right now? Why aren’t people sleeping well?
Michael Breus: So first of all, I’m glad you noticed, there’s so many people that haven’t figured this out yet. There was actually data that came out within the last probably month or so just looking at something called sleep apnea, which is where people stop breathing in their sleep. It’s now estimated that over 980 million people have undiagnosed sleep apnea around the world. That’s almost a billion people, not in the United States, mind you, but around the world, right? So it’s almost a billion people out there with a sleep disorder. I mean that’s crazy when you think about just the number of folks that have that.
Michael Breus: So to answer your question, why? Why do so many people have sleep disorders? What’s been going on? I think there’s different reasons based on the sleep disorder, so as an example, with sleep apnea, I would argue, not in all cases, but in many cases being overweight is definitely a risk factor and as we know here in the United States, there are a lot of folks who are overweight and also quite a few people that are obese. I mean you don’t have to be big in order to have sleep apnea, but most people that have sleep apnea unfortunately are big and so that’s certainly one of the reasons why we’re starting to see this. Of course, anatomy has a big effect on sleep apnea as well.
Michael Breus: If you’ve got big tonsils, big adenoids, those kinds of things. If you move on over to something like insomnia, the reasoning is very different. While, it doesn’t matter if you’re big or you’re small, you can certainly have insomnia. But that a lot of times has to do with stress. One of the things I can tell you, Kim, is since 9/11 I’ve had a backlog of people wanting to see me for insomnia, since 9/11. So it’s really, 75% of insomnia is either stress or depression and insomnia, it affects almost a third, a third of the population.
Michael Breus: I mean if there’s 400 million people in the United States… 30 million people at any given time are not sleeping too well. So it’s just, it’s rampant and I think the biggest reason is people don’t put it as a priority. I mean, you’ve noticed it, you and I have had many conversations about how important sleep is and you’ve said how you want to educate your group, your tribe of people to learn more and understand, I mean, sleep is healing. Why would anybody do anything to affect their body’s ability to heal? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Kimberly Snyder: Well, I think like you said, historically, some people don’t really value sleep. They kind of siphon it off at either end. They’re like, “Oh, well I’m going to focus on eating. I’m going to focus on getting to the gym and exercising.” And maybe not really understanding sleep’s effect on balancing our hormones and autophagy and detoxification that goes on in our brain. One thing I’ve heard a little bit about too, speaking of detoxification, Dr. Breus, sorry, I didn’t mean to call you Dr, Breus, I know you said I could call you Michael, but-
Michael Breus: Call me Michael.
The so-called sludge that is said to detoxify from your brain at night
Kimberly Snyder: What’s up with this so-called sludge that is said to detoxify from your brain at night. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Michael Breus: Absolutely, so one of the things that we know is that during stage three and four sleep, one of the things that we know is that it’s kind of like a waste removal and we get out all of the bad proteins that are building up in our brain. Amyloid proteins, something called tau. These are things that have been linked to things like Alzheimer’s, dementia, cognitive decline.
Michael Breus: So one of the big things that we’re always talking about with people is, “Hey, think about something like this because stage three, four sleep actually helps keep your brain healthy, helps keep that out there for you.” And people don’t really think about it that way because longterm effects could be disastrous. And that’s really where autophagy hits hard, right? That’s when we start to see people really understanding more about something like autophagy, which is that cleansing out of the system. But sleep has a dramatic effect on it.
Pharmaceutical drugs and the alternative to not sleeping and how it detrimentally affects your health
Kimberly Snyder: So let’s say we start to understand how important sleep is and then some, and after this I want to get to some natural solutions, but if it’s between not sleeping and not having proper autophagy and potentially really disrupting your hormones and taking pharmaceutical drugs, I mean this is a hard decision that a lot of people have or family members. I mean, we know Dr. Breus that, sorry, Michael, there’s millions and millions of people are in pharmaceuticals. I mean, what? What is your take on that, if the alternative is just not sleeping and really detrimentally affecting your health?
Michael Breus: Right, so to be fair, there are definitely people who require pharmaceutical intervention for sleep. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. Now these people might be in very specific medical situations. These people might be in very specific mental health situations, things of that nature. So there’s a lot of different people out there that can definitely have some pretty significant-
Kimberly Snyder: Well what percentage would you say that is, of people that are medicated? Is that like a high percentage, a fraction-
Michael Breus: Well that’s a great question, Kim. I mean, here’s what I would tell you, is in my practice, almost every patient that shows up shows up on drug and they’ve been on drug for extended periods of time. So a lot of times the first thing people are saying to me is, “Well, my Ambien, my Restoril, my Sonata isn’t working any more.” And so the first thing I say to them is, “Well, why do you keep taking it if it’s not working?” You know what they say to me?
Kimberly Snyder: What do they say?
Michael Breus: They say, “Can you imagine how bad my sleep would be if I didn’t take it?” So what we’ve got is we’ve got this fear, right? So once somebody gets on a sleeping pill, then they’re afraid to come off of it, which keeps them on the sleeping pill. So not only are some of these things highly physiologically addictive, but there’s a mental addiction that goes along with these as well, and a fear and that’s the thing that we really have to break. And so I would argue that probably anywhere from less than 15% of the people that are on sleeping pills probably need to stay on sleeping pills.
Michael Breus: Now, to be fair, I don’t want anybody listening to just pull themselves off of their sleeping pills, okay? That is a dangerous thing to do. You have to do a drug taper, you have to do it with a physician, preferably your prescribing physician, things like that. So please, please, please don’t just cold turkey stop taking your sleep meds. Number one, you’ll end up being awake for three or four days. Number two, it could be quite harmful, but I would argue that most people don’t need a drug to help them sleep.
Michael Breus: Now there are people where supplementation can be helpful. There are people who just have, by the way, an underlying medical disorder that looks like a sleep disorder. An example of that would be hyperthyroidism. When people’s thyroid is overactive, it actually looks like insomnia. So again, going to a sleep specialist and learning more about what could this be? Turns out to be very, very important. But no, to be fair, not everybody needs to be on a pharmaceutical. I would argue that most people do not.
Whether a baseline test of all organs is important to do and what those tests consist of
Kimberly Snyder: So when you see patients at your clinic is one of the first things you do, sort of a baseline test of all organs. Like you mentioned thyroid. Do you think that’s important to do initially?
Michael Breus: I do, so what I do is a little bit different than what many other sleep specialists do because I work with physicians and so they’ll order the blood work and we do a full screen. So we look at everything from thyroid to iron. We look at vitamin deficiencies, we look at mineral deficiencies, things like vitamin D, magnesium, things like that. So the first thing we want to figure out is could there be something deficient or could there be something wrong with the system that’s causing this sleep problem, physiologically? Then the next thing we look at is, could this be mental health? Remember if it’s insomnia, 75% of the time it’s either anxiety or depression.
Michael Breus: So that’s the second area that we start to look at. And then we also look at environment, right? So could it be, you mentioned earlier in our conversation about blue light is blue light causing problems? It is causing problems. It’s not the biggest offender, but it’s definitely causing problems. If I had to pick the biggest offender of sleep, I could easily say that, that was caffeine, right? It’s arguably the most abused substance in the world. It by far affects people’s sleep and I guarantee you, Kim, there are people in your audience who are saying, “Ha, sleep doctor. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” They’re saying, “I can drink a cup of coffee and go right to bed, no problem.”
Michael Breus: So here’s the truth. We now know that people do have different caffeine sensitivities. However, caffeine is a stimulant, whether you like it or not and it doesn’t get metabolized as quickly as most people think. On average, the metabolization of caffeine occurs between six and eight hours. So if you stop drinking coffee at let’s say 3:00, 2:00 to 3:00 in the afternoon, six to eight hours later, only half is out of your system. So what we really want to see people doing is stopping caffeine by about, like I said, 2:00 PM so at least half of it can be out of their system, so they have a greater opportunity to sleep. Now people-
Whether chocolate is a stimulant and how much is too much
Kimberly Snyder: What about chocolate, Dr. Breus? What about chocolate as a stimulant?
Michael Breus: There’s nothing wrong with chocolate. My wife told me long ago if I started getting on media and telling people that they can’t have chocolate, we would be divorced before the end of the day, that’s number one. Number two, there’s not enough caffeine in chocolate to really make that big of a difference. Now to be fair, if you eat a three pound Hershey bar before bed, it’s going to have an effect.
Kimberly Snyder: I am one of those people, Michael, that eats chocolate, even a little square or a few, I pretty much eat chocolate almost every night after dinner. It calms my sweet tooth, I don’t know, it just makes me feel settled, so I’m very happy to hear that. So 2:00, 3:00 okay, that’s interesting because a lot of people, we meet for lunch or not even lunch meetings, coffee meeting, tea meetings and so, “Oh, I’ll just have a green tea.” And all that caffeine, there’s still caffeine in green tea, if you’re not having coffee. That is still going to have a hyper effect on your sleep then.
Michael Breus: there’s no question about it. I mean, I would argue that caffeine is easily our biggest offender, if you will, when it comes to sleep and people don’t even think about it because it’s so ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. Almost anywhere you go, I mean, I went to get my haircut the other day. They were like, “Hey, do you want a cup of coffee?” I was like, “Uh, what time is it? Like what’s going on here?” So I think that, that’s a big thing that a lot of people don’t really think about. Environmentally, we also look at things like blue light, right?
Kimberly Snyder: Yes, yes.
What is blue light and how to reduce its effects
Michael Breus: And so when we look at blue light, here’s how blue light works. So first of all, it’s not blue. It’s actually, it’s called cyan, C-Y-A-N and that is considered blue. That is a particular wavelength of light and so when we look at wavelength, it’s between 450 and 480 nanometers. And what that does is, when that light, which by the way, blue light is in every LED, every regular white light that we see, when it hits a particular cell in our eye, called our melanopsin cells, which we have a couple of million of in each eyeball.
Michael Breus: It actually sends a signal to our brain to turn off the melatonin faucet, right. That’s bad for sleep. This is the reason why we don’t like blue light at night, but we do like it in the mornings. So getting as much sunlight in the morning as you possibly can will help clear the brain fog, but you don’t want light at night. That’s why I personally use things like blue light blocking glasses. We have specialty light bulbs that you can buy for like less than 20 bucks. They can sit in your bedside table lamp, things like that.
Kimberly Snyder: Wow, that’s interesting because I actually did think blue light was more blue, which is why when you put your phone in night mode it kind of looks more red, so it’s-
Michael Breus: So that’s an interesting point, Kim, in that if you put your phone in night mode, it does no good. It doesn’t help you one-
Kimberly Snyder: What? Why?
Michael Breus: Because all it’s doing is, it’s not changing the actual wavelength of light, it’s just changing the brightness.
Kimberly Snyder: It doesn’t do anything for your brain. It does nothing?
Michael Breus: Nothing.
Kimberly Snyder: Wow, so you do have to get the blue light blocking glasses.
Michael Breus: Yeah, especially if you’re going to look on your phone and to be fair, look, I don’t have a problem with people watching television to fall asleep. I even do it. But what I don’t like is if you’re on your phone right before bed, you’re emotionally tied to whatever it is you’re looking at. Whether it’s Facebook or email or trying to get to a high score on candy crush or whatever, right? All of that is not sleep inducing. So what we want is calmness before bed. We want people to chill out. We want people to be mellow, we want people to read, we want people to meditate, we want people to pray, we want people to do all the relaxing things they can do to help themselves fall asleep.
What is recommended for patients who have sleep issues due to anxiety and depression
Kimberly Snyder: And you mentioned, Michael, there’s the caffeine, there’s the blue light and you said a lot of the insomnia is related to anxiety and depression, which again, unfortunately is a huge category besides straight sleep pharmaceuticals where people are also medicating. So what do you say to your patients that have these… you mentioned meditation and chilling out, but I mean as a doctor, what do you say to them when they come to you and you check out their organs, you check out their lifestyle, cut the caffeine and you know it’s an
