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#22 Why Choose Sleep Part 1: How Sleeping Well is Critical to Thriving in College · College Is Fine, Everything's Fine

it was a very unique time, both in my life and in the world. Covid had basically just started that semester, , and I had just left, my university life to go back to Colorado to quarantine. , and it was, you know, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of stress, , but outside of the pandemic stressors, which everyone was feeling, , there were factors that made my own sleep a little more difficult. I had days where my schedule, my, my sleep week cycle was so weird that I'd be over caffeinated at just absolutely the wrong hours of the day or night., there was a TV in my room. Definitely did not help. I was trying to power myself through all of it. I knew that I needed a regiment, a very structured way to get back on track I had a lot of responsibilities that I did need to be wakeful and attentive and energized. And I saw that a lot of those aspects of my life were suffering a little bit just because of the exhaustion that a horrible sleep schedule, um, was having.So Sarah and I are excited. We have a really well known sleep expert with us, Dr. Shelby Harris. And I'm gonna do my best to. Give you a little bit of idea of all the things that Shelby is up to. She has a private practice, uh, in White Plains, New York where she specializes in the use of cognitive behavioral therapy.She's board certified in behavioral sleep medicine by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and treats a variety of sleep disorder. And lastly, she. The author of the book, the Women's Guide, to Overcoming Insomnia, getting a Good Night's Sleep Without Relying On Medication. So as you can see, she's an expert on sleep disorders and the perfect guest to talk more about sleep and college. Welcome Shelby.Well, thank you for having me, Liz and Sarah. I'm really happy to.I feel like with that intro, people should just do what you say,I feel like half of my job is negotiating with patients, but yeah, it helps. Yeah.Good, good. So one of the main things we hear about in college, and we've heard people say it over and over again, you can have sleep, you can study and get good grades or you can have friends and be social, but you can't have all three. I'm curious what you say to that.I hear that all the time. Yep. It's, you know, it's, it's a lot of a struggle of finding the time for sleep and balancing it with the social life. And then a lot of people are trying to just cram a lot of times too, and the cramming then gets in the way of sleep and then all the other things. But it's super common.Yeah.All right, so do you have an anecdote  it's more about doing what we can most of the nights, while also not sacrificing a night or two out. But if you're staying out, like. Every single night or most nights a week, that's a problem. And then I'm also gonna work with people on, you know, consistency of awake time, trying to give them some sort of a sleep schedule to follow.Cuz a lot of times they're just kind of weighing at where they can. And also then it's about thinking about your study habit. Right. Are you a procrastinator? That's where I see this happen a lot, right? So people are trying to cram for that, stu for that test that they have the next day and that actually be fine when you're not sleeping.That's the worst way to encode any information. So to really learn to space it out and really be thoughtful about how you're gonna study is really very beneficial for your sleep overall. And you're gonna encode things much better and actually likely do better on the tests.what you're saying is we should do an immediate follow up episode on procrastinationProcrastination. Yeah, that's a hard one, and what I usually tell people who are really skeptical about it and don't wanna make changes and say, just gimme two weeks. And usually after two weeks people see that there's benefit to it and then I get some buy-in.Yeah. You're gonna kind have to try it. And, and have a bit of a leap ofExactly. Shelby . You know, Sarah was talking about how sleep is often the thing that is sacrificed. So if a call shouldn't is listening, why should they prioritize their sleep?  I think the thing is, is that what I hear all the time is I'll sleep when I'm dead. I'm like, well, guess what? You're gonna make that happen faster if you just continually sleep. Deprive yourself from here on in. So sleep is really, it's that bedrock with which all the other stuff is built, right?So we always talk about these pillars of health, right? So diet, exercise, sleep is one of them. But I often think of sleep as the thing that really boo bolsters everything else. So if you're someone who is, um, an athlete in school, right? Sleeping more and making that a priority will help with your athletic performance.It also helps with reducing injury risk. So we find that people recover faster from injuries and they have fewer injuries if they're not sleep deprived. So if you're there for athletics, definitely something to think about. We also think about sleep four. Memory consolidation, right? So all the things that you're learning, if you have tests, things like that, you need sleep to actually be able to, it's a filing cabinet.You need to sleep to be able to be able to remember what you are learning. Essentially, it's super important for mood regulation. So people tend to have more anxiety, more depression, more irritability, um, more mood liability, so ups and downs a lot more when they're not sleeping as well. Your immune system has, um, issues when you're not sleeping well.Even one night of lost sleep, meaning. about four hours or less can reduce your immune system. It doesn't mean you'll definitely get sick, but you are more susceptible to getting sick. It is so important for brain function, heart function. I mean like everything you can imagine that you might not even care about when you're 20 years old.It will serve you down the road, but the things in school, right? Mood. Being able to learn weight management, it's super important for as well. People are always trying to, like, a lot of times people diet and exercising, you're gonna get more out of that stuff if you're sleeping. If you're not sleep, if you're sleep deprived, you're gonna crave sweets, you're gonna crave fats, um, which makes it even harder to lose weight.My friend was, um, part of the study that showed that the. what is it? Hormone, chemical. What is that? Whatever it is that's produced when you're high is the same chemical hormone, whatever it is that's produced when you're sleep deprived.Sleep deprived. Yeah, yeah,so it doesn't mean like lack of sleep gives you the munchies, but it does mean that you have those same sort of cravings that aren't necessarily.exactly. Exactly. You know, your body is craving. When you're not sleeping, you essentially have less of the, we call it less of the leptin, which is the hormone that says, stop eating. You're full. And you naturally, when you're sleep deprived, have more ghrelin, which is go means you're hungry, eat. So your body is literally giving you the signal to keep eating, even though you might not be needing food anymore.And then you're gonna gravitate towards the fattier sugary foods because you need that kick of. And also when it's late at night too, your frontal lobe is not working in the same way. And if you're sleep deprived, you really, your judgment decision making is not, uh, it's more compromised. And so you're gonna go for all that stuff that really is not gonna help you in the long run. Well we gave I think, a lot of reasons why college student should pay more attention to it. Cause I think it's tied to, you know, if you really think about your two functions at college, it's like, have fun, socialize, make relationships and, and academics. And if you wanna function well in those two areas, , you need that foundation.Super important.So, Now, let's say a college student in is really struggling with the adjustment, and I think we hear this too, like you said, and maybe not when they're dead, but they'll be like, winter break, I'll sleep, I'll like catch up on my sleep. And I'm like, that's four months away. Like it's way too far away. So what are some things that are within their control if they're just struggling with getting a good night's sleep. What would you say or what are some things they can prioritize?So you can prioritize like why you're at. prioritize. Trying to make enough time as often as you can. Friday night, Saturday night. If that's out the window, fine. But try to make sure that you're in bed by a certain time most nights of the week, and you're getting up at a consistent time. A consistent wake time is really important for most people, so really trying to keep that schedule is gonna be helpful to you as often as you can.Now, if you have a bedtime that you're trying to keep within, then think about what are things that affect the quality of my sleep that I'm getting? Right? So is it the. With pot is it so varied. Some people are using it to help them sleep. Some people we find that it actually wakes them up too much. Some we find that some people feel worse in the day from it.So you gotta think about if that's disrupting your sleep. Cuz sometimes that can actually worsen REM sleep, which is the part of sleep where your brain is remembering things more. So you have to think about that alcohol. Will decrease REM sleep, which is that filing cabinet sleep. So you've gotta watch the alcohol.So really try to limit that within three hours of bed as often as you can. Heavy meals, like are you someone, like, I think about when I was in college, I'd go to like the, you know, the snack bar and get like the pizza bites at like one in the morning. Oh my gosh. Um, you know, like that's probably not the most ideal thing to help with quality sleep.Right. Heavy fatty foods right before bed. Try to think of that stuff. Then it's also during the day, like, Studying most of the day. Do you find that you don't move, you don't get more light on certain days? Try to make sure in the morning you're at least getting a little bit of light exposure, getting some movement during the day.Exercise as much as, you know, once a day for 20, 30 minutes if you can. So really trying to do those things can help improve the quality of the sleep, even if you're not getting enough sleep.So I hear there's does, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. It's not like you have to go and just be completely like, you know, lame and only steady and wake up every day, et cetera. And no one's saying that where everyone knowsthat there is room for having a lot of fun chaos, right, during this time.Yes, we always think about quantity and that is super important, but you also have to think about the. Right. So even if it's a night where you, you had to study late or something was a say, okay, I don't have that much, much time. I'm gonna be able to sleep tonight, but what can I make sure I'm doing to, that's not gonna, then also Im impact the quality of whatever sleep I do get.So it's trying to think about it that way. And then also, the one other thing I didn't mention is like the screens, right? So it's, it's not always about the blue light. So the blue light has gotten this bad, bad rap that you have to be away from blue light all the time, you know? I think of it as a stepwise approach, right?I have a lot of teens, young adults who are like, I have to watch the office or friends before bed. So I'm like, all right, fine. If that quiets your brain and put on some blue blocker glasses, you can get something called fux for your, um, laptop. If you're watching on your laptop, that'll help take out some of the blue light.That's great. It's not, you know, gonna make or break whether you fall asleep if you find that that works for you. But it's what most people are doing is they're on their iPhones or their phones that they have and they're just scrolling and they're just like going on TikTok nonstop. That's meant to be.So it's hard to put that stuff down. So having alerts, having timers, having um, night mode on your phone, things to put a stop gap in so at least you know, you should stop autoplay on things like Netflix. You need to have that stuff to help remind you, like a timer or something to remind you that you should put it down, cuz otherwise you'll just get sucked in all night.and I think that's a great point and something we work with people a lot to say, if you want to change something, when is the most. Motivated you're gonna be, it's gonna be probably during the day when you realize, oh, I'm so exhausted. I wish I hadn't done that last night. And that's when you set the settings.You don't wait till 1130, midnight as you're scrolling and expect for the motivation to get hit right in. Cuz that's when the addictive stuff has already started to work. Any just quick concrete tips for the average listener who's not? Struggling with this chronically, but has those nights occasionally where they just really struggle. Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of different ways to look at it. So if it's just a night here and there, That's not like past that three times a night, you know, three times, three nights a week threshold that I was talking about. First thing is always just make sure that you, it sounds kind of weird, but get up at the same time the next morning because that helps to break the pattern for the next night.You gotta build up that pressure, that appetite for sleep during the day. And if you sleep in, you're not gonna be as hungry for sleep and the reality is that not every day after a bad night of sleep, Sometimes we predict that it will, but it doesn't always.So that's the number one thing, is just get up at the same time, get out, get some light exposure. That helps to really stop the pattern for a lot of people. But in the moment, you know, a lot of times, and it also depends on where you're, you are, right? Are you in a dorm room? Are you in your own apartment?Like, where are you living at that time? Try not to lie in bed and toss. Because the laying there and tossing and turning is just making and trying to force yourself to get sleepy is a recipe for disaster. Sleep happens when you're not actually actively thinking about it or trying to force it. So I usually tell people to like, don't look at a clock.Give yourself about 30 minutes, and then get up and sit somewhere else. And if you have nowhere else to go, just sit up in your bed at least and try to do something without your. So reading, listening to a podcast is great. Doing some like adult coloring books. What? Find something to pass the time, and usually just that act of passing the time and getting up and doing something else helps to break some of that, that rumination and that worry that's going on.But a lot of people think that the getting out of bed is meant to make you sleepy. Like I read and it didn't do anything. I didn't get sleepy. That's not the point of it. The point of it is just so you're not laying in bed tossing and turning and worrying and letting your brain go. So it's really just sit up and then when you sleepy, it might be a half hour later, it might be two hours later, go back to bed.And if you wake up again, you do the same thing, rinse and repeat, eventually your body is gonna start to learn that that's what the bed's only for. Um, the other thing that's really, I find super beneficial for this kind of just busy. is meditation, but so many people do meditations to the apps to fall asleep to cuz they all have sleep meditations.That's not how it should really be used. And if you look, there's a whole new line of therapy called mindfulness-based cognitive be, uh, cognitive therapy for insomnia. And believe it or not, the meditation is not at night. It's during the day, so we have people meditate five, 10 minutes every day, and the reason is that you're practicing in a lower stakes setting.You're letting your brain wander, but then getting back on track so you're getting stronger by doing it during the day so that at night, , when your brain is going, blah, blah, blah, it's easier for you to say, Nope, let it go. This isn't serving me. Let it go. And then you can do a deep breathing meditation or whatever, but you've practiced it more that it's not so forced.So I really encourage people to put the time in now with doing meditation, even if they're not that bad with insomnia, because it will pay off in spades down the road, but it's not an immediate kind of payoff.right? A lot of people, they just expect meditation to come easily as if like, oh, I'm just gonna run a marathon today. I'm just gonna wake up. I'm gonna run the marathon. It's like, no. Just like all things you're. , practicing creating and strengthening that part of your brain. So I love the idea of practicing during the day.Shelby, of the things you just mentioned before, I think the one that most people might be the least familiar with is the light exposure and also the hardest sell to, for some of my college students who tend to likelive underneath their blankets and really like never leave their dorms. , so maybe you could talk a little bit the importance of that,Mike. Yeah. So, you know, I. We, we have a clock that we use on our phones or wherever, and we think that we can just fake our body into being, adjusting to whatever the clock time says or whatever we want the clock to be. And the reality is that we are developed, we have these circadian rhythms in our body.So circa means about Deanne a day. So it's a little longer than 24 hours, but. it is set by things like, like light and dark. That's really what sets this cycle. And what can happen for some people is they just start staying up a little bit later and then maybe sleep in a little later. If you don't have light at around the same day, some time every day, your body is gonna actually start naturally going to bed a little later over time.Or you might have trouble falling asleep here and there. So light exposure at around the same time every morning, um, is very important. Set that body clock so that your body will start to fall asleep routinely at the same time and awaken it around the same time. It is super important. And then if you're during the day, right, so a lot of people are just kinda like in their, they have all the shades down they're studying, which is a lamp on or whatever, you know, it's not, it's not energizing.Light is also an energizer, so a lot of people are relying on a. Coffee in the afternoon, um, red Bull, whatever they can to help give, keep them awake at that, like after lunch kind of time, they're having a dip. But the reality is if you go and sit outside for 20 minutes or you sit by the window as best you can at just after lunchtime, that is just as alerting as a cup of coffee.Just most people don't wanna spend the time to do that. So light is very important to set that body clock and also keep you, keep you awake during the day so that you can then dim the lights an hour before bed to help make melatonin come out in your brain. The natural melatonin that comes out in your brain, it responds to the sun going down and we call it the hormone of darkness.So you need that dim light at bedtime to help your body now get into a routine pattern for falling asleep.The hormone of darkness sounds soI know it's scary, right? I know.So, guys, you heard it here. Get those eight and nine, 9:00 AM classes when you're registering for your next semester. There's some lemonade out of lemons there,but there's a fine line too, like if you are so sleep deprived that you normally, like your, so your skating rhythm is such a night owl that you're going to bed at like three or four in the morning. Then you might wanna talk to a sleep specialist who understands circadian rhythm stuff, because then for some people getting light first thing in the morning when they have to get it for class actually could worsen the problem.But for the vast majority of people, if you're getting around seven, eight hours most nights, or even six and a half, make sure you're getting light in the morning.And Liz, you know, you mentioned those early morning. Classes. I, when I was in school, always really envied the people who had the motivation to get up and do the early morning classes, and I never did. I was the person who was like, maybe at 10 30 I can try to make it work. Um, I wonder if there's a way to reframe that, to say in a way that those classes naturally shift to a sleep schedule that can allow for some more consistency.Do you find that there. Certain ways to schedule and pay attention to those times where it might be easier to have a consistent, you know, Sunday through Saturday sleep wake schedule along with academic.uh, consistency is key. So it's the worst thing for people is like that 1 8 30 class and then they have like 1:00 PM classes the other days. So it's like sleep deprivation. Then I'm gonna get as much as I can if you can try to find a happy medium, right? Instead of maybe saying, I gotta get up for eight 30 every single morning.Um, if like maybe some other days you could switch it to 10 as opposed to like noon. Try to find something that's not as drastic of a shift back and forth. That can be very beneficial so that you can start to fall asleep a little earlier. But if you really wanna try and shift yourself to becoming a morning person, you just gotta do it.And if you can't, then maybe on the other days that you don't have to get up as early, just shift it like 15 minutes earlier every few days, and then you'll start noticing that you're gonna get sleepy earlier over time too. But lights at those awakenings is really important to help.that's kind of the battery getting recharged a bit.Exactly.and I, this is really leading up to one of our main questions cuz you said, look, in college there can be this sort of work hard, play hard piece to it, where during the week, a lot of times that's when you're focusing on classes.Maybe you're taking some early classes during the weekend, you're sleeping in, you're, you know, quote unquote trying to catch up on some of that sleep. And that can be hard to shift, right? You're sort of essentially in jet lag for four.Mm-hmm.shifts and people are gonna start to rely on things to wake them up and things to put them to sleep.What are some of the more common things you see for people trying to use, you know, we see, you know, marijuana all the time, obviously. What are other things you see for people to both wake up and try to go to sleep?um, you know, for the falling asleep it really varies and I think honestly the pandemic has changed some of that stuff. I see so much more medication use amongst teens prescribed medications. But I see a lot of benzos being used a lot of times because there's a lot of anxiety with teens now, understandably. I. See occasionally some other sleep aids like Ambien. That's still more, I don't see it as commonly as I do with adults. But I do see more of the, you know, the anti-anxiety meds. And then I see a lot of marijuana use, alcohol use, and just melatonin. Like people are, you ch just pop in melatonin cuz they're gummies and it's like it's candy.So that's, those are the main ones. I see. And then daytime, you know, it's the uppers and downers essentially. Right. So what are they doing during the day? See, it's just like with the adults, right? But I see a lot of like red Bulls, a lot of coffee, a lot of caffeine, um, and then medications. So a lot of. Use happening.I see a lot of stimulant abuse happening. And then the stimulants then, for a lot of people, especially, are longer acting than many people will assume. And then that then starts the whole cycle of the insomnia again, and so on  when people have insomnia they start to, I think, panic and then they try to get sleep whenever they can.And they almost try to go to bed earlier and stay to bed, and it almost has this effect of when they're trying to lengthen out the amount of time they're in bed, your body tries to get you into. its own amount of sleep, right? So if you're trying to sleep 12 hours, but your body needs nine or 10, what happens?So it's the, the classic common sense problem. I always talk about it. So one of the biggest issues with insomnia is that your common sense is actually what's getting you in trouble. So common sense says, I'm not sleeping. I'm gonna go to bed earlier tonight. I'm gonna sleep in tomorrow. I'm gonna take these long naps, I'm gonna start using more caffeine, whatever it is to help me sleep, alcohol.That's the stuff that's actually the problem when it comes to it. So sleep ex extension, what you're talking about is going to bed earlier or sleeping in and kind of following your body's lead is not gonna help with setting that body clock overall. And if your body every night is saying on average for a week, it's not about night to night, it's about the average sleep need for a week because there is a bad night here and there.If your average is about eight hours or even nine hours for a lot of. , but you're in bed for 12 hours, your body's gonna say, I don't care if you're in bed 12 hours, unless you had a lot of really bad nights. You might get a lot that night, but your body's gonna say, okay, I'll sleep in chunks, or I'll take a little longer to fall asleep.So you start to have that problem with insomnia. You'll have a good night. And then bad, bad, good, bad, bad, bad. Whereas if you, we limit the amount of time you're in bed, spend less time in bed, that actually helps people to fall asleep faster and stay asleep more. And it, you're basically meeting your body where it is.And then we slowly trick it into giving more sleep if we need to Over.You're trying to find that sort of right middle path, and I think that's different for everybody. And so then, , especially in college, if you're seeing like one person who can kind of handlecertain things more so than you, and you're just surrounded by people's sleep habits all the time,you know, you've got a roommate who has this, you've got a friend who can pull off these sort of seemingly pull off these all nighters, right?So how do you work with people to stay in their own lane and figure out their needs yeah, that, that whole idea of you have to get eight hours. It's individual variation from per, from person to person. There's also individual variation from night to night within that person, right? So it's figuring out on a break ideally, cuz that's when they have the most time. Like if you could go to bed, whatever time you want and wake up whatever time you want and you sleep okay on your own schedule, that's probably your sleep need.Try to let go of what other, that person, other person's. And then there's this other idea that people are like, oh, that person falls asleep so fast. They're an amazing sleeper. That that other person might actually have a sleep problem. They might be sleep deprived. They might have other issues snoring.There might be some sleep apnea going on. It shouldn't, you shouldn't fall asleep in one minute. It should take at least five minutes to fall asleep most nights, at least.And then of course I knew someone in graduate school who was just the best sleeper ever. You know, she could sleep anytime. I was so jealous. She had narcolepsy. She hadYes, that was gonna be my next thing. Right. So if you feel like you're sleeping a lot right, and you're, you're just not, nothing's working to feel refreshed, then definitely talk to a doctor about that too.And luckily I was taking that sleep class during all of that time, so slowly, uh, piece by piece. It kind of taught me things that helped me put it back together, whether it was removing certain elements or implementing new habits. I think that outside of being beneficial to just sleep, having a very organized and consistent sleep schedule can also have an impact on all the other parts of my life, you know, to, to feel that if this part of my life is, has been good and consistent and regimented, that does have a positive effect on motivation, um, to keep myself accountable in everything else