Transcription:
Puttting Insomnia To Rest, Holistically

Melanie Cole (Host): Sleep is a basic necessity of life that’s essential for our health and well-being. A lack of sleep can have an impact on your mood, thinking, relationships, work performance and long-term health. My guest today is Mary Beshara. She’s a board certified clinical nurse specialist in adult health and pain management at the Penny George Institute for Health and Healing. Welcome to the show, Mary. So, insomnia: what actually is it and what causes it?

Mary Beshara (Guest): You know, insomnia is a pretty complex topic and so as far as what causes it, there can be a number of causes, Melanie. The kinds of things I think about, though, are anxiety, stress, another disease process that, actually, because of medications or things like that can actually cause some insomnia. But, there is something also called “essential insomnia” or “primary insomnia” and that would be where you’re just having difficulty sleeping but you don’t have any of those other comorbid conditions or things like that. So, it’s pretty multifactorial, to be honest.

Melanie: Is it hereditary?

Mary: You know, there is a study out there that does say that there may be a genetic link but one study is not enough to say yes there definitely is that. Generally, what that study said was that it was more about how people's stress reaction was genetically. So, it was more tied to stress than it was insomnia.

Melanie: So, people who suffer from insomnia try every medication on the books and melatonin. They’re trying all of these different techniques and sleep studies but we’re talking a little bit about how they can do some holistic or complementary medicine to help their insomnia. Give us a few tips.

Mary: Well, there are lots of things we can do. As soon as you sort of have some of the issues of sleep sorted out to make sure that it is not something that is needing to be followed up from a medical perspective, then we look at if it’s something having to do with sleep hygiene. Sleep hygiene is this idea of am I setting the state for success to sleep. So, what am I doing right before I go to bed? Or, have I eaten a decent diet or have I exercised today? There are a lot of different factors that are going to flow into the successful ability to sleep at night and so we have to sort of look at all of those. Beyond that, if you want to talk about specific interventions that we would use to help with sleep, there is everything from herbs to supplements to aroma therapy to acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. There’s a really broad array of tools that we can use to address sleep issues.

Melanie: So then, let’s talk about some of those tools that people can use and you can start with sleep hygiene and then let’s talk about some of those supplements that we hear about and whatever people can try.

Mary: Yes. Starting with sleep hygiene. You know, the longer screen time we have in a day, the more stimulated our neurotransmitters are in the brain. So, if we go “Screen time? What’s that?” Telephone, television, computer time. Those things all send off a blue light and there was a study done out of Harvard that looked at what that blue light does actually in the brain and it stimulates the brain. How many people do you know that have a TV in their bedroom? A lot. So, the idea of maybe blue light actually stimulates the brain, unbeknownst to you, and you’re watching it late at night before you fall asleep, may actually be counterproductive. So, that’s one of the sleep hygiene things that’s easy to know. Another thing is how many electrical things do you have in your bedroom that are running that you don’t really think about? There is this background electricity, electromagnetic field that people sometimes react to and they don’t know why they’re not sleeping but they’ve got their phone plugged in, a clock plugged in, a television plugged in, a fan going—a this or a that. There’s quite a bit of an electromagnetic field. That’s quite a controversial contributor to insomnia but I’d say clean it out of the bedroom just to be on the safe side. Another thing is, what are you eating? If you’re eating lots of sugar, that’s going to give you quick energy before you go to bed and so a lot of people, including my husband, like to eat a bowl of ice cream before they go to bed. That’s really contraindicated because it’s going to give them lots of energy and then he’s going to have that energy when he goes to bed and he’s trying to get to sleep. So, some of those things are like that. Exercise is a biggie, too.

Melanie: So, let’s talk about exercise.

Mary: Sure.

Melanie: Sometimes people like to do it sometimes at night when they get home from work. Does that contribute to insomnia or help it?

Mary: You know, I would say if you’re doing it within 3 hours of trying to go to bed, you might be stimulating the body and getting circulation going and stuff like that which would then be harder to calm down but I would say any exercise from dinner and going forward into the day is perfect because you want to move. The body was made to move and the better we exercise or we have regular exercise, the better the body is going to then feel fit and it will need that rest and restoration time that we get when we go to sleep.

Melanie: That’s really good advice. Tell us more about the insomnia shared visits offered by the Penny George Institute for Health and Healing.

Mary: The shared medical visits take a group of people who are struggling with the same issue—so, insomnia—and we get together as a group because people need ideas from each other but sometimes somebody will ask a question in a group that you would have loved to asked if you would only have thought of it. So, it’s a great way for you to learn from each other but it also, too, is an opportunity for patients to get an introduction of the different therapies that might be helpful. We will bring in a practitioner for traditional Chinese medicine and they can talk about what acupressure points or acupuncture points would be helpful that a person can use in their own bedroom at night to try to use to help themselves calm their body and to actually get into sleep? We use a multitude of different interventions and aroma therapy. So, what kind of essential oils help to relax you and cause calmness and sleep? We do nutrition. What kinds of foods are actually going to promote that whole tryptophan pathway that’s going to help you sleep as well as doing some mindfulness, as well as introducing qi gong or tai chi? So, those kinds of things are the things the patients get introduced to in these visits and they really are a lot of fun.

Melanie: So, then, wrap it up for us. If somebody thinks that they have insomnia, what are the first steps that they should take and what can they do at home holistically to try and help that?

Mary: Well, what can they do at home? They can kind of go through any website that lists what causes insomnia and they’ll get that whole hygiene piece. They can just sort of go through that and check off and make sure—is that one of the things I’m struggling with or is that contributing to it? They can do that at home. The other thing is go see your medical practitioner because you want to know if your kind of sleep is just simple insomnia or is there something else going on like sleep apnea where you might not be breathing well during the evening hours when you’re sleeping. That’s a much more serious thing. You want to rule out a serious something or other that’s going on but your medical practitioner can simply do that. The other thing is, you make the decision: do I want to start a medication or would I rather do something more natural? So, then, you’ve got to decide that because your practitioner is probably going to say, “If you’re not sleeping, we can give you a medication to do that.” Sometimes people just don’t want to go that route for a number of reasons or they have bad side effects from trying that. So, what else can I do? Then come to Penny George Clinic and you can talk to us. You can join a group medical visit or you can talk to an individual practitioner and they can sort of give you recommendations of what they can do on a more natural basis that would maybe be more congruent with the way that you think. So, those are the ideas I’d give.

Melanie: Thank you so much, Mary, for being with us. It’s great advice for people who suffer from insomnia. You’re listening to The WELLCast with Allina Health. For more information, you can go to www.AllinaHealth.org. That’s www.AllinaHealth.org. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.