Melanie Cole (Host): Study suggests that adults need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep at night but the realities of life at MIT often make that number a seemingly impossible goal to reach. Welcome to Conversations with MIT Health. I'm Melanie Cole. My guest is Zan Barry, she develops programs to support the wellbeing of groups and individuals including stress management, healthy sleep, mindfulness, eating and body image concerns. Welcome to the show Zan, tell us why sleep matters, what benefits do we really get from a full night’s rest.

Zan Barry (Guest): Sleep is the foundation upon which all good things are built, biologically, cognitively, so if you want maximal cognitive performance, if you want maximum memory, if you want to not have your memory deteriorate, the things that you’re studying, you want actually be able to retain them, if you want to be able to play well in your sport, if you want to be able to remember your piano piece that you have been practicing. Sleep is essential for all those things, but we are finding more and more that it is also vital for long term health and chronic disease prevention, so if you look at big global studies of things like calcification of the arteries and obesity and weight gain and propensity for diabetes, all those things are related to short sleep time.

Melanie: So, what is a healthy amount of sleep for a student, you know, as we age, our sleep needs change, so what is the minimum you would say to still stay healthy.

Zan: Well, it’s funny when I do informal surveys of students about how much they would like to be getting, most would like to be getting eight or nine hours of sleep and most are getting somewhere around six, something six and change hours of sleep but I would encourage them all to try to get an average of seven per night because seven hours if you look at the studies about health about poor health associated with short sleep time, it does seem like seven hours is a tipping point to protect the health of your immune system and your arteries and you know all these other systems of the body, it might not be the optimal amount to feel you are most rested and you are most productive but it is probably a good goal to shoot for in terms of health protection.

Melanie: At MIT, lack of sleep is a point of pride among some students and do you have tips for helping students to overcome that peer pressure to stay awake and work harder.

Zan: Well, eventually the body does assert its need for sleep and so people do find that they crash, they might start coming down with every cold and flu that goes around and then their bodies will demand that they get more sleep. So often the body, mother nature knows best and body will force people to start getting more sleep, but we also find that students start to find a person with a similar kind of biological rhythm to them, so if you’re more of an early night person, if you like to be a morning lark and you like to go to bed at a reasonable hour, you can find people to do your studying with and to finish your PSETs with who have kind of chronotype rhythm that is similar to yours, not everybody is a night owl, although, you know, some people are, it’s certainly not biologically that common that everyone,  in a particular area would be a night owl. Students are of an age where their bodies might push them to stay awake a little bit later than an adult who is in their 30s or 40s because our optimal time for sleep does change over the course of our life but still not everyone is a night owl and people who start to find the other morning larks, really become more productive with their new cohort of people.

Melanie: How about power naps, do you have any advice on the most efficient way to nap.

Zan: Well, napping is one way that students do make up their sleep deficit and if it’s the only way they can do it, I encourage them to do it, so a power nap is about a 20 minute period of sleep, so your body stays in a very light stage of sleep from the beginning of that nap to the end and you’re waking up in nice light stage of sleep which makes it easier to get back up and not feel so groggy, which is called sleep inertia when we first wake up in the middle of a deep sleep cycle, we are just crawling through molasses, we feel so groggy, so we want to avoid that. Students who are trying to make up more time in their sleep deficit will often take a 90 minute nap, so they will be getting a full sleep cycle from the beginning of the sleep cycle through the deep slow wave part of the sleep cycle up through the later stage of sleep again and so if 20 minutes is not going to do it for you and power nap is just not cutting it then you can try taking a 90 minute nap and that will probably awaken you in a more refreshed state.

Melanie: When you do get the chance to sleep, how do you ensure that the sleep you get is the best quality sleep possible, do you have any advice for a really good night’s sleep.

Zan: Right, well, the three hallmarks of a good sleep environment are cool, dark and quiet. So, we want to make sure there’s not a lot of extraneous noise on the hall, if your hall mates are playing with nerf swords outside your door and things are bouncing off the walls and people are laughing, that’s going to disrupt your sleep and make it very unconsolidated, they will keep waking up. So, you want to have something that provides white noise or quiet in your environment. White noise could be having an air conditioner going or fan, it could be white noise machine. You certainly want your environment to be cool, not cold but on the cool side, the body temperature needs to drop in order for the sleep drive to really be strong and dark is important, so if you have no shades on your windows, you might want to get a sleep mask or hang something to block out outside light. In addition to the sleep environment, the cool, dark, quiet sleep environment, one of the best and I think most little taken advantage of tips is to get much more sunlight, you know, take advantage of the sunlight in the early part of the day, especially since MIT has a cold and long winter and so sunlight is really at a premium here, anyway try to get as much sunlight as you can by having breakfast by a window, sitting in your first class by window, walking outside whenever you can instead of being underground or in the shuttles and that sunlight is setting your body up to have a stronger sleep drive at night. There are many other ways that people can encourage themselves to get better quality sleep from not taking caffeine after noon or not at all, if you’re someone who is very sensitive to caffeine, you don’t want to have really much of it at all, alcohol also creates more fragmented sleep, so leaving yourself plenty of time after having an alcohol drink before you go to bed and don’t drink too much before bed anyway because you do not want to be getting up and making trips to the bathroom, so stopping liquids except for sips, stopping liquids about 60 or 90 minutes before bed.

Melanie: Are there any foods that you or even drinks, you are mentioning alcohol and on campus, we know that can certainly be something to talk about but any foods or chamomile tea, do you like any certain kind of alternative things that can help people or hurt their sleep and what about exercise too close to bed time.

Zan: So, I don’t think I can endorse any particular foods or herbs or, you know, things that work for everybody but anecdotally, I will tell you that some people really like the scent of lavender, to have a little lavender sachet by their bed or little lavender oil on their nightstands, light bulb can for some people be very relaxing and soothing. I would say that I think more about food in terms of what disrupts your sleep, so big meal before bed, you know, high-fat foods like a cheeseburger, milkshake or French fries, you know, ice cream, those are going to probably be more disruptive because your body will send blood to the digestive system, your body is going to get hot and it’s going to be the enemy of deep sleep. So, I encourage people to eat a light snack so that they don’t feel too hungry when they go to bed but something that’s, you know, light and easy to digest, some fruits, some crackers, you know, something like that and your second question was about.

Melanie: Activities, exercise.

Zan: Activity, physical activity is very-very beneficial for deep sleep, except right before bed, so within two or three hours of bed, you don’t want to do anything that’s getting your body too hot and when sleep experts will recommend exercise, it is usually in the morning or the afternoon to promote deeper sleep. Athletes, we know do get more deep sleep and consolidated sleep, so it’s good for sleep but just not within two or three hours of bed and when you hear people talk about, oh take a warm bath or a warm shower, it’s not that you want your body to be warm, it’s that your body taking a warm bath or shower about 90 minutes before bed can stimulate a cooling response and your body starts to cool off and it’s the cooling response that strengthens the strength that heightens your sleep rather than the warmth of the bath. It’s the body’s cooling response after that bath or shower.

Melanie: Zan and just the last minute, your best advice for a real good night sleep for students at MIT.

Zan: I have to say that the one thing I see keeps people awake more than anything is their busy-busy minds. We have a group of people with extremely active minds which is wonderful and they are constantly generating new material and they’re going to solve all the major problems of the world, I really believe that, I think this is a group of people who have the ethos to go out and solve the world’s major problems but not right before bed. It’s really important to be able to downshift your brain and actively do some form of meditation, relaxation or just something that shifts the brain to a much lighter state right before bed because overthinking right before bed is going to keep the brain in an active brain pattern that’s not conducive to sleep, so if you need to write things down in a journal, if you need to do something very light and not related to your school work right before bed but something that helps keep your brain attuned to sleep.

Melanie: Thank you so much Zan Listeners can visit Health.mit.edu for more information and to get connected to one of our providers. That concludes this episode of Conversations with MIT Health. Please remember to subscribe, rate and review this podcast and all the other MIT Health podcasts. . I'm Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for joining us today.