Good News! You May Be Getting More Sleep Than You Think, Especially If You Suffer Insomnia!

The Wall Street Journal today had a very interesting article about how people with insomnia tend to greatly underestimate how much sleep they get and overestimate how long it takes them to fall asleep. They also overestimate how often they wake up at night.

Roughly 30% of adults have some insomnia each year. About 10% of people have chronic insomnia which means that you have trouble sleeping three times a week or more. According to the Journal article, 42% of insomniacs who actually slept the normal amount (6 hours or more) underestimated how much they slept by more than an hour. I looked up the research article which was published in Psychosomatic Medicine. According to this research, insomniacs who slept six hours or more typically showed a profile of high depression and anxiety and low coping skills according to psychological testing.

What’s also interesting is that even though insomniacs may be sleeping six or more hours a night, there does appear to be some real differences in their brainwave activity compared to good sleepers. Even though they are asleep, their brains are more active, which may account for why they perceive their sleep to be less than it really is.

Another interesting factoid was that normal people tend to overestimate how much sleep they get. Most people when asked how much sleep they get will answer between seven and eight hours, but they are actually getting six hours. That’s why people tend to be so sleep deprived. For most people six hours is not enough sleep to feel really good.

So what’s the answer to this sleep estimating dilemma? It turns out there is a very simple answer. The two gold standards for measuring sleep are brainwave measurements and activity measurements. While brainwave measurements are difficult to come by in the home, activity measurements are very easy and inexpensive to obtain. Many of the current fitness tracker’s have a sleep tracking function. For instance, according to my Xiaomi Mi Band, which cost me the grand sum of $15, last night I was in bed for seven hours and 58 minutes, and got three hours 20 minutes of deep sleep and four hours and 38 minutes of light sleep. I was awake for one minute. (Yes, I know, please don’t hate me all you insomniacs!)

For insomniacs who worry about how much sleep they are getting, I recommend buying a fitness tracker and wearing it every night. The best ones automatically track sleep without having the requirement that you push a button to activate sleep mode. This is pretty important as most people forget to press the button. I have been pretty happy with my Xiaomi Mi Band, which you can buy directly from the company  but I’m sure there are other brands of fitness trackers which offer similar features.

Also, as I’ve written about previously here and here, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) may also improve the quality of sleep as well as the quantity. Some studies show that CBT-I improves people’s ability to accurately estimate their sleep time, and it also may calm  the over-activity of the brain that occurs when insomniacs sleep.

So here’s the executive summary for all of you sleep-deprived folks:

1. If you are an insomniac who is anxious and depressed, then you are probably getting more sleep than you think. Buy a fitness tracker with a good sleep tracking function, and you will see how much sleep you are actually getting.

2. If you want to improve the quality of your sleep, either practice meditation or see a CBT psychologist for CBT-I, as both of these interventions seem to lower the activity of the brain during sleep, which will improve your perception of your own sleep.

3. If you consistently feel anxious or depressed, consider getting some cognitive behavioral therapy for these problems, as they may contribute to sleep difficulties.

I’m off to bed now and hope I don’t have insomnia now that I’ve written about it!

 

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) Outperforms Drugs for Insomnia

The New York Times today had an excellent article The Evidence Points to a Better Way, which summarized what I have written about before. Cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic insomnia (CBT-I) kicks the butt of drug therapy!

One study compared CBT with a common sleeping pill called Restoril and found that the CBT treatment led to larger and longer lasting improvements in sleep. Another study found that CBT treatment outperformed the drug Ambien, and that CBT alone was even better than CBT plus Ambien combined.

Even more impressive are the results of a large meta-study which was published today. This meta-study, which combined data from 20 clinical trials and involved over 1000 patients with chronic insomnia showed that CBT I resulted in these patients falling asleep 19 minutes faster and having 26 minutes less wakefulness during each night on average. The actual study is protected by a pay wall, but the summary results are here.

One might question the clinical relevance of these outcomes. Does falling asleep 19 minutes faster really make that much of a difference? Does sleeping an extra 26 minutes a night make patients feel better the next day? As a good sleeper, I don’t really know the answer to these questions.

But I suspect that the biggest impact of CBT-I is in affecting the person’s perception of control over sleep. One of the horrible things about chronic insomnia is that patients feel out of control in terms of their sleep. They worry tremendously about the impact of loss of sleep on their ability to function the next day. It is this worry cycle that actually can create insomnia.

So I suspect that even though the effects were durable but modest, that the overall treatment made a large difference in how people felt. There is a big difference between taking 45 minutes to fall sleep and 20 minutes to fall sleep. And I suspect that sleeping an extra 26 minutes a night actually does make a difference. I know that I feel much better on eight hours of sleep as opposed to 7.5 hours of sleep.

When I work with patients on CBT-I one of the things I work on is helping the patient lower their anxiety about the impact of sleep restriction. As crazy as it sounds, one of the interventions I typically use is to have the patient stay up all night and go to work the next day. Although they are typically very tired, they discover that they can focus and function, maybe not at 100% but at an adequate level, maybe 75% or so. This lowers a lot of the anxiety about insomnia, since even a bad night of insomnia typically leads to quite a bit more sleep than staying up all night.

Other than the time and energy that a patient must invest in learning CBT-I skills, there are no side effects of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. All sleeping medications have significant side effects the most troubling of which involve impaired cognition and coordination during the night and the following day. This impaired coordination and cognition leads to increased falling in the elderly, and probably also leads to an increase in automobile and other accidents. Because drug companies don’t want studies done on this issue, there are relatively few studies, but one study in Norway found that there was a doubling of traffic accidents among patients who took a variety of sleeping pills. Another study that compared 10,000 sleeping pill users to 23,000 nonusers found that the sleeping pill users were five times more likely to die young than nonusers.

So what does this mean to the person suffering insomnia? It means that you should avoid taking sleeping medications, and get cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. This kind of therapy typically does not take very many sessions. I teach the basic skills of CBT-I in about 4 to 6 sessions, and typically the entire course of CBT-I takes less than 10 sessions. There are also options for CBT- I online and even apps that run on your phone. One such app that runs on both android and iPhone is called CBT-I Coach. This app was developed with your tax dollars as part of a large Veterans Administration insomnia treatment program, and is excellent.

It’s getting late, so rather than have to experiment with any of these treatments, I’m off to bed…

Calming An Overactive Brain–My Day In Pacifica

Today I am taking a seminar with William Sieber calling Calming an Overactive Brain. He’s an excellent presenter, with a good sense of humor, a down to earth speaker. He’s got a nice balance of enough confidence to be a an excellent speaker without being arrogant. This is quite rare in the seminar business. Even though there’s a lot of stuff I already know I’ve learned a number of  interesting things. The seminar is on the ocean in Pacifica, and outside the windows of the meeting hall I can see the waves crashing on the sand.

One funny thing happened at lunch. I had hurried out to the next door cafe so I could get a table before the crowds hit. Dr. Sieber showed up, looking for a table. I invited him to join me at my table. We started talking and discovered some remarkable commonalities! Both of us had attended Yale for training, me for undergrad, and he for graduate school. He had worked closely with Judith Rodin and Peter Salovey while there. Judy Rodin had been my first psychology professor, and probably the one that influenced me to go into psychology. Peter I had known while teaching at the Bridge, Stanford’s peer counseling center, many years before, and in whose book I have a chapter on Listening Skills. Eventually he went on to teach at Yale, and now is Yale’s president. More surprisingly, Dr. Sieber and I both interned at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, in different years! We had a fun lunch reminiscing.

About the seminar. He spoke at length about sleep and it’s impacts on health and wellness. For instance, one study showed that those who got less than 6 hours of sleep were 42% more likely to get diabetes. Or that those with the most disturbed sleep were 97% more likely to die in the next 20 years. Poor sleep makes you more prone to pre-diabetes, anxiety, upsetting emotions, not to mention lowering overall mood and vitality.

Less sleep also affects appetite and eating. Leptin is the hormone that lowers our appetite, and ghrelin is the hormone that increases appetite. With sleep deprivation our leptin goes down, and our ghrelin goes up, and on average we consume 250 calories more on days after a bad night’s sleep. This doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up to about 25 pounds of extra weight per year if you chronically sleep poorly.

I also learned how to assess sleep. The key metric is “sleep efficiency”. This means what percent of the time you are in  bed trying to sleep are you actually asleep. A good number is 90-95%. This is hard.  It means if I am in bed for 8 hours a night, I am asleep 95% of the time, or all except 24 minutes. What is your sleep efficiency? He went over how to use the sleep efficiency log to diagnose sleep problems and guide treatment.

One other interesting factoid for all of you pet lovers. Fifty-three percent of pet owners have disturbed sleep due to their pets.  Maybe we should all shut the door at night and train our pets to sleep somewhere else other than in bed with us.

He discussed how to fix common sleep problems. One such pattern is mine, the delayed sleep cycle. This is the night-owl pattern, going to bed late and getting up late. To fix it, he suggested a short term use of sleep aids to shift the cycle to earlier bedtimes, combined with bright light in the mornings, and no screen light for an hour before bedtime. Cutting back on caffeine use is also helpful.

Others suffer the early phase shift, those who fall asleep too early, and get up too early. To shift these people he recommended getting bright light exposure in the early evening so the melatonin production is suppressed until later in the evening.

In the afternoon we got into discussion of moods and control. Discussing anxiety, he explained the key role that perceived control over situations plays in creating or ameliorating anxiety. Exercise turns out to be a strong treatment for anxiety. Most people with anxiety disorders do not exercise more than once a week, and those who exercise 3 or more times a week rarely have anxiety disorders.

Then he turned to relaxation training for anxiety. He made a great point—that even if you train people to relax deeply, the probability of them continuing to practice even four weeks later is very low. So instead, he shared a 20 second relaxation. Take two deep and slow belly breaths, exhaling for longer than you inhale. While doing that go somewhere relaxing in your mind, and experience that place (ie the beach) in the sensory modality of your preference—seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling. Make up a two word description of that sensory experience, i.e. “Warm sun”. Repeat that phrase as you take your 2 deep breaths, during the exhale.

He suggested pairing this relaxation practice with something you do multiple times a day. So for instance, pair it with hitting the Send button on your email. That way you will remember to practice a quick relaxation many times a day.

He also shared James Pennebaker’s work, which I often use with patients. Pennebaker found that writing about traumatic events for just 30 minutes a day for 4 days in a row had a fairly profound impact on future emotional and physical health. Interestingly, the initial impact was negative, more anxiety and upset, and more susceptibility to illness. But after three to six months, the pattern reversed, with people showing less upset and anxiety, and better health.

Finally, he shared some info about new findings about heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is the change in the rate of your heartbeat over each beat and each several seconds. It turns out that having MORE HRV is better for both mental and physical health. People with anxiety disorders have less HRV. And it turns out the the three factors that most predict low HRV are: sedentary lifestyle, a cynical and hostile view of life, and anxiety.

Can you retrain your heart rate variability? Yes, with both breathing retraining, and with biofeedback. And it turns out that when you learn to increase your HRV, your anxiety goes down. Very interesting and cool stuff.

The final part of the workshop was about mindfulness. I won’t even try to summarize this part of the seminar, as it was very detailed, and even profound. Perhaps I’ll blog about it later.

Overall, it was a good learning experience, with a wonderful view of the ocean the whole time!

Now I need to go to sleep early….