[New Study] Sleep, Stress, & Anxiety

👋 Raise your hand if you want more resilience to stress!

Less anxiety?

Yes please 🤚

New research shows that one way to achieve these things is simply by getting BETTER SLEEP.

The study looked at data from 1600 healthy adults during 2020 (an anxious time for lots of people!). Most of the participants were women.

They found that both positive coping strategies and higher quality sleep made people more resilient to stress and anxiety—independently, meaning each of these things work on their own.

Need some tips & motivation for better sleep?

✅ Keep the room cool

✅ Turn off screens in the evening

✅ Commit to a calming routine

✅ Cut off caffeine in the afternoon

✅ Get exercise during the day!

We have lots of tools in our functional medicine toolbox to help with stress, anxiety, & sleep.

Like if you found this helpful ❤️

Reference

Sullivan EC, James E, Henderson LM, McCall C, Cairney SA. The influence of emotion regulation strategies and sleep quality on depression and anxiety [published online ahead of print, 2023 Jun 21]. Cortex. 2023;166:286-305. [link]

Junk Food Messes with Sleep (New Research!)

New Research!! ⤵️

👉👉 Even if you sleep the exact same number of hours, eating junk food during the day can affect the QUALITY of your sleep—making sleep more shallow and less restorative.

Let’s back up 🚙

Sleep consists of different stages with different functions. Deep sleep, for example, regulates hormonal release. Each sleep stage is also marked by specific electrical activity in the brain.

A brand new study in the journal Obesity looked at what happened to sleep quality (measured in a sleep laboratory) when healthy young men ate nutritious meals vs. junk food. Here’s what they found:

🔹 Participants slept the same number of hours, regardless of which diet they consumed.

🔹 They also spent the same amount of time in each of the sleep stages.

🔹 But slow-wave brain activity (a measurement of how restorative deep sleep is) was less in those who ate the junk food.

This means that the junk food resulted in sleep that was less deep—similar to what happens with aging and insomnia.

Why should you care about restorative sleep?

Because it’s essential for…

💫 Graceful Aging

💃 Balanced Hormones

🔥 Healthy Metabolism

🧠 Brain Function, Mood, & More!

Like if you learned something ❤️

Share to spread the word ↗️

Reference

Brandão LEM, Popa A, Cedernaes E, Cedernaes C, Lampola L, Cedernaes J. Exposure to a more unhealthy diet impacts sleep microstructure during normal sleep and recovery sleep: A randomized trial [published online ahead of print, 2023 May 28]. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2023;10.1002/oby.23787. [link]

🦉Night-Owl Guys? Open Up.

🦉 Any night-owl guys out there?

If you think you don’t need sleep 😴, you’re fooling yourself.

Here’s a partial list of ways that sleep affects men’s health & hormones:

✔️ Good sleep is needed for the release of growth hormone, which is needed to build muscle, decrease body fat, and maintain brain health.

✔️ A study of more than 2000 men in the United States found impaired sleep to be linked to lower testosterone levels.

✔️ Sleeping less than 5 hours per night has been linked to a 10% - 15% decrease in testosterone levels.

✔️ Sleep is essential for maintaining healthy blood sugar levels and maintaining a healthy weight.

I know that sleep is a real challenge for some people (we have strategies to fix that!), but if cutting your sleep short is a conscious choice you are making, you might want to reconsider.

References

Patel P, Shiff B, Kohn TP, Ramasamy R. Impaired sleep is associated with low testosterone in US adult males: results from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. World J Urol. 2019;37(7):1449-1453. [link]

Leproult R, Van Cauter E. Effect of 1 week of sleep restriction on testosterone levels in young healthy men. JAMA. 2011;305(21):2173-2174. [link]

Music & the Brain: Choosing the Right Playlist

💥🗞️Hot off the press!!

If you have any interest in improving your sleep👋, listen to this:

🎶 A brand new study found that listening to music for 30 minutes before bedtime may improve sleep:

Participants downloaded an app called *Music Star* and listened to music for at least 30 minutes at bedtime for 4 weeks.

👉 They experienced better sleep quality and longer sleep than people not listening to music.

The Music Star app is designed as a multicolored star, with each corner of the star linking to a different tempo of music:

🔵 Blue playlists are the quietest

🟢 Green playlists are more lively

🔴 Red playlists are the most upbeat

⚪ Gray playlists are more for focus

So, if you’re trying out new ideas for a bedtime routine, maybe you could think about adding music to the mix 🎶

Know a friend who might want to hear this? Tag 3 people in the comments to share ⤵️

P.S. For the detail-oriented: The study was called MUSTAFI: Music to Improve Sleep Quality in Adults with Depression & Insomnia. It was presented in March at The European Psychiatric Association 2023 Congress.

Did you know this?

Most people don’t do this 👇

Of all the things that can disrupt sleep, did you ever think of wi-fi?

The wi-fi router sends constant invisible signals throughout your home—increasing your family’s exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs).

EMFs stress the body, nervous system, and hormones.

Some people are more sensitive to EMFs than others, and you may think they don’t affect you, but EMFs could absolutely be one thing contributing to ‼️poor sleep‼️

One simple thing you can do to decrease the EMFs in your home while you sleep:

💥 Turn off your wi-fi-router 💥

An easy way to do this is to plug the router into an outlet with a programmable timer⏰

There are other benefits too!

📲📲📲 You (and your kids) will be forced to shut off devices at a specific time every night, and you won’t be tempted to grab your phone if you wake in the night.

Sounds like a more peaceful environment for sleep to me 💤

Had you ever thought of this?

↗️ Please share this post so others can learn too!