How to Get a Good Night's Sleep
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Hey there, welcome to Paging Dr. Gupta. Thank you so much for joining us. This is the show where I get to hear from you, where I get to answer your health questions. Zonked, out cold, crashed, dead to the world, catching winks. There are a lot of ways to describe being asleep. Maybe because we spend so much of our time doing it. If we're lucky, we get eight hours a night. And if you think about it, that translates to about a third of our lives. But even things that come naturally don't always come easily.
Sleep is not an eight-hour coma. I had a mentor once who told me that, and I like to tell people that.
Dr. Brianne Miner is an assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine, specializing in sleep medicine and geriatrics. And she's going to join us today on the podcast to help answer some listener questions about sleep from a disease. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Paging Dr. Gupta. Our first two listeners called in to ask a similar question. If interrupted sleep is a problem. So let's start with Patty from California.
Hi, Dr. Gupta. I am an 82 year old female and I can't seem to get more than five hours of sleep at night. I'm frequently awakened by the need to use the bathroom and sometimes I have a hard time falling back to sleep. I do not wake up tired, thank goodness, but I do have a need to take a daily nap around 1230. How do I train myself to sleep longer? I've heard that seven hours of sleep is optimum. I appreciate your helping us all.
So, first of all, Patty is right. It is pretty widely accepted that adults should get between seven and nine hours of sleep every night. We talk about that all the time. It's a good goal. But of course, it's not that simple for a lot of people, especially for older adults. Part of the issue is this. As we age, lighter sleep and more frequent awakenings just become more common. And Dr. Miner says getting close to seven hours of sleep if you're older than 65, that can be great. And the occasional nap as well, just fine.
A nap during the day when the overnight sleep duration is a bit on the shorter side can be helpful for cardiovascular health. It can also be helpful for cognition. If it's really five hours and then there's a nap during the day that is hopefully on the shorter side, so less than an hour, and earlier in the day so that it's not preventing the ability to fall asleep or stay asleep, And that is maybe not necessarily every day, but a couple times a week. That's the kind of napping that we think is beneficial.
So Patty, for you, so far so good. But you might want to pay closer attention to those overnight bathroom trips.
Frequent urination three to four times a night and not frequent urination during the day is, in my mind, sleep apnea until proven otherwise.
That's something I didn't realize either, and I want to repeat it. Frequent urination at night but not during the day is sleep apnea until proven otherwise, according to Dr. Miner. So this is definitely something you're going to want to bring up with your doctor. In fact, we're going to take a closer look at this particular issue in our very next show. But here's a quick definition of sleep apnea from Dr. Paul Hoff.
Sleep apnea is basically your tongue falling back or your palate, you know, the area of the back of the throat where the uvula sits. All that collapses down and stops your airway.
Now, Dr. Miner says you need to also take a look at external factors like caffeine and alcohol consumption. Our bodies simply don't metabolize those things as well when we become older. We can't tolerate as much. And that brings us to our next question.
Hello, Dr. Gupta. This is Mary Crisp from Westford, Massachusetts. I'm 56 years old. I really loved your book, Keep Sharp. So if you've covered this in your book, would you please remind me if the small disturbances that we don't always remember, like turning over or adjusting the pillow during sleep, are detrimental to our brain health or are only the more lengthy awakenings harmful? My watch records all of it and counts it towards quote unquote time awake during the night.
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