Episode 46: #Spring4Change Sleep Week Recap with Annette Zapp, CSCS*D
#Spring4Change week 1 is finished, and today I recapped the information.
Sleep is crucial for both mental and physical well-being, and there are so many small steps we can take to ensure better quantity and quality.
So what, now what?
Knowing is 1/2 the battle, so you need to know that sleep deprivation is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease, suicide, accidents, and cancer...the big 4 killers of our firefighters.
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Annette: [00:00:00] Listeners, it's AZ with Fire Rescue Wellness Podcast, and this is episode number 46 and I am recapping week one of Spring4Change: the sleep week. Now it's a little weird cuz I'm recording this before spring for change even starts. But I don't do my own production, and so I need to get this to my man, Jeremiah.
And so here we go. I want to talk to you about some methods, tactics, techniques, whatever you wanna call it, to improve upon your sleep. And here's why I keep harping on sleep. Sleep and nutrition, mental health interventions and fitness are all [00:01:00] upstream prevention strategies for not only challenges with mental health, but challenges with physical health as well.
And I would challenge you, in fact, I would fight you if you said anything but sleep was the most upstream of the four interventions, and here's what I mean. Your ability to get quality, restorative sleep impacts, all of those other things that I mentioned. Your good nutritional choices are directly related to whether you got enough sleep.
Think of the last time you were on a box alarm all night long, and you got no sleep. What did you just want to do so badly on the way home, half a dozen donuts [00:02:00] and a caramel macchiato through the drive-through and eat 'em on the way home, right? You just need that food that you wouldn't normally choose to comfort you.
You're not making your best decisions on your nutrition when you're sleep deprived. You also put yourself in a particularly poor mindset when you don't get enough sleep. And so well, let's just talk about a little kid. Let's talk about Chris Marella’s little kid. When Nathan is being a monster, it might be because he didn't get enough sleep and little kids grow up to be big kids who are monsters when they don't get enough sleep.
So sleep impacts your nutritional choices. It impacts your mental health and your mindset. It also impacts your ability to motivate yourself to [00:03:00] train and then be able to have the energy to train to the level that you would want to. The intensity, I guess I should say, that you would want to.
And so that's my argument for why sleep is the most upstream of the four interventions. Now, a little bit of a scare tactic, but also you just need to know cancer is taking the lives of more of our firefighters than line of duty deaths. Cancer. The World Health Organization has declared shift work, a type 2B carcinogen, which means it probably causes cancer in humans.
But last summer they determined that the career of firefighting is a Group 1 carcinogen: very likely, almost undoubtedly, causes cancer in humans. But the wonderful thing that we have fighting [00:04:00] against that risk is, while we are sleeping, our body is sort of restocking our immune system. Remember the last time you went on a bachelor or bachelorette party, you had, you know, three nights and three days of no sleep.
What happens? You come home and you get sick because your immune system isn't working to the level that we would want it to be working. And so we can help soften and mitigate our cancer risk by getting sufficient restorative sleep when we are able to.
Everyone always talks to me about, okay, what are your top tips for sleep? What do I need to do? What supplement do I need to take? My very first recommendation to you is to tell you you need seven to nine hours of sleep. And so if you are not giving yourself a seven to nine hour sleep opportunity, you're not in bed for seven to nine hours, you're never going to get [00:05:00] seven to nine hours of sleep, and so that's where you need to start.
Give yourself that seven to nine hour sleep opportunity. Now, if you are currently sleeping three and a half hours, routinely going from three and a half to seven is unrealistic. So I would start trying to back up that bedtime 15 minutes at a time and incorporate 15 more minutes of sleep, every few days. So give yourself that seven to nine hour sleep opportunity.
The next thing I encourage people to do is to create a sleep routine. If you have little ones, I'll go back to Chris Marella and his little ones, uh, Nathan and Sawyer. I guarantee you they have a routine and it probably looks something like this: Eat dinner, brush teeth, put on the fuzzy feety pajamas, [00:06:00] read a book together, get 47 drinks, and then it's time to go to bed.
And because they have that routine, it isn't unusual for them to go to sleep. If we apply that same logic to ourselves and create a sleep routine for ourselves, it will be easier for us to fall asleep.
So I'm gonna share my sleep routine. I try to eat dinner around 5:30 or six o'clock. I try not to be on social media and texting and watching television and playing with screens after dinner.
I try, sometimes I'm not successful if I'm unable to avoid the screens, I use blue light glasses to try to block out as much of that light pollution as possible.
So eat dinner, minimize the use of screens, [00:07:00] potentially read a book, talk to a friend on the phone, something like that. Around 7:30, I go upstairs and I turn on my chili sleep, which is a mattress pad system that keeps my bed cool.
I turn that thing on to pre-cool my bed, and then I go back downstairs. Usually I have a cup of tea. When I'm done with the tea. That's my signal. It's time to brush my teeth, put my pajamas on, and go to bed. Now, I don't know if it's because I have a wonderful sleep routine or if I'm just lucky, but generally when I lay down, pull up the covers, the next thing I know, it's the morning. I don't lay in bed and toss and turn.
Most of the time I don't have to get up in the middle of the night. I should mention that I try to be careful with how much liquid I take in after 6:00 PM. I do have the cup of tea, but that's it. [00:08:00] I try to front load my liquid during the day so I'm not up all night peeing.
It's just one more way that helps me get more sleep. I've always. Always been a proponent of not keeping a television in the bedroom, especially, I'm not going to fall asleep with the television on because unfortunately, if that noise is going on in the background, your nervous system is engaged. You're not getting as restorative of sleep as you possibly could.
I make sure that my room is cool and dark and free of…I love dogs, but I don't own a dog. But if I did own a dog, the dog would not sleep with me. I don't want the animal waking me up in the middle of the night. I've heard the rule before that the bed should be for two things, and I'll let you leave that to your imagination, what [00:09:00] those two things are.
One of them is sleep, and so you know, doing activities again. Facebook in bed, playing a game on your phone in bed, things like that. It's sending a message to your brain that this is not necessarily the place that I sleep,
So, affording yourself a seven to nine hour sleep opportunity, creating a routine for yourself so that you, your body knows, oh, hey, it's time to start getting ready for bed.
And then, you know, cutting down on the screen time, cutting down on the distractions in the bedroom. All of these things can be ways to help improve your sleep. So I would call these all low barrier to entry.
Now. During the course of the Spring for Change week, I did invite you to take the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index Test. And if you look at the [00:10:00] test at the results at the end, it'll say if you scored five or above, you should probably take a look at what's going on with your sleep. And so is it simply that you aren't being disciplined or do you have a serious sleep disruption or sleep disorder?
So are you suffering from insomnia?Are you suffering from waking up for no explained reason at two o'clock in the morning and you can't go back to bed? Some of those things may need a medical intervention.
And let's go back to insomnia. Really the best intervention that they have found for insomnia is simply cognitive behavioral therapy. So talking to someone about what's on your mind can help you unload it and sleep better. So, uh, again, if you. A very high score on your PSQI, you may need to see a board certified doctor in sleep medicine. [00:11:00] And as my friend, DocJockZ, Alison Bragger says, bonus points for a credential in pulmonology or neurology in addition to the board certification and sleep.
And just as a side note, I understand if you have an HMO, you have to start with your primary care physician, but if you are having a sleep disorder or sleep dysfunction, your primary care physician is probably not. Woo. Words are hard. Probably not the place that you need to be Ultimately.
So giving yourself seven to nine hours, having a sleep routine, minimizing distractions, screening yourself for a potential sleep disorder, and then following up with an expert are all potential ways that you could, sleep better.
Now, could supplementation with magnesium help something [00:12:00] like, uh, Dr. Brager recommended Calm, or, I like Ionic Fizz. Absolutely. Something like that is, again, low barrier to entry, benign, and much better than something on the opposite end of the spectrum, like a sleep drug. We wanna try to avoid those if at all possible.
Another resource that you could investigate is Yoga Nidra, or it's sometimes known as iSleep, and this is a Department of Defense endorsed method for falling asleep faster or gaining sometimes what's called non-sleep deep rest, and I'm going to put in the show notes a link to my girl, Jacqueline at First Responder Sleep Recovery.
They…she and her husband Sean are wonderful. Sean as a Denver firefighter, and they actually go out to departments and do trainings. They're having a retreat. I just saw on Instagram, way to [00:13:00] go, Jacqueline and Sean, but wonderful resources for sleep. I'm gonna put that in the show notes.
Another resource to potentially help you sleep better is a not-for-profit called 62 Romeo and I audited their course last fall with Robert Sweetman and with Lori and it. Again, a lot of the things that I knew already, but it was put together in a really well synthesized event style format. It was six weeks of Zoom calls and prior to the inception of the course, I got a beautiful box with a book and a sleep mask and some ear….
I was gonna say EarPods. Earplugs, thank you, earplugs. And, a mat that I put underneath my mattress that [00:14:00] during the course of the class, they used it to do basically sleep research on the participants. But now it's just hooked to my phone and it, and it helps me monitor my sleep. And then a wonderful alarm clock called a Hatch that wakes me up with gentle light rather than a screaming.
And so the uh, 62 Romeo program is grant funded. You do not have to find your own grant. They have already found the grants for you. And so if you are accepted to the program, there is no cost to you, but you are obligated to participate. So if you cannot attend the six weekly sessions, then I would not recommend taking away a spot from someone else that could benefit.
So I'll put that in the show notes as well. 62 Romeo. I think that's all, that's about all I'm gonna say about sleep. Again, it's hard to recap something that we haven't done yet, but I think that I hit [00:15:00] most of the high points. If you wanna look better, feel better, play better. Make better decisions, have better relationships, do better on a promotional test, perform better in your sport, in your occupation.
I'm just gonna tell you, sleep is the best performance enhancer out there that is also legal and free. Keeping this one pretty short today. I hope you enjoyed the first week of Spring4Change. If you did not get involved, what even are you thinking? Go over to Instagram, follow Spring4Change now and get involved prior to next week, which is nutrition.
And I think that is absolutely all I have for you today. So your call to action is to go follow Spring for change. And you know what? I'm gonna give you another one. Get on my email list and get notified [00:16:00] of all the cool things that are going on in Fire Rescue Wellness world as they happen. Folks, thanks for listening.
This has been AZ and I am out.
