A sleep medicine specialist and the director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Sleep Medicine, about how to sleep better. Dr. Morgenthaler shares tips about maintaining a consistent sleep schedule and optimizing the sleep environment, and when to see a medical professional for sleep issues. how poor sleep can actually be the cause of many other seemingly unrelated health problems. This story starts with a patient who had developed psychosis — but his doctors couldn’t understand how he got that way, or how to treat him. They came to you. What happened there? I thought that the patient probably had a very severe sleep problem called restless leg syndrome – had it severely And within a matter of just a couple days, the patient was actually beginning to sleep and he was able to participate in the treatments and the therapy that the psychiatrist had been trying to do. First of all sleep is really when your body does its repair work. During sleep and especially during deep sleep – our so-called slow wave sleep, your body is like a construction crew. It’s busy fixing tissues, building muscle, repairing muscles that were torn or injured, strengthening bones. Growth hormone, which is kind of like one of the body’s repair tools, is released primarily during sleep. Your immune system gets a boost while you sleep. It protects you from infections. It’s producing cytokines that help reduce inflammation. When we skimp on sleep and your body doesn’t really have all the time that it needs to heal and defend itself, you can feel a lot less healthy very quickly. It’s very important that sleep take place to kind of get the metabolic byproducts out of the brain. Then finally sleep — I think everybody knows — they regulate your emotions. If any of you have children, or partners or friends, we all know when they don’t get enough sleep, they’re just irritable, crabby, snappy. I’m sure that sounds pretty familiar to you.
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Monday, January 20, 2025