The Insomnia Blog - Sleep Doctor Michael Breus, PhD

Fido or Tabby Got Your Sleep?

If you’re still scratching your head wondering why you’re not feeling as refreshed as you should in the morning, you may have overlooked a little furry sleep thief: your pet. 

I get asked about pets in the bedroom pretty frequently, and it can be a hard to hear that pets in the bedroom can be problematic for sleep. Pets are like family members, and we don’t like to exclude them from snuggling with us when they show so much affection and beg to be with us at night. But they can be a major cause of poor and disrupted sleep.

Studies have demonstrated that a reasonable percentage of pet owners who allow their pets in bed have sleep problems. And if you think a cat is harmless, then look no further than a home video of what goes on in night when you think your furry friend acts like a stuffed animal. If only…

Trouble Keeping Up with Your CPAP?

It’s widely known in sleep medicine circles that the most common—and helpful—treatment we have these days for patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is the CPAP machine, short for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. If you’ve been diagnosed with OSA, then you know exactly what I mean.

The problem with CPAP therapy is that not a lot of people are good about using it on a routine basis. Or, like trying to start a ambitious exercise program, they are compliant at the start and then slowly drop off. Within a few months, they are rarely found using their CPAP. And sleeping poorly as a result.

But there’s hope: new research that just surfaced and was presented last week at a conference in San Diego has revealed that when patients are prescribed just a two-week course of a certain sleep aid (the one marketed as Lunesta), they are more apt to be using their CPAPs in six months.

Not Fit to Fly

It’s hard to legislate sleep. As an employer you can certainly set rules and guidelines, hoping your employees show up refreshed and ready to perform, but you can’t really enforce or police it—even when lives depend on it.

Hearing about the fatigue factor involved in Continental’s February plane crash on a cold, icy night near Buffalo, New York has been horrifying. According to the latest reports from the NTSB, the main cause of the crash is being blamed on the crew’s lack of experience and lack of sleep (lack of proper conduct in the cockpit, too, which certainly stems from a lack of experience and sleep).

Have you ever wondered:

• When you step on to a plane, how alert are your pilots?
• Have they just gotten off a transcontinental flight and haven’t slept in a day—or two?
• Have they been working the graveyard shift and catching some Zs on a couch in the terminal before taking control of your plane?
• Are they feeling fuzzy and spacey as they continue to fight a nagging cold bug (which really prefers them to be sleeping more)?
• How much does sleep factor into performance…even when an emergency happens suddenly?

To quickly answer that last question, sleep plays a huge role in the ability to perform, even when it comes to basic skills we’ve done over and over again. And thinking about our pilots’ alertness is probably not something that enters our minds as we’re boarding planes and getting organized in our seats, but the thoughts are crossing millions of grounded minds this week as more news emerges about the fate of that February ride.

Stormy Weather, Stormy Sleep

Have you ever had trouble sleeping when a storm blows through? (No, I don’t mean being awakened by the sound of thunder or the pelts of rain on your window.) If you suffer with obstructive sleep apnea, listen up: there’s new evidence that the weather can worsen your sleep-disordered breathing. In other words, when the pressure drops, so does your ability to achieve smooth, restful breathing during the night. 

Surprisingly, not much has been studied when it comes to connections between the weather and sleep. Lots of studies have been done to show the effects of high-altitude, which also worsens sleep apnea; but weather-related changes in atmospheric pressure and breathing during sleep has been a neglected area of study. Until now.

Are You Fooling Yourself?

There are plenty of stories about famous short sleepers to go around. Among those who claim (or claimed, as some are no longer with us) that they do perfectly well on four hours of sleep are Jay Leno, Madonna, Michelangelo, Napolean Bonaparte, Florence Nightingale, and Thomas Edison (whose invention—the light bulb—forever changed our sleep habits). Winston Churchill got by on six hours, and Leonardo Da Vinci kept one of the most outrageously crazy sleep schedules, sleeping 15 minutes every four hours day and night.

If you’re a short sleeper, which is technically defined as someone who gets fewer than 6 hours a night, are you living well off that brief sleep? Are you catching more Zs during the day in the form of a nap? (Which, by the way, is how some of the aforementioned geniuses got by. Churchill took a complete 1.5- to 2-hour nap in the afternoon—and he undressed and got into bed.)

Well, if you think you could use more sleep time, you’re probably right. And science continues to reveal what sleep deprivation can do to us (other than make us tired and cranky). The National Sleep Foundation recently released an alert pointing to new evidence: people who average fewer than six hours a night could develop prediabetes. And you know what that leads to: full-fledged diabetes.