The Insomnia Blog by Sleep Doctor Michael Breus, Ph.D.

The Heat Factor: Warm Skin, Cozier Sleep

There are lots of things you can try to enhance the quality of your sleep and avoid waking up at night. But here’s something you probably haven’t heard of before: warming up your skin.

The news just came in from the Netherlands in a study published in the journal Brain. Turns out that increasing the temperature of your skin—but not your core body temperature—just a little bit can help you achieve deeper, more restful sleep and avoid waking up too early in the morning.

These types of sleep problems are common among older folks. The reasoning behind the phenomenon is that skin warming has been shown to stimulate areas in the brain that are involved in regulating sleep. Studies on skin in recent years have been turning up all sorts of fascinating discoveries. We’ve learned a great deal about how skin is like the brain’s twin. It can create messages for the brain to respond to without needing the brain to act first.

To think that a little warmth on your skin can effect change in the brain and plunge you into top-quality sleep is, well…amazing. Gives a whole new meaning to wrapping yourself up in a blankie. It’s not always easy to find sure-fire ways to solve sleep problems, especially in people who suffer from insomnia or who can’t seem to get through the night and early morning hours without waking. The elderly are famous for their lack of quality sleep and inability to stay asleep for long periods of time.

So can this recent study offer a new way to promote better sleep? I think it may be worth trying. Keep the ambient bedrooms temps cool but keep the blankies close. Sleep tight.

Can’t Get to Sleep? Try Exercise in the Late Afternoon

I’m not the first person to tell you that exercise is good for you. But if there’s one magic bullet for enhancing the quality of your sleep, it’s exercise. Because sleep and exercise are both vital signs of good health, if you can accomplish both well, you’re way ahead of the game. But now there’s more to this bit of advice if you’re a victim of insomnia: scheduling an exercise session in the late afternoon might be your magic bullet to end the sleeplessness.

A new study just came out pointing the benefits of late-day exercise on people who have trouble falling asleep.

Specifically, people who engaged in moderate aerobic exercise in the evenings, such as 50 minutes on the treadmill, fell asleep more quickly, woke less often, and increased their total sleep time. Sorry, but no sleep-promoting benefits were reported for strength training or a heavy workout.

This is not news to me and I hope this study, which confirms earlier findings, further encourages natural ways to support healthy sleep rather than resorting to drugs or exercise-avoidance (people with insomnia are not usually advised to work out in the evenings because of the potential rousing effect of exercise).

Red Alert to Moms and Dads: Your Insomnia Could Trigger Suicidal Behavior in Your Kids

Now this is scary stuff. I just read an article reporting new research on the effects that insomniac parents can have on their children. The gist: if you suffer from chronic insomnia and have adolescent kids, they could be at a higher risk not only for insomnia themselves, but also for suicidal behavior and for using drugs that induce sleep (like hypnotics).

Whoa. I know what you’re thinking: how could something as commonplace and seemingly “harmless” as insomnia in one person trigger suicidal behavior in another person? It’s a bit more complicated than you think.

Insomnia Gets another Nod

Are you an insomniac? If so, then which kind? The one who flat-out can’t ever get to sleep? Or are you the type who fall asleep okay but then has a restless night of tossing and turning as you struggle to stay in dreamland? If you’re the latter, there’s hope—maybe.

Tossing and Turning -- A Genetic Mutation?

I just read about a new study that details how scientists have found mutations in two genes that could clue us into understanding insomnia better. These two genes control electrical excitability in a particular area in the brain known to be involved in sleep.

Of course, the researchers were looking at mice genes, but this could give us a model for understanding how a genetic mutation could partly be to blame for those restless nights. And it could lead us to better treatments in the future. But this would certainly come with a few, shall I say, caveats.

Can You “Have It All”—Sleep Included?

A thriving career. A house with 2.5 kids, the average. Time to exercise. A vibrant social life. A great romantic relationship, whether married or not. And you sleep like a baby at night for a full X-hours, whatever you need to feel like a million bucks the next day. Is this possible? Is this a total fantasy?

I’m not trying to state the obvious or beg the obvious answer. My gut feeling is that having it all, including sleep, is a tall order. And recent research proves it. A Canadian article I read online outlines researchers’ data about the relationship between sleep and lifestyle, which includes a number of things like employment status, gender, and marital status.

Do you commute a long way to work? Do you work full-time (i.e., long hours)? Do you have kids, especially ones under the age of 15? If yes, then chances are you don’t get as much sleep as someone who answers no to most of these questions. And I don’t think you have to be Canadian to fit the bill of what these researchers found. In fact, in America I think we tend to fare far worse.

Teenage Insomnia Can Create Problems Later On

Teens take a lot of heat for being inherently and chronically moody. They typically scoff at authority and often act like they’ve gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. (Sorry, I say this with much respect for teens, so if I offend any haphazard teen out there reading this, my apologies; virtually everyone goes through this phase, so it’s a relatively fair comment to make, generally speaking of course).

But here’s the kicker: which of the following do you attribute this behavior to?

a)    Social pressures 
b)    Hormones
c)    A developing brain and psychological profile
d)    All of the above

If you answered D, you’re right—partially. Now, we can say there’s one more ingredient at play here: insomnia.

What Do Sleep and Baseball Have in Common this Week?

Aside from the exciting Sox vs. Cardinal baseball that went on last week leading up to the World Series, the drama surrounding Cleveland Indians pitcher Paul Byrd caught my attention in particular. Byrd acknowledged using human growth hormone for a medical condition, but what got my eye wasn’t related to the fact HGH is a banned drug in professional baseball (since 2005) without a doctor’s prescription. It’s about something else I read that I bet most people didn’t stop to think about.

Pop Quiz: Who Sleeps Better, the Man or the Woman in a Couple?

I was amused last week when the media summarized new findings about how well men and women sleep when they share the same bed. If you’re a woman, let me guess: you’d say your partner sleeps better. You have to contend with his snoring and abrupt shifting around, which awakens you easily. Now there’s proof in the pudding. Men are indeed more likely to sleep better than you in the same bed. And here’s the kicker: they also are more likely to be snoozing soundly because of your nearby warmth.

There were two items in the particular to read in between the lines from the study and that every woman should heed:

Gwen Stefani Can't Sleep, Either

A quick note:  we can now add singer Gwen Stefani to the long list of celebrities who report sleep problems.  According to this article in The Daily Mail, Stefani is having a hard time sleeping while running after her toddler:

"Kingston is walking now and he never sleeps," sighs the singer, who turns 38 on Wednesday. "And if he doesn't sleep, I don't sleep. Last night was insane. By this morning I thought I was going to die from the tiredness."

On the bright side, she says having  a child helps her make the most of her travel experiences while on tour:

"On my days off, I used to sleep in for as long as I could and then do a workout or go shopping. Now I get up early, play with Kingston and go out. For the first time, I'm actually seeing the places I'm visiting."

Snuff Out the Cigarette to Snooze Out

An article I read online relating a study about nicotine in breast milk and how it can affect sleep patterns in a baby really got me thinking: how much do our parents’ habits after we are born affect our internal programming for life?

As a non-smoker, I can’t sympathize with the mother who feels the need to smoke during those critical breast-feeding months. Many are successful at quitting during the pregnancy, but then fall back into the habit of lighting up once the baby is born. The same thing happens when it comes to drinking alcohol.

But the difference is people are more aware of alcohol’s negative effects on breast milk, so new moms continue to ban it from their diets. I was stunned to read what the study’s main author said:

“Because nicotine is not contraindicated during lactation, mothers may believe that smoking while breastfeeding will not harm their child as long as the child is not exposed to passive smoke. However, there has been very little research on either short- or long-term effects of nicotine delivered through breast milk.”

Nicotine is not “contraindicated” when a mother is breast-feeding? Given all that we know about the health consequences of smoking as well as a mother’s passing of nutrients to her infant through breast milk, it surprises me to hear that some would assume smoking wouldn’t also be harmful to a baby. It also would seem obvious (at least to me) that sleep patterns would get disrupted much in the same way smoking can affect an adult’s sleep.

It never ceases to amaze me how people view smoking as a “relaxing” habit. In reality, nicotine is a stimulant that can infringe on getting restful sleep. So when I read that babies whose mothers smoked in the study had a reduction in sleep time of about 37 percent (and that level of sleep disruption was directly related to the dose of nicotine infants received from their mothers’ milk), I wasn’t shocked out of my seat. Not in the least.

Which brings me back to this question: if our sleep patterns as developing babies are routinely disrupted (ahem, while our brains are forming and setting certain things in stone for life), how much does this then affect our sleeping patterns for life? Now that’s a study I’d like to read about!

In the meantime, I encourage all new moms to do as follows: snuff out the cig to snooze out soundly (both you and your baby).