January 11, 2022 - EyeClarity Podcast
Dave Gibson is a sleep coach and offers a sleep course Sleep Coaching for a Perfect Nights Sleep in 4 weeks tailor-made to you individually, available online or offline Corporate Workshops. With 30 years of continuous sobriety, along with helping solve sleep problems, he helps clients with addiction, stress, food, and underlying self-esteem issues, and more. He has found that once our life is in balance we sleep better too. You can get in touch with Dave through his Website or social channels: Instagram | Twitter
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sleep, night, people, melatonin, diet, eating, serotonin, question, brain, exercise, seasonal affective disorder, drives, light, women, dave, poor, hormone, day, minerals, men
00:03
Hey, everybody, it’s Dr. Sam. And I’d like to welcome you to another EyeClarity podcast. As part of the Summit Series, you know, I’m organizing the Whole Health Summit, January 14 to the 16th 22. And I’m having the speakers on my podcast and today, we are blessed to have Dave Gibson. And he is an expert on one of my most sought after subjects that I’m learning about his sleep. So he coaches people on sleep. I saw on his Instagram that perfect night’s sleep in four weeks. So that sounds really pretty cool. He teaches workshops, he does individual sessions. And he’s joining us today from London. Dave, welcome to the program. I want to thank thank you for joining us. So how did you get in? Oh, yes. So how did you get into this topic? We’d love to hear your story. I know my listeners would. So give us a little background on who you are. I had a
01:19
personal need and a professional need to crack it. I mean, my background is that I I escaped advertising in my early 30s To become an osteopath. And in advertising, I used to drink a lot to get myself to sleep and I’d quit the booze and there there was lying awake, not able to sedate myself. So I had to relearn the art of sleeping. And I realized that I’d never really invested in it. As a child, I was sort of allowed out late at night to play in bands. So I had developed a habit of being underslept and coping with it. And equally on my mom’s side, she’s a very poor sleeper, and we’ve got a 30% chance of inheriting our parents sleep genes. And it’s one of the questions I always ask somebody, when it comes to me as a patient, you know, what’s your mom and dad sleeping? Like? When did you start sleeping badly. And you know, you open up a Pandora’s box when you look at your own genetics. And if you’ve got good genetics, you’re on it, you’re on a winning wicket more often than not anyway, when I started to work as an osteopath over 20 years ago, I suddenly found that more people had sleeping problems and bad backs. You know, I was talking about stress management, time management. And the more the more we started using mobile technology, it seemed that the worst athlete was getting, you know, so there was a, there was a tipping point that we got to about a decade ago, when all of a sudden people are noticing that their health is suffering, because they’ve gone below a sort of sustainable threshold. We’ve gone from being under slept on occasion to be chronically under slept long term. And then things started to go wrong, health wise and emotionally wise.
03:01
Got it? Wow. So, so many, so many factors involved in sleep, but I didn’t realize the 30% in the genetics, but, you know, makes total sense. I mean, in my field, and I care I asked about genetics, because there is a you know, there’s that gene that when it gets triggered in a certain way environmentally or through diet or stress, that we have a higher risk. So, um, you talked about the screens, the the electronics, how do you see that playing into people having difficulty with
03:35
sleep? I think what it’s done is it has two effects. One is the sort of psychological effect of being attached to stimulation very late in the day. And then the other is the physical part of it, which is called blue lights. The blue light is easier to control because what happens is when when you get hold of a screen like this, or an iPad, or a PC, the the wavelength of light that it emits mimics the same blue that is emitted from the sun first thing in the morning, that’s designed to wake us up. The alternative is when you shine blue light into your eyes, it fires a receptor and it blocks the production of melatonin. So it stops has been able to produce a signal that produces melatonin from the pineal gland in the brain. And melatonin is regarded as the sleep hormone. It’s the it’s the hormone that gives us the desire to sleep. You know, when you’re sort of laying on the couch and all of a sudden you feel like you’re going to not off. If you’re like me and my age is sort of after sort of okay, it’s time for bed. And one of the ways that we know it’s time for bed is when we feel like we’re going to we’re going to crash and that that is that melatonin it gives us the desire for sleep. The need for sleep is another mechanism that builds up during the day. It’s the one We blocked with caffeine. And that’s called adenosine as that sort of accumulates through the day in the brain, and it tells us that we need sleep, that desire for sleep is blocked, you can put the blue light filters on it, that’s fine. But what the other side of it is that we are mentally attached to mobile devices devices too late at night, and that is stimulating the brain, it’s winding us up. And what happens with sleep is we’re trying to get to a deep sleep quite quickly, quite efficiently, the more hyped up you are late at night, the harder it is to step down into sleep, you can’t flick a switch and go to sleep. You have to you have to not off, not switch off. And that process is a decline. You know, if you think about the prehistoric man in a cave, he wasn’t going to be watching too much at night. He was downtime. You know, he was relaxing at night. They did some interesting research recently, in Tel Aviv. They looked at people who use phones at night, particularly apps on phones at night. And they found that they were 60% more likely to grind their teeth than the people who just use mobile phones. And then when asked the research team, why they said Fear Of Missing Out. And it was like once once you’re attached to your phone, it’s very hard to be unattached because there’s so much going on. And I go into companies and I teach, you know, the science of sleep and the tips of sleep. And when I do the stats, I ask people to fill in a questionnaire before, I would say categorically that 20% Worst sleepers all use the mobile phone in bed. I would say it’s very rare. Very rare for you to be able to use this. I mean, not in the bedroom. I mean in bed. Once you’re on this segment, it sort of gets us hooked. And we’re overstimulated. And I would say that we wouldn’t be having a conversation about sleep being a problem if it wasn’t for a mobile phone. Mm hmm.
07:02
Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. Yeah, it’s, you know, again, in my my community, one of my challenges that I recommend people do is take your phone, put it downstairs or put it in another room, shut off your Wi Fi, if you can shut off your phone, get a break? Because you’re absolutely right. I know people are scrolling in bed, and they do it late at night. They do it early in the morning. And it’s so disruptive in, you know, in our sleep cycle. So from your perspective, why do we need sleep? Why is it so important to us?
07:42
It has a variety of effects on different cells, but every cell needs it. Firstly, when you look at the sort of immune system, it gets recharged at night, when you look at the brain and detoxes at night, when you look at the the effects of poor sleep, you get problems with your heart. So the body, the body needs it in terms of recovering the cells in terms of we get a downtime for the cells to repair. We get the sort of the emotions, we get the consolidation of our memory, we get the creative thinking from sleep. So there’s physical and emotional benefits of sleep, but every single cell goes into sleep mode. So there’s a sort of there’s not there’s not one just there’s one, there’s not just one reason there’s multiples. You know, the brain requires it, the body requires it. Everything requires it just to have that recuperation.
08:41
Yeah, oh, yeah, totally. And, again, I know so many people who don’t sleep well. And it affects their immunity, it affects their digestion, it affects their emotional health. And I’ve got a lot of questions here from my community. And I guess they’re looking forward to having you on our health summit. We’re here with David Gibson. He’s a sleep coach. He’s from the UK. He does workshops, he consults with on a corporate level. And he’s a real expert on sleep. And he’s going to be talking about sleep on our health summit, which is coming up January 14 to the 16th. So why don’t we go to our questions. We’ve got a number of them from our listeners. This is from Candace and she is from California. And she’s writing in how does the diet affect our sleep?
09:40
Great question. Great question. When you look at the content of a good diet, you need certain vitamins and minerals, that sort of if you’ve got a balance of a Mediterranean diet with all the colors of the Sun in the vegetables, and you’ll find that that will give you enough the gut biome as well. The gut bacteria theory any good good bacteria, gut bacteria go to sleep when we do they sleep in 90 minutes sleep cycles like we do. And they, they then create a lot of the a lot of the the serotonin that we need. So anyway, coming back to the importance of a good diet, it supplies the right minerals. So for example, magnesium is the one that mune traditionally associate deficiency with with parsley. Magnesium is an important one, vitamin D, you need that to get the depth of sleep and investment see, but all the minerals in a way, the B vitamins, all the minerals and vitamins play a role in sort of creating the right effects for the brain. If you have a poor diet, what tends to happen is if you eat too much processed food, too much carbohydrates, it overstimulates you and you don’t get to sleep at night well, and then when you when you lack sleep, the hormones that control your hunger starts to go haywire. So we get a decrease in the one that tells us we’re full. And we get an increase in the one that tells us aren t we get the munchies, we get cravings for very sugary, sweet and fatty foods. So the brain goes into panic mode. It reckons that we are in crisis if if an animal’s underslept. The brain goes well hang on a minute, why would you be under slept, you must be in crisis, I better get you to feed more, because that’s the only reason you could possibly still be awake at this time of night. So it drives us into the fight or flight syndrome. It drives us to eat more sugary and sweet foods that then kick us into even poorer sleep. So we get this vicious circle. So a good diet provides the vitamins and minerals and including supporting your gut biome. gut biome is one of the biggest symbols supporters have a good night’s sleep. So good diet drives good sleep good sleep great drives good bike, it’s a two way street.
11:55
Mm hmm. Great. All right, next question. This is from Jill and she lives in Vancouver, BC. And she says I have seasonal affective disorder. And I think this is affecting my ability to sleep. What do you
12:12
think? Yep, can do and events and it’s it’s vice versa. With seasonal affective disorder, the certain things that you can do. First one is to get yourself one of those sad lamps and get get a good one that gives you a dose of sunlight first thing in the morning, because and then also to look at something called five HTP. Go to your go to your to your local health physician and look at whether that could help because five HTP is a precursor of serotonin. So that’s something to consider looking at your food, what we realize is seasonal affective disorder runs in families. It’s related to serotonin and light. But this is important, Dr. Sun, when we look at the amount of seasonal affective disorder that you can attribute to lack of lights, only 12% of it. When they’ve done research worldwide. On the incidences, and looking at lights and people’s affective sort of discomfort if you like or seasonal affective disorder, only 12% can be blamed on the sunlight. What happens to says when we get a lack of light in the winter, we naturally feel a bit lower, you know, we’re not as busy, we’re not going out as much. And we start to socialize less, we start to eat poor food, we start to spend slightly longer in bed because it’s a bit too cold and damp out. There’s particularly in London, not where you are. But we adapt our lifestyle. And we change our social aspects in response to the lack of light that then make us feel depressed. So it’s not actually the lack of sunlight. It’s what we do in response to the lack of sunlight. So if we carried on exercising, eating well, socializing, not staying too long in bed, eating all the right foods and doing the stuff that we did in the summer. We wouldn’t feel the effects of seasonal affective disorder in the way that we do.
14:15
God. Wow. That’s great. Okay, let’s take a question from Jerry. He follows me on tick tock and he is in Athens, Greece. And his question to you is, what’s the difference between men and women and their sleep cycles?
14:37
Wow, great. One great one. Women have poor sleep the men factor her women actually women die about Simas than than men. Which is interesting because we now know that Alzheimer’s is related to poor sleep. Now what happens? We don’t have the menstrual cycle which is the biggest change in In a woman’s sleep pattern, because what happens is that progesterone and estrogen now is different ways that that encourages sleep. Progesterone is quite soporific. So when there’s an increase in progesterone during the cycle, it’s easier for women to get to sleep. Now what happens is a, we don’t have childbirth, we’ve got we don’t have the menstrual cycle. We were lucky in that way with regards to sleep, we don’t have to have the burden of carrying a child. We don’t tend to be the primary carer. So women’s sleep are disrupted by the menstrual cycle is disrupted by carrying a child is disrupted disrupted by being the primary carer afterwards, and then it’s disrupted by the change in life. All of those factors disturb women sleep more than men. So women tend to get more disrupted sleep than men, period. That would be the biggest difference.
15:55
Absolutely, absolutely. That’s a great question. And okay, let’s let’s go on to our next question. This is from Bob. He lives in Boston, and he wants to know how exercise can improve our sleep.
16:14
Exercise helps in a number of ways it increases our uptake of serotonin through the food. So it’s great that pulling in serotonin, serotonin is required for making melatonin. And it’s it’s a hormone that’s generally regarded as a feel good hormone in general, isn’t it, it’s a mood enhancer. The other thing with with, with with exercise is, the more we exercise, the easier it is to get more deep sleep. When you look at athletes, they tend to sleep longer than than the average. So professional athletes. You know, when you look at people like Roger Federer and even Usain Bolt, they’re having eight 910 hours sleep and more. So that they’re they’re sleeping more than the average. So certainly, you know, Federer is is 10 hours boat was 10 hours, but used to do a lot of napping as well. So when we when we when we drive the body harder with cardio, particularly, we increase our ability to get deep sleep, which is the one that rejuvenates the body. So we get more of that sort of deeper sleep, when we exercise more, we find it easier to get to sleep, and certainly that it sort of enhances it. Exercising too late at night, though, is something to be wary of both in terms of increasing your cortisol, increasing your body temperature. And also if you’re doing it under bright lights, it tends to affect us if we’re in a gym in a bright gym. For exercising first thing in the morning, going out getting a bright sunlight first thing, an exercise outdoors would be a great way of doing it.
17:49
So we’re here with Dave Gipson. He’s a sleep coach. He’s one of my featured speakers. My whole health summit. And we have a question from Australia. This is Jason. And he wants to know, what are the best supplements to take? And he is underlying Should I take melatonin? Should I do CBD oil? I don’t sleep very well.
18:16
I think the answer for Jason is it’s really to sort of start off by getting yourself onto a good diet like we were talking before to start with. So eating a range of fruit and vegetables, it’s about eating lots of stuff that that drive your gut bacteria. So propre post biotics getting that sorted, and really sort of looking at other stuff. So cutting down caffeine would be one way of making sure that you you could get a better night’s sleep, increase in the amount of exercise that you do learn in meditation there’s lots of other avenues apart from diet system we’ll look at why I’m I’m not sleeping and looking at meditation being as one of the great things in terms of allowing us to, to wind down slowly and to switch off properly. With regards to supplements attend to to use melatonin as a last resort. Older people tend to benefit more from it. But certainly if you’re under the age of 30, it wouldn’t be something to consider as a first line melatonin. It’s something that the body produces normally in enough quality and it’s really to look at the amount of light that you’re exposing yourself to to really have dim lights late at night to give yourself the best opportunity to produce it. Eating foods that contain tryptophan which is an amino acid that produces serotonin that then produces melatonin is useful phone and eating those with carbohydrates. So having a turkey sandwich or milk and honey Layton valerian, I quite like as a sort of herb, it’s a reasonable one but I would say, you know if you were worried about you know what things my diet could lack traditionally, it’s magnesium is the one that people would take for sleep. CBD Oh, some people love it. Some people don’t respond to it very well at all. It’s one of those socket unseen things. But I get all the other bits right first and then look at what you should add to it. So that would be the better way to do.
20:21
So I, there’s a question here from Caitlin. She lives in Florida. And she says that she practices IR VEDA. And so she’s following that particular medical theme. And our question to you is, what is the best time to eat dinner? So it won’t affect my sleep?
20:45
anywhere from three to three to four hours. But at least three
20:49
hours before you go to sleep at least two hours. Yeah, I think, you know, she, she’s a viewer of follower of mine and, and she wrote me a long email. And she says that sometimes she and her husband will go out to dinner like a, you know, 830 at night, and she has trouble sleeping. And then if she eats at six o’clock, she has less trouble sleeping. So that’s kind of what’s behind that. Do you have any thoughts on that in terms of? Go ahead?
21:20
Yeah, no, I would say categorically, you know, if you eat and drink alcohol, close to bedtime, you’re disrupting your sleep. So certainly three to four hours for both would be it would be would be ideal. Certainly, you know, getting getting that sort of opportunity to get your digestion out of the way and then to sort of unpack it earlier in the evening. 100% 100%.
21:46
Great, I appreciate that. And so that she so we’re coming down to the end of our interview, do you have any kind of golden nuggets, things that you might say to people, whether it’s on a corporate level on a you know, performance level, how they can improve their sleep? What are some of your, you know, go twos,
22:10
control the lights, control your exposure to line, get it very bright first thing and very dim at night. We’re learning more and more that a circadian rhythm is really driving itself through life. Don’t go to sleep too late. We’ve all got this idea that we’re night owls. We’re not very few people are traditionally night owls. They’ve done some research recently on heart disease and optimum sleep time. Best time to go to sleep for most of us is between 10 and 11 o’clock at night it’s early compared to what we would like it to be you know and when when I when I when and particularly this is a problem with men is you know you’re going to man commandos? Do I really need eight hours because I can get by with six and it makes me I’m more of a man if I could do in six or nine. No, not really. It’s just believe you are you’re not, you know, the the best way. Honestly, if you know, the way to know you’ve had enough sleep is to go to bed with go to bed. When you feel tired on a regular basis and wake up without an alarm, then you know that your body’s waking you up. Not you’re waking you up your body is so to go to sleep without an alarm is the sort of holy grail if you like, control your lights. Don’t overstimulate yourself at night, do something that’s a hobby that gets you in the flow. Learn to meditate so you know, learn to relax at night. Don’t drive yourself like a steam train at night. And when you start the day, think about how you’re approaching the day. Because when you approach the day, you include your evening with it and you know people know but when they wake up, they know they’re going to they know they’re going to cut it short. You know what I mean? They know that they’ve got too much on they no no I typically it’s it and we talked about women’s sleep part of the issue in the current environment. I get a lot of women clients for osteopathy, hypnotherapy for sleep, they’re all getting shredded because not only the dual income earner not only they’d be working from home, they do more of the childcare, they’re doing more of the school runs, they’re doing more of the cooking. And women are women constantly a time poor. And I would say to any woman that’s listening to this get your get your other half to do their fair share, please because when we set up our day, we know whether we got too much on and part of it is planning your day so you can have a reasonable day where you’re in charge not the day’s running you if you’re doing that you can allow yourself enough time to wind down properly. And you can’t do that to go to sleep. We nod off we don’t crash out of people who say my head hits the pillow I’m asleep all night great against asleep. No you’re sleep deprived. If you take less than than five minutes to get to sleep technically That’s too quick, it should take you a little bit of time. Because back in the wild, you’d be checking out whether it was safe to nod off, you’d be listening for the sounds of nature, it would take you a little bit of time to nod off slowly. If you crash out, you’re probably sleep deprived. So plan your day to allow yourself enough time to wind down at night, and to relax into sleep rather than expect to sort of crash out at night. And really allow enough time for it. It’s, you know, there was a guy called Matthew Walker and he said, You know, when people ask you, why should you sleep? When you look at what sleep does for you physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, you should be asking yourself, why should I bother being awake? Because your body benefits a lot more from being asleep than it does being awake.
25:48
That’s right. I totally agree. So Dave, how can people get in touch with you and give us your contact info?
26:00
Well, my website is called the sleep site.co.uk. Hopefully, there’s a lot of blogs on there with some topics covered like snoring and how to breathe through your mouth. It’s
26:08
really good, by the way, and yes, it’s really good, by the way, yeah.
26:15
co.uk then I’m on Instagram at Dave sleep expert, you know, please, you know, look me up. So, it’d be a pleasure to ask and answer any questions that you got be real.
26:26
Yes, very, very good. So ladies and gentlemen, check Dave out. He’s got an amazing amount of information. He’s going to be one of our featured speakers in my upcoming summit. Dave, thanks so much for your time. I wish you the best. And we’ll see you again.
26:46
Looking forward to it. Thank you.
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