Podcast: E8 - The Brain Warrior's Way and Sleep

Listen to the episode here: E8 - The Brain Warrior's Way and Sleep - https://apple.co/3UyoByM

Hey there, it's Dr. Tiffany, and I want to welcome you to my podcast, Integrative Mental Health Therapy with Dr. Tiffany. This is episode eight of the public podcast. We have merged the private and public podcasts now, so I am recording for both. So please disregard the numbering for those of you who still are accessing the private podcast stream and you're like, what? Wait a minute, I've already listened to number eight. I thought we were on like 20 or something.

So, what is the topic of today's podcast? Uh, we are wrapping ADHD awareness month. And I'm also in the middle of registering people for a program called the Brain Warriors Way, which is my five-week group program. It's a master's class and, uh, we meet every week. So it's a bit of an intensive where you get like almost this crash course, boot camp experience of all of the things that I typically am trying to teach people about ADHD symptom management and brain health and how do you manage the mood and people will come to me and they're struggling with anxiety or they're really flat or you know and they're like okay what is this three-leg stool that you have? What is this? psychological, neurological, physiological, the brain, body, mind.

And the Brain Warriors Way allows me to share with you what I've been trained in from the AEMIN clinics. There are nine AEMIN clinics nationally at this time. Dr. AEMIN and Tana AEMIN created this program. I am integrating that foundation with all the things that I have learned as a practitioner. When it comes to the physical the neurological and then we have a week that is Psychological and neurological as well. So I'm excited about that. So I'm sharing about the Brain Warriors Way and tying it into um ADHD because so many people come to me wanting to manage ADHD symptoms.

One thing that has come up a lot is sleep. So the focus of this podcast is sleep very kind of generically. Now, if you've listened to me at all, you may have even yawned at the thought of talking more and more about sleep, but many of us have wearables now. We're using our Apple watches, we're using our aura rings, we're using our whoops. We're paying attention to the quality of the sleep. And it's making us honest as well about how much sleep we're actually getting.

I'm quite, quite passionate about sleep personally. I sleep like it's my job. I have a time that I have to be in bed and there's all these rituals and things I have to do to make sure that I feel well enough to have the kind of days that I do where I'm expected to be on eight to nine hours a day, able to be present mentally and emotionally for every person that comes to see me. That's not an accident, that's intentional.

My brain can't just drop off a cliff because I stayed up until two o'clock in the morning or I'm not eating properly or I'm not exercising. I'm not taking naps at work. I'm getting through a full day and it's partly because I really prioritize sleep. Using an aura ring has been very helpful for me because it monitors my deep sleep, my REM sleep, how much light sleep I'm getting. You know, how much movement in the middle of the night, my oxygen saturation, my respiration, it gives me a lot of good details about where I am hormonally and what I should expect of my energy, my HRV, my heart rate variability.

I've done some different sessions, some episodes here on, um, not all of these topics, but on HRV, um, and the importance of understanding that and, and on sleep. What I want you to know is that from a brain hygiene perspective, from a brain warriors way perspective, what time you go to sleep matters, how much blue light you have before you go to sleep matters. I really do not like TVs being in bedrooms. I don't think it's healthy.

I know so many people feel like they need to have a TV because the TV is calming and it helps them go to sleep. I've heard so many things about so much of this and I'm just going to tell you the research does not agree with you. So I think what we really want to think about is what's best for your circadian rhythm.

Even my oral ring tells me that. It tells me where I am in their circadian rhythm and if I'm in alignment with it or not. It's just been really helpful for me, somebody who's put my lupus diagnosis into remission. The data I got from my oar ring was just invaluable. Okay. I was working with somebody recently and they had the same experience that I had where they were getting these weird readings at night that their oar ring was telling them the stress level was too high overnight.

And I'm not oar ring them, sorry, their wearable was telling them that. And so what I have found. and Ora tells us this, and so not everybody has an Ora ring, so I wanted to say this, is that when you eat too close to bedtime, it will oftentimes throw off your heart rate variability. It'll throw off your REM and deep sleep.

So one of the things we talk about a lot in the kind of sleep hacking communities, and I talk about in my practice, is really cutting off dinner. Just three hours before bedtime, but as much as four or five hours before bedtime. Going to bed with almost an empty stomach. Now if blood sugar drops are a problem, I've got a hack for that. So if you end up waking up in the middle of the night because you're super stressed out or activated and that keeps happening, you know if you're working with me personally, I have addressed your blood sugar dropping overnight.

But before we ever get to that, we need to see if part of your sleep disruption is coming from what? Eating too close to bedtime. So many people will eat in the bed as they're falling asleep and that's not good for sleep hygiene. It's just not good for REM sleep. It's not good for deep sleep. So things to keep in mind. Brainwaters weigh ADHD symptom management.

Bedtime needs to be 10 o'clock for most people at the absolute latest. What I find is most people, I have people going to bed at 8.30, 9 o'clock, 9.30. Most people really need to have it shut down by 10 if they're gonna try to shoot for being in bed for eight hours, because a lot of my clients have to be up by six. If you're able to sleep past six, that's great for you, but still.

Anything past midnight is actually not appropriate for your circadian rhythm. It actually is quite stressful and dysregulating So I want you to really think hard about a bedtime of 10 just to keep this simple bedtime of 10 No blue light. No TV in the bedroom Do not sleep for 10 hours Cut sleep off at eight and a half to nine hours cut it off Most people are walking around like zombies and feeling like they're Dorsal vagal or feeling depressed.

Mostly because they're getting, you know, too much sleep. I look at these watches and these rings and I'm like, oh my gosh, what are

 you doing sleeping for 10 to 11 hours? That's too much sleep. We need cortisol to be releasing predictably. So I really like people to shoot for seven and a half to eight and a half hours of sleep max.

Some of my teenagers need, or my young people need a little bit more sleep, but even then I'm pretty, I'm pretty direct about looking at do you need that much or do you just not like to get up? Okay, and that dreamy and attentive state sometimes that happens with ADHDers can be they're kind of sleep drunk. Okay, so this is one of the things we'll be talking about in the brain warriors way and I'll be customizing really taking serious that bedtime, that wake up time, not overdoing it, not doing too much, getting too much sleep.

And then if you can have the benefit of a wearable, monitor your HRV. And if you've got a loop or an aura ring, monitor that deep sleep and that REM sleep. Monitor that oxygen saturation. Look at how much you're moving. How much deep sleep and REM do I like? The younger my client is, the more deep and REM they tend to get. It's a beautiful thing to be young again and to know all the things I know now.

Oh my gosh, I would have been unstoppable. You wouldn't have been able to tell me anything. I swear. I swear we're just all so young and dumb, but I'm trying to intervene on that because I want our young people to know how to take care of their bodies and their brains.

And so my young people in my practice are learning about oar rings and monitoring their deep and their rim and they understand. So they get a lot of it. They can average four to five hours of deep in REM. As you get into your 40s and 50s, you're gonna be sitting somewhere around two to three hours of those of recovery of deep in REM. Deep is more muscle recovery. REM is rapid eye movement, but it's consolidation. And for me and my healing journey and making sure that I was going into remission with lupus and dealing with fibromyalgia symptoms in a brain that wanted to be foggy. REM was the game changer. Bad REM, bad day at work. Harder day, harder day. There was a direct relationship for me and my own personal data with REM.

And my training is that people with autoimmune disorders and pain syndromes really have to work on REM. And there's all kinds of hacks. There's all kinds of thoughts I have about saunas and cold plunges and cryo and all the different things that can really help push us into more REM. PIMF, mats and all kinds of things to help with HRV. There's, there's all kinds of things just with the sleep hacking. But what I want to emphasize is just taking the sleep seriously is a massive part of getting your brain to work correctly.

Many of us just aren't doing the basics properly and we think we can cut corners and then we don't make a connection between the corners that we cut and the symptoms that we have. And so I'm trying to beat the drum on lifestyle interventions and that's what the brain warrior's way is. So hopefully you heard me. Hopefully you're gonna use some sort of tech, a wearable to help you monitor.

I don't get anything out of this. I just personally love the Oura Ring myself. It's been… It's been really helpful. I do not represent them. I just like having the tech for working with my clients. But if you don't have that, just having rules around how you sleep and what you're going to do before you go to sleep and what time you're gonna get up will make a major difference in how your dopamine level or your child's dopamine level or the brain fogging your brain functions, okay? Alright, I hope this was helpful and until next time, be well.