Health Wanted: Sleep

The Episode

The topic: There is a reason we spend around a third of our lives asleep: We need sleep to survive. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow and guest Dayna Johnson, PhD, talk about why we sleep, the importance of sleep quality, and how to make sure you are getting the most out of your body’s time at rest.
 

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE NOW

The takeaway: While often overlooked, sleep is a vital aspect of human health. It plays an essential role in many bodily processes, and not getting enough sleep can harm overall well-being.

• While asleep, the body performs important functions like storing new memories, consolidating new things you’ve learned, removing waste products in the body, and secreting hormones to help the body function properly. Sleep is a time for healing and refreshment and is necessary for the body to function the next day.
• Adults should aim for an average of seven to nine hours of sleep a night. Getting too little or too much sleep can have negative consequences. While too much sleep is associated with depression and weight gain, a lack of sleep is linked to a higher risk of accidents, impaired cognition, and a tendency to develop health conditions like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
• Sleep has four stages. The first stage is very light, where you drift in and out of rest. In stage two, the body begins to relax, your temperature drops, and breathing slows. Stage three is deep and restorative sleep, which is when most of the body’s restorative processes occur. Finally, stage four is the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, where dreaming occurs. Dreaming’s purpose is not certain, but it is likely one of the body’s ways of consolidating memories and processing emotions from the day.
• There are many common sleep disorders. Insomnia is a condition where people have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. Orthosomnia is a condition characterized by someone having an anxiety-inducing obsession with getting good sleep. Some people can also experience sleep paralysis, which occurs when the brain wakes from REM sleep before the body does, leaving the person temporarily unable to move.

The Interview

The guest: Dayna Johnson, PhD

The key takeaways:

• Environmental factors like light can have a significant impact on sleep quality. The natural cue of morning light helps regulate circadian rhythm—the body’s internal clock. Artificial light exposure during the night can disrupt circadian rhythm and decrease sleep quality. If you do not have easy access to natural light, simulating the sunrise with light therapy devices can be helpful.
• Along with sleep, circadian rhythm also affects hunger cues, hormone levels, and other processes in the body. Taking naps during the day can disrupt the body’s circadian rhythm, so it is best to get one long sleep session per night rather than broken-up sessions throughout the day. But if you really need a nap, try to limit it to 20 minutes.
• There are multiple factors that determine how healthy your sleep is. Quality sleep includes your consistency of sleep, satisfaction with sleep, level of alertness during the day, time of day when you are asleep, length of time asleep, and how much of your time in bed actually involves being asleep.
• Black and Brown communities often face more barriers than other groups when it comes to healthy sleep, as they tend to have more light, sound, and air pollution in their neighborhoods. These challenges make it physically more difficult to get quality sleep and contribute to broader health disparities.

The Listener Questions 

Does rice contain heavy metals?

A recent study compared levels of arsenic in brown versus white rice. The researchers looked for papers that measured how much arsenic was in each type of rice, took the average, used self-reported data about how much rice the average American eats, and calculated an estimated arsenic exposure level.

The study found that there aren’t significant differences in the amount of arsenic in white or brown rice in the U.S. 

Arsenic comes in organic and inorganic forms, both naturally occurring and man-made, but too much arsenic can cause cancer and skin lesions. 

Brown rice is rice that still has the husk, or “rice bran,” on it. White rice has had that removed. Brown rice is considered healthier because the rice bran contains micronutrients, but it’s thought that the bran can also pick up environmental contaminants in soil, like heavy metals. This is a bigger issue in places with high levels of industrial pollution.

Whether eating rice is dangerous or not depends on how much you eat. The limit of arsenic proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is 0.21 micrograms per kilogram of body weight a day. So, an adult would have to eat around two cups of cooked brown rice or two and a half cups of cooked white rice a day to hit that threshold.

The bigger concern is for kids under five, since they are smaller and likely have exposure to arsenic from other sources, like fresh fruit.

It’s really important to pay attention to environmental arsenic levels and control them by controlling pollution. But currently, this is another case of headlines blowing a paper out of proportion. Even the authors of the article say the levels of arsenic in the daily rice intake for average Americans were “of little concern.”

Is it safe for pregnant people to take SSRIs?

There have been some very large studies on the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in pregnancy and breastfeeding that found no increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders for the babies who are exposed.
One SSRI, Paxil, could slightly raise the risk of heart defects in babies when used in the first trimester, so it isn’t typically prescribed in pregnancy.

SSRIs are safe, and they are certainly safer than leaving depression untreated, which comes with the risk of premature birth, low birthweight, missing prenatal appointments, engaging in risky behavior like substance use, being unable to care for infants or existing children, having a hard time bonding with your baby, and more.

Not everyone is going to need SSRIs in pregnancy. It’s estimated that between 7 and 10% of pregnant people are prescribed antidepressants, of which SSRIs are the largest fraction.

But for people who do need them, they’re lifesaving and improve the quality of life for both parents and children.

Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:

• Streaming at wabe.org or the WABE app
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