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10 31 24 Sleep expert Dr Harvey Karp on how ending daylight saving time impacts us
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Plus buying in bulk means you can get as much or as little as you like for your next recipe or snack attack. Visit your neighborhood Sprouts Farmers Market today, or fly for fills every scoop. Are you getting ready to fall back? The end of daylight saving time happening at 2 a.m. Sunday morning. For some of us, it's a giant disruption to sleep patterns. And joining us now on the KOA Common Spirit Health Hotline to talk about it in detail. Sleep expert Dr. Harvey Karp, Dr. Thank you. Glad to have you here on Colorado's Morning News. Just to level set to begin with, is the hour changed? Is it more psychological or is there real biometric changes with the time change for us in our sleep? You're exactly right. Actually, it isn't just all in your mind. It does change the body. And it's associated with that loss of an hour is associated with increased illness, increased heart attack. It has a real effect on the body. Listen, we're learning more and more. Sleep is not, you know, it's not like if you can sleep for hours, you're a bigger man. You know what I mean? You need your sleep for your health and for the working of your brain. When we talk about springing forward or this upcoming falling back is one time change easier on our bodies than others or is it really just difficult no matter which way we go? Yeah. Great question. So, springing, getting an extra hour of sleep is always going to be better because we're sleep deprived nation to begin with. And it turns out our brains really are set to a 24 and a half hour sleep cycle. So we're all kind of off the ragged edge to begin with. So, losing an hour definitely makes it tough. As a doctor in this space, would you recommend that we don't change time and just have some uniform time, uniform time all year round? I don't have an answer to that to be honest with you. I think that there are economic and political reasons for doing it. It's kind of beyond my take rate. When we talk about the falling back or the jumping forward, we love to always joke about the pets because they have no idea what in the world's happening. They're like, I'm hungry. I'm supposed to be eating right now. But there is one that you can adjust and it comes to kids. That's a way to make sure that kids stay on a regular sleep routine when we fall back this weekend. Well, there are a couple of things that we can do for our kids and for adults as well. Number one, get a lot of sun exposure. Sun is the best thing to readjust your time clock. So get out, do a little exercise, get some sun exposure early morning. Number two, turn the lights down like an hour before bedtime. Start darkening the house a little bit. And I often recommend white noise, which is like a rumbly sound in the background. And when you do that about a half hour before bedtime, it kind of sets your brain. You're not going to fall asleep with a rumble of an airplane or a train or a car. So that kind of gets the brain in the mood. And then the last thing is you can give a little melatonin about an hour before bedtime like for an adult three milligrams for a child, one to three milligrams. Not something you're going to do on a prolonged basis, but you can do it for a few nights. The last thing for little kids is to start before daylight savings or go after, if you didn't do it before daylight savings, don't change their schedule all at once. But do it 20 minutes a day over three days or so. So push it 20 minutes later over three days to make it a gradual transition for them. Dr. I also hear that some of the other things, do you have heard that it's not good necessarily to have alcohol before you go to bed. I've also heard that you don't want to be on your phone necessarily watch TV. Is that still a case? Does it upset our sleeping rhythms or what is it, the circadian rhythms that we hear about? Yeah, exactly. Urban legends and urban realities. So it turns out the urban legend about drinking to help you fall asleep when you drink, but you tend to wake up in the middle of the night. So it actually is disruptive for sleep. But the TVs and the computers, your phone have a bluish color light, which actually turns off your body's natural melatonin, which is the sleep hormone. And so if you're using a computer, a lot of people have to do that or you're watching TV, they have special glasses that block the blue rays of the light and you can purchase those. And that helps your brain not get thrown off by the blue light that's coming off of the devices. Final question. And it's about overall health, Dr. I know you're an expert in the sleep realm, but when it comes to exercise, diet and sleep, is there a hierarchy or are they all equal or should we prioritize sleep a little more than I think as you've alluded to that, maybe we do. Yeah, it's like you prefer vitamin A, vitamin T or vitamin C, which is the most important vitamins. It's kind of hard to differentiate. They are all important and we know that we are a sleep-deprived nation. I mean, the number of hours people sleep over the last 50 and 100 years has gone down one to two hours. So it's, it's, you know, we're on the ragged edge. It's part of the reason why people are so irritable I think is, you know, it's not just the political discourse. It's that everybody is working for jobs and, you know, trying to jam in everything else. When it comes to babies, I would say parents are the most sleep-deprived of the entire population. And one of the things we do is teach, well, we have this baby bed that tens of thousands of people get for free now called SNU. And this is an employer benefit, so big employers like Chase Bank and Under Armour and lots of companies like that give this as a benefit because we can give babies an extra hour or two, which means the parents can get an extra hour maybe longer than that, which is really life-saving when it comes to taking care of a baby. Sleep expert and author of the Parent Guides, the happiest baby on the block and happiest toddler on the block, it's Dr. Harvey Karp. There's only one feeling like knowing your banker personally. Growing up with a bank you can count on, like being sure what you've earned is safe, secure, and local, there's only one feeling like knowing you're supporting your community. You deserve more from a bank. You deserve an institution that stood strong for generations. Bank of Colorado, there's only one. Remember FDIC.