This Common Sleeping Mistake Can Double Your Risk of a Heart Attack

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

Video has been removed from YouTube.

In my experience, you can have the best diet in the world, have the best exercise program and be free from emotional stress, but if you aren’t sleeping well, for whatever reason, it is virtually impossible to be healthy.

But how much sleep do you need for optimal health?

In this interview, Dr. Rubin Naiman — a clinical psychologist, author, teacher, and the leader in integrative medicine approaches to sleep and dreams—sheds light on this question.

Dr. Naiman earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Alliant University in San Diego.

During the 1990’s, he served as the sleep and dream specialist at Canyon Ranch Health Resort in Tucson for 10 years, where he created the first formal sleep laboratory outside of a hospital setting.

Dr. Andrew Weil was also on the staff at that time. Later, he served as director of sleep programs for Miraval Resort. In previous interview, we discussed what sleep actually is, the spiritual dimensions of sleep, the primary causes of insomnia, and why sleeping pills are not the answer. Here, Dr. Naiman delves into several of the most frequently asked questions about sleep, starting with:

How Much Sleep Do You Need?

Over the years, I’ve come to a conclusion that there is no perfect answer to this question because like everything else, the answer depends on a large number of highly individual factors. The general consensus seems to be that most people need somewhere between six and eight hours of sleep each night.

There’s compelling research indicating that sleeping less than six hours may increase your insulin resistance and risk of diabetes. And recent studies show that less than five hours of sleep at night can double your risk of being diagnosed with angina, coronary heart disease, heart attack or stroke. Interestingly enough, the same appears to be true when you sleep more than nine hours per night.

The question of the ideal amount of sleep is a topic Dr. Naiman has addressed on numerous occasions throughout his career as a sleep expert, and he agrees; people want a number, but this ‘number’ must be as individual as the person asking for it.

“I think asking ‘how many of hours of sleep should I get?’ is like asking, ‘Doctor, how many calories should I eat?'” he says. “Of course the answer to that depends on who that person is. It’s so individual. It also depends on the quality of those calories. Again, a lot of people are knocking themselves out night after night after night with sleeping pills. They may be getting seven to eight hours, but is it sleep? It looks like sleep. It might feel like sleep, but you know what, it’s not really sleep. That’s part of the question too—the quality of it.”

Insufficient Sleep Puts Your Health at Risk

Dr. Naiman is familiar with the studies showing increased health risks when you sleep more or less than a certain amount, but is still cautious about taking these findings as the final word on the matter.

“There is really interesting data,” he says. “I think the data is very strong showing that if you don’t sleep enough, you’re in trouble.”

However, it’s important to differentiate between occasional lack of sleep, and a chronic pattern. Everyone loses sleep here and there, and your body is typically resilient enough to allow for that. However, when poor sleep becomes a constant, there’s no question your health may be at risk.

“The American Cancer Society did a study of a million American adults, and short sleepers showed a dramatic increase in risk of cancers across the board,” Dr. Naiman says. “So we know that there is a mountain of data showing if you don’t sleep enough, you’re going to get yourself sick…

The other end of it, I think, is a little more suspicious. When you say people are sleeping too much, questions arise like ‘why?’ It may be that in some of those studies they don’t have frank illnesses. These are people who don’t qualify clinically as having diabetes or heart disease. But they may have metabolic syndrome; they may have very early stage of underlying chronic inflammatory process.”

Potential Causes for Sleeping “Too Much”

One of the first indications that you may be getting sick is that your body tries to rest, as sleeping helps strengthen your immune system. So chronically sleeping longer than the average eight or nine hours could be an early indication that you have an underlying illness your body is trying to recover from.

However, the need for more sleep could also be an individual requirement, or even a sign of your body being in tune with a more natural rhythm…

“The data suggests that if you go back 100 years, people were sleeping an average of nine hours a night,” Dr. Naiman says. “People also had a very different relationship with sleep at that time. Sleep patterns were very different. It was routine that people woke up in the middle of the night for about an hour or two. It was called night watch. Everybody did it. People also slept during the day.

Think of the Yin and Yang; the white wave representing in this case waking; the dark Yin wave representing night and sleep. There is a dark Yin sphere within the white wave. This is a place of rest in the middle of waking consciousness and natural rhythms. In the middle of the dark Yin wave, there is a place of Yang, a white sphere suggesting that there is a place where awareness, a kind of waking, awareness in the middle of the night.

When we lose sight of that, we overreact to two things. We tend to overreact to being sleepy during the day, and we tend to overreact to being awake at night. And overreactions cause anxiety.”

To Nap or Not to Nap…

According to Dr. Naiman, we’re actually biologically programmed to nap during the daytime, typically in the middle of the afternoon. Some European countries still adhere to the daily siesta and close shop for a couple of hours in the middle of the day when the heat is also at its most pressing. Most employers in Western countries, however, do not accommodate daily snoozing, so when the natural tendency to get drowsy sets in, you may try to alleviate it with coffee, or simply fight the urge to take a nap.

The problem is, you’re now training your body to resist the urge to sleep, which can then lead to being unable to easily fall asleep at night.

“Also, in the middle of the night, when we falsely assume that any kind of awareness is pathological inside, people get up and go, “Oh crap, its insomnia.” I’ve asked hundreds and hundreds of people over the years… “What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you wake up in the middle of the night?” The most common answer I’ve gotten over the years is, “Oh, sh*t.” People wake up and they curse their wakefulness.”

However, as Dr. Naiman explains, occasional waking in the middle of the night, perhaps as many as five times, is actually completely normal. You may pull up the covers or fluff your pillow, then go back to sleep.

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