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Hi this is Jessica Green Wellness Coordinator here at Stonehill College. Today we have Professor John
0:08
McCloy who is gonna come talk to us about sleep, how important it is, how to get a good nights
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rest and why every college student needs more of it. Hi John, welcome! Hi Jess.
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Thanks for having me. Thanks, so tell us a little about you. I'm a professor in the Psychology
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Department. I'm the director of the Neuroscience Program, which is
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neuroscience kind of combines biology and psychology and chemistry
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to try to understand the relationship between the brain and behavior. And my area of
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research has to do with sleep. That's good, thank you. Yeah absolutely we all need more sleep I can
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tell you that. So tell me a little bit about why do you think sleep is so important and why do we
0:51
we need a good amount of it. Well you know it's interesting you know I think
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we all have a sense of you know if I ask someone
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why do you sleep? They'll usually say you know well because it restores
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me or it's refreshing or you know I feel better and
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that's true. You know we all feel that way but you know as scientists
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we need to have something that's measurable and so for many
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years it was difficult. You know we had that sense that something is being restored. You
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know when we get a good night's sleep we feel refreshed and restored but what is it that is
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being restored and you know it's only been more recent years that
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you know scientists have actually been able to measure and study physical
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restoration and repair in the brain as well as cognitive restoration and repair in the brain.
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So for example you know some of the things that are being
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restored when we sleep, what involves let me
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say that when we're awake all day we're we're using more energy, we're moving
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around we're thinking, we're generating free radicals.
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Which for those who haven't had chemistry since high school it's an atom or a
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group of atoms that has an unpaired electron that will react
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readily with tissue in the brain or in the body and what free radicals
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can do is essentially oxidize your tissue which is like
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rust really. So when free radicals accumulate over time,
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it's like a rusting of your brain and body and it contributes to aging,
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premature aging, so for example chronic sleep can prematurely age
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you and so when we sleep when we go
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into deeper sleep there are mechanisms that they clear away these free radicals
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and this is critical. So if you're chronically sleep deprived,
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as we call a short sleep. If you're only sleeping five or six hours
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a night instead of seven to nine hours over time you know free radicals
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can accumulate and it can cause you know premature aging. So that's
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one reason. Wow, are there other negative consequences of not getting enough sleep? Oh
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there's multiple so you know when we're
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asleep there's hormones related to growth. So for young people
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and in college they're often still growing so you know you need it for
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proper growth, you need it for clearing other toxic compounds
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from the brain for example beta amyloid is a protein
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that is linked to Alzheimer 's disease and beta amyloid
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will much somewhat similar to free radicals can accumulate
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and sleep has the effect of
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removing free radicals.So there appears to be a link between
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sleeping and lack of sleep and Alzheimer's is possibly
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as well as other forms of dementia. There is you know the lack of sleep is
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tied to all sorts of physical problems like aside from that like
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increased incidences of heart attack and stroke, obesity, diabetes.
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To just choose one of those heart attacks, it's been documented that
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you know daylight savings in the springtime we lose one hour of sleep.
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The next twenty four hours there's a twenty four percent increase in heart attacks
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worldwide and in that day simply because we lost one hour of sleep.
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It's very detrimental. So I'm wondering if college students are losing sleep
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you know at night and trying to make up for it napping during the day. Are naps recommended or is that not a
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good way to catch up on sleep. No I think you know I mean there's some controversy about
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naps. Most people think that they're okay and in fact
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there are many proponents of naps including myself. I think the main thing
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is that though that naps should be held to
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fifteen to maybe twenty five minutes at most. And
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if your body is requiring more than fifteen/twenty minute nap then that tells
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me that you're probably not getting a good night's sleep at night time. And also if you
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do nap beyond that. Take a ninety minute nap or something like that. You wake up
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and you often feel worse than you did when you know you're you're really asleep now because
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your brain, in your brain there is a gland called the pineal gland that's secreting melatonin
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and when we're in deeper sleep and it's sort of pulling your body into thinking
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that it's nighttime. And so now you're in this kind of nighttime mode and so you don't want
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to take a real long nap because that's gonna put you into that night time. But if
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you take a shorter one you know power naps as they if call it, there's many people who I love to get
6:22
one. I can't do it often but on the weekends as long as you keep it short. And if you
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keep it short and you still feel tired then to me that tells me you're probably not getting enough sleep at night time.
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And I wonder if you could make up for lost sleep so I hear a lot of students say "oh well you know I
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usually get a couple hours sleep, you know maybe four five hours sleep during the week but on the weekends
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I sleep in I sleep ten twelve fourteen hours" Is this not a good habit? What are some pros and
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cons to sleeping a long time on the weekends? I will say that
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I was similar to most college students as well and of course I didn't know
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all the things that I know now about sleeping. So what we call
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this is sleep debt and I think many or most of our students understand
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the financial concept of debt so now this sleep analogy is that you know if you're
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only sleeping four five six hours a night you're accumulating sleep debt you
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need to get it back you need to pay back that sleep and then what happens is the student
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student will sleep in on Saturday and Sunday morning. The problem with that
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is that one problem with that is that especially if
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you sleep until like say eleven or twelve is that you now reset your biological
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clock. So you know you're Circadian control shifted and
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let's say you have an early morning class on Monday morning and you slept in till eleven or
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twelve on Saturday and Sunday. Well you're not gonna get to sleep until three o'clock
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in the morning on Sunday night and you know that's one problem associated it's
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much better to try. Alright you know I always say try because you know
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who's sleep is perfect? Certainly not mine I have an occasional insomnia.
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I have stress just like every everyone has anxiety and various things we have to worry
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about. But I'm a lot more conscious of sleep than I used to be
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and I try really try to get seven to nine hours which is what
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most people need and I try to keep that fair as constant as possible and
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also in the same period of time. So that you're not shifting at your notch you know
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sleeping later or earlier you know you stay within the same
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time frame and that seems to be the best for health. That's good to know, that the same
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time going to bed at night whether it's later, as long as it's consistent it's really helpful.
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I also hear students say "well you know I had this big test I had to study for or paper to do if I
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pulled an all nighter." I was wondering you could just talk about some of the pitfalls or perhaps staying up all night and then trying
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to do good work the next day. Pulling an all nighter from the sleep researchers point of view is
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the worst possible thing that you could do in college for a number
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of reasons. One of one of the functions of sleep that I haven't discussed yet is
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cognitive restoration. Your brain needs
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sleep for optimal learning and memory and cognitive performance
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and there is a huge amount of research on this now in the past two decades
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that confirms that it's critical. Most especially for the forming of new
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long term memories. So when you have information that comes in as a short
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term memory that you have to rehearse. If it's something that you wanna put into long term memory
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when you don't have to rehearse it anymore until the day of the exam and recall it, the process
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of going from short term to long term memory is called consolidation and proper
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sleep is critical for consolidation to work properly. So if you're
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staying up all night you're going to have almost like
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an amnesiac kind of syndrome and you may well show up on the test and blank
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out completely even if you don't, even if you did do well on that test you're
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not gonna retain that information in the future and you know I know students are
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concerned about grades but really the goal is for you to learn something that you retain
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long after the exam is over. The other thing I wanted to say about pulling an all
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night is that it severely suppresses your immune system. So
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for example there are certain immune cells called natural killer cells that are suppressed
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and that over the long term that could increase your chances of certain
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kinds of cancer but in the short term and the more short term if
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you suppress your immune system you're likely to get sick. If you get sick
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now guess what? You're gonna miss like three or four more classes, you're gonna fall further behind
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and you know so it has the opposite effect on your grades. You know
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you're trying to do well in school but in the long run it's going to
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do the opposite. So you know it's essential to try to get sleep. I understand
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that students fall behind because I did in college and you know sometimes you wind
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up staying up a little later then you wanted to but to pull an all nighter
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is just there's multiple bad things associated with that. I concur.
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I also heard of and I'm not sure if you can back this up but sleep deprivation is equal
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to you know being drowsy like when driving or drunk driving like when you're sleep deprived
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it's almost like you're that paired as someone who will be drunk driving. Yeah
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after about sixteen hours of being awake
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you know if you think about it you should be sleeping about
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one third of your life since we should sleep about eight hours out of every twenty four.
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So after sixteen hours of wakefulness, we begin to see
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the effects both physical and cognitive and then if it's
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up around twenty hours that you've been awake at that point
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your attention, your concentration, memory function is beginning
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to go. Attention and concentration lapses are equivalent at that point
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to someone who's legally drunk that is true. And you talked a little bit about
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how sleep affects your health, I'm wondering if you found that there's also a mental health tie
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or if there's any connection between anxiety or emotional
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health in your sleep if you want to talk a little about that. It's tied to anxiety and depression.
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When I talk about the brain and students ask about the brain, I say look everything
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that's good for your heart is good for your brain. The kinds of foods that are good for your heart are good for your
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brain, you know blueberries and strawberries that have antioxidants have a protective
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effect for the heart and for the brain. Exercising is good for your heart and your brain
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sleeping properly is good for your heart and for your brain so it doesn't surprise me that
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you know lack of sleep is associated with heart problems but it's also
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associated with anxiety and depression which tend to go together. A
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very large percentage of severe depressive cases.
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there is co- diagnosis with an anxiety disorder.
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And we're beginning to understand how we don't fully understand how it affects
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the brain and how this occurs but we're beginning to see some studies that show a
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decrease in what's called neurogenesis. so neurogenesis
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is the formation of new brain cells which until about twenty years ago was
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thought to only occur during fetal and
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embryological development and then as adults it was thought you know you only get so many brain
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cells and that's it and up you don't get any more and in many parts of the brain
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that still true. Where you reach a certain level and then
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it stops from there and you try to take care of the ones that you have remaining. But we now know that there
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are certain parts of the brain like the hippocampus and certain parts of the cortex, the
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outer part of the brain, that engage in adult neurogenesis which means all throughout
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our life, you know I'm in my mid fifties, okay.
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I think about this often because I actually have, as I tell my students, I have fewer neurons
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than they do because a lot of my neurons are dying off. Which is a little frightening to consider but
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the ones that are left can you know I can stave off the
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severe decline in numbers because adult neurogenesis occurs and
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what stimulates that is proper sleep, proper exercise, proper
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diet, all of these basic things can you know and if you don't get
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those things for example if you're chronically sleep deprived that can suppress
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neurogenesis and it can actually result in far fewer neurons
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being regenerated in the hippocampus. And we think right not to get
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too far into it but we think that that is linked to the anxiety and depression. Wow.
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So if someone is anxious or they're struggling with mental health that
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not only makes it harder for them to get a good night sleep but then their lack of sleep will then kind
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refueled that feeling and those anxieties and that mental health cycle.
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It is. There is a vicious cycle there and when we're thinking
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of sort of a vicious cycle also it sort of triggers the
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notion of, you asked earlier before the show
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about caffeine rand coffee and things. Yeah. And I must admit that I love
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coffee. I can't imagine my life without it so I need my morning
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coffee and occasionally I'll have this small coffee after lunch
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but you know I know my body pretty well now and that's all
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I can have at around maybe one o'clock. Any
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after that in the later afternoon or at night time if I have caffeinated beverages.
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it will impair my sleep. Okay if I have something to work on
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it may make me feel better. And we do understand why that is the case,
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why it wakes you up, why it can contribute to your concentration and so forth but you pay a
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price for that and the price that you pay is that when you come down from it
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you have excess, you have what's called residual hyper
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somnolence or sleepiness. Including changes in emotional
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liability which is a fancy way of saying you feel grumpy or you know your
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moods, you have mood swings the following day you don't feel very good. So and you're
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very very tired. So what to people do to try to stave off the tiredness? Drink
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more caffeine. Exactly and so there's this vicious cycle where you're chasing your tail
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constantly. this is not good also you know so. I've also heard
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alcoholic can impair a good night's sleep that it affects your ability into REM cycle is
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that correct? It's somewhat and it also you
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know I think I remember one of my grandparents who used to you know this old wives
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tale about you know just have a little nip of bourbon or whatever and that'll put you down.
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You know the thing with alcohol is not an effective hypnotic which is
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you know sleeping medication because although it may put you down to sleep quickly
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it actually induces what's called often induces maintenance and some. Which
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occurs a lot in older people and also people who drink. So
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it's like you know you fall asleep quick but then you wake up in the middle of the night and you can't get back to sleep.
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So you know alcohol does
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alter your sleep patterns and ways that are that are not good for you either. Something to think about in a
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college campus is that occurs, especially if it's a weekly basis right or thinking about habits
18:53
that were developing and how clean practice, good sleep hygiene, and if our habits are something that we're doing that are
18:58
negatively effecting us on a weekly basis montly basis that goes to affect us long
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term. Absolutely. Do you have any tips about getting a good night sleep or how to have good sleep
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hygiene? Sure, one of the things you know
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from a historical perspective one might argue that sleep
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hasn't been quote normal since the invention of the
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lightbulb. If you think about it you know back years
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ago in the seventeen hundreds. It's like you know they had candlelight
19:34
and you'd eat dinner and maybe read by candlelight a little better. You know but then they
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fall asleep pretty darn early and this doesn't happen at all anymore. There's
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lights everywhere but now to complicate matters
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this is what I mean and and there's no going back I mean here we sit
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in the middle of technology everywhere and all students have laptops they have
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you know smart phones they have all sorts of different computers. Laptops,
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the blue light really alters and impairs your sleep
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terribly so I would say you know what you wanna do and it's hard
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to do because a lot of students take these devices with them to bed is to
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never do that. You need to train yourself that the bed is for sleeping,
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okay? Other things to be done elsewhere. Like preferably
20:32
in another room you know and keep the electronic devices out
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of the bedroom or at least out of the bed. Don't take them to bed with you because it is going
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to impair your sleep sure you'll fall asleep but the quality of your sleep will not be very good.
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I hear a lot of students say "Oh I just check my phone and scroll through like Instagram or Facebook before bed" and
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so that blue light is actually keeping them more awake and making it hard for them to fall asleep if they do that and also the
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information. The information is keeping you thinking. So I mean
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that's definitely something to keep in mind and it's something we have to all
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try our best to manage but if there's many other tips to just be
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more aware to try your best to stay on a regular cycle,
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to to limit your caffeine intake in the late afternoon and
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try not to have any in the late afternoon or evening. Exercise
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is great for you I encourage that, but if you exercise late at night.
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you know what happens is you activate your autonomic nervous system, your sympathetic
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nervous system. It sort of causes your body to react as if there's
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a threat and you're reacting in a fight flight kind of way and it takes hours
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to come down from that. So you know exercise is great but maybe in the morning
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or the afternoon maybe not in the evening. I realize that may not be possible for the
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athletes. I know I've heard of some athletes practicing as late of nine o'clock at night. Yeah that's hard
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You know I guess if they have late classes that might work but if they're,
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if they have class at eight thirty in the morning you know they may not be falling asleep
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until two in the morning you know. So little things like that and just
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trying your best to stay on a regular schedule. Understanding that no one 's perfect
22:29
and that I understand that on the weekend you might sleep a little later, it feels good but
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you know sleeping until eight or nine is different than sleeping until
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eleven or twelve. If you sleep till eleven or twelve you're really resetting your biological clock.
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In a way that it's almost like that's another thing with all nighters is that you're completely
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resetting your biological clock and in a way that is gonna take several more days
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for you to get back on schedule. Yeah it's hard. I also heard
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if you are hungry you know college students they eat dinner at like five or six and they're up
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till maybe midnight you know if they have a healthy snack trying to keep that like low in fat
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low in sugar so that doesn't that digestion doesn't keep them up late at night. You don't want be snacking
23:17
on like you know ice cream sundays or brownies or chips, things that are really fatty, greasy, sugary
23:23
because that can kinda keep you awake too. That's true. Although I don't wanna be a hypocrite. Late night ice cream!
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And say I've never done it. But you know at least
23:33
when if I engage in that sort of behavior I know it's wrong and I shouldn't do it. Yeah try
23:38
to limit it. And I know a lot of our students have roommates and sometimes their schedules are
23:43
off like some people are morning people some might be evening people. I've always suggested some type of like
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shutting out noise. So either like ear plugs or like a sound
23:54
machine or a fan just to drown out if you wake easily that that can be something that's helpful to
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people. Sure, yeah. Do have any other tips or anything you wanted
24:05
to talk about to help students get a good night's sleep and then be able
24:10
to be better ready to make their academics successful.
24:15
I think we've covered quite a bit. You know one thing that I wanted to mention also
24:20
is not only is it not good for you to be a quote short sleeper,
24:25
it's not good for you to be a long sleeper either. Oh, sleeping too much? So
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yeah it's really that window of seven to nine hours for most people is what we should get
24:36
per night and people who sleep significantly less or more
24:41
than that it's associated with a shortened lifespan in both cases.
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It's not completely understood why but you know so
24:52
both sleeping too little and sleeping too much chronically are both
24:57
associated with a shorter lifespan so you wanna be right
25:02
there in that pocket of seven to nine hours for adolescences it's a little different,
25:07
eight to ten. and for high school students and
25:15
interestingly because they're going through puberty and adolescence there seems
25:20
to be a bit of a shift. And so for high school students there's a reason why they feel very slick
25:25
you know it's kind of an old saying that parents complain about that
25:31
my lazy son or daughter is complaining all the time about how you can't get them out of bed or whatever but
25:36
and maybe that's contributing but it turns out that there's actually an endocrine reason for
25:41
why they feel really sleepy and ideally we should kind of shift the bus schedule back
25:46
about an hour. I always thought that as well it's too early to be at school at seven seven thirty in the morning
25:51
for high school kids. There's a
25:56
researcher at Brown who's done all of this work with adolescents and the best thing would be
26:01
to move the buses back but it becomes sort of a political issue as well because
26:07
how are we gonna do we're gonna move everything back an hour. If you did that then you know sports
26:12
practice has to be backed up an hour and you know so there's it's but I think ideally
26:17
for their body you know it's like eight to ten hours for adolescents
26:22
but really that's kind of shifting as we get into like eighteen nineteen twenty
26:28
-year-olds and then it reverts back to like seven to nine and you wanna just stay right in that pocket
26:33
and continue that throughout your life. That's the goal. That's good to know.
26:38
And if someone's not getting enough sleep or they're sleeping too much there could be underlying causes too so
26:43
it's always good we like to reach out to resources so here at Stonehill College we have health
26:48
services and counseling services who can do a check in and look at your sleep schedule and
26:53
the Health and Wellness Center also goes over sleep hygiene tips and ways to
26:59
help you get a good night's sleep. I just thought of one more thing can I mention one more thing? Yeah absolutely.
27:04
So one more point is that college students
27:09
often especially Stonehill students have very full lives and they
27:14
kind of pride themselves on you know being a good student and I have a part
27:19
time job and I'm involved in various extracurricular things and I also wanna have a social
27:24
life because I'm young and and I get all that you know and then what
27:29
they'll do, not just Stonehill students but all college students is they'll engage
27:34
in what we were refer to as sleep fragmentation. That is catch a couple hours of sleep
27:40
here and a few more hours of sleep there and you know hopefully it will all add up
27:45
to say seven hours per night. But it turns out that fragmenting
27:50
your sleep results in sleep that is not as high quality
27:55
sleep and so you might not get enough. delta wave activity which is the slow wave
28:01
activity that is correlated with being cognitively refreshed
28:06
and in doing well in concentration and understanding and so forth.
28:12
So you know fragments of sleep that add up to seven or eight
28:17
hours is not as good as seven or eight hours of continuously. Wow
28:22
so if you wanna you know be able to memorize that paper or understand that passage that
28:27
you're reading having fragmented sleep will really inhibit that but having a full eight hours straight
28:32
will actually help improve your memory concentration. That's right and my once
28:38
again you know I'm not saying I'm perfect even to this day and and certainly not when I was in college
28:43
there were times when my sleep is fragmented. You know
28:48
towards the end of the semester and you've got a lab report due and you've got this other test to study for you know
28:54
I get it you know life is not perfect but you just wanna be conscious of these things and
28:59
and try to do your best. I just have one more question. I was thinking of some of the ways students were using
29:04
technology to help with sleep such as like sleep apps or meditations, do you recommend those
29:09
or does that keep you awake? W ell you know this is an area that my students
29:15
usually know more about that where they sort of oh let me show you this and
29:21
you know so I think us older folks we're little slower on the drawl but I
29:26
I find it very interesting. I mean for example we used to have to test sleep waves
29:31
EEG wave patterns we used to have to bring someone into the sleep lab
29:37
for several nights and you know it's not your normal bedroom so you're kind of you
29:42
know you kinda don't like it at first and it takes a night or two to sort of adjusting. But now
29:47
they're you're able to do that on your on your smart phone and now the
29:52
EEG readings are not quite as accurate but students can gain
29:57
some semblance of understanding of whether they're getting enough slow wave sleep, whether
30:02
they're getting enough REM sleep. There are apps out there for that, they can combine it with other things
30:07
like you said and you know I'm open to that to the various things I don't know about all of
30:12
them. I've heard also on your Fitbit that we can actually track your sleep to and
30:17
it'll tell you like how long you been asleep for so very important stuff. Well thank you so much Mr. McCoy!
30:23
I appreciate you being here and talking to us about sleep would love to have you back again sometime later this semester. Thank
30:28
you for having me. Thanks again, take care.
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This is a machine transcription and is subject to error. Apologizes in advance.