PowerLiving with Kimberlee Langford
PowerLiving with Kimberlee Langford
Snooze or Lose: The Surprising Ways Poor Sleep Sabotages Your Health
Sleep is the foundation of health that too many of us take for granted. We dismiss fatigue as normal aging, snoring as a mere annoyance, and interrupted sleep as something to endure rather than address. This harmful mindset is costing us dearly in terms of our overall wellbeing and longevity.
Did you know that 90% of people with sleep apnea remain undiagnosed? This silent condition creates a cascade of health problems as your body struggles to compensate for interrupted breathing. Your heart works overtime, potentially leading to enlargement and eventual congestive heart failure. Your kidneys become stressed when circulation is compromised. Your brain misses its nightly detoxification process when the glymphatic system can't properly clear waste products. The stress hormones released during poor sleep drive inflammation, weight gain, and push those predisposed toward diabetes over the edge into full-blown disease.
The cognitive impacts are equally concerning. Research shows a 13% decline in cognitive function with poor sleep quality—imagine trying to perform at work or make important decisions with that handicap. Your mood, personality, and emotional regulation all suffer when sleep is compromised. Meanwhile, growth hormone—essential for cellular repair and metabolism—primarily releases during deep sleep phases that many of us aren't reaching.
The solution doesn't require expensive supplements or complicated protocols. Remove electronics from your bedroom, prioritize consistent sleep hours, front-load your fluid intake earlier in the day, and address any urinary or prostate issues rather than simply accepting them. Remember your mother's wisdom: go outside and play, eat your vegetables, and get to bed on time. These three simple pillars support optimal health at any age.
If you wake feeling tired despite adequate hours in bed, or find yourself waking multiple times throughout the night, talk to your healthcare provider about sleep apnea screening. Quality sleep isn't a luxury—it's essential preventive medicine and perhaps the most underrated health intervention available to us all.
Power. Living with Kimberly Langford, where inspiration meets empowerment. Kimberly is a nurse, executive leadership coach, reiki master and your guide on this journey to whole person wellness. Hey friends, let's talk about sleep. How well do you sleep and are you aware of the critical role that sleep plays in your overall health? Powerful, in fact, in working upstream from some of the critical role that sleep plays in your overall health. Powerful, in fact, in working upstream from some of the highest cost conditions in healthcare. We see sleep as an important role, an important factor in anything having to do with inflammation of any kind.
Speaker 1:Did you know that 90% of folks with sleep apnea don't know that they have it? Sleep apnea sneaks up on people very quietly and insidiously over time and most people aren't aware, unless you're lucky enough to have a spouse who hits you in the middle of the night and tells you that you're snoring. But for many folks snoring is just snoring. We fix that by sleeping in a different bedroom. Now we can talk at another time about why that's really not good for your marriage, okay, but you know it's not just a matter of keeping your spouse awake. Snoring signals it's one of the most common easy little warning signals that you might want to talk to your doctor about your risk for sleep apnea. Folks typically carry a higher risk for sleep apnea when they're over 50. And if they tend to be carrying a little extra weight or they snore. Now, keep in mind, not everybody who's overweight has sleep apnea, and some folks who are very thin and fit. Also, my son is a bicyclist, like holy cow, fit as a fiddle, and I think he has some sleep apnea too.
Speaker 1:But what happens when folks have sleep apnea is when you fall asleep you stop breathing and when that happens, your heart says don't worry about it, I'm going to pick up and I'm going to work a little bit harder, a little bit faster, because the lungs can't do their job. And then you rouse a little bit and you take a breath and you know you do that throughout the night and you don't get good rest. You get a lot of interrupted sleep and most people they think you know oh gosh, yeah, I'm tired all the time, but I'm getting older. Let me just be clear Losing control of your urine, ladies, if you've had babies, incontinence is not a normal thing that you have to put up with. Neither is getting tired a normal thing that you have to put up with. Neither is getting tired. When you get older. It is not normal or healthy for you to pack on extra weight those things. Or when you get older, you're not. You know aches and pains that is not a normal part of aging. But we tend to brush some of those things under the rug as a part of aging. But it's really important. If you find that you wake tired, you need to take a nap. You can't stay awake during a meeting. I mean, I've had patients I've talked to who literally, they were afraid of losing their job because they could not stay awake on the job.
Speaker 1:And what happens when you have sleep apnea to a couple of different well, a few things. You have sleep apnea to a couple of different well, a few things. Actually, your inflammation goes up and if you know anything about inflammation, the adrenal glands that sit on top of your kidneys. They pump out more steroids which actually can increase your sugar. So if you have a predispensation, so to speak, for type 2 diabetes, if you're on that pathway already, there you go. You don't want that. So it can absolutely play a role in diabetes and inflammation in any degree.
Speaker 1:But also the heart muscle, like we talked about. The heart muscle says don't worry, I'm going to work a little bit harder. The heart is a muscle. It's a pretty fantastic muscle. Did you know you can cut out a chunk of your heart and it will beat independently, all on its own. Your heart is a gorgeous muscle and it will work hard when your lungs aren't doing their part. And, just like any muscle, you work it and it grows. And so people that have undiagnosed sleep apnea for a long time no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Catching sleep apnea is that people develop congestive heart failure because this enlarged heart can't manage all that fluid and then people, people basically drown in their, in their own fluids. That's awful, and this is why it plays such a powerful role in kidney disease, because people with congestive heart failure or CHF, they can very easily go into fluid overload, where they just have too much fluid on board because it can't get to, where it can't circulate right. And if it can't circulate, then you're not going to be able to get rid of the extra fluids, not going to be able to pee that off. And so what happens? You have this kidney that's overloaded and then you have damage because of that. Now you also have a kidney that's not able to filter as well, so you can see how these things they kind of snowball on each other.
Speaker 1:The other thing that can happen is that, well, sleep apnea actually dramatically impacts your personality. It can make people moody, it can change people's personality 13% decline in your cognitive function and it gets better from there. We have a system. You have a glymphatic system, which is basically the fluid that runs all over the body and goes up. It crosses the blood brain barrier, gets in there and bays the brain and your cerebral spinal fluid and the glymphatic system. When you sleep, waste products and toxins are released and they're moved through this system, the glymphatic system, into the rest of the body so that you can circulate it through and get rid of those things.
Speaker 1:Well, when you have sleep apnea and interrupted sleep, your body doesn't get a chance to do that. Sleep is so important, as you can tell. It impacts your heart, it impacts your brain, it impacts your whole endocrine system, your it impacts your brain, it impacts your whole endocrine system and you know sleep apnea, and interrupted sleep in particular, can play a huge role in terms of not just your overall quality but your longevity as well. It's really an important thing to pay attention to a couple of my favorite tips. If you are having interrupted sleep, few things. Get the TV out of the bedroom. If you have a TV in your bedroom, get it out. Your bedroom should be preserved for sleep and other fun activities, all right. So sleep and intimacy is what your bedroom is for. For watching tv, um, just having a tv in the bedroom? We know that we call this sleep hygiene. It absolutely plays a role in the overall quality of your sleep.
Speaker 1:Some folks have a hard time, um, especially women if you have any incontinence, or men if you have an issue with your prostate. Sometimes during the day it's hard to drink enough, because you know if you drink enough you're gonna have to go pee and doggone it. You have to work. I mean, I've known people that they specifically withhold a water pill or they'll not drink before they go to a medical appointment because their incontinence or their urgency meaning that they have to go to the bathroom frequently is so bad. And so what can happen sometimes is and that's a whole other topic for another day but what can happen sometimes is that we wait until the end of the day to try to get our fluids in and then you're up all night. It's so much better when you front load your fluids. I start every day with a quart of water and that way I know if I get crazy busy I'm half the way there at the start of my morning. It really kind of jump starts your circulation and boosts your energy as well. Front loading your fluids means that if the day gets away from you, you just have to have a couple more cups at lunchtime, maybe a cup or two at dinnertime, and you know you're not, your blood pressure isn't going to bottom out, you're going to be okay. So I encourage folks front load your fluids if at all possible. First thing, when you wake up, you're going to be busy anyway getting dressed, brushing your teeth, all the stuff that you do in the morning. You're right there by the bathroom.
Speaker 1:If you have trouble with incontinence, ladies, please ask your doctor for a therapy consult. There is so much you can do and incontinence is not just embarrassing and it's not just inconvenient. I've seen older women die of urinary tract infections as we get older. There's a whole other topic we'll get off on. But as we get older the uterus drops. Especially if you've had children, everything drops. Come to think of it. The uterus drops a little bit puts pressure, the urethra gets shorter and so bacteria has a much shorter pathway to travel. It's already a pretty quick entrance just because the opening for the urethra, the vagina, is really close to the rectum in females. Men, you got an advantage there. You got a little bit of distance to travel. But if you suffer from incontinence, there is so much you can do to avoid that Kegels I've seen totally reverse incontinence. If you're not, if you don't know how to do kegels, or you've tried them and you haven't gotten anywhere, a therapist can help with that and it might be embarrassing and uncomfortable but I promise you it will totally change the quality of your life and very well may avoid a life-threatening sepsis due to UTI later in life.
Speaker 1:Men, if you're having issues with your prostate and you're finding that you're dribbling I mean I've seen guys that they won't drink at work because they got to pee all the time what happens when the prostate becomes enlarged? Okay, your prostate sits around the urethra and when it becomes enlarged it constricts that urethra so you have a hard time getting urine through. So sometimes guys will have to strain really hard to get a stream going or milk their bladder. All that means is they palpate, they push in on their lower abdomen to try to get urine to come out, or sometimes they have dribbling. You might go to the bathroom and you dribble. Or you're going to the bathroom and you dribble. Or you're going to the bathroom frequently, small amounts, or you never quite feel like you get your bladder emptied.
Speaker 1:Please get that checked out again. It's not comfortable. Everybody pees and everybody poops. It's just part of our body. So please take care of yourself. There's you know it used to be back in the day a terp, a transurethral radical prostatectomy. Those used to be a lot different and today they have some minimally invasive procedures and things. A lot of guys would hesitate to take care of their prostate issue because they didn't want to suffer a side effect of that procedure in terms of erectile dysfunction. That's becoming less and less with some of these newer techniques. Please, please, please, talk to your provider about that. You also are on the same risk of having more frequent urinary infections and not drinking enough.
Speaker 1:Remember that your kidneys, if they don't have enough work to do, they're just not going to show up. Have you ever like, if you ever had a Brita water filter? I use that example a lot when that filter gets dry, it doesn't filter so well, right, you've got to prime it, you got to soak it a little bit, get it wet, and then it'll start filtering in again. Your kidneys are much like that. Don't let your kidneys dry out because you're having an issue with urination. Your kidneys dry out because you're having an issue with urination. Those, those conditions are, are so fixable. Um so, anyway, got a little bit of off tangent, but not quite. I mean, those things do come into play as you get older.
Speaker 1:Your risk for sleep apnea goes up. You have an interrupt, you have interrupted sleep because you're getting up to the bathroom all the time. That absolutely plays a role in inflammation, in your ability to maintain a healthy weight, your ability to think clearly, your ability to feel good from a from a psychological, social, socio-psychological standpoint. It can really make a big impact there. So please take a little bit of time this week and just think about how is my sleep? If you're one of those folks that are saying, hey, I can get by on four or five hours of sleep and pride yourself on that, don't, you're not kidding anybody, you're not kidding your body, that's for sure. Adults still need somewhere between seven and nine hours of sleep. There is so much work.
Speaker 1:We talked a little bit about the work that your body does at night. While you sleep, in terms of your cognitive health and the glymphatic system, but also your pituitary gland kicks in and you secrete more growth hormone. Have you ever noticed you put your kids to sleep and you wake up in the morning and they look bigger? Well, it's because they've had this influx of growth hormone and they really have grown Now, you and I. Well, I'm trying not to grow. The older I get, it's easier to grow out than it is to grow up, but you still have a lot of growth work to be done in the form of repair At night. When that growth hormone kicks in, that's when you're shedding things that no longer serve you Big factor in your weight, remember.
Speaker 1:If you're having interrupted sleep and you're not getting enough high quality sleep, your adrenal glands are going to kick out more corticosteroids. That will make you gain weight. It will. If you're on that pathway to diabetes, it can absolutely push you over that edge. It does play a role in diabetes as well, and inflammation overall, and just keep this in mind If you have inflammation anywhere in your body, it's everywhere in your body, and that's huge, not just for things like diabetes and heart disease. But how about cancer? We talked about cognitive health. It's so important.
Speaker 1:If you're looking this year to optimize or improve your overall health and well-being, I just want you to keep in mind there's three main components and it's nothing fancy. Your mama probably taught it to you long ago, when you were a wee one and that is this go outside and play, right. Make some time for some exercise and joy of living. Go outside and play, eat your fruits and vegetables Nobody's going to overdose on their vegetables right? Eat more vegetables. You need protein as well. I'm a big fan of the protein. We don't need to sit down and eat a cow. You need a small amount of protein at a regular interval, but eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. Vegetables are so powerful. They actually help to alkalinize the body, which lowers inflammation, does a whole lot of good things. So go outside and play, eat your fruits and vegetables and go to bed early.
Speaker 1:Make sure that you're getting enough rest, at least you know. Aim for seven to nine hours and if you're finding that you're waking tired or you're waking up at night, even if it's just to go pee. A lot of people that get up at night to urinate actually are waking because of sleep apnea and then they go to urinate. It's not the urination that's causing it, it's the sleep apnea. So if you're waking more than once a night, make sure that you have a conversation with your doctor, your healthcare provider that's my thought for you today. Make sure that you're making some time for yourself to get your Zs in. It's super important. Make it a great week. Bye for friends.