Your Sleep & Your Health - What is the relationship?

This article combined data in the US from 3 sources;

• Sleep Cycle (sleep tracking app)
• US Census
• Centre for Disease Control in the US

to evaluate relationships between sleep quality/duration/snoring and various health metrics and diseases. I am not aware of such data gathering in Australia, but it does bring together several important health considerations that we can take on board clinically. The analysis helps to show that our physical, mental, and sleep health have multi-directional effects on each other.

Those cities in which participants were experiencing good sleep had some similar characteristics;

• higher leisure time
• lower diabetes scores
• lower obesity scores

Dr. Michael Grandner a sleep expert, notes that sleep is closely tied to health, in that "not only can lifestyle factors influence sleep health, but sleep problems can lead to more problems with maintaining a healthy diet". An important consideration in understanding a healthy diet/ability to achieve a healthy weight, is that our urge to eat and the food choices that we make, are strongly influenced by our sleep quantity and quality. Let's unpack that in more detail. Your urge to eat (i.e., appetite) and the effects of eating, that is feeling full (i.e., satiety) are regulated by hormones. The culprits are called leptin, which provides a sense of being full (i.e. satiety) and ghrelin, which provides a sense of hunger. Researchers have shown that short sleeping (i.e. 4.5 hours) of just one night, reduced blood levels of fullness feeling leptin (18%), while guzzling ghrelin increased (28%)**. Not only had the urge to eat more increased, but the preference for the type of food changed towards salty (e.g., chips, salted nuts), starchy (e.g., pasta, bread, potatoes) and sweet (e.g., cakes, ice cream, pastries). Further, when short sleeping, the appetite enhancing effects of cannabinoids interact with the reward systems of dopamine and opioids, resulting in a stronger desire to eat in excess of energy needs***. Is it any wonder that as the average hours of sleep have decreased, average BMI has increased.

If we as clinicians, are involved in assisting clients to achieve a healthy body weight, and only addressing their exercise level and their calorie intake, then we are missing the essential foundation for both, that is achieving adequate sleep.

The umbrella of sleep influences a broad range of health related features and while not studied in this article, other health metrics like fertility, learning, concentration, work accidents, blood pressure/heart attack/strokes and immune function are also affected by poor quality or quantity of sleep. You can learn more about how you can integrate sleep education into your clinical practice here.

If you are interested in adding the professional skill of sleep education into your clinical practice, you can download our most popular pdf from the Sleep Mastery Course titled Sleep Hygiene Guide here.

The guide covers 16 points associated with good night and day sleep hygiene.