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Hey there. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're gonna be talking today about a really important foundational physical strategy for managing anxiety. We've talked on this podcast about different mental strategies for managing anxiety, where you're working directly on the way that your brain sees the world, and we've talked about physical strategies where you are working on using your body to calm your mind or your environment to calm your mind. But one physical strategy that we haven't talked about yet, which is really important, is the strategy of sleep. Now this may seem like kind of a no brainer. It's kind of obvious that if you are short on sleep, that everything is harder, that it's gonna be a lot harder for your brain to feel like you have resources to meet your demands. We all tend to get irritated and grumpy when we are short on sleep. Anxiety goes up. It's kind of obvious. But what I'm talking about today though is not just the importance of getting enough sleep, but the importance of when in your day you sleep. Your sleep schedule. Whether you're a morning person or someone who likes to get up late and stay up late. Turns out this does actually influence your anxiety levels.
Now before I get started, I know this is a tough subject for some people, especially the people who don't consider themselves morning people, but I, I'm just gonna cover my back by saying that this information comes from lots of peer reviewed research in academic journals. I'm gonna link up these articles in the show notes so that you can look at them if you want to, so that you know that I'm not just talking off the cuff or this isn't just my opinion. Okay.
So there are people that consider themselves morning people, and these are the people that like to get up early and go to bed early. And then there are people that don't like to get up early and go to bed early. They like to get up late and stay up late. Researchers call these different types of people um, chronotypes, right? So the morning Chronotype is the one that likes to get up in the morning, go to bed early. The evening chronotype is the one who likes to get up late and stay up late. So there's been a lot of research done on what influence your chronotype has on your emotional and physical health. And it turns out that morning chronotypes consistently show lower health risks and overall better wellbeing metrics. That the evening chronotypes or the people who like to get up late , they have higher rates of diabetes, cancer, depression. They have poorer cardiometabolic health. They have elevated depression, anxiety, insomnia, poor sleep quality compared to the morning chronotypes. So I just wanna emphasize 'cause it was kind of buried in that list of risks, but anxiety is in there. That people who are evening chronotypes, who are not morning people, they have increased anxiety. And if this weren't enough, it turns out that being an evening person is linked to higher all cause mortality. Meaning if you are a morning person, you'll actually live longer. If you are a evening person, an evening chronotype, then you are, you have a higher mortality rate. This is pretty serious. Researchers haven't totally figured out all the reasons why, They've just identified that all of these different risks are associated with being an evening chronotype or being a night person. But they have identified it a couple of reasons, which I think are interesting to go over, just so that you understand a little bit more why it might be that being a morning person could have such an impact on your physical and mental health.
So one of the more obvious reasons is that if you are an evening chronotype or a night person, you have later sleep wake times, and so you are exposed to less natural daylight. By the time you get up, the sun's already been up for a while and you're awake for more of the night when the sun is down. So that means that you have less natural daylight and more artificial light. And this is especially problematic nowadays in our modern environment, because most houses and buildings have LED lights. They use less electricity. But the problem with LED lights is that they have a short wavelength light. Even if it says it's a warm LED, it, they're all short wavelength basically. And short wavelength lights have the greatest disruptive effect on your circadian system. What is your circadian system? Your circadian system is your internal biological clock that manages your sleep wake cycles, and it so it releases hormones at certain times and controls your body temperature to help you to be alert during the time when you're awake and feel sleepy during the time that you wanna sleep. And so it helps produce melatonin at the right time to make you sleep. But anyway, this short wavelength light that we have in our houses and our buildings and our screens that is from LED lights is very disruptive to our sleep wake cycle. So it, the short wavelength light starts to mess up when your body releases the hormones that it should to help you to be alert or to help you to be sleepy, and it makes your body temperature goofed up according to when you should be awake and when you should be asleep. Anyway, what happens is that people who are on the nighttime schedule exposed to more artificial light they have more insomnia and they have poorer sleep quality 'cause their circadian system is messed up. So even if you're sleeping a long time, the quality of the sleep isn't as good because your circadian system isn't optimized. And if you're just gonna look at poor sleep quality as the origin of a lot of these problems, it kind of makes sense, right? Because when you have poor sleep, that increase your, your risk of heart disease and high blood pressure and stroke. Whereas if when you are a morning person and you have an early bedtime and you wake up early, this leads to more consistent sleep patterns, patterns, because your circadian rhythm is working well, it's well oiled. And it, this improves your sleep, sleep quality, and the duration. So you're getting better quality and longer sleep. And when you have quality sleep, this improves your immune response and your cognitive fun function. So this already can explain a lot of those risks that researchers have identified associated with being an evening chronotype versus a morning chronotype. So in a nutshell, you're gonna have better quality and longer sleep if you are a morning chronotype than if you are an evening chronotype, just because of the fact that you are more in sync with sunlight. We evolved to be in sync with sunlight as a species, and so that is, when we're in sync with the sun, that is when our circadian system, our, sleep wake system works better. It helps us to sleep better and longer. So that's the sleep part of it. Your sleep quality and duration will be better if you are going to bed early, getting up early.
But there's more. There's more to it than just the sleep part of it. It turns out that being exposed to more natural light will actually affect the mitochondria in your cells. What are your mitochondria? They are the tiny power plants inside almost every cell in your body. They make energy out of food and oxygen. This energy is called ATP. If you didn't have ATP, then your muscles couldn't move. Your brain couldn't think. Your heart couldn't beat. Your body couldn't repair itself. So mitochondria, they're always converting fuel and oxygen into usable energy, and they power everything, every movement, every thought, every heartbeat that you have. And when your mitochondria don't work well, this affects your overall health and energy levels because when they become less efficient, then your cells don't produce energy as well. And this is what happens as we age, our mitochondria get less efficient. And also when we have disease, a lot of times this affects the mitochondria as well. But it turns out that MI mitochondria are light sensitive. And when you go out in the sunshine and you get exposed to the long wavelengths of light that are present in sunshine. You know, we just talked about the short wavelengths that are in the artificial light that we have in our houses, but when you are exposed to the long wavelengths that are present in sunshine, this actually has been shown in research to improve your mitochondrial function. It increases your A TP production. And this is shown, especially in cells that have already had declined production because of age or or of disease, they really see a difference when cells are are exposed to these long wavelength. And on the other end short wavelengths that we just talked about, like those present in LED lights, they have the opposite effect on your mitochondria. They actually reduce the performance and function of your mitochondria. This is a problem, right, because we spend so much time indoors, but especially for those people who are getting up late and going to bed late, and they're exposed to so much more of this short wavelength light. It affects your mitochondria. It affects the way that your cells can produce energy. So when you go outside and you're in the sunlight that has these long wavelengths. It's true that sunlight does also have short wavelength light. But sunlight is what we call full spectrum light, where it has all the different wavelengths and apparently these short wavelengths are not harmful to your mitochondria when they're balanced with long wavelengths, when it's full spectrum light. So the short wavelengths in sunlight doesn't damage your mitochondria because it is a full spectrum light. And the same thing with fire light, the same thing with incandescent lights. Those are all full spectrum types of light. But the type of light that we have in most of our houses and buildings and on our screens and all of this, it's the short wavelength light. It's not full spectrum. And when we are just exposed to that, that's when we start to see these effects on the mitochondria. That's what researchers are seeing, that it reduces your mitochondrial function and performance. So when you think about the fact that your mitochondria in your body power everything, every movement, every thought, every heartbeat, if your mitochondria are not functioning optimally, then nothing in your body is functioning optimally, and that's how you can see how you might be more susceptible to different diseases and also different mental health issues.
So we've got these at least two different reasons that researchers have identified: that when you are exposed to less natural light and more artificial light, that you're gonna have poorer sleep quality, and it's not gonna be as long, and also your A TP and your cells are not gonna be as optimized because they are getting all the short wavelength light, which is actually bad for them, which actually harms their function, and you're not balancing it out with enough long wavelength light that you get outside in the sun. And of course there are probably a lot of other reasons why these different risks come with being an evening chronotype, and benefits come from being a morning chronotype. We, as I said, researchers haven't identified all of the reasons why people that are evening chronotypes have higher risk of all kinds of health problems, both physical and mental, and also overall higher mortality. But it's important to note that they have identified that there is a clear relation between when you sleep and your health, both physical and mental. And even though we may not understand all the reasons why, we've started to identify a couple. Let's talk now about what to do about it.
There have been studies that have shown that evening chronotypes that work on changing their sleep schedule and work on advancing it toward being a morning chronotype that they can have improvements in anxiety symptoms. So this is encouraging. So. How can you work on changing your sleep schedule? You may not like it at first. The fact that you don't consider yourself a morning person means that you don't like getting up in the morning. But if you consider all of the health, mental and physical benefits that you can get from changing your sleep schedule, maybe that can help you to get started.
So here's the first tip that researchers give us, and that is to make the changes gradual. Don't try and do it all at once, just from one week to the next, decide, okay, this week I'm going to get up 15 or 30 minutes earlier and go to bed 15 or 30 minutes earlier, and then the next week I'll move it another 15 minute segment earlier. So you're just really gradually moving it. You wanna be consistent. You don't wanna be changing your sleep time every day. You want it to be the same, basically. With just a really gradual change of 15 to 30 minutes. Okay? So that's the first thing, to make it gradual.
And the second thing is, when you get up in the morning to be exposed to bright light. If there's sunshine outside, go outside. That's the best kind 'cause that's natural light. That's where we, that's what we evolved in. If you don't have sunlight to go out into when you get up in the morning, then there are artificial lights that can help there, you know, if it's winter time where you are. You can get a 10,000 lux light to put on for 30 to 60 minutes in the morning, and that can help to set your circadian rhythms. It apparently, it helps your brain to start, um, producing melatonin at the right time at night to help you to go to bed earlier if you're exposed to bright light early in the morning. So go outside, spend some time outdoors early in the day, or at least be around a really bright indoor light for 30 to 60 minutes.
Another thing that can really help is to do exercise in the morning. Moderate to high intensity exercise between six and 10:00 AM. That this really helps with advancing your circadian rhythm, rhythm and helping set your melatonin clock so that your body is starting to produce melatonin at the right time to be able to go to sleep earlier. And if you can do this for a longer term, like 10 to 12 weeks in a row, that this, studies show, helps to start to include in, improve your sleep quality and optimize your melatonin production and start helping with anxiety issues.
Another thing that can help is to eat breakfast soon after you get up and avoid eating a really late dinner.
And last one to remember is caffeine con consumption. If you are a caffeine consumer, make sure you are consuming it early in the day because even consuming it six hours before bedtime can disrupt your sleep. And experts suggest that you shouldn't consume more than 400 milligrams a day. So limit your total caffeine consumption and make sure that it is early in the day so that it doesn't disrupt your sleep.
So five things that you can do to help change your sleep schedule. You can, you do the gradual sleep advancement. You get bright light when you wake up. You go from morning exercise, moderate to high intensity exercise between six and 10:00 AM. You eat breakfast soon after waking, and you make sure your caffeine consumption is not too much and not too late. You make sure that it's early.
But I'll just end this episode by saying if you can't sleep, if you are going through a period of insomnia, and I've gone through many of these in my life too, a lot of times what we end up reacting to it with anxiety, we can't sleep and we know we should be sleeping, and we know there's all these health problems that come from not sleeping and then we just get more anxious and we can't sleep even more. The worst insomnia period that I had in my life was the three years that I had long COVID. I just had really terrible sleep quality and very little sleep for three years. And this was due to all of my health problems. I couldn't breathe properly. I had terrible heart problems. I had, you name it, I don't even wanna list them all, but they were all contributing to not being able to sleep. But even though I couldn't sleep well, I worked really hard on different, on other anxiety management strategies. Just remember the quote that we talked about last week, that " practicing anxiety management is like free money. Even a little bit is good." So even if you can't practice anxiety management with optimizing your sleep, there are a lot of other strategies you can work with that can still work on your anxiety management. So work on the ones that are within your grasp. And that's what I did when I couldn't sleep well. I worked on developing a gratitude practice. I made sure that I got outside every day and got this long wavelength light, and I worked on having the little bit of exercise routine that I, that was possible for me at that time, even though I could, had hardly any, any energy at all. I worked on developing my sense of purpose. That was probably one of the biggest ones that helped me. Anyhow, next week we're gonna talk about the six pillars of anxiety management, those six strategies that I feel like are the most important for your anxiety management. And one of them is sleep. But I wasn't able to work on the sleep part. You know? I mean, I did work on it, but it didn't really result in me sleeping. But I worked on the other five. And when you can work on any piece of anxiety management, it's like free money. It'll help you even if it goes through the back door. If you're gradually getting less anxious, you'll eventually see benefits in your health and in your sleep, even if it takes a while. So don't despair. Don't get overly anxious if you can't sleep. Just work on some other anxiety management within your grasp.
But if your circadian rhythm is all goofed up, try some of these ideas about how to shift it so that you're more in sync with the sun, and this will help you. We don't know all the reasons why, but we know a couple of them. This will help you to have better mental and physical health and less anxiety. So that's my suggestion for you today. Thanks for listening and see you next week.