"praise god for i am fearfully and wonderfullymade" what a great text the psalmist, david, sharedwith us and i want to welcome each one of you to "wonderfullymade" thank you for allowing us to come into yourhome and to minister to you today, and to helpteach more about the bodies that god has given us.today, we have an exciting topic that i'm very passionate aboutand that's the topic of sleep! i'm glad to have with me today, mr. danielmiller dan, i'm glad you're here today. thank younow, dan, is a businessman from chattanooga,
tnand he's also a health consumer and, in talking about sleep, i think it'svery useful to have someone that might have had some experiencewith sleep, and i think all of us have had someexperience with sleep. right can you just tell us some of the experiencesyou've had in your sleeping patterns over the last fewyears. well, my sleeping patterns are a little bitdifferent than those peoples...owning a business like i do, i run the business duringthe day, and then at night, i plan, in my
mind,what my next day will be. and so, in doing that, what i do is stay awakeall night and so i've had to develop ways that i canget my rest and still function... which is very difficultwhen you don't have any rest.so that's part of problems that i've had. well how do you adapt to this,and do you think this lack of sleep has affected your health, or your performance in any way...or do you think it's catching up to you, or you think it's something your toleratingwell? now when you have a family, it always affectsthe family
when you don't have enough sleep...you're grumpy the next day, you're short with people,you don't have the patience that you should have...you know, there are a number of different issues whenit comes to that. as far as my performance at work, i don'tthink it affected that, but, you know i can't tellyou that for sure. you know, we deal with our sleep habits inseveral different ways, i guess...and the way that i have is i like it completely dark,and i sleep with a fan on.
i can't sleep any other way.and so that's kind of helped me deal with some of theissues that i've had when it came to that. well, that's what we're going to talk abouttoday. we're going to talk about sleep...and as time has gone on in the practice of medicine,i've gone on to think that sleep is as important as anything else we do in taking care of ourbodies. and we're going to explore that with today'stopics. one of the things that i'm now appreciatingabout sleep is, you know, dan, most people spend abouta third
of their life sleeping... right...or trying to sleep well. most people admit that they don't feel likethey do that part of their life well ... sleepingwell. now, if i asked you bluntly, "do you thinkyou're sleeping well in your life...is that an aspect of your life that you think you're doing welli think, at this point in time, i am, because i've finallydeveloped steps that i needed to take. it's kind of a learned behavior for me. righta third of us... you know we spend a third of our timein sleep, and it's sort of a shameful admission,
and i'm one of them to admit that a thirdof my life... i'm not living well.and yet, as christians, and living to the glory of god,we want to do as well as we can in all of our time... rightwhether that's sleeping time, or waking time i've studied some statistics recently,and million americans right now... million americans... and i'm sure those acrossthe world have similar problems feel like they suffer from insomnia... rightand insomnia is not being able to sleep. a couple of interesting statistics that iwanted to share with you, and the audiencebefore we get started today...
did you know that a giraffe, as big as a giraffeis, and as long as he is, guess how many hoursa day a giraffe sleeps? i have no clue!a giraffe sleeps on the average of hours, or . hours a daythat's an average amount that a giraffe sleeps now here's another animal that i thought wasvery interesting do you know how long a brown bat sleep? noa brown bat sleeps almost hours a day! a brown bat spends roughly % of his time sleepingwe spend about a third of our lifetime to sleep,so that's what we're going to focus on today... ways we can think about that one-third ofour lives
that we normally don't give it much thought...right so with that, let me tell the audience howwe got these questions... these are people that writequestions to heartwise ministries from all over the country, and what i'm doing is,i'm grouping these into topics, and these are all questions that have to doon the topic of sleep, and i'm praying that as we talk,that everyone will look at their own sleep habitsand maybe we can make a change here or there. i don't think these changes occur overnight.i think, you just try to change here, and then asyou feel better, you move to the next one...
so let's move on to our questions now...all right... st question comes from brenda in california. okaybrenda says, "my doctor gave me a prescription to help mesleep at night... i still sleep poorly. " "should i take a stronger dosage?"okay. well brenda, i think that a lot of people don'trealize it, but i try, in this type of situation, i would want to know... why does a personnot sleep well at night what is the root cause?a medication really doesn't solve the problem it just perpetuates it.and a lot of people don't realize that when these sleepmedicines came out years ago, and some of
the names...one was called "halcion" i don't know if you've heard of that... rightbut they took that off the market because it wascausing people... well, maybe they didn't take it off themarket, but it was associated with adverse events.the most popular one now is called "ambien" but there are a lot of other sleep aids outthere. but the faa only recommended that these medicationsbe taken for weeks or less. they've never recommended them to be takenlong-term is it possible then that these medicationsare meant to
reset your sleep clock?because i, at one time, had taken ambien, and for a short period of time while i wastaking it, i just didn't understand how sleepy i wasuntil i woke up one morning, and realized that i was sorested, you know, life was totally different for me.well that's possible because the sleep aids change thechemical transmitters in the brain. and they're only made, really, for the shortperiod of time until you can look at the cause of what causedthe insomnia to begin with. i'm afraid nowadays that people are stayingon these
years, and years, and years,and they're not getting at the cause, and they're allaltering the chemicals, but we're never fixing the problemwe're just sort of covering it up and that problemis going to get worse, and every chemical reactionyou have in your body leads to something else... rightso let's get back to brenda for a second... brenda... we're going to look at a graphichere that might give us some suggestions to help you sleepwell at night and looking at the cause of why you don'tsleep well
the first sleep suggestion that i would giveto you... and you might be doing a lot of these things...is try to have an empty stomach we recommend having a stomach empty to hoursbefore you go to bed at night because a lot of your energy goes to digestingfood. up to a third of your blood flow goes to digestthe food also when you lay down at night, you couldhave acid bubbling up and that can affect sleep greatlywe would like for you to avoid stimulants... more exercise during the day, so you're moretired avoid stress and that's a whole other topic.sometimes you can take a natural substance
called "melatonin"that might aid in your sleep. another thing that seems to help sleep islaughter laughter creates all these endorphins,and i wonder if johnny carson slept better because he laughed so much.sunlight increases a substance called serotonin whichaids in sleep. and, of course, reading the bible...in ephesians , it suggests that we don't go to bedever with anger in our hearts. these are all some suggestions that mighthelp you a little bit in dealing with sleep, brendanow, one of things we mentioned just a second
ago wasstimulants... now, what kind of things, when you were havingyour sleep problems, that you considered that mighthave stimulated your mind at night, or your wholebody system that might have affected you, because i thinka lot of people don't look into things that stimulate... rightother than just the caffeines and so on and so forth... righteveryone knows about the caffeines, and everyone knows about, you know, certainmedicines what are other things that might have addedto your problem, dan
for myself, a child, you know... that's rightit came at a time when we had just had our daughterand, you know, she was up at different times during the nightso it broke up my sleep pattern. there's a whole list of different things,i would assume and you probably know more about those thani do, but you've got lights being a stimulant...you've got sounds being a stimulant. for myself, light is a major stimulant forme. temperature... being very hot is probablyone of the major causes that i don't sleep; i like tosleep in a cool room
well, in talking a little bit more about stimulants,anything that affects the senses, can adversely really affect these sleep patterns,because, remember, at night the sleep time is a timewhere you're basically turning off... and anything that's coming into the senses,could alter this... whether it be a sound, how about snoring next door?does your wife snore? no, and i'll never admit that on national...okay well, i mean... you don't have to admit that,but i hear a lot of people that snore at night, so the other one doesn't get good sleep...and no one will say anything... yes you'll leave a third of your life tired andin torture
rather than say, "listen, you have a sleepingproblem... we need to deal with that... well most peoplewill deny that they do snore... righti think lights is a good one, sound... how about taste?i've had some people that had a bad taste in their mouthand they can't sleep from that... that's another sense that needs to be turnedoff. and that goes back... i think a lot of thesleep problems we have, these million people,this food is a big deal... how many people eat late at night now?i would say a lot. i don't know the numbers.
we didn't bring up...you know, we talked about the caffeine... a lot of people don't realize that caffeinecould stay in your system up to hours. rightit's just not, you know, you drink coke in the morningor caffeinated beverages, and it's totally outand, caffeine affects people different ways... some people can get by with it.alcohol... a lot of people drink alcohol, because they thinkit's going to help them relax at night and go to sleep....and is that the case? no, it's not the casealcohol breaks up your good sleep pattern
because itchanges again... some of those neurotransmitters that'sgoing on in your head... right i'm finally... here's one big one in our societythat i think needs to be talked about, about whyamericans aren't sleeping well.and going back, a third of our life... this is a long period of time!i'm very passionate about why we've given that away.a third... a lot of people are watching too muchtelevision... # yeah and i think that stimulates the mind.one way or the other, before you go to bed...
i mean, you know, there are not too many goodshows anymore of course, the shows on abn make exceptionto that and also, the sports, sporting eventsyou know, everyone gets revved up and excited, and when you get revved up, and excited, thosechemicals that make the stress hormones go up, and it'sa whole cascade of events... so we can't turn offthat clock! ...and video games yeah, video games are justa host of things... and i think in talking to people about gettinggood sleep, i want to encourage everyone out thereto look at the stimulants you have before
you go to bedwe want to turn off the senses and not turn on the senseswell i think, brenda, i hope we can get at the root causeof yours, but let's go to another question nowlet's go to a question from max, in texas he writes, "how do i know if i'm getting enoughsleep?" well, that's a good question since we're talkingabout sleep it's a difficult question, actuallyand we hear this frequently... how many hours of sleep do you need to feelwell? or to know that you're getting enough sleep?and how do you know you're getting enough
sleep?i don't know... everybody's different... bill clinton says he only needed hours ofsleep per night to exist as our president.well that's not very much... hours i would have wanted him to sleep a littlebit more but it goes back to saying that everybodyis different one of the things... you know, how do youknow? that's a good way, and i think you have tothink about it and, i think that in sleep, you have to treatsleep like a job... you want to do it well...you want to learn about your body,
find out about your sleep patterns, and optimizeit and, one of the things that we know is...if you have to wake up to an alarm clock, maybe you're not getting enough good sleep...okay a second thing is if you're tired in the day,we know that you're not getting good sleep also, frequently people that are not gettingenough sleep are involved in more accidents correctyou know... they do crazy stuff... they get in car accidents.we see in people, one sign that might not begetting enough sleep is frequent colds they get colds a lot, and infections...lowered immune system
but when at night, when you don't get enoughsleep, the immune system is affectedthere are these cells in the body called... "natural killer cells"and, dan, these go around and really scarf up thosethings that aren't supposed to be there. we know that people that don't sleep justdon't make these to the degree that people doesanother thing that might be a sign... this is a little bit off... and you're goingto have to follow me with this one...a sign that you're not getting enough sleep ispeople getting fat!
now would you believe that? no...people getting fat could be a sign... as you're not getting enough sleepwell, what goes on in your brain... when you're not getting enough sleep...there's a hormone called "growth hormone" that helps people grow...and you've heard that kids grow at night when they sleepwell, at night, that's when the growth hormone really kicks in.but at night, if you're not sleeping well, the growth hormone levels could go downand if your growth hormone levels go down, guess what happens?you're not growing, you're not metabolizing much,you could... say you're putting on extra pounds..
rightand another thing that could happen... ...you wake up tired the next day,you're stressed out... and how do people deal with stress... somepeople? i deal with it very poorly.but some people eat... you know, they wake up and they don't feelgood in the morning, so what are they going to get?you know, more things that adversely thought... they might get some more donuts...they might say, "well, let's have a cappuccino or somethingto get the day going... and all along, they're not dealing with theroot called stress
now another thing that goes down is there'sa hormone in the brain that's called "leptin"leptin is a very important hormone that says... "i'm full"and if you're not making this leptin hormone, you're always not feeling this "full"and this happens in people that don't sleep wellnow, are there medications that can take over for leptin?not really... not that i know of. it's just sleep... god has made the body toneed sleep... right and with that sleep, you have restorativepatterns and your brain does things at sleep thatit can't do during the day.
it processes memories... it makes these hormoneslike leptin that says, "i'm full" it does a lot of things...the brain is a busy place... even when you're notconscious to it. right and a lot of people, when they think aboutsleep, they don't think, "well, my brain has to goto a different environment for a while to get itsjob done so, they're not letting their brain get it'sjob done it's like, you know, you're working all thetime... and the brain is still working,but it's doing a different type of work...
and see, that goes back to what i was havingproblems with ...my brain never shut down at night. rightand different parts need to work and other things... have you ever heard thecomment that... "i need my beauty sleep?" yesdo you know that studies have shown that people thatdon't get sleep, age must faster... they get wrinkles... the full yardsand it's sort of the same process we're talking aboutresting... i view resting as therapy for many things... okayin the bible, genesis ... the god of the universe worked days...and then what did he do? he rested.
he rested a full day.and, he set up day and night. and if this rest was good enough for him,there must have been a master plan... correct and we see... "well, why do we get all thesediseases?" "why do we have all these problems?""why do we have all these stresses?" one of the problems, i think, is not gettingenough sleep. so, getting back to max's question...some of the things we talked about... the alarm clock,the tired, the accidents, the frequent health problemsmax, are you getting wrinkles early? you know, maybe that's a sign.but all these might be a sign that you're
not getting enough sleep.all right, let's go to fred in north carolina... he says, "my wife told me that i have sleepapnea. " she is not a doctor, but does read a lot.oh... okay there you have it! could she be right?well, fred, take it from a man that's married... my wife is always right!and you're going to have to treat it that way. mine is too.fred, you're going to have to just treat it that wayyou know, your wife is right... and in this case, fred, you know off the record,she is right about this one. you could very well have sleep apnea.and sleep apnea is a medical condition where
at nightyou don't breathe... sleep apnea... apnea means periods whereyou're not breathing at night and the sort of characteristic breathing patternis like this... they do that over, and over and overand physiologically, when that happens, the oxygen levels go down in the body... rightso the tissues don't get renewed... you can have high blood pressures in the lungs...it can cause all sorts of problems... the heart has to pump harderit can cause funny heart rhythms... numerous thingsrecently, sleep apnea, they say, what was that football player,the green bay packers, "reggie"... white?
reggie white!he actually had sleep apnea... a big old strapping guy,very young... he had this as a complication nowadays, fred, a lot of people are walkingaround with sleep apnea, and they walk around it theirwhole lives and they never realize they don't have itthe cells in the body aren't getting enough oxygen... rightso, the symptoms of sleep apnea, dan, people that have it...they're tired all the time they have headachesthey could have high blood pressure they're irritable... because they're not sleepingthey make lots of mistakes...
it's a major problem... a difficult thingto go through i had a cousin at one time, that had thissame situation and he would go to sleep at a red light!and... people would come, and have to wake him upto get him to go through the red light... so i thought that was kind of a dangeroussituation... how is he doing now?he is,... well, taking care of it. now, we have a video, a slide that we wantto show up about the different aspects of sleep apneaand, going over the consequences... what happens when you have sleep apnea?we talked about the fatigue, being tired all
the timeheadaches might be a symptom high blood pressure... we talked about theabnormal heart rhythms and we put strain on the heart because ithas to pump against such high pressures in the lungs.so sleep apnea is a problem that we need to deal withwhat are several ways or applications that they usein the medical field to deal with sleep apnea? a couple of things... i think the most usefulthing is losing weight and exercising.they say that if you can lose about pounds, often you can treat sleep apnea successfully...but usually, it's because of the airway...
there's too much pressure on it,or the muscle tone in the tongue is poor... rightsometimes they can cut an area in the back of your throatto let more air in and out. but the most common type of treatment is wherethey put a mask... it's called a "sleep mask"and it blows air in and what i try to do in the management ofsleep apnea, is hit it on -folds i try to get to the root of the cause...if it's weight loss, lose weight ...if it's sleeping in a different position,as well as placing the mask until they can do that... rightand people that wear the mask it's a pain
to wear,but they feel so much better for the first time in yearsthey've had rest it's amazing, so...now with fred, who's up in north carolina, would he take what his wife says for granted...or would he go to a sleep center where they would be able to help him a littlebit? dan, what would you do in this situation?i think i'd go to the sleep center... i think i might... what i would do, fred,is i would tell my wife...i'd say, "honey, you're probably so right, and i think you'reso right, that i'm going over to this sleep
center...and there, they're going to watch me when i sleepand they'll hook me up to oxygen monitors, and they'll see if my oxygen level goes downin the middle of the night, and if i meet criteria forsleep apnea, then i'll have aggressive treatment for this.if this goes on untreated, it creates tons of health problems down theroad... right so, i hope that answers your question, fred,...that's what i would do all righty! the next question comes from dave in reno...he says, "is there a difference between resting and sleeping?""i rest a lot but sleep only a little. "
wow... dave, this is one of the most difficultquestions i think i have to answer... in sorting through resting and sleeping...you can be asleep and not get good rest... rightand also, you can rest and not sleep so, in answering your question, dan, whati've been trying to do in the treatment of people,how do you know what's true in life? you know, you see... eat this diet,high fat diet, low fat diet... or being fed everything through the mediayou know, how do you know what's true? this medication is so good for you,then you take it off the market so what i do when it comes to tough questions,i try to turn to the bible,
and see if the bible gives us insightlike the day of rest... you know, that only makes sensei'm turning to god for our answers... the diet, you know, daniel and his friends...the diet they ate but, i want to throw some texts up here inour next slide here and give some texts that i wanted toshare with dave that might help him a little bitsleep does not necessarily equal rest, and one of the texts i like to share is matthewand that's the text that says... "come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden,and i will give you rest. " what do we have to do?we have to come unto him, and i will give
you rest...that's a gift! so i will give you now that's not necessarily sleep, but that'sa rest in itself... "i will give you rest"psalms ... again talks about rest and then there's genesis , where it says..."god worked for days" the god of the universe, of the whole universe...what did he do for day? he rested! and i don't think he slept at all...i mean he might have slept, but he rested, so understanding what god means by resti think it's all about, you know, our spirituality ...you know, to have that rest, that peace,where the mind is allowed to work on other thingsit brings to the mind one more text that i
wanted to sharewith everyone... hebrews , says... "there remains therefore, a rest for the peopleof god" i think that when you have god in your life,there's a certain rest that you cannot attain any other way. right, i agree with thatwe've got one more question okay "i'm a truck driver, and my shift is at night,i sleep during the day. i am ... is this hurting my overall health?there are so many different aspects that could be talked about here.there could be a chance if you're not resting wellduring the day, that it could affect you... have you ever worked shift-work?have you ever had to work night? i really
haven't.well this question is very dear to me because i do stay up at night, and tuesday nightis my call night, as long as weekends, and i never sleep well on that night,and i do think it affects my health because when you break that night/day cyclethat's not natural, and when you disregard one of, sort of, god's laws, you're goingto have some consequences, and the consequences that we'retalking about... the circadian rhythms, you've heard that termyes... the night/day... god created that at light, we have a substance, when lightcomes into us... a substance, a sleep substance that's madecalled melatonin
and this is released from the pineal gland,and this actually helps us sleep a great deal. so, i think that when you break this cycle,you know, the light/day cycle, these natural chemicalsthat help you have true rest, it is disturbed... right thrown offand then you get these subsequent health problems that we sort of identified with that adverselyaffects everything. i've also heard that night shift work basicallyaffects your whole quality of life long-termand it's probably the same mechanism of this lightmelatonin, pineal... all this is probably as an associatewell, we've certainly covered a lot about
sleep today, dan...i want to thank you for joining us i appreciate your inviting me, i've had agreat time... good a couple of final thoughts i want to leaveeveryone with are that sleep is an important part of ourlives, and we spend a third of our life resting orsleeping ...we need to do it well, and to the gloryof god we need to think about our sleep patternsand do it right... spend some time thinking about it like we'vedone today and just not sort of haphazardly let the yearsgo by, and then all of a sudden figure out
wehave health problems because we didn't sleep. and the second thing i want to leave everyonewith is poor sleep could certainly be because ofstimulants we have too many stimulants in our lives,too many stressors we've talked about tv, eating big at night...we've talked about caffeine that % of the united states is now taking.now finally, the last thing that we want to talk aboutis the true rest... the real peace that comes withinit comes from walking with god "come unto me all ye that are heavy laden,and i will give you rest. "
what a wonderful promise for us today!
