The Morning Myth

by Frank J. Rumbauskas, Jr.

  To really know where you’re at, request a D3 check from your doctor or from a walk-in lab. Knowing what your levels are is the right start for getting them ideal. Also, I strongly recommend the book The Vitamin D Cure by James Dowd, MD (Wiley, 2012), to educate yourself on the importance of sunshine, not only for good sleep but for overall health. It does a great job of destroying the myths about skin cancer and other needless mythology about sun exposure that has led to a D3-deficient nation and the long parade of health problems and illnesses that the deficiency causes.

  Wake Up with a Therapy Light

  I’ve mentioned therapy lights (or therapy lamps) earlier in the book and want to touch on them again here.

  As with daylight, getting bright light as soon as you awaken, or are forced to wake up whatever the case may be, terminates your body’s melatonin production so you can fully wake up and become alert and ready for the day.

  The reason I like using a therapy light is convenience: I wake up, turn on the light and set it to the 30-minute timer, and sit up and read in bed until the light turns off. Then I’m wide awake and get up. It’s more practical than getting up and trying to immediately get outside, particularly if the weather isn’t inviting, or if you live somewhere like Seattle where even normal outdoor light levels can fall below those of a good, bright therapy light.

  By shutting off melatonin production as soon as you wake up, you sort of “program” your body to turn it off at that same time every day. In turn, your body will begin to produce it a bit earlier in the evening, allowing you get to bed on time and fall asleep much more easily.

  If you need to get up and move immediately and can’t sit next to a therapy light for a half hour, another option is a light therapy visor. These will run you a lot more money—most go for over $100 or more—however, you can get your light exposure while “on the move” whether that’s making coffee, eating breakfast, or whatever your morning routine entails.

  On rainy days, which happen in Dallas a lot more than I’d care for, I’ll bring my light out with me and plug it in on the kitchen counter while out there, and on the bathroom counter while getting ready. I know I can just get a visor, but until the light breaks, why bother?

  TIP: Unplug your therapy light at night! I once dropped a tissue or something at night, and when I accidentally hit the power button on the light. bam—10,000 lux of 5600 K daylight right in my eyes! Thankfully I instantly clamped my eyes shut and took a sublingual melatonin and got back to sleep, but that was too close a call. Since the buttons are so light as to be practically touch-sensitive, I now unplug the light when not in use.

  ANOTHER TIP: Sleep Cycle, the most popular sleep app out there, now integrates with Philips Hue lighting. I picked up four of their bulbs for my bedroom, synced them up with our wifi, and can now have the Sleep Cycle app gradually turn on the lights over a 30-minute period prior to my set waking time. This simulates the natural sunrise our bodies evolved to wake up to over millions of years. Better still, I can control the light temperature with the Hue app, ensuring a nice, bluish daylight hue to wake me up! Likewise, I can turn them way down or even change color, say to dark red, for nighttime use without interfering with melatonin and sleep.

  Always Go to Bed at the Same Time (Optional)

  This is a classic, time-tested piece of sleep hygiene advice, and it works—on most people.

  During the week I go to bed when my body is naturally tired, with the help of some of the herbal sleep aids I mentioned. However, as a night owl, I love—and I mean love—staying up late. That is why I don’t go to bed at the same time every night, and seriously question whether any true night owl can pull that one off.

  The thing is, if I know I have something lined up the next morning, or a busy day in general, I’ll pay attention to what time I go to bed and sometimes will go easy on any sleep aids to avoid next-day grogginess.

  However, if I have nothing planned the next day, other than the self-employed daily routine of figuring out what needs to be done next, I let my inner night owl come out to party and enjoy it to the fullest! I might put on a movie I like, read a book, or if the weather is nice I’ll sit outside late at night and read or listen to an audiobook.

  If I really don’t care how late I go to bed, say, if it’s a Friday or Saturday night, then I put the headphones on and bring on the Rush because I love few things more than good music but also know that listening to music gets me very worked up and that will delay my bedtime by at least one to two hours.

  Having said all that, even if you’re a tried-and-true night owl like me, if getting enough sleep is posing a real problem for you, this one is worth trying. Choose your desired bedtime based on how many hours of sleep you do best on, and if you use any sleep aids like melatonin, valerian, or others, set out the ones you take right at bedtime, and take others such as melatonin at their recommended times; in the case of melatonin that would be about two hours prior to bedtime.

  Have any morning supplements or medications out and ready to go for the morning (such as, in my case, thyroid medication), and do what you need to do to make that plan work. You now have a nice, long list of tips and suggestions to get to sleep and stay asleep, so what do you have to lose?

  What to Avoid in Order to Get Great Sleep

  Here’s where I’m going to become the bad guy, because there are a lot of very commonly used products, such as caffeine and alcohol, along with others like marijuana that are not nearly as prevalent but still commonly used, that will interfere with your ability to sleep well and on time, if not obliterate it. Certain prescriptions, along with over-the-counter drugs such as Sudafed (pseudoephedrine) and Bronkaid (ephedrine), can also wreak havoc on sleep, so avoid taking those if possible past noon, and avoid any 24-hour extended release version of these products. Certain antidepressants like Wellbutrin (bupropion), which work in part by increasing norepinephrine (also known as noradrenaline) levels in the brain, can also interfere with sleep if taken too late in the day.

  First, my personal story on this topic: I used to be a moderate to heavy drinker, usually moderate on weeknights then all out on weekends. This “habit” started, ironically, because it was my way of falling asleep back in the days of having to get up extra early for a waste-of-time daily sales meeting.

  When I decided to try giving up alcohol as an experiment in self-improvement, I was expecting to have the usual withdrawal symptoms I’d read about, but evidently I wasn’t enough of a heavy drinker to get those. What I did get astonished me: sleep!

  In fact, I slept 12–14 hours each night for about a month after ditching the wine and booze. This puzzled me at first, because insomnia is perhaps the most well-known and common alcohol withdrawal symptom. That’s because alcohol works rather like Xanax and when you come off it, the brain’s GABA receptors are no longer bound and your nervous system gets excessively excited. Hence why really hardcore alcoholics have to be hospitalized to avoid risk of seizures and death from delirium tremens.

  What actually happened, or so my high-IQ mind has deduced, is that I’d long been depriving myself of high-quality, restful, deep sleep (or phase 4 sleep), and my body was suddenly making up for a lot of lost time.

  You see, there’s a popular myth that rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, is the restorative phase of sleep. However, that isn’t true. This is the phase of sleep where dreams occur. It’s only in deep, or phase 4 sleep that brain activity drops to producing slow, delta waves, and it is the deepest and most restorative phase of sleep. There is no dreaming in this phase. That’s why people who are suddenly awakened while in phase 4 deep sleep will commonly be entirely disoriented and not even know where or possibly even who they are for a few minutes after.

  And that’s where alcohol was throwing me off and keeping me chronically fatigued: It interferes with phase 4 deep sleep.

  After that experience I moved on to the next experiment and tried giving up caffeine. Knowing that doing so causes intensely brutal withdrawal headaches, I tape
red off over four weeks by gradually mixing in decaf with my regular beans, then moving to decaf entirely for a little while (decaf still contains some caffeine), then green tea, then stopping altogether.

  The result? Wow! Talk about an amazing, huge, incredible increase in energy levels! All those years coffee was beating up on my adrenals, just as it’s doing to you if you drink the stuff. (Hey, I warned you that I might get preachy here about this stuff!)

  With that, let’s get into some specifics.

  Alcohol

  Alcohol, or more properly, ethanol, the kind found in alcoholic drinks, has long been used as a “nightcap” to help one get to sleep easier, and it will indeed do that—have you ever been passed out drunk or know someone who has? That isn’t sleep; it’s just being passed out drunk. This is largely where the misconception that alcohol can assist with getting a good night’s rest comes from.

  Alcohol, once in the bloodstream, rapidly binds to the brain’s GABA receptors. Remember that GABA is the calming or relaxing neurotransmitter, the same one that the benzodiazepines bind to, as well as magnesium to a much smaller degree. It’s the activation of GABA by alcohol that provides the relaxation and drowsiness it’s known for.

  However, there are two huge problems with this that prevent you from truly getting a solid night’s sleep after drinking alcohol. The first I’ve already touched on: The fact that it interferes with stage 4, or deep sleep.

  During deep sleep, the brain produces slow-wave sleep patterns called delta waves. This does occur with alcohol in the body; however, alcohol simultaneously causes alpha activity to occur. Alpha activity is not normal during sleep, but rather occurs with conscious relaxation and resting.

  The other problem with alcohol is that you won’t sleep through the night after an evening of drinking. First, as with drugs like Xanax, the GABA-binding activity wears off rather quickly, and the rebound effect wakes you up. The common misconception is that alcohol turns into sugar and the sugar rush wakes you up; however, alcohol is not converted into sugar, nor is it a sugar, nor can any alcohol be a sugar any more than a fat can be a carbohydrate.

  What alcohol is actually converted to in the liver is acetaldehyde, the chemical responsible for hangovers. Again, sugar and what kind of alcohol you drank, in relation to how bad of a hangover to expect, is also total mythology. It is acetaldehyde, and only acetaldehyde, that causes the hangover effect, and of course the dehydrating effect of alcohol contributes to the morning headache and fatigue. Acetaldehyde is a very toxic substance and your liver works overtime to get rid of it.

  Eventually, acetaldehyde is finally converted into water and carbon dioxide, at which time it is eliminated from the body.

  The other reason alcohol can put you to sleep easily is that it increases the production of adenosine, which I’ll also touch on in the caffeine discussion, which is a sleep- or drowsiness-inducing chemical in the brain. Just like with the GABA rebound effect, adenosine doesn’t stick around through the night and also contributes to you finding yourself wide awake in bed four or so hours after crashing.

  Other less technical, but equally problematic, effects of drinking alcohol include the fact that it’s a diuretic and causes water to be eliminated from your body. That’s why a night of drinking is followed by one or more nighttime bathroom trips, which ruin your sleep. It also causes breathing problems by causing muscles to become overly relaxed, hence why people who don’t normally snore can keep the entire house awake after a night of drinking!

  In summary, alcohol is the last thing you want to consume, except maybe for caffeine, before going to bed if you expect to sleep well and wake up feeling rested and rejuvenated.

  Caffeine

  This one is more obvious in terms of understanding why it disrupts sleep: Caffeine is a stimulant.

  Before getting too technical, let’s visit the biological half-life of caffeine. Half-life is defined as the time it takes for your body to get rid of half of the active drug in your body. So, for a simple example, say you drink a big mug of coffee on your way to work. Your body will take 5–6 hours to eliminate only 50% of your morning caffeine intake.

  Using a half-life calculator, I did some math based on consuming 200 mg of caffeine in the morning, which is less than most coffee drinkers realize they consume, along with a 5.5-hour half-life. Based on that, I would have 50% or 100 mg in my body 6 hours later, 25% or 50 mg 11 hours later, and 13%, or 25 mg, 17 hours later.

  Are you beginning to see the problem with caffeine?

  At issue isn’t that you only drank it in the morning and should be good to go by bedtime. The hard reality is that you still have active caffeine in your body at bedtime. Let’s say you had that coffee at 8:00 a.m. and go to bed at 11:00 p.m. If you drank 200 mg of caffeine at eight, about the same amount in a large Starbucks drip coffee, you’re going to have about 35 mg or so of active caffeine still in your body at bedtime.

  Double those numbers for the amount most coffee drinkers actually consume, combined with the astonishing amount of foods, beverages, and even medications that contain caffeine.

  Every fall, my kids’ school has an event called Donuts with Dads. I take them to school and we hang out on the playground for thirty minutes enjoying coffee and donuts, and hot cocoa for the kids. It’s at 7:30 a.m., which never amuses me, and I can’t help but notice that while I’m holding my little Styrofoam cup of coffee, virtually all the other dads are walking around with huge plastic mugs in their hands!

  In my research I learned that many people who use those big mugs and have two or more are actually consuming upwards of 900 mg or so every day! Based on caffeine’s half-life, these guys are going to bed with somewhere around 150 mg of caffeine still active—more than two espresso shots! It’s little wonder that so many people are chronically fatigued and just can’t seem to catch up on sleep. It’s because their morning “jolt” is still jolting them at midnight. What’s worse is that caffeine’s infamous “crash” keeps them drinking more and more throughout the day, compounding the negative effects.

  Speaking of a caffeine crash, let’s revisit adenosine, the fatigue-inducing neurotransmitter.

  Caffeine keeps you awake (actually stressed) in two ways. First, it releases the stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine (adrenaline) in order to activate the fight-or-flight response. It’s this caffeine-induced stress that masquerades as “energy.” In reality, caffeine doesn’t give you any energy at all. It merely puts you into the same situation as a caveman facing a lion. The same fight-or-flight response is activated, and if you’ve ever had an adrenaline dump, as I’ve experienced while doing advanced firearms combat training with law enforcement officers, you’ll know that it massively increases alertness, situational awareness, and also has other effects such as shaking hands, sweaty palms, and tunnel vision.

  While research at Johns Hopkins University has shown that caffeine does increase alertness and cognitive ability on the “up” swing and during the “high,” it equally inhibits those same functions during the “down” phase, entirely negating any so-called benefits you believe you may be getting from it.

  Speaking of the down phase and subsequent crash, that’s where adenosine comes into play. The other way caffeine causes heightened wakefulness is by binding and occupying the brain’s adenosine receptors, preventing them from being activated.

  In response to caffeine, like any drug, the body builds a tolerance, causing the coffee drinker to gradually need more and more to get the same effect. That’s because, in response to caffeine clogging up the adenosine receptors, the brain simply creates more and more of them.

  The end result? The added adenosine receptors have a compound effect, and when the caffeine starts to lose effect—boom! Adenosine takes over and you experience the so-called “crash” of caffeine. What is really happening is that the sleepiness-inducing neurotransmitter has expanded its capacity in the brain in response to caffeine consumption and it fights like hell to bring you back “down.”


  Finally, caffeine has long-term implications on your endocrine system and HPA axis. The constant release of cortisol and epinephrine from your adrenal glands eventually wears them out over time. For a long time my office was near the best coffee shop I’ve ever experienced anywhere, Local Coffee in San Antonio, Texas.

  For a few years I was having as many as six double espressos every day!

  And then it happened: I found myself in the throes of what many might mistake as chronic fatigue syndrome, but in reality was adrenal exhaustion. Beating up my adrenal glands with daily, high caffeine intake gradually depleted their ability to keep up, and soon they weren’t producing enough cortisol for normal daily functioning.

  I was completely wiped out. There was no “pushing through”—it was like trying to drive a car, not on fumes, but rather with the gas tank missing entirely. It’s impossible to do so, and it had negative effects on both my personal and professional lives.

  My physician sent me to see a nutritionist, who set me up with certain adaptogens, which are herbs and supplements that help your body to adapt to circumstances. About six months later my cortisol levels were perfectly normal and I never went back to that crazy high caffeine consumption, although I’ll still have a small cup if I feel like I need it in the morning, or just want to enjoy a good cup of coffee. (I’ve become a big fan of Black Rifle Coffee Company! Erring on the side of caution though, I get only their low-caffeine light roasts delivered.)

  Finally, caffeine, like alcohol, has a strong dehydrating effect on the body. For each cup of coffee you drink, you need to consume two cups of water to replace what your liver needed to use to get rid of the caffeine. Just being able to avoid the endless bathroom visits while I’m trying to work during the day, all thanks to caffeine’s diuretic effect, is enough to keep me away from becoming a regular caffeine consumer again!