The Truth About Sleep: Myths, Tips, and Longevity Secrets with Dr. Rebecca Robbins

**Dr. Rebecca Robbins** (0:00)
One of our biggest myths is that when our head hits the pillow, our brain just kind of checks out for the night. If you're falling asleep right away, you're probably starved for sleep.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:10)
Do you have tips or tricks? I mean, I want to share mine that I think will solve everybody's sleep problems. Number one.

**Dr. Rebecca Robbins** (0:17)
Sleep is just the ultimate accelerator of good health. The quality and quantity of our sleep is one of the strongest predictors of our longevity.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:25)
You have talked a lot in the past about cognitive health, Alzheimer's, mortality. Are there sleep biomarkers?

**Dr. Rebecca Robbins** (0:32)
The truth is, sleep is not going to be perfect every night, but the key is getting back on track towards those four components. Sleep is a product of two processes. The first is called the homeostatic sleep drive. For the risks of circadian desynchrony, the difficulties for our bodies to really repair and get good sleep, Shiftwork has been named a probable carcinogen.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:55)
Do you have a position on sleep medications?

**Dr. Rebecca Robbins** (0:58)
The research that pits those two treatments head to head, pharmacological intervention and behavior change, those two patients suffers of insomnia and we compare them over time. The behavioral treatment wins out.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:18)
Why should we sleep?

**Dr. Rebecca Robbins** (1:19)
Well, sleep is one of the most important parts of a typical 24-hour day. But unfortunately, so many of us, whether we choose on our own volition to curtail sleep, whether it's watching Netflix, staying up for another hour to do another report, or something, a professional obligation, a personal obligation, or out of necessity, if you're working multiple jobs, your time to sleep is going to be crunch. But sleep is one of the most vitally important parts of our typical 24-hour day. Over the course of our sleep at night, our blood pressure drops to its lowest point, and the 24-hour day is just one example. And that natural dipping of blood pressure is vitally important for us to wake up and maintain a healthy blood pressure. Our emotional regulation gets out of sync. Our ability to maintain a healthy appetite is thrown off when we're not getting enough sleep. But when we can reverse that, when we can put sleep at the forefront, and higher on our to-do list, higher on our priority list, so many positive things fall in line. Our emotions, our relationships, our productivity, so often I laugh, people say, what's the best productivity hack in the afternoon when I'm sleepy? I'm like, just take a nap. It's so interesting that we push back so hard against the idea of a good night's rest. But couple that with the fact that in at least the United States, we really don't have proper education about sleep. We're really not informed about evidence-based principles when it comes to sleep. For instance, I don't know if your mother ever told you this growing up, we love your mother, but my mom would always say, if you're struggling to sleep at night, stay in bed. You'll get some sleep. Stay in bed. But wrong. If you're experiencing insomnia, we want you out of bed. We want you to reset, to go do something relaxing and build up what we call sleep pressure and get back into bed when you're ready and give it a shot again. It should take you about 15 minutes to fall asleep and much longer than that. We want to break the cycle. We want to get you out and then trying again when you're ready.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:14)
We do hear a lot about sleep now probably more than we ever have. How long have you been in sleep science?

**Dr. Rebecca Robbins** (3:21)
I admittedly was interested in other areas of medicine earlier on in my career. Exercise, physiology, nutrition, nutritional sciences, or other broadly really interested in health behaviors and how to promote health behaviors in a Western society where we are taught to treat diseases. So that really was a big driver of my going to graduate school.
And I just became amazed by the research in sleep. And I took a class that was taught by Dr. James Moss. We tragically just lost him. He was older and has had an amazing career. But he was larger than life at Cornell where I went to undergrad. And he was known as the sleep professor. And he coined the term power naps in the 1980s in response to power breakfasts and power lunches. He said, take a power nap in the afternoon to boost your productivity. And he was just an incredible guy. He taught Psych 101 and promoted awareness about sleep in the context of this course.