Not sure when I’ve ever been so tired, and that’s saying something. This has been quite a week. Buddy, too, is back at work, but his office is on the water and is way more beautiful than mine. This is his picture of Sunken Ledge Buoy, one morning when he was getting up as I was going to bed.
Heather (I have no right to call you such, but feel you a dear friend) words cannot express appreciation — mine and so many — for you. Rest well and thank you, sincerely, for all you give.
Sleep, rest, recover. Take two nights if needed. Please. As dire as it all seems these days, tomorrow is another day and a new dawn for fresh perspectives.
I don’t know how you do it — day after day, month after month — synthesizing the day’s news from so many sources into a coherent narrative, but I and the members of the community you created are grateful for your tenacity. Thank you for helping keep us sane in insane times.
Pictures like today’s post remind us that in the midst of all the is happening there still is beauty out there, if only we take the time and effort to recognize it. Peace.
Dawn to dusk. And beyond. The Light is there for us. Filling every crack of darkness. As are the guardians that protect us. Have faith, be steady, stand a little taller than you did the minute before. Thank you, Professor Richardson. You, too, are a guardian of truth.
Rest well Heather. Your analyses have helped all who follow your Letters from an American immeasurably. Hats off to Buddy as well for keeping us in touch with the beauty of where you live, reminders of nature's beauty generally.
Please take care of yourself, Heather. I do know when I've felt the most tired in my whole life. In 2013 I had a massive pulmonary embolism and was within two hours of death. Fortunately, they gave me the clot buster drug, TPA ($17,000 for 100 milligrams!), in time and I survived. The next five weeks I found my body was in charge. There was no mentally pushing through the extreme fatigue. There was literally no gas left in the tank. My body would tell me I could lay down on the floor right where I was or it might let me get to my bed. It taught me to listen to my body and get the rest I need. The rest we all need. About eight hours per night. Here is an article I wrote for my monthly column on Accessible Living on sleep. It was the December article so I used Twas the Night Before Christmas poem as a framework. I think it is the potentially most impactful essay I've ever written.
December 2015
ACCESSIBLE LIVING by Catherine Learoyd
Byline: Stille Nacht: Creating A Haven for Sleep
“The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar plums danc'd in their heads,
And Mama in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap —
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.“
This is the original wording of the second verse of “Twas a Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore written in 1823. “Settled our brains”? “Visions of sugar plums”? “A long winter’s nap”? “Snug in their beds”? In the context of what we know today about our brain during sleep, this verse shows a family that is getting a good night’s sleep.
“Arose such a clatter”
Papa was probably in the first stage of sleep known as N1. N1 is light sleep where one can be easily awakened say by the clatter of eight tiny reindeer. Mama may have already reached the second level of N2 sleep or even the deep sleep of N3 since she wasn’t arosed. N3 deep sleep (also called long wave sleep) is when the brain does its house cleaning through the ingenious glymphatic system getting rid of waste products that have built up in the brain while awake. For example, the build up of the protein amyloid beta has been shown to be one of the key steps in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. If the brain doesn’t get the time to do its house cleaning and keep the waste from building up this suggests that worsening sleep quality and sleep duration will contribute to conditions like Alzheimer’s.
“Visions of sugar plums”
The children are dreaming which means they have reached REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. In this stage of sleep the brain is actually more active than when it is in the wake state. In REM, the brain is very busy processing and consolidating memory, integrating old and new memories, reinforcing pathways within the brain, developing rules from the patterns it discerns, gaining new insights, and even projecting future scenarios. If you have the opportunity to “sleep on it” after learning new material, you will retain three times the learning when tested twelve hours later compared to not having the benefit of sleep in between.
“All snug in their beds”
Since we spend one–third of our lives in bed and in our bedroom, how do we make it a haven for tranquil sleep and gain the tremendous benefits to our health and well-being from full and deep sleep? Let’s start with the bed itself. The best pillow is soft and made of natural materials (more resistant to dust mites) and is flexible so that it can be adjusted to the various sleep positions we go through each night. Mattresses are a very personal choice so when shopping for a mattress spend fifteen to twenty minutes lying on each candidate in your usual sleep position. Couples need to test the mattresses together since a key difference between types of mattresses is whether the movement of one person is felt by the other. A person with back problems is probably best off with a medium firm mattress – not too soft or too firm. Over the years a mattress loses its ability to give your body the support it needs. The resulting pressure points then trigger your body to tell the brain to wake up multiple times in the night so you’ll roll over. Waking up multiple times in the night for this or other reasons is equivalent to getting only four hours of sleep. So, consider buying a new mattress every ten years or so.
“Settled our brains”
The daily cycle of sleep and wake periods are regulated by our circadian biological clock within the brain’s hypothalamus which manages an army of neurotransmitters. By “settling our brains” a half hour to an hour before we go to bed we greatly enhance the quality of our sleep. This tuck-in period is the time to wind down. Brushing one’s teeth in a brightly lit bathroom is one of the worse things you can do just before climbing into bed so do this at the start of the tuck-in period. Put dimmer switches on bedroom and bathroom lights and lower the light levels at tuck-in time. Use part of the tuck-in time to pick up and declutter the bedroom to lower stress and anxiety. Keep the bedroom uncluttered and reserved exclusively for sleeping if at all possible. White and blue light suppresses melatonin delaying sleep so cover or remove electronic devices from the bedroom at tuck-in time even e-book readers. It is best for you and your child’s overall health to remove TVs from the bedrooms altogether.
“Long winter’s nap”
How much sleep do we need? The longer we sleep the greater the percentage of time spent in the restorative N3 and consolidating REM periods. Newborn babies spend 50% of their 16 to 18 hours of sleep per day in REM sleep because of all the demands of growing and learning and the need to organize and set up connections in the brain. Teenagers, another demanding time in life, require ten hours of sleep a night and their circadian rhythm naturally shifts their day to wake later and go to bed later. Younger children need more hours of sleep than the teenagers. Adults including seniors level off at eight hours of sleep. While the quality of sleep can decrease with age, the need for eight hours of sleep does not. If we take a typical day in the life of a teenager, they get up at 6:30 a.m., have classes from 7:50 to 3:25 p.m., have marching band or athletic practice from 3:45 to 6, have dinner and then do 3 hours of homework from 7 to 10. If they get in bed by 10:30 they need to sleep until 8:30 the next morning way past the tardy bell to get ten hours of needed sleep. They sit in class with lessened ability to concentrate or pay attention and feel moody and stressed. The teacher assigns more homework to make up for the lack of learning in the classroom and this devitalizing cycle of sleep deprivation continues. Further, sleep deprivation is now linked to obesity
because the tired brain releases the hunger hormones and to Type II diabetes. According to the National Institute of Health, sleep deprivation in children can cause daytime hyperactivity
and decrease in focused attention. This can be mistaken for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or other behavior disorders! At bedtime and through the night, have the bedroom as dark and quiet as possible. Have the thermostat of the bedroom wing programmed between 65 to 68 degrees F starting at tuck-in time until around dawn. Have plants to take out carbon dioxide and add oxygen into the room. Have red night lighting outside the bedroom and in the bathroom if you need to get up in the night. This gives you enough light to see but not enough of the white/blue light to bring you to a fully awake state and make it difficult to go back to sleep.
“Sprang from my bed”
In the morning, the best way to wake up fresh and alert is to do so naturally with the light of the sun with the bedrooms oriented to get eastern light. The thermostat is programmed to bring the temperature of the room to around 70 degrees F. Your body wakes you up at the end of REM instead of the alarm clock jerking you awake in the middle of your dream. This is the decade we’ll change our attitudes as a society about sleep as we come to understand the neurobiology of sleep and its massive impact on our physical and mental health and productivity.
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”
Further readings:
Twas the Night Before Christmas in its original version:
It was a pleasure hearing you speak in person in Portland and I appreciate your nightly letters and artistic Sunday evening photos. You keep us all grounded when the seas are rough and quicksand seems to be all around. I never miss reading your recap of the day, helping us to see through your informed, honest, and well polished lens. Thank you for all you do for us ordinary Americans. Take all the rest you need!
Thank you Heather/Prof. Richardson for your amazing work this, and every week. Your Letter, the day after the Jan. 6 televised hearing was just perfect and I was amazed since it was exhausting and ABSOLUTELY VITAL that we watch all the hearings. Hope you are having a wonderful rest. You give so much to us.
I add my name to the multitudes of Americans who owe you a deep debt of gratitude for the gift of reasonable thinking and sanity you have given us amid the crazy thinking taking over our country . Thank you. Joan Sweet
Thank you for the fantastic work you did for us this week. Rest well.
Heather (I have no right to call you such, but feel you a dear friend) words cannot express appreciation — mine and so many — for you. Rest well and thank you, sincerely, for all you give.
Sleep, rest, recover. Take two nights if needed. Please. As dire as it all seems these days, tomorrow is another day and a new dawn for fresh perspectives.
Thank you for your dedication.
I don’t know how you do it — day after day, month after month — synthesizing the day’s news from so many sources into a coherent narrative, but I and the members of the community you created are grateful for your tenacity. Thank you for helping keep us sane in insane times.
Pictures like today’s post remind us that in the midst of all the is happening there still is beauty out there, if only we take the time and effort to recognize it. Peace.
Dawn to dusk. And beyond. The Light is there for us. Filling every crack of darkness. As are the guardians that protect us. Have faith, be steady, stand a little taller than you did the minute before. Thank you, Professor Richardson. You, too, are a guardian of truth.
UNITA! 🙋🏻🙋🏼🙋🏽🙋🏾🙋🏿🇺🇸🗽
Rest well Heather. Your analyses have helped all who follow your Letters from an American immeasurably. Hats off to Buddy as well for keeping us in touch with the beauty of where you live, reminders of nature's beauty generally.
Please take care of yourself, Heather. I do know when I've felt the most tired in my whole life. In 2013 I had a massive pulmonary embolism and was within two hours of death. Fortunately, they gave me the clot buster drug, TPA ($17,000 for 100 milligrams!), in time and I survived. The next five weeks I found my body was in charge. There was no mentally pushing through the extreme fatigue. There was literally no gas left in the tank. My body would tell me I could lay down on the floor right where I was or it might let me get to my bed. It taught me to listen to my body and get the rest I need. The rest we all need. About eight hours per night. Here is an article I wrote for my monthly column on Accessible Living on sleep. It was the December article so I used Twas the Night Before Christmas poem as a framework. I think it is the potentially most impactful essay I've ever written.
December 2015
ACCESSIBLE LIVING by Catherine Learoyd
Byline: Stille Nacht: Creating A Haven for Sleep
“The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar plums danc'd in their heads,
And Mama in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap —
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.“
This is the original wording of the second verse of “Twas a Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore written in 1823. “Settled our brains”? “Visions of sugar plums”? “A long winter’s nap”? “Snug in their beds”? In the context of what we know today about our brain during sleep, this verse shows a family that is getting a good night’s sleep.
“Arose such a clatter”
Papa was probably in the first stage of sleep known as N1. N1 is light sleep where one can be easily awakened say by the clatter of eight tiny reindeer. Mama may have already reached the second level of N2 sleep or even the deep sleep of N3 since she wasn’t arosed. N3 deep sleep (also called long wave sleep) is when the brain does its house cleaning through the ingenious glymphatic system getting rid of waste products that have built up in the brain while awake. For example, the build up of the protein amyloid beta has been shown to be one of the key steps in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. If the brain doesn’t get the time to do its house cleaning and keep the waste from building up this suggests that worsening sleep quality and sleep duration will contribute to conditions like Alzheimer’s.
“Visions of sugar plums”
The children are dreaming which means they have reached REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. In this stage of sleep the brain is actually more active than when it is in the wake state. In REM, the brain is very busy processing and consolidating memory, integrating old and new memories, reinforcing pathways within the brain, developing rules from the patterns it discerns, gaining new insights, and even projecting future scenarios. If you have the opportunity to “sleep on it” after learning new material, you will retain three times the learning when tested twelve hours later compared to not having the benefit of sleep in between.
“All snug in their beds”
Since we spend one–third of our lives in bed and in our bedroom, how do we make it a haven for tranquil sleep and gain the tremendous benefits to our health and well-being from full and deep sleep? Let’s start with the bed itself. The best pillow is soft and made of natural materials (more resistant to dust mites) and is flexible so that it can be adjusted to the various sleep positions we go through each night. Mattresses are a very personal choice so when shopping for a mattress spend fifteen to twenty minutes lying on each candidate in your usual sleep position. Couples need to test the mattresses together since a key difference between types of mattresses is whether the movement of one person is felt by the other. A person with back problems is probably best off with a medium firm mattress – not too soft or too firm. Over the years a mattress loses its ability to give your body the support it needs. The resulting pressure points then trigger your body to tell the brain to wake up multiple times in the night so you’ll roll over. Waking up multiple times in the night for this or other reasons is equivalent to getting only four hours of sleep. So, consider buying a new mattress every ten years or so.
“Settled our brains”
The daily cycle of sleep and wake periods are regulated by our circadian biological clock within the brain’s hypothalamus which manages an army of neurotransmitters. By “settling our brains” a half hour to an hour before we go to bed we greatly enhance the quality of our sleep. This tuck-in period is the time to wind down. Brushing one’s teeth in a brightly lit bathroom is one of the worse things you can do just before climbing into bed so do this at the start of the tuck-in period. Put dimmer switches on bedroom and bathroom lights and lower the light levels at tuck-in time. Use part of the tuck-in time to pick up and declutter the bedroom to lower stress and anxiety. Keep the bedroom uncluttered and reserved exclusively for sleeping if at all possible. White and blue light suppresses melatonin delaying sleep so cover or remove electronic devices from the bedroom at tuck-in time even e-book readers. It is best for you and your child’s overall health to remove TVs from the bedrooms altogether.
“Long winter’s nap”
How much sleep do we need? The longer we sleep the greater the percentage of time spent in the restorative N3 and consolidating REM periods. Newborn babies spend 50% of their 16 to 18 hours of sleep per day in REM sleep because of all the demands of growing and learning and the need to organize and set up connections in the brain. Teenagers, another demanding time in life, require ten hours of sleep a night and their circadian rhythm naturally shifts their day to wake later and go to bed later. Younger children need more hours of sleep than the teenagers. Adults including seniors level off at eight hours of sleep. While the quality of sleep can decrease with age, the need for eight hours of sleep does not. If we take a typical day in the life of a teenager, they get up at 6:30 a.m., have classes from 7:50 to 3:25 p.m., have marching band or athletic practice from 3:45 to 6, have dinner and then do 3 hours of homework from 7 to 10. If they get in bed by 10:30 they need to sleep until 8:30 the next morning way past the tardy bell to get ten hours of needed sleep. They sit in class with lessened ability to concentrate or pay attention and feel moody and stressed. The teacher assigns more homework to make up for the lack of learning in the classroom and this devitalizing cycle of sleep deprivation continues. Further, sleep deprivation is now linked to obesity
because the tired brain releases the hunger hormones and to Type II diabetes. According to the National Institute of Health, sleep deprivation in children can cause daytime hyperactivity
and decrease in focused attention. This can be mistaken for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or other behavior disorders! At bedtime and through the night, have the bedroom as dark and quiet as possible. Have the thermostat of the bedroom wing programmed between 65 to 68 degrees F starting at tuck-in time until around dawn. Have plants to take out carbon dioxide and add oxygen into the room. Have red night lighting outside the bedroom and in the bathroom if you need to get up in the night. This gives you enough light to see but not enough of the white/blue light to bring you to a fully awake state and make it difficult to go back to sleep.
“Sprang from my bed”
In the morning, the best way to wake up fresh and alert is to do so naturally with the light of the sun with the bedrooms oriented to get eastern light. The thermostat is programmed to bring the temperature of the room to around 70 degrees F. Your body wakes you up at the end of REM instead of the alarm clock jerking you awake in the middle of your dream. This is the decade we’ll change our attitudes as a society about sleep as we come to understand the neurobiology of sleep and its massive impact on our physical and mental health and productivity.
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”
Further readings:
Twas the Night Before Christmas in its original version:
http://www.nightbeforechristmas.biz/poem.htm
National Institute of Health “Your Guide to Healthy Sleep
http://catalog.nhlbi.nih.gov/catalog/product/Your-Guide-to-Healthy-Sleep/11-5271
TEDtalk by Russell Foster “Why We Sleep”
http://www.ted.com/playlists/223/talks_to_inspire_you_to_go_to
Peace.
Thank you for this lovely photo - take care of yourself - tough days ahead!
Please rest as long as you need to.
I love the fiery clouds along the horizon with the buoy in the center of them and the burnished reflections in the waves. Thanks, Buddy.
It was a pleasure hearing you speak in person in Portland and I appreciate your nightly letters and artistic Sunday evening photos. You keep us all grounded when the seas are rough and quicksand seems to be all around. I never miss reading your recap of the day, helping us to see through your informed, honest, and well polished lens. Thank you for all you do for us ordinary Americans. Take all the rest you need!
Thank you Heather/Prof. Richardson for your amazing work this, and every week. Your Letter, the day after the Jan. 6 televised hearing was just perfect and I was amazed since it was exhausting and ABSOLUTELY VITAL that we watch all the hearings. Hope you are having a wonderful rest. You give so much to us.
Thanks to Heather and thanks, too, to all who read, comment, debate and support each other on this forum.
I add my name to the multitudes of Americans who owe you a deep debt of gratitude for the gift of reasonable thinking and sanity you have given us amid the crazy thinking taking over our country . Thank you. Joan Sweet
Thank you Heather
Well deserved sleep!!! Sleep well. Self care it important.
Sleep tite😘thank you for all you do, doc💕