LANSING, Mich. — It's been almost one week since Daylight Saving Time caused our clocks to jump forward an hour. But losing an hour of sleep isn't the easiest adjustment to make.
We sat down with Cassie Sobelton, founder and CEO of Wellness Collection, to talk about the time change in light of Sleep Awareness Week.
Q: What are the health risks associated with losing an hour of sleep?
"There are mental and physical health risks that are associated with losing sleep or not getting enough sleep, which of course is happening this week," Sobelton said. "There's a 6.3 percent increase in fatal car accidents this week alone, which tells us the cognitive impairment that we have. I mean, it's almost like, you know, we're driving with a little bit of something going on and that's true in our daily life. We have losses in our memory, our mindset shifts a little bit. We have professional type things that come up. It'll be harder to retain information, it'll be harder to gather it as well as our body. So hormones are actually regulated during our sleep time and when our sleep is bounced around a little bit, it's not going to be as easy to regulate, so it can show up in a lot of different areas of our body and so we want to be really careful to be able to get enough sleep while this time change is occurring to keep ourselves in balance."
Q: How much sleep is necessary and does that change over time?
"It does change over time. It's interesting," Sobelton said. "Infants as much as 17 hours a day, children about 12 hours, that reduces as we age and the typical adult about seven to nine hours. It gets less and less as we age. If you think about it, children need that time to repair and rejuvenate. They're growing a lot so it makes a lot of sense, but when we sleep our mind repairs and processes and deals with stressors that are coming in. Our body goes in and repairs and rejuvenates so sleep is very important for both the mind and the body."
Q: Are there natural ways to help us sleep better?
"There are and it makes a difference what kind of sleep we get. That surface sleep, as opposed to the REM sleep, which is rapid eye movement, that's when we're dreaming. That's when we're in a deep sleep state," Sobelton said. "There are a lot of things we can do that will naturally help us. So, first of all, melatonin is made in the body and that is what we need to sleep. So, that reduces over time. If you're having problems sleeping you can take melatonin.
Melatonin has what's called a short half life and that means it gets out of our system quickly so a lot of people wake up about four to five hours after taking it. Taking a melatonin that's combined with a CBD or another type of substance that will actually drive the sleep through the night is very effective.
We can take baths. We can get into any type of routine that's going to help us get into that deep sleep state before we go to sleep. That could be meditation, it could be journaling. Having a room as dark as possible is super important. Not having those blue lights up to your eyes right before you go to bed, at least giving it an hour before."
Sobelton also said finishing your meal at least four hours before you go to sleep is going to be very helpful. "Of course, using eye pillows, anything to block out the light if your shades aren't good in your room. We have weighted blankets. They're pretty heavy and it almost feels like a hug. It's like this very comforting feeling we can have in bed at night."
Depending on the issue and why someone's not sleeping well, there's a lot of really great ways they can go looking for that. "A diffuser; just put a couple drops of essential oils inside a diffuser can be really beneficial because you can breath that in all night long. Any of these ways are great ways and all of them together are going to give you really good sleep."
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