HEALTH & WELLNESS
Doctor, why can’ t I sleep when I’ m off duty? A growing epidemic in our law enforcement community
Unfortunately, I hear this too often from our patients in law enforcement with working hours that change routinely. Consistency is very important, and attempting to alter the body’ s natural sleep patterns can result in abnormal rhythms and behaviors.
It is not uncommon to hear from our law enforcement patients,“ Doctor, my internal clock is messed up.” They are referring to their circadian rhythms.
DR. MAZ The body has circadian rhythms that signal the brain to be awake and go to sleep. At night when it gets dark, the brain signals the production of melatonin and serotonin, which causes you to go to sleep. So requiring a person to be alert at night works against the body’ s ability and natural rhythms. Prolonged interruptions of this routine may cause damage to multiple functions of the body including brain alertness, fatigue and depression.
People in professions such as law enforcement, healthcare and security who may be required to change their shift schedule every week or month make up most of the sleep-deprived population. In doing their jobs, they create harm for their bodies. This is alarming, since these are some of the professions that require the greatest degree of alertness. Sleep deprivation affects millions of Americans. It slows down the body’ s ability to eliminate toxins. Sleep is essential for the body to detoxify and rest the organs for the next day’ s activity.
While we advise having a continuous morning shift as a standard and good routine, we realize that this is almost an impossibility in some professions. However, it is highly recommended not to alter working schedules on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
TV and electronics are also a major component— and many times the cause— of those sleepless nights. We are all addicted to our phones, iPads, TVs, social media accounts and so on. Watching TV or using our cellphones before sleep is a bad habit that most of us do have. Some fall asleep with their phone in their hand. As a result, the brain keeps firing at a high frequency, preventing the ability to relax, fall asleep and stay asleep. There is a neurologic basis behind this that we will not get into, but there are certain“ repairs” your body needs to make that can only be done at rest. If you are not getting the rest you need, your body cannot repair. It’ s as simple as that.
Without proper diagnosis to find the true cause, these patients become medically managed with pills and drugs to be able to fall sleep without addressing the true cause. Unfortunately, patients can develop a dependency to medications and become worse. As they say, you need to treat the fire and not just the smoke. In many cases, sleep problems are caused by a functional problem that needs to be addressed by a functional medicine doctor, not to be self-diagnosed nor be remedied by sleeping pills.
I advise taking the TV out of the bedroom— or even out of the house completely. It is too stimulating to the brain. TV also negatively affects your pineal gland’ s ability to make melatonin.
Avoid caffeine. Seems like a no-brainer, right? A recent study showed that in some people, caffeine is not processed efficiently. These people can feel the effects long after drinking it. So an afternoon cup of coffee( or even tea) will keep some people from falling asleep at night. I am one of them.
Another factor that affects sleep quality is your gut function. Some people refer to the gut as the second brain, but I refer to it as the first brain. Food sensitivity is a very common underdiagnosed condition. The only way to know what foods you are sensitive to is to get tested. Food sensitivity may present in a nontraditional way that neither patients nor traditional doctors may relate to insomnia. Inability to sleep, attention deficit, brain fog, cloudy thinking, depression and anxiety could be directly related to food sensitivity. I have seen many patients who have never thought to make the connection between food and sleep. If you are sensitive to some foods, you may experience nasal congestion, sneezing, watery eyes and runny nose. These symptoms can lead to poor sleep, which can result in significant daytime sleepiness and fatigue.
Most often, what you eat, particularly before bedtime, is directly contributing to your sleep and quality of sleep. Some may not go to sleep easily, some cannot stay sleep for a long period and some patients suffer from both. All these types of asleep issues originate in different parts of the brain and need to be addressed differently.
Although it is easy to take a pill and go to sleep, I do not recommend it. These types of drugs chemically alter the brain’ s neurotransmitters and neurophysiology of neurons throughout the brain and can cause serious side effects in short or long term.
At Medwell, we provide a take-home sleep study kit to qualified individuals. Patients go home with it and sleep with it for one to three nights based on our physician’ s recommendation. The device measures brain activity and computes how long it takes to fall asleep after turning off the lights. How long does it take to go into a deep sleep, if it happens at all? How long does the individual remain in deep sleep? How many times an hour does the individual wake up without realizing? The results are computed by a board-certified sleep medicine specialist, along with a specific recommendation for a natural supplementation and remedy. It is not unusual to see benefits after only a few days of following the recommended protocol.
Patients can visit www. fixmeup123. com to become more educated or call 201-848-8000 for a free consultation to see if they qualify. d
Dr. Ali Mazandarani( Maz), DAAIM, BCIM, DC, CCRD, CCPCP, provides care at MedWell, a center for chronic conditions recovery with natural, drug-free methods. He has successfully helped thousands of patients using the“ Maz Method,” an individualized program developed after years of collaborative research amongst himself and his colleagues. The center is located in Midland Park, Bergen County. You can reach the center at 201-848-8000 or www. FixMeUp123. com.
www. njcopsmagazine. com ■ NOVEMBER 2017 75