participantOne:(1140-26620): Welcome to All Things Vegas, nourishing self-care for the helping professional. During our time together, we will explore a wide variety of topics relating to self-care, all especially geared to the helping professional. Our guests are all thought leaders and cutting-edge providers in their respective fields of endeavor. They will offer not only helpful insights, but practical skills that you can begin to use immediately. Thank you.
participantOne:(27100-55280): Dagny Deutschman is the owner and founder of The Art of Rest. They are a nervous system professional who works from a top-down and bottom-up approach to the nervous system, specializing in not only stabilizing a nervous system through sleep, rest, and habit formation, but also how to access nervous system health through connection, creativity, wonder, and awe. Dr. Smith received his medical training from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon.
participantOne:(55420-79980): Before that, he completed a master's degree in New York City where his research focused on epigenetics and neuroscience. Dr. Smith provides comprehensive naturopathic care for individuals of all ages, focusing on neurological, mental health, gastrointestinal health, and respiratory conditions. He is passionate about supporting the health and wellness of patients across the lifespan and throughout generations.
participantOne:(80920-109880): Michael and Dagny, we're back for round two. So the last time we connected, we talked about the whole idea of rest and the seasonality around it, specifically around wintertime. So we want to continue our conversation about sleep. And Michael, I think you want to kick it off with some actual science, huh? I think it's amazing to see and think about what happens in our brain while we are sleeping.
participantOne:(111820-138160): We can do that on lots of different levels. The field of neuroscience is very broad. And we can look at the anatomy, at the regions of our brain, and what is going on in our prefrontal cortex, in the very front part of our brain, versus the cerebellum in the back of our brain, versus the cortex and the thalamus and all these different aspects. Each geography has their own role. We have the...
participantOne:(138960-167100): physiology on a very cellular and molecular level. We've got neurotransmitters being released and then binding, strengthening these synaptic connections. Then we can also look at a more harder to grasp tangibly aspect of neuroscience, which is cognitive neuroscience. How do we think
participantOne:(167880-193940): It's always the harder part for me to wrap my head around just because it's not tangible. But sleep interacts with all of these things. From the geography, we've got the thalamus, which is the middle kind of, I think of it as like the grand central station of the brain, processing in lots of things in and out.
participantOne:(194640-220959): It's connecting with the cortex, the upper top layer that's doing a lot more planning and thinking. While we're sleeping, there's these synaptic connections that are being strengthened. That's all due to neurotransmitters being released. And as they're released, the receiving neuron says, oh, there's this pattern that's being fired, this neuron that's firing all the time. I better create some more receptors for that.
participantOne:(221720-243560): There's the idea that neurons that fire together wire together. And we're literally all the time, as we live, as we during awakefulness or sleep, we are continually rewiring our brain. This synaptic plasticity idea and sleep touches on all of those things.
participantOne:(243800-257459): Totally. And I think one thing that's really interesting is when I educate about sleep, it's really actually hard to communicate like, what is sleep? How is it different from the consciousness that we're doing while we are awake?
participantOne:(257680-285880): What are the unique factors of what's going on in a brain and the synapses and our neurotransmitters while we are asleep? When we're studying this in a lab, we actually cannot accurately discern if someone is awake or asleep by their brainwaves alone. What we're doing is we're actually putting electrodes all over their brain and then all over their body as well. We have electrodes on their legs, on their shoulders, on their arms, and most importantly, on the muscles around their eyes.
participantOne:(286200-314800): So we can only really accurately discern by brainwaves alone if someone is in, let's say, the REM cycle of sleep because their entire body is paralyzed except for their ocular muscles and of course any of the muscles that are helping with like breathing or digestion or anything like that. But all of the muscles that we are maybe used to using agency to move around with, that's the only way we know how. So if you have a wearable device, let's say, that is tracking your sleep,
participantOne:(315120-341580): They call those types of wearables actigraphy devices. You actually can't tell if someone is awake or asleep by just actigraphy alone. You can make a very good guess, but you cannot know for certain unless someone is fully hooked up to polysomnography and their whole body's paralyzed except for their eye muscles. We have thoughts, we have visions, we have dreams in our wakeful state, and we also have them in our sleep state.
participantOne:(342020-360420): Yeah, it's really interesting because, again, similar to like what is sleep, we're also still finding this answer to what is dreaming? What is dreaming actually doing? What is our brain doing while we're sleeping? Is all of it considered dreaming? Is only the type of dream where we remember the narrative of it a dream?
participantOne:(360840-390400): And there's actually not a clear answer to this. I think depending on which scientist you talk to, you'd get a different answer. But I think most of us can at least relate to the idea of having a dream that has a narrative. We wake up. We actually didn't even know we were in a different state of consciousness until we wake back up into the one that we're used to operating in. That's the only way we know it was a dream is because we wake up from it. And we are learning a lot about what the benefit of this part of our consciousness is. Right.
participantOne:(390820-416060): And a lot of it is around memory consolidation and trying to figure out how that memory consolidation is different from wakefulness compared to being asleep and doing that memory consolidation. If I'm kind of understanding correctly, there's not a lot of difference between what we're doing, what our brain is doing in wake and sleep? It's interesting because our brain doesn't actually turn off when we're sleeping.
participantOne:(416380-422240): our brain does very different things when it's sleeping than when we are awake. We...
participantOne:(422160-448160): are just now getting to learn the patterns of what those things are. So we know for sure in sleepfulness, our brain is maybe just as active or sometimes more active than when we are awake, but it's doing different purposes. And I know like one of the major purposes that's happening when we're sleeping is like clearing out different parts of the brain, which I think you know a lot more about than I do actually. Yeah, and there's this idea of the glymphatic system.
participantOne:(448160-472660): And the glymphatic system is involved with the clearing out all of the debris and protein and other things that are accumulate. We've got the cerebrospinal fluid, which is what our brain is swimming in right now. And there's certain ion channel transporters that are causing fluid to come in and out of cells. There's.
participantOne:(472760-498800): pulsations of the cerebral spinal fluid that cause movement throughout the whole nervous central nervous system down even including our spinal cord all of these things are designed to help clear out the garbage in essence one I think very very tangible example is the idea of amyloid beta protein these are intrinsically unstructured proteins that over time can accumulate and
participantOne:(498940-528420): There are many different ideas about the ideology or how Alzheimer's disease comes about, but the amyloid beta hypothesis has been one of the leading ones. These proteins will clump together in ways that other proteins won't. They're just naturally sticky. They form clumps. They can block neurotransmitters. These amyloid beta proteins can get in the way of normal brain function, and during the
participantOne:(528800-555100): sleep, our body is like clearing those out. We're able to pull out from our cerebrospinal fluid into our lymphatic system, which then goes into our blood, into our GI, and then out of our body these proteins that are not serving us very well. I think that's one very tangible example. And there's research that shows that individuals who do not get enough sleep
participantOne:(556000-577020): have a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease. The uptake of different things on the positive PET scans that are used to measure brain function, they are higher for people who have lower amounts of sleep. So evidence...
participantOne:(577360-604780): that we need sleep in order to function. It literally is clearing out the garbage. Dagny was talking about how it's strengthening synaptic connections. We need all of these things to happen for a healthy nervous system. We often just think about the synapses or the neurotransmitters that are high or low, the serotonin, the dopamine. They get all the press and all the headlines, but really there's so much more happening in our nervous system
participantOne:(605120-619960): beyond the neurotransmitters. Yeah. And I think what's really interesting about all this too, right? Like the actual beta amyloid process of our body clearing things out while you're sleeping is also somewhat happening in kind of like you were talking about earlier, a
participantOne:(619960-638060): cognitive neuroscience kind of a way as well. So not only are we doing this in a literal physiological way where we are clearing out actual proteins, our brain is also selectively figuring out what memories are the most important ones, what social cues did we interact with during the day that are the most important ones.
participantOne:(638100-663300): And it is helping us find which ones are the most useful and re-crunch them and sort of clean them up and reset them for the next day. So even though we know for sure that sleep does all of these different things, one of the things that we know is very unique to sleep itself that is very different from when we are awake is that it is restoring our ability to be socially and emotionally aware of
participantOne:(663780-684860): And it's really interesting because we know that this is happening kind of across different stages of sleep, but we know that it is mostly happening during our REM cycle. And our REM cycle is where we report having most of our narrative dreaming. Again, to just kind of link these two things together, these different states of consciousness and being curious about like which parts of these states of consciousness do what is.
participantOne:(684939-700980): Well, they probably all do multiple things, just like most of our body does. But very uniquely and specifically, our REM cycle and the dreams that we have within it are helping us attend to what is socially and emotionally important in our world and how does that help us.
participantOne:(701100-729860): us achieve our goals. And I say that very broadly because if we think about the way we evolved, maybe that goal was literally just survival, right? And this is where we get cultures that think about dreams as oracle. Sometimes we've poo-pooed that idea because we are so much smarter and better than that now, but it's actually kind of accurate if you know how dreams are consolidating memories and choosing specific data. So if we think about it in terms of survival, it was at one point very literal. I think part of our ability to
participantOne:(729660-742600): be alive now is because of our ability to dream. And what that might look like in a modern era now is navigating complex social problems or complex problems at work. And we do know that there's a lot of famous...
participantOne:(742939-766400): inventions or insights that happen through dreaming, like the periodic table of elements was completed through a dream. The sewing machine was inspired by a dream. The song Blackbird by the Beatles was composed more or less, with lack of a better word, in a dream. For those of us, myself included, who I'm guessing I dream, but I have no, I have zero recall. Like,
participantOne:(767000-788720): I just don't. I just don't remember. So I'm hoping that all of that is still working in the background, even if I'm not remembering directly what the narrative. Yes. Yeah. So that's accurate. I think that it's hard, right? Dreams are very subjective. In general, in the scientific community, we believe that people are dreaming whether they remember it or not.
participantOne:(788839-815640): And just because of how we're now understanding how these different patterns with these more sensitive tools that we have, we more or less can say that person was probably dreaming, even if you wake them up in that moment and say, what were you dreaming about? They go, I don't remember. We can more or less discern that they were dreaming. And there's some really interesting hot debates happening about that in the animal world as well and like what that means about animal sentience and how we treat animals. So there's a really big debate going on around that with animals that are nonverbal.
participantOne:(815300-835560): That's something that we just believe is happening all the time. And then this again brings us to this idea of like, well, what is a dream? Is a dream something that is narrative specific? Is a dream a procedural muscle memory thing, which we think actually happens more in the slow wave sleep, that earlier falling asleep part of the night, that deep restorative physiological sleep?
participantOne:(835860-850420): During that time, there's been studies that show different brain pathways lighting up. Let's say someone has to memorize rats. This is a very common thing for a rat researcher. They'll look at a rat learning a maze.
participantOne:(850920-879360): And that's not necessarily a narrative dream, but it is a procedural dream. And you can see that that same pattern, while the rat is awake and moving in the real world at real speed at real time, that next time that rat goes to sleep, if it's hooked up to the right imaging software, right, whatever, then you can see that that same pattern is being played out again. So what's a dream? Is it only when we wake up and we remember the narrative of us being on a spaceship and at the mall and with our best friend who's also our sister at the same time?
participantOne:(879579-905860): Or is it this thing that's the entire process of how we consolidate memory and information at night? And I don't know that I have an opinion on it. I'm just endlessly fascinated by what I think it is. And we're learning that brain, specifically during where we think narrative dreaming is happening and we're starting to unpack the subjective relationship and content of dreams, is that our brain actually prioritizes transformation.
participantOne:(905600-921860): trying to associate the weakest link in our brain, not the strongest, which is why you have often we think that that contributes to that feeling where you wake up and you're like, well, yeah, I was in my house, but it wasn't really my house. It was also the White House and it was the mall and it was also the Orange Street food farm.
participantOne:(921860-941520): And everyone can relate to that being like 12 things at once, but you also know very distinctly where you were and the emotional sensation of what that place feels like. It felt like home, even though the things you're viewing around you are not home. And we believe that that's because the brain is prioritizing space.
participantOne:(941819-965480): weaker associations, not your strongest associations, because it is actively problem-solving. If you're trying to find a novel solution to something that you've already gone through all of your regular neural pathways, you're crunching on it day in and day out while you're awake, and you're not coming up with anything new, evolutionarily, it would be a strategic advantage to have your brain do it a different way.
participantOne:(966040-994920): at a different state of consciousness and to start to look at, well, where are all the associations we haven't tried yet because they don't make logical sense? Because they're happening in a different part of the brain, those logic-based connections and tools that we're so used to using are happening in that prefrontal cortex, whereas a lot of these associative memories are more emotional and they happen more in that limbic system. I think a really good example of this is the Disney Pixar movie Inside Out,
participantOne:(995300-1023180): where we have these emotions. There's Riley who's navigating life and all that that's bringing. And it's focused on these core emotions that are on this control panel in the brain. And we see when it's talking about dreams, everything going from the normal, quote-unquote, life to these very abstract figures and thinking. And it's that...
participantOne:(1023500-1045440): it is but it isn't state that you were talking about. I think they do a really good job at describing in a very visual way what's going on in our brain. Also the memories, we have these core memories. When something really big happens,
participantOne:(1045859-1070120): when our limbic system is activated for some reason, whether it's really positive, a very, very amazing day that we want to remember, and then we do remember for seemingly the rest of our life, or it's a very not so great day, trauma, heavy, sad news, whatever it might be, we still remember that those core memories in our brain, through that limbic system connections,
participantOne:(1070760-1096000): is noting, I need to remember this. Right, which I love that you said that, right? Because if you think about for those people who maybe do have a little bit stronger dream recall, we very rarely have a mundane dream that we remember. Sometimes we do. I think people who really pay attention to their dream and track it on purpose, you do tend to find more of that content. But I would say for most of us, we probably have a dream from our childhood that we remember.
participantOne:(1096180-1113980): We probably have a dream from our early 20s that we remember or like a series of dreams that we remember from our 20s. We probably remember a dream that really scared us or a nightmare we've had at some point. So like to your point, there's these things that are attached to our core memories and a lot of these dreams are.
participantOne:(1114280-1141520): Not always. This is a very broad stroke. But a lot of times our dreams are pretty indicative of where our nervous system is at while we are having them. So if you're having a nightmare, nightmares are very tightly associated with PTSD, with having suicidality, with having a very stressful period of our life. Sometimes grief really can trigger on a lot of very intense nightmare or very high stress. And that makes sense. Your nervous system is in a state of everything is different. I have to really change.
participantOne:(1141720-1154700): crunch, I'm really trying to reorient now that this big piece of information, a new core memory is telling me the world is not as safe as it was before. And at nighttime, that elicits more nightmares or more stress dreams.
participantOne:(1155160-1175200): And then I think all of us maybe could probably resonate with the idea of having a really sweet dream where we wake up and it was really nice there. It's almost like our real life's a little bit like we'd like to go back to sleep because our real life's not quite as fun as whatever dream we were just having. Probably a really good indication that our nervous system is in a parasympathetic state of rest and digest during those dreams.
participantOne:(1175420-1202500): And it's not one-to-one, but it's often when I'm working with folks with dreams and they're not someone who recalls the actual narrative. The way that we'll start is I'll just ask someone like, hey, can you remember the primary emotion that you woke up with? Because that's a good segue into trying to figure out where is their body and their nervous system? Where's their general sense of safety right now? What about repetitive dreams? Yeah, I love this question because I...
participantOne:(1202320-1226280): For so long, I think people who, particularly psychologists, right, I think psychologists have chips on their shoulders about not being called a soft science so often. And they're like, oh, we have to really step it up a notch. So they were very, very avoidant of talking about something like dreams because it's just really subjective material. And it's increasingly becoming less subjective as we get these different ways of measuring it in the body as well. But it's really unique.
participantOne:(1226560-1253240): Dreams are the most bespoke thing about us. They are entirely constructed of our own unique individual memory bank, our nervous systems at the time those memories were formed, and then the information that has come into our world in plus or minus the last three or four days. And then every time we go to sleep, we re-crunch all of that information. It's like a little Rubik's cube in our brain. It reshuffles the whole thing, and then we reprocess those memories as they are useful.
participantOne:(1254220-1280700): It's not a very objective thing to keep track of, right? That's hard. And so you can imagine that for many years, especially something like a behavioral psychologist would say, dreams are just a random firing of synapses in the brain. Because it was a more convenient solution than saying this is really complex and we have no idea what to say, so we're just going to say it doesn't matter. But a repetitive or recurring dream completely changes.
participantOne:(1281120-1300340): interrupts that idea because if it's a truly random firing in the brain we would not have the exact same imagery showing up over and over again across different parts of our life it is statistically impossible for that to be true so if nothing else with math we can be like
participantOne:(1300120-1316440): that's not true because that's impossible. Then the, I think, more complex and difficult scientific question is, okay, so why do we have recurring dreams? If they're not entirely random and we do know they show up over and over again, what purpose do they serve?
participantOne:(1316440-1339340): I was reflecting on what you said earlier about the state that we wake up and how the dreams and the feelings are reflective of the state of our nervous system. And it makes me very much think about how our nervous system, specifically the sympathetic nervous system, is very connected with our adrenal function and our cortisol levels.
participantOne:(1339340-1365980): And we see that if we're running from a bear, we need our sympathetic nervous system to activate and we need our cortisol to activate very quickly thereafter. And both will activate our body systems to get us out of that situation. Oftentimes when someone comes to me with wanting help with sleep, I think about this sympathetic nervous system that's manifesting in a dream or through the dreams and things like that.
participantOne:(1366320-1393660): how is it being influenced by our cortisol, by our adrenal glands? One of the first things that I'm thinking about is how our cortisol is actually helping our body respond to low blood sugar. Interestingly, we think about mammals that are bears that are hibernating. We think about even just us as humans that are sleeping. We are fasting in a sense, unless we're
participantOne:(1393980-1413140): want this night walking to the fridge sleepwalking to the fridge in the middle of the night we are fasting for 8 10 maybe 12 hours and over that time our body is noticing that our brain kitten is is observing what's happening while we sleep and
participantOne:(1413639-1436660): If that blood sugar gets too low, and especially as I think about this with people that wake up at certain times every single day, I'm wondering, is your blood sugar off? Is your blood sugar off that's causing your adrenal glands to start kicking in to cause you to wake up at that given time to help your body go and get food?
participantOne:(1437060-1458620): from a basic physiologic survival standpoint. And we see cortisol rising in the morning, and I think it is very much reflective of that. So oftentimes one of the things, and this is a very tangible takeaway, individuals who have those challenges to sometimes just simply eat protein before bed, not sugar.
participantOne:(1459160-1488400): not carbohydrates, but a hard-boiled egg in the fridge or a scoop of peanut butter or a meat stick or something where you can kind of stabilize that blood sugar for a little bit longer and help ensure that that's not triggering your adrenal system, your cortisol, which is then not triggering your sympathetic nervous system, which is then influencing your dreams. It's kind of that whole tangent coming back to that.
participantOne:(1488680-1506300): It is, and I'm really glad that you're talking about this because the way that some of the modern science is showing that we're learning that dreams in particular are helping us process complex emotions, and they call it sort of the pancake theory that's helping flatten them, is because while we are sleeping, our brain will selectively...
participantOne:(1506740-1532380): activate some of these physiologically arousing parts of our brain, including our HPA axis, which controls our cortisol. It'll strategically repress other parts that keep us from actually acting out our dreams with our body so that we can be close to this highly emotional stimulus without it kicking on our cortisol too high. You're talking about if other pillars of your health are not
participantOne:(1532700-1548080): dialed in or just are off for a day, whatever. We don't have to sort of like moralize it, but let's say you go to bed hungry and you're also processing something that's pretty difficult. Your body is less likely to turn off some of these pieces of the HPA system because
participantOne:(1548300-1574980): i.e. that cortisol response. And if you're processing something heavy emotionally and you haven't eaten, you forgot to eat before bed, which can happen if you're in a big grief process or something, your eating gets weird, and then you have a nightmare and you wake up at 3 a.m., it's easy to start to create a bigger spiral around that whole process, right? It's much harder for us to ask ourselves the question, should I eat a hard-boiled egg and go back to sleep, which could be a very easy fix, right?
participantOne:(1575480-1602700): It then turns into, I woke up feeling a state of panic and urgency. What's wrong with me? Or what's wrong with this? Or now I'm afraid to go back to sleep. That dream was really terrifying. I don't want to lay back down. And so these things are so intertwined and complex and really interesting, right? I think it's easiest to study these things in the way when they're extreme like this, when someone's in a state of trauma or stress or crisis. But this is happening on a low level grade all the time too.
participantOne:(1602940-1619060): I would like to wake up in the morning feeling ready for the day, so energized, refreshed, but also receptive and calm and creative, etc., etc.
participantOne:(1619280-1636900): I'm going to guess that there's something that we can do way back before maybe we go to bed to open up the possibility that would happen more often. Yeah. No, I think that's a brilliant question. I feel like I've got a ton of answers from the sort of sleep side of things. I'm wondering if you wanted to talk to anything about, like,
participantOne:(1636560-1656680): like what's going on metabolically during the day so people can really tee themselves up to a good night of sleep. Yeah, how we sleep affects how we are awake and how we are awake affects how we sleep. And knowing that relationship and really driving down, there is this three-legged stool of health.
participantOne:(1657020-1678800): that really builds the foundation for everything else. It is how we sleep, how we eat, and how we exercise. All those three things all interplay with each other, and we can't live on just one of them. If we are sleepy, that's going to make us hungry during the day.
participantOne:(1680040-1707700): We need to eat so that we can have enough energy to exercise, and then exercise will help regulate our nervous system so that we can sleep better. Like there's all of these pathways and things that we are doing even without thinking. If not exercising is a default choice that we might not consciously be making, but it is a choice and all of these little choices are,
participantOne:(1708460-1728500): affect each other, affect our health, affect our nervous system, affect our ability to live and manage in this increasingly stressful, crazy world. Yeah, so I think that as it pertains to actually heading into that bedtime, right, it's making sure that you've eaten a meal, you know, roughly three hours or so before bed. The science shows absolutely.
participantOne:(1728260-1749460): actually it can be as close as 40 minutes, but anything closer than 40 minutes will disrupt that part of the process. You want to make sure that leading up to bed those couple of hours is an opportunity to have some kind of a make sure your nervous system is the thing that is winding down. So hopefully you had some kind of healthy movement during the day that allows the nervous system to continue to wind down at night.
participantOne:(1749700-1765300): And then when you're actually heading to sleep and going to sleep, I'll just totally own this. This is my bias because I'm fascinated by dreams. But I think that dreams are actually a really important piece of sleep health to pay attention to. So whether you are an active person who remembers your dreams or not,
participantOne:(1765560-1791080): When you remember a dream, not forcing yourself to remember a dream, but when you remember a dream, to just be really curious about it. Even if it's a dream that might have some confusing or interesting or alarming material to it, being curious with that content on purpose can actually help us move into a parasympathetic nervous system state. By even just practicing being...
participantOne:(1791340-1819740): in relationship with dream in general, despite what the content itself is, we start to train our body to learn that whatever's happening while we are in a different state of nighttime consciousness, all of it is safe. None of it is actually threatening to us. And the stronger we can make that connection to being curious and interested with our dreams, the less likely we are to fall into a period of having sleep anxiety where we avoid sleep or fear sleep because of dreams.
participantOne:(1819740-1847200): And then another thing that I think is really interesting and tangible around like, how do we wake up feeling restored and happy and healthy and curious and engaged? I think there's an under-talked about maybe fourth leg of the stool that's being talked about, which is our sense of belonging and our sense of social connectivity. And we know that loneliness is now killing people at the same rate as smoking cigarettes for a life.
participantOne:(1847500-1852360): You know, it's one of the major things that predicts longevity in our world.
participantOne:(1852600-1879340): And sharing dreams with other people is a way to give and receive highly emotional content that has kind of low consequences if it gets dropped. Right. So in our modern world, many of us have our histories, have our traumas, have our big wins and big losses. And most of those things are very tender and very personal. It's not often that we would make a friendship and then sit them down and be like, let me tell you about my whole childhood and all of my attachment wounding with my parents.
participantOne:(1879340-1902040): That's really vulnerable to do and that is scary. And if someone doesn't hold that well, that is actually something we know is very disruptive to the sleep process. Even if it's somebody you don't even like that much, it can interrupt your sleep for multiple days. But a safe way to practice a similar kind of connection without the bigger risk is sharing about a dream that happened.
participantOne:(1902280-1911880): It's all the same parts of the brain that are crunching and processing these highly emotional parts of our inner world with images that are deeply unique to only us.
participantOne:(1912180-1940420): and we can share it and be really present and connected with that dream content, then if it's dropped, it's okay because it didn't really happen. It can be kind of nonsense. Sometimes it's tender, right? There are certain dreams we probably wouldn't share with anybody, but it can help create this connection with ourselves and our emotional content, and it can give an opportunity to create a deeper and more robust sense of belonging with other people, which, again, bidirectional relationship, then increases our ability to fall asleep more easily.
participantOne:(1940720-1969540): and access these nervous system states that are indicative of rest and digest and parasympathetic functioning and curiosity and all those juicy things. I was thinking about the idea of blue zones, the idea that there are certain areas of the world. I think of, I think it's Sicily is one of them. There's an area in Japan. I think there's others where a statistically abnormally large part of the population lives to above a hundred. And I think about
participantOne:(1970020-1994240): what goes into that formula. It is that social connection. It is a community. And if anything, our digital devices have jeopardized our sense of community in our modern world. There's activity. These 95-year-olds, they're walking up many flights of stairs each day.
participantOne:(1994660-2019940): They're always active. They eat healthy. There's the Mediterranean diet is the one I think about. And I need to think about more with sleep. I can only imagine that they prioritize sleep. If you have this longevity, there has to be an element of a decreased sympathetic state where they are more relaxed, more present with themselves, with loved ones, with others, and
participantOne:(2020760-2039760): And they're able to rest. They prioritize rest. They have to. Based on the research we talked about earlier with the amyloid beta protein, like it has to happen. It's rooted in these very basic fundamentals, including sleep. I have one remaining question.
participantOne:(2040020-2065639): For those of us who don't remember our dreams who really would like to, any ideas about how we could get better at that? Absolutely. There's actually quite a bit of science on increasing dream recall if that's something that's a goal for people or that they want. It's similar to different types of attentional cognitive science, which is that the more we choose to attend to something, the more times we will recognize it. And this will strengthen the
participantOne:(2065860-2077139): you know synapses that fire together wire together so if you go to lay down in your bed and you're like oh i'd like to i'd like to remember my dreams you know a dream journal is something that's pretty common for a lot of people
participantOne:(2077380-2104020): So that's one method is actually to sort of take this top-down approach of, I'm going to remember my dreams more, so I'm going to have a dream journal. I will make the space on my bedside table, and before I go to bed at night, I'm just going to write down the sentence, I hope to wake up and write my dream down in the morning. And most people find that when they do that, if they do that a couple nights in a row, sure enough, a dream will show up that they will remember. So that's one method. Another method is...
participantOne:(2104400-2120200): a different version of working with the same nervous system functions, but it's just actually waiting. It's a similar process to how we increase our sense of gratitude or savoring, which is that we don't force gratitude when gratitude is not actually there. The science on that actually shows that that can make us more cynical.
participantOne:(2119840-2142100): We wait for an organic moment to feel grateful and then we savor it and we really like try to expand into it. And so a similar process can happen with dreams. You don't force a dream. You don't maybe try to have a dream, but you have curiosity around dream. You're waiting and noticing and attending to them. And then when one arrives, you really take the time to spend with it.
participantOne:(2142360-2163839): And my tip for folks, if they're really hoping to be curious about it for nervous system functioning especially, is when you write that dream down, or one of my favorite methods is actually to voice memo it to myself. It's much lazier and you can do it with your eyes closed in the morning, is that you retell the narrative of that dream in the present tense. Okay.
participantOne:(2164100-2186940): And what that does is that activates your limbic system more than it activates your prefrontal cortex. And so you're more likely to get a more fruitful interaction that feels deeply relational with that dream. So even if that's the only exercise, the whole exercise is just writing it down in the present tense, you've already done something really healthy for your nervous system, right?
participantOne:(2187420-2217160): You can then increase that by then going back and listening to that voice memo for yourself later and being really curious as to where your tonal inflection goes up and down. If a weird detail catches your eye, you can then instigate more creative process with that. Or similarly, you can take that same dream and then share it with another person. Again, sharing from the present tense because it's just a little more vulnerable. It's a little edgier, but it helps us build that relational muscle and the strength to hold the capacity of our own feelings.
participantOne:(2217900-2228700): Really simple things to do and quite fun if you get really into it and get nerdy with it, but very, very healthy and important for tending to our own nervous system.
participantOne:(2229560-2247980): I would second every all of that. I think those are all great pieces. And I think it's just takes us remembering that our body is not shutting down, our brain is not shutting down while we're sleeping. For me, one of the big takeaways of this conversation is that there is so much happening.
participantOne:(2248520-2267080): While we're sleeping. As we have been talking about this podcast, I have thought about the movie While You Were Sleeping, the 95 film with Sandra Bullock. Lots of things happen when this individual gets into an accident, into a coma, a lot of complex relationships. Yeah.
participantOne:(2267300-2296400): And ultimately, the girl that Sandra Bullock plays falls in love with this guy's brother. Anyway, it's this really complex web without giving any spoilers. But just to really emphasize that just like that whole movie played out in an hour and a half or whatever while this individual was sleeping, even more is happening in our brain that gives us a lot of information as we work on improving our health.
participantOne:(2299160-2322900): All Things Vegas is brought to you by Western Montana Area Health Education Center, working to recruit and train health care professionals, and by the Red Willow Learning Center, working to make resilient skills available to everyone. We are very grateful for the sponsorship from Natura Health and Wellness Clinic in Missoula, Montana, who is sponsoring a series of six podcasts.