Sleep Saviors: Unmasking the Impact of Blue Light with Melissa Deally Part 1 of 3

Hey, welcome back, No Problem Parents. In today's Wellness Wednesday episode, we're going to be discussing sleep and the profound influence of blue light. And our special guest, Melissa Dealy from Your Guided Health Journey, she's been on the show before, she is back. She's an integrative mind-body health practitioner, and she's going to talk about the critical connection between our sleep patterns and exposure to blue light, especially from digital screens.

Melissa shares insights into how blue light disrupts our circadian rhythm and melatonin production affecting our overall quality of sleep. And this is not just for your kids. This is for you parents as well. We're going to bring Melissa back on the next couple of Wednesdays and continue our conversation on sleep.

But today is just a quick short episode on specifically blue light. Melissa also wrote a chapter in our first book called Raising Your Kiddos with More Confidence and Less Fear. You can get that link in the show notes. And she wrote a specific chapter on how you can get more water into your kids by teaching them about their poop.

So that's a super fun chapter. If you don't have the book yet, go grab that. And to learn more about Melissa, there's a link in the show notes for her Linktree account. But you can also go to yourguidedhealthjourney.com.

We're just going to jump right into it. Melissa, I am excited to have you back on the show. Welcome. Thank you so much, Jackie, for having me.

I'm excited to be back here too. We're going to talk about sleep. It's not just about getting on a regular routine and getting our kids to bed on time and making sure that they're napping and all of that. There's so much more to it.

And most people haven't ever done a class on sleep. We're all doing the best we can. We're born. We know how to sleep as babies.

And so people don't realize that modern day life is getting in the way of our ability to sleep well. And that applies to children as well as to adults. and one of the biggest issues today getting in the way of sleep is blue light. Now, blue light is the light that is emitted by the sun at high noon.

And that tells our brain when we get that blue light into our eyes, it tells our brain that it's time to be active and time to be awake. And as a result, if we have had too much blue light getting into our eyes in the evening, our brain doesn't even know to start producing melatonin and that it's time to do that to get ready for sleep. Now back before the advent of electricity the brain would get natural signals of when to be producing melatonin and that natural signal would be dusk because the light in the sky changes it changes to that orange kind of campfire glow and that would signal the brain it's time to start producing melatonin because this person is going to be going to bed soon. Yeah. Blue light,

in fact, blocks the production of melatonin. So it's not even that, okay, I'm going to, you know, turn off my computer half an hour before I want to go to bed. So my brain can start producing melatonin half an hour before I go to bed. That doesn't work because for every hour you've been on a device that's emitting blue light, when you get off that device for every hour you've been on it takes another 30 minutes for your brain to be able to start producing melatonin.

Okay, wait, are you kidding me? 30 minutes for every hour? Yeah. So if you spend three hours on a device after dark, which is really easy to do, particularly in winter, right? When you get off your devices, that's 90 minutes before your brain can start producing melatonin. Okay. So maybe you're going to get to this and I'm jumping ahead.

Like I can fall asleep fairly easily, but now I'm thinking there's something to this because I am waking up with thoughts or sometimes I'm feeling like my brain's not really shut down. Exactly. So you're falling asleep and some people can't fall asleep, right? Some people do fall asleep and the people that can't fall asleep, it can be other reasons like stress. Things are running around in their brain. Maybe they've had too much caffeine in the day and that's running around in their veins. So there's a lot of factors when it comes to sleep. However, you're falling asleep, but you're not getting into a deep restorative sleep. Therefore, you're not waking up, feeling rejuvenated. And it's really important that we get into a deep restorative sleep and the body cycles through, you know, sleep cycle through the night, multiple times, depending how many hours you're asleep for. Right. And the REM sleep is helping recharge the brain and the deep sleep is helping recharge the body. And we need good amounts of both. We want to have one and a half to two hours of REM sleep in a seven to nine hour window of sleep. And we want to have around 90 minutes of deep sleep. And blue light will prevent all of that from happening. So we need to, A, the first thing is just be aware of this, right? And most people aren't because life is busy. We're so used to devices now. We just take them for granted as being part of our life. Our phones are, you

know, attached to us. So what do we do about this? Well, on our phones and on our iPads, there are night shift. I have an iPhone, so it's called night shift in settings that you can turn that on and you can set it like every day to turn on at dusk and turn off in the morning. And it will just change the lighting to more of a yellow light. So this helps. Is it perfect? No, but it's something that's doable for kids and teenagers. On our computer, I can give you the link. There's software that's free called justgetflux.com. You download that. It has GPS in it. So even when I travel, when I go to a new place, it pops up and goes, it looks like you're at these coordinates.

Would you like us to change the timing based on when dusk is happening here? And I say yes. And so that is protecting my eyes. Again, it's giving me a yellow light rather than the blue light. On your television, maybe more recent televisions have the opportunity to do this.

My television's, I don't know, more than 10 years old. I wear blue light blocking glasses. And the ones I love are called Viva Rays, V-I-V-A-R-A-Y-S. They're made by a Canadian company by a fellow who's both a physicist and an engineer who studied all of the light spectrum that's produced by the sun. And he has then incorporated that to ensure that these lenses will block the blue light from the screens that impacts our melatonin production. Many of the blue light blocking glasses that you just buy on Amazon or at your local drugstore aren't actually blocking the full amount. They help, but there's more that we can do.

so those are my favorite blue light blocking glasses now why is all of this important well first of all we do need melatonin to get into a deep restorative sleep and as human beings we are creatures of nature so our body is designed to start producing melatonin in the evening and it is an inverse hormone to cortisol so cortisol we have at its highest in the morning because we want to be waking up and having energy to start our day. And melatonin we want at its highest in the evening. The best time for us to go to bed as adults is where these two cross, where cortisol is at its lowest and melatonin is at its highest. And that happens between 10 and 11 p.m. at night.

Now for younger children, obviously they're going to bed earlier. And younger children need more sleep than adults. Adults need seven to nine hours sleep. And I know many people are surviving on much less than that. Right. People, you know, discount the importance of sleep and believe, you know, sleep is overrated or I'll sleep when I'm dead. I'm here to tell you that sleep is so important to our wellness that if you choose to put off your sleep, you're actually shortening your life. There's times where I'll get five or six hours of sleep and I'll just feel so wide to wait that I just, okay, I'm up. And that's not accurate. We should be putting ourselves back to sleep. We still want, we definitely need that seven to nine hours of sleep every single night for optimal health. Now, if you're feeling sick, it's going to be more to that eight to nine hour window. And if you're feeling really healthy and good, then you can get away with the seven hours on a regular basis. Going below that starts to have other downside effects on your health. Sleep negatively impacts the health of our gut. When we don't get enough sleep, it starts to break down the healthy microbes that we need in our gut to have a healthy gut. And our gut is really the core of all of our health. Hippocrates said all disease starts in the gut. And I like to flip that around and say, so therefore all health also starts in the gut. And the other thing that we

have in our gut are something called killer cells. We all have cancer in our body and our killer cells are responsible for killing the cancer cells. Not getting enough sleep on a regular basis reduces the number of killer cells we have fighting the cancer that's in our body. And this is important for children to understand as well, because nobody goes to bed healthy as an adult in their 40s or 50s and then wakes up the next day with a diagnosis of chronic illness.

illness, right? It builds in our body over time from all of the little habits that we have that we are unknowingly doing that are negatively impacting our health. And one of those is the way society looks at sleep. We should all be planning our sleep around our day the next day.

So what time do you need to get up in the morning to get to work, to get to school, and then go backwards by the number of hours of sleep that you need, and then go backwards another half hour to make sure you're in bed half an hour before you need to be asleep because it does take time to fall asleep and then you want to start your bedtime routine another half hour before that before i jump into the bedtime routine which is another important part of sleep that i know you wanted to chat about i just want to also mention the hours of sleep needed from newborns to adults so newborns zero to three months need 14 to 17 hours of sleep a day infants four to 11 months, it's 12 to 15 hours, right? There's so much happening inside their little brain and their bodies in terms of development. They need the rest in order to get the restorative time to be able to thrive and develop properly. Toddlers need 11 to 14 hours of sleep. Preschoolers 10 to 13 hours of sleep. That's ages three to five. Children aged six to 13 need nine to 11 hours of sleep per night. Teens from 14 to 17 need nine to 10 hours of sleep a night. Again,

at the teenage age, there's so much change happening in the body, right? I can guarantee you 90% of teenagers in the world today are not getting close to nine hours of sleep. Yeah. And you know what is so interesting is that, so one that can be self-inflicted if they're staying up on their screens at night, but there's also a number of teens that are going to school have extracurricular sports. So they're up late from those sports or they're working.

And so then they're also getting to bed late from that and then having to get up in the morning. So it's not always just that they're on their screens or doing something they shouldn't be doing. And we're thinking you're old enough now, you should be able to handle five, six, seven hours of sleep. And then we're yelling at our kids for sleeping in on the weekends. Right. So I just want to point that out because. And I totally agree with all of that. And it's just a matter of helping them to manage that so that they're overdoing it, that they're not working three nights a week, playing hockey four nights a week, and they never get nights where they can actually get the right amount of sleep or that they're, you know, working late one night and then they're up super early for some sports training the next morning, right? Teaching them about this and having them understand it and helping them manage their schedule is really critical because it's their body. It's their health. They need to understand this and they are old enough to start taking responsibility for it. But here's the other thing. Sleep minimizes anxiety. It minimizes depression because it increases our stress resilience, right? And so look at all the kids today that are struggling with anxiety and depression. If we could get them sleeping more,

that would have a profound impact. I'm not saying it's the only solution, but it's definitely part of the solution. And here's something else teenagers will understand is all the professional sports teams, right? Lately, there's been all this research into how do we help the professional sports teams continue to perform at a higher level? How do we prevent injury? You know what it's coming down to? How do we get these people to have a more restorative sleep? Because sleep does reduce the risk of injury. We have better decision-making, better judgment when we have had good sleep. Our coordination is better. It all comes down to sleep. We only heal in the theta state, which is part of our sleep cycles. And we have to get out of the stress state to be able to heal, to be able to recharge our mitochondria, our energy powerhouses, and for the body to be able to detox and for us to feel rejuvenated. This is so good. You have a couple of suggestions for how to make sure that we can get better sleep, but also a resource for us.

because there are times when it's not possible to get the seven to nine hours that we need as adults or the teens to have that. And so share a little bit about that before we wrap up today. Sure. So this is brand new technology that I'm really excited about. And this is technology that helps our brain drop into that theta state that I just mentioned. It's the healing state. It's recharging our mitochondria. It's helping the body detox. And it is where we finally get out of our fight or flight stress state. And this is technology that you can listen to overnight.

The ears and the music are the carrier so that you have a nice experience. But what it's doing is it's actually delivering math and physics signals to the brain to drop the brain into that theta state. So it's all about the signal. The music is the bonus so you have a nice experience.

So it's much more than your regular sound healing that you can find on YouTube. And during the daytime, they have a few other options as well. So one of them is restore and restore is designed to literally drop you into that theta state after eight minutes of listening to the music. And then you have the option of a 20 minute, a 30 minute or a 50 minute session. And during that time, again, your body can heal and restore. And when you end your session, that 20 minute session is like a two hour deep sleep equivalent to. So it's powerful for people that are having afternoon slumps or the teenager that's come home from school and has to go to work in two hours. They could do a 20 minute restore session to give the body what it needs before they head out to work. And so I'm really excited about this because it's been now being used by the Department of Defense, the SWAT,

the FBI, military's using it. They're using it to help with anxiety and depression, PTSD, negating the need for drugs. This is incredibly powerful. And because it's easy and the music's really enjoyable to listen to, people will do it. Well, this is exciting, Melissa. I have downloaded and we're going to test this out in my family and see the difference. And we're actually going to report our results back and we'll do that in next week's episode. Melissa is going to be a regular contributor to the podcast and sharing her knowledge because there is so much that we don't know. And once we know we can do more for not just our kids, but for ourselves. And oftentimes parents, I think it starts with making sure that we're taking care of ourselves first. You can find Melissa at yourguidedhealthjourney.com. Again, links in the show notes. If you want any more information before the next episode, feel free to reach out to Melissa and get your questions answered there. Otherwise stay tuned to parents. We'll be having the most back on next week on wellness Wednesday for more information on this topic, a continuation of this topic. And we'll focus on bedtime, bedtime routine, and Oh, incorporating breath work. Yes. And also timing of eating before bed and people can choose what's easy for them to shift right now. And that's going to be different from person to person, right? But as we shift one thing and we notice the

improvement and we get that habit down, then we can come back and shift another thing because we have the knowledge and we know what we can do versus when we don't have the knowledge, we don't know what to do, right? You don't know what you don't know. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, thanks so much. We'll see you next week. All right. That's it for today's episode of the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Hey, thanks guys for tuning in. If you found value in today's episode, click the subscribe button and share it with other parents who might need a little boost.

Stay connected on our socials by following at No Problem Parents for more parenting tips and get your free download of the 60 ways to respond to your kids without losing your cool. Go to noproblemparents.com. Until next time, remember your confidence comes from embracing both successes and setbacks. So take a deep breath, embrace the chaos, and remember you got this.

Thank you.