Sleep Wake

The following is a radio transcript from an interview performed by Dr Schiesser and Dr Lazar with Dan Adams of Apollo Light

Dr. Michael Schiesser:  Welcome back to Health Dimensions, on Seattle's Progressive Talk. And I want to invite listeners to call in: 877‑753‑1090. And I'm here with my co‑host, Dr. Amy Lazar, who practices adult psychiatry and also specialized in child and adolescent psychiatry.

I also want to recommend that listeners go to www.CreeksideMedicine.com and look at the breadth of options, as far as approaching health problems, that's available at Creekside Center, which is in Bellevue, Washington. We have several physicians there that have various specialties, including psychiatry, family medicine, internal medicine, sleep medicine, as well as psychology, naturopathy, acupuncture, and physical therapy. So, it's quite a breadth of integrative options.

And I'm your host, Dr. Michael Schiesser. I'm an internal medicine specialist and the medical director for Creekside Sleep Medicine Center in Bellevue. We are talking about sleep this month. Next week, we will be focusing on sleep‑related breathing problems.

And I'm here today with Dr. Amy Lazar, who is my co‑host. She's an adult psychiatrist and has a specialty in child and adolescent psychiatry as well. And we have on the line Dr. Dan Adams, from Apollo Light. And Dan, I really appreciate you coming by today. Was there anything else that you wanted to say about light therapy that we didn't cover at the quarter hour?

Dr. Dan Adams:  Yeah, there's a couple of things, and we may be able to get into this in other programs. But one of the things that they've also discovered about this special wavelength of light‑‑by the way, I think that you have these available at your center. It's a very, very safe level of blue light. But this light also produces a very strong alerting response. And those two factors, or those two forces, work very, very well in concert with each other.

What we're learning about the brain is that, not only do we have a sleep‑wake cycle that it's regulating, but we also have an alertness, that sunshine, and that specific wavelength of light from sunshine, causes a reaction in the body so that we feel alert and awake, and we feel energetic.

They've done a number of studies where they show that memory, psychomotor vigilance response‑‑and that just means your reaction time, how quickly you can respond to something‑‑your ability to stay awake longer, your ability to pay attention better, all improve at least twice as much when you use that light.

That light signal has that powerful of a response. What we know is that if you can cause you to be more alert during the daytime, then it's going to be a lot easier for you to fall asleep in the nighttime, and to be able to stay asleep.

So, we have two very strong influences that we can manipulate now, so that we can help people fix that sleep‑wake cycle so that their body clock timing is right, and also so that they can be more alert, more active, and energetic during the daytime, so that their sleep is a better quality of sleep at nighttime and they have more energy during the day.

Dr. Schiesser:  Well, I know that Dr. Lazar has a few things that she wanted to mention about sleep and light therapy. Dr. Lazar?

Dr. Amy Lazar:  I think it's very important to note that seasonal affective disorder, so common here in the Northwest, is actually a subtype of major depression. And it is a huge concern when I see clients that come in that actually relay that their mood is down, and it happens to be more common once the dark and cloudy weather sets in to our part of the world.

Dr. Adams:  Yeah.

Dr. Lazar:  And that it is such a common occurrence: four to six percent of the general population have this seasonal depression.

Dr. Adams:  Yeah. And it can get fairly severe as well. And we recommend that people, if they have a question whether they have seasonal affective disorder, they should go see a doctor, because it's a serious situation. And it may be that they have something else that's masking, and it might not be seasonal affective disorder, so they really should talk to a doctor about it.

One of the things that seasonal affective disorder does is that, over the shorter days, the darkness causes the body to overproduce a hormone called melatonin. And melatonin causes a hibernation response; it makes us pull back and withdraw. Many people, it disrupts their sleep cycle, but in a lot of people, it causes them to just continually want to sleep. They overeat. And they can become very depressed.

So, it's a fairly serious situation. There are a lot of people, in the wintertime, who start with sleep problems. And maybe that's all they have. But we can use light to fix that. It can progress, though, into something a little bit more difficult, and they call that winter blues. And with winter blues, getting the light also fixes that. And then, for the four to six percent of the population‑‑and it's much higher in Seattle because of the cloudy days‑‑it can progress into seasonal affective disorder.

Dr. Schiesser:  Well, Dan, I really appreciate you outlining all this for our listeners today, and I apologize for having to cut you off so abruptly. But this is Dr. Michael Schiesser, on KPTK, Seattle's Progressive Talk on AM 1090. And I appreciate Amy Lazar coming in today for our show. And next week, we'll be focusing on sleep apnea, with Dr. Terry Jacobs from Creekside Sleep Medicine Center, Dr. Steve Carstensen, and Dr. Jan Zemplenyi.

You're listening to Health Dimensions. I'm Dr. Michael Schiesser, on Seattle's Progressive Talk, AM 1090. Visit www.CreeksideMedicine.com for more information.

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