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The Rest of Your Life

SERIES: Health Series #2 of 6

2008-05-25

PRODUCTION #: 1082

SPEAKERS: Shawn Boonstra, Fred Hardinge,

Now I don't mean to stick my nose into your personal business, but let me ask you something. How did you sleep last night? I've got to be honest, it was only so-so for me, and I know that's true for millions of other people.

So today on It Is Written we're going to talk about something that you might not expect to hear on a Bible show, a good night's sleep.

So, go grab your Bible, because in a minute I'm going to introduce you to a very special guest and he will show you "The Rest of Your Life" for the rest of your life.

Come on, admit it. You're not getting nearly enough sleep. You drag yourself into the house at the end of the day and by the time you make supper, wash the dishes and put the kids to bed, and then go over those papers you have to prepare for the meeting tomorrow, well, it's a lot later than you figured. And that's a bad mistake because you have to get up at 4:30 in the morning to make it to the airport before rush hour. And you know you're not going to be able to sleep on the airplane.

Now, if that's not a picture of your life, there is probably something else stealing precious moments of sleep away from you, and you are just plain tired.

INTERVIEW

Today I have invited Dr. Fred Hardinge, a specialist in the field of health and nutrition to join me on the program to see if there is something we can do to help you. Dr. Hardinge, it's really great to have you on the program again.

FRED: It's good to be here.

SHAWN: Listen, Dr. Hardinge, you know in the world we're living in, we make heroes out of people who push themselves to the limit, who work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and deprive themselves of sleep to get the job done. Then when you talk about making time for sleep, some people just kind of assume, well, you're lazy. So let me ask an expert today: Is sleep a waste of time?

FRED: Many people today think sleep is a waste of time, but the reality is that it isn't. It is extremely valuable to our ability to perform and carry out our life functions.

SHAWN: You know, sleep has always baffled me. I think I remember as a kid I heard about somebody who trained himself not to sleep, or he was trying to train himself not to sleep. He didn't believe in the Bible particularly. He was an evolutionist, and his argument was that we have evolved into the need for sleep, but we didn't used to sleep. So he was going to train himself to be more productive by getting rid of sleep altogether. And I thought about this. I have looked at my life and there is not enough time to do everything I want to do in life, so maybe that makes sense. I should skip sleep more often so I can enjoy life more.

Now, your job is to talk me out of it.

FRED: There have been a number of people who thought that they could wean themselves away from sleep, and there is a small percentage of society today who think that they can get along with five hours or less sleep. But they have been studied by the scientists, and have been followed for five years, having their productivity measured, and looking at how much sleep they get. And what the investigators learned was that they did better when they got more sleep.

SHAWN: So it was in their imagination that they were performing better or performing up to par?

FRED: Actually, the scary part of it was that these were productive people who went through periods of time during that study in which they were unproductive. They couldn't do anything. They collapsed. They burned out. Some of them ended up being institutionalized for a period of time. Others had to go to the beach and recover for a week or two, or four, or five weeks, before they could return to their activities, because they basically burned themselves out. And it was the conclusion of the investigators that they would have accomplished as much or more if they had had regular sleep throughout that period of time.

SHAWN: So this isn't just a myth. We really do need seven or eight hours of sleep a night? Nine hours? What is it?

FRED: Seven is considered to be enough to get by on, and eight to eight-and-a-half for most people seems to be what will allow them to function at their optimal cognitive performance.

SHAWN: I think we all know that sleep is a good idea and enough sleep is a good idea. But I remember stories of a guy like Thomas Edison who would sleep, I think it was 20 minutes at a time. He didn't go to bed at night like you and I would; he would just catnap on his lab bench whenever the need to sleep arose. So the question I have is, does it matter when I sleep? Can I stay up through the night and then catch catnaps through the day to make it up? Are there better times to be in bed sleeping?

FRED: The answer to that question is a very interesting one, especially in terms of Thomas Edison. I read a book several years ago by a medical anthropologist who went back and looked at the diaries of scientists who came to work with Thomas Edison. Several from Europe came over and left early, and in their diaries they recorded that they were frustrated that he slept all the time.

Now his desire to invent the incandescent bulb was to extend the daylight hours because he thought sleep was a waste of time. And this medical anthropologist suggests from his research of the diaries that Thomas Edison probably only got about five to five-and-a-half hours of sleep, which was really insufficient and probably accounts for the fact that he took so many naps in the daytime.

SHAWN: OK, let's look at sleep itself. I don't know a lot about sleep. I have struggled with sleep all my life and I long to understand a little more about it, as do many people watching today. I have heard that sleep comes in cycles. It's not that you drop to sleep, wake up in the morning, and that's it. A lot happens during the course of the night. Quickly, what are those cycles? How does it break down? And then maybe we'll go back and look at each stage of sleep.

FRED: Well, typically, sleep is divided into five stages. We then commonly categorize those stages into two general groups. There is the slow-wave sleep, which is stage three and four of the five-stage scale. And then there is REM sleep, which is known as rapid eye movement sleep. Named thus because during that phase of sleep, people's eyes often, while their lids are closed, their eyes go back and forth very rapidly, appearing as if they were awake and looking at things. But they are sound asleep when they're doing that.

The benefits of both of these phases, or categories, of sleep, are very significant, and many things take place that benefit us from a health standpoint.

SHAWN: Then let's break it down a little bit. Explain some of the phases of sleep and what happens during those phases. What benefit are they to me? For example, what happens during slow-wave sleep?

FRED: During slow-wave sleep, two primary things take place. The first is that this is when restoration and growth of tissue take place. This is when the repair to the "damage of living" during the day occurs. The other thing is that during this phase, immunity is strengthened and repaired. So people who don't get adequate slow-wave sleep should expect to have more colds, flu and infections.

SHAWN: What about REM sleep? You were talking about the eyes moving quickly. Why do we do that?

FRED: During the rapid eye movement phase of sleep a person will look like they are awake and yet they have every other sign of being sound asleep. They probably aren't moving their hands or legs. They are sound asleep, but if you look at their eyes, you notice there is quite a bit of movement. During this phase of sleep, many interesting things take place in the brain.

For instance, this is where the things we have learned during the day are shifted from the short-term memory area to the long-term memory area. This is especially significant for students. There is some interesting research being done on senior high school students and college students that shows that if they get at least two hours of good sleep before midnight, they will retain their newly learned information longer.

SHAWN: Really?

RED: Yes.

SHAWN: All those nights I stayed up through the night cramming for tests weren't really helping me that much?

FRED: You may get by, but it isn't the best way of doing it.

SHAWN: So is this kind of like a filing stage of sleep? We take all the information from the last day or two and our brain puts it in the appropriate place? Is that a fair analogy?

FRED: It's kind of like a computer. When you sit and type, what you have typed goes into the RAM memory, and until you save it on a disk, well, if the power fails, what you've typed is gone. And all of us who have used computers have had that unhappy discovery. So we save frequently, or we set our computer programs to save automatically so we lose the minimum should there be a power failure.

When we learn new information, it goes into short-term memory, but then it has to be transferred into a long-term memory area. And during this transfer, similar bits of information, if you will, are stored in areas where the same type of information has been stored. And that occurs during REM sleep. And so REM is a very important aspect of sleep for learning and memory.

SHAWN: Just out of curiosity, is this when we're dreaming?

FRED: REM sleep is when we are dreaming.

SHAWN: I've often wondered, is REM sleep a filing process? Are we taking information and sorting it away?

FRED: It's actually a renewal process. And the reason that dreams often are so nonsensical is that memories need to be refreshed periodically, and this automatic process takes place during REM sleep in which memories from various times and places that we have in our mind are refreshed.

SHAWN: That is very interesting, because I remember last night I was dreaming about things that happened in my life 20 years ago that I haven't thought about since, and all of a sudden they popped back into my mind.

FRED: Exactly. Part of the function of dreams is to randomly refresh old memories. We have no control over what get refreshed and in what order, and that's why dreams are often so nonsensical. Now, everybody dreams but most of the time we don't remember our dreams, and that's probably a good thing.

Now there are a lot of Christians who are concerned about the content of their dreams.

SHAWN: Yeah, as a pastor, I have had people come to me and say, "Pastor, I'm dreaming about this, this and this, and I don't want to."

FRED: That's right. We have to remember, whatever inputs have come into the mind are placed into memory, whether they're sights, sounds, smells, feelings, etc., and there is a principle in Scripture, found in Philippians four, verse eight.

SHAWN: I know this one.

FRED: It says to "think upon these things" and then there is a criteria list. It's the filter.

SHAWN: What sort of things are true. What sort of things are just. Think on these things.

FRED: Right. And like computers, whatever goes in comes out. Now, what about the Christian who has recently become a Christian or at some time in the past has engaged in activities they wished they hadn't? Now, they know that these activities were wrong or immoral, and they are still troubled by that. I believe that God, who created this wonderful and marvelous organ called the brain in which these things take place, has the ability of doing miracles even today. I believe the Lord has helped many people stop dreaming about those types of things. And it has been in response, or in direct response to a request they make to the Lord.

SHAWN: There is a passage where God tells Israel that he will restore the ears of corn the locusts have eaten, and that includes our old life. So we can claim that promise.

Listen, we know that sleep is important, we know that we ought to be getting our seven, eight, nine hours of sleep, whatever it is for each individual, and we know God designed us that way. So the question is this, I have had trouble sleeping since I was eight years old. I almost never sleep through the night. And so my question is: If it's good for me and it's natural and it's what God wants, then why am I sleepless? What causes sleeplessness?

FRED: Well, there are many things that can cause it, and there are some things that can help people.

SHAWN: OK.

FRED: Let's talk about a few of those. I would like to start with those things that may hinder sleep.

SHAWN: Absolutely.

FRED: And then we'll talk about the things that will benefit sleep.

SHAWN: Fantastic. Let's go.

FRED: The first thing that may hinder sleep is eating too close to bedtime, food in the stomach, snacks, ice cream, late heavy meals. When food is in the stomach, sleep doesn't come as easily and it isn't good quality sleep. It isn't as recuperative as it could be.

SHAWN: In my life, I've kind of made a general rule. I'm not really legalistic about it, but a general rule I've decided that I'm going to stop eating by six, six-thirty, and I've found I fall asleep more easily.

FRED: I don't think there is any question about that. It's just the law of physiology.

SHAWN: Very good. So eating too late, obviously a hindrance.

FRED: The most common sleep aid used in the world is alcohol. It helps people go to sleep, but it so disturbs the sleep patterns during the latter half of the night that they don't get the recuperative value of the sleep that they get.

SHAWN: So they knock themselves out, but they're not resting?

FRED: That's exactly right. And they pay for it long term. Things like caffeine. A single cup of coffee?

SHAWN: You're talking about one cup of coffee?

FRED: One cup of coffee will disturb sleep patterns for up to 48 hours.

SHAWN: One cup of coffee. Two days.

FRED: Now you see, the common counsel today is, "drink it in the morning, but don't drink it in the evening."

SHAWN: Right.

FRED: The reality is that we can measure changes, negative changes in brain patterns during sleep up to about 48 hours after a single cup of coffee.

SHAWN: One cup of coffee. Seems to me the best thing to do is knock off the coffee.

FRED: Well, I would agree with that.

SHAWN: All right. So caffeine, eating late, what else?

FRED: Not viewing exciting or depressing television. It gets our emotions stirred up, one way or the other, and it is hard then to relax. And even if we fall asleep, the quality of the sleep is impacted.

SHAWN: I saw a study from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Campus, some time ago where they said horror movies will impact your sleep cycle years after you've watched them. So I can understand. We are building excitement and putting thoughts in that don't aid in rest.

FRED: And even the news may not be really conducive to a good night's sleep.

SHAWN: Yeah, and that's such a habit for most people.

FRED: In fact I have talked to several sleep specialists who tell me that the eleven o'clock news is the world's curse to a good night's rest.

SHAWN: I have noticed that if I'm in a place where there is no television, I fall asleep at nine or ten o'clock. But when one is there and I'm flipping through the channels, I'll stay up much later.

FRED: You're exactly right.

SHAWN: All right. So television. Is there anything else we need to avoid?

FRED: We should not use our bedrooms for work. The bedroom should be reserved for sleeping. When the treadmill is there, when the computer is there, we're creatures of habit and we really need to condition ourselves, teach ourselves, that when we go to the bedroom it's for sleeping.

SHAWN: At one point in my life, I actually removed the nightstand and put in a desk. That's not good?

FRED: That's probably not the best.

SHAWN: OK, don't work in the bedroom.

FRED: That's exactly right.

SHAWN: OK, anything else?

FRED: We shouldn't use sleeping pills for more than two or three nights. And I really don't recommend sleeping pills. People who are fully exercised and relatively healthy and are following these suggestions shouldn't have too much trouble going to sleep.

SHAWN: OK, so we're talking about some of these medications that you see advertised all the time now, generally speaking, they're not a good idea, especially in the long term.

FRED: That's correct.

SHAWN: OK. Well, that's what we shouldn't do. Tell me what I should do.

FRED: Well, there are some important things. The first is to learn to value sleep. Much of our population today does not really value sleep. I sat next to someone on a plane the other day and had a conversation with him, and he told me that if he could hire employees who didn't need sleep, then those are the ones he would hire.

And I thought to myself, if you could hire those people, your company would go downhill, because they wouldn't be able to perform. A little later he asked me what I did, I told him I was on the way to do a seminar on sleep, and that kind of ended his conversation with me.

SHAWN: OK. Well, you know, I made reference to that earlier. In our corporate structure, corporate world, we make heroes out of people who skip sleep.

FRED: We do, unfortunately. The next thing that we should do in order to have a good night's sleep is to adopt a routine.

SHAWN: Very good.

FRED: We need to go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time as much as possible. Irregular schedules make it harder to go to sleep and they decrease the quality of the sleep. It's interesting, they have looked at individuals going to bed at ten o'clock and waking up at six, and they've looked at the same individuals going to bed at midnight and getting up at eight. And those who went to bed at ten were more rested than those who went to bed at midnight. So the timing of going to sleep is important and we need to get in the habit of that as much as possible.

SHAWN: OK.

FRED: We need to use a firm and comfortable bed. We sleep better when we do that. The room should be as cool and dark for the best sleep. That influences the quality of the sleep.

SHAWN: Now, you know, all across America right now there are husbands and wives looking at each other saying, I told you to keep the bedroom cool. Right, we fight over that. But generally speaking, cool is better.

FRED: Cool, you know, it doesn't have to be cold. Now, if you ask me, I sleep best when there's frost on the covers when I wake up in the morning.

SHAWN: Yeah, me too. I like it near freezing.

FRED: We can't have a good night's sleep without exercising appropriately every day. I know we keep coming back to this, but exercise is absolutely vital. We also need to establish good bedtime rituals. We are creatures of habit. We have to teach our bodies that we are preparing to go to sleep. It is impossible to keep up with the pace of life and then put our heads down and expect to be able to immediately go to sleep. So bedtime rituals are very important. For some people it may be a shower. It's a very personal and individual thing. It may be having family devotions. It may be checking the doors of the house and the windows to make sure that they're secure. It may be turning the lights out. I think there are a lot of people who have difficulty sleeping because of guilt, and the only way I know of dealing with guilt is through the blood of Jesus Christ.

SHAWN: Absolutely.

FRED: I'm so thankful that I can put my burdens at the foot of the cross and I can go to bed and say, "Lord, I'll take them up in the morning if those are the ones you want me to take."

SHAWN: Beautiful. That's beautiful. Trust in God. I find that all through the Bible. Sleep is a big subject. It's there everywhere. God treasures sleep for us. He designed us that way.

I can't thank you enough for being on the program today. I wish we had more time. There's so much I'd like to ask you.

FRED: Well, maybe we'll do that another time.

SHAWN: Fantastic.

SHAWN: You know, I have often read the story of Acts, chapter 12, and I've been a little bit jealous. Here is Peter chained to two prison guards and he's sitting on a hard stone floor. They are planning to execute him first thing in the morning and he is sound asleep.

Listen to this: (Acts 12:6, 7)

"That night Peter was sleeping, bound with two chains between two soldiers; and the guards before the door were keeping the prison. Now behold, an angel of the Lord stood by him, and a light shone in the prison; and he struck Peter on the side and raised him up, saying, 'Arise Quickly!"'

Here is the frustrating part. Many nights I have trouble falling asleep in a bed, and here is Peter sleeping so soundly in a prison cell that the angel actually had to hit him to wake him up.

So let me ask you, how do you get a good night's sleep during the worst moments of your life? When your life is full of problems and your mind is racing at bedtime, how do you shut it off and fall asleep? I think I know what Peter's secret was.

Back in the Gospel of Mark, there is this story where the disciples are out in a boat during a storm and Jesus is fast asleep at the back. The waves get so high they begin to fill the boat and, to their frustration, Jesus just keeps on sleeping. So they wake him saying, "Listen, don't you care that we're sinking? We're all going to die and here you are sleeping."

And that's when one of the most incredible moments in the Bible takes place.

Listen to this: (Mark 4:39)

"Then He arose and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace, be still!" and the wind ceased and there was a great calm."

Just try to imagine the effect that had on Peter. I'm guessing that's how he learned to sleep in a storm.

So let me ask you, what are the storms that are raging in your life? What is it that threatens to sink the boat? What keeps the sea of your mind churning with whitecaps all night long?

I'll tell you, there is Somebody who, with just a word, can put a stop to it. His name is Jesus and right now, at this moment, He is offering you some peace of mind so that you can get a good night's rest and get more out of life. He wants you to grab hold of an abundant life and when you start to realize how much He cares and how much He is still in control, you will rest. Just knowing that is a great start to getting the rest of your life.

Dr. Hardinge, there are people who have been awake for nights, why don't you pray for them now, if you would?

FRED: I'd be happy to do that.

PRAYER:
Our loving Father in heaven, again we thank you for the wonderful way in which you have made us. We are created as your children and you ask us to get a good night's rest. There are many who are reading this script, Father, who may be struggling with that, maybe due to anxiety, maybe due to worries, maybe due to circumstances. Whatever the reason, I just ask in a very special way that you would reach out and touch them, give them peace, give them freedom from guilt, and help them to trust in you, that they can have a good night's rest. Thank you, Father, for being willing to help, in Jesus' name we pray, Amen.

Scriptures Used in “The Rest of Your Life”

"That night Peter was sleeping, bound with two chains between two soldiers; and the guards before the door were keeping the prison. Now behold, an angel of the Lord stood by him, and a light shone in the prison; and he struck Peter on the side and raised him up, saying, 'Arise Quickly!"'
—Acts 12:6, 7

"Then He arose and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace, be still!" and the wind ceased and there was a great calm."
—Mark 4:39