Here Comes The Sun

It seems we are in for an early spring. We are already seeing double-digit temperatures and most of the snow is gone. Hopefully, it means that we are heading outside more and getting into the sun. I’ve written several articles on the importance of the sun, but that’s because of just how important it is for our overall health both physically and mentally. Today I want to focus on how the sun and light in general, affect our sleep/wake cycle.

I previously talked about how our sleep and wake cycle are tied to our body’s temperature and how it can affect when we start to feel tired or wakeful. It turns out, perhaps not so surprisingly, that the sun and light in general also have a huge effect on our sleep cycle. A large amount of light into our eyes will wake us up and make our bodies more alert. Darkness helps our bodies wind down and prepare for sleep. Many people tote the use of blue light filters while looking at screens. These blue light filters are supposed to make the screens have a less intense effect on the eyes and make it easier to sleep at night. The problem is that the benefits of blue light blocking glasses is somewhat controversial and perhaps just a little bit of overzealous marketing. While blocking blue light can be helpful, it turns out that any form of light-blocking is beneficial for sleep. What you should be focusing on is the amount of light, not the colour of light. The reality of the relationship we share with light is one that is simple, straightforward and unfortunately hard to cheat. This relationship is based entirely on the sun. Our bodies are not designed with modern light exposure in mind. Our bodies know 2 basic things when it comes to light. The first is that when light enters the eye it’s time to wake up because the day is beginning. The second is that as light decreases, the evening is approaching and the time to sleep has come. If you understand these 2 basic principles you can greatly improve your sleep quality and also when you will wake up in the morning. It might sound simple and rather boring, but often the reality is. 

So how can we utilize these two basic rules of our eyes? It turns out there are a few ways we can learn to use our relationship with light to our advantage and properly set our sleep-wake cycle. I said earlier that the amount of light matters. If you want to start getting up earlier, one of the best things you can do is get as much light into your eyes as possible, as soon as possible. Now don’t go looking at the sun, but getting outside and seeing the daylight is the best way to set your internal clock. That blast of natural light stimulates our wake cycle and “sets our clock” so to speak. You might say, “well I turn my kitchen lights on first thing in the morning, so that’s my light exposure”. Turns out, that while you may believe that you are getting a lot of light into your eyes, it’s actually only a fraction of what you would get by going out and sitting on the porch. It is very hard to substitute natural light with artificial light. Now you might be thinking, “if our kitchen lights aren’t enough to set our internal clock why would our phone screen mess it up at night?” Well, it turns out that we become very sensitive to light as evening approaches. If our bodies are still seeing a decent amount of light from something such as a phone(even with blue light filters and the dimmest setting), our sleep clocks will be delayed and we will stay up later and later each night. 

As is often the case, the best way to look after our sleep habits is to return to what is more natural for us before modern conveniences. If we can get lots of light in the morning and turn our phones off at least an hour before bed, sleep will come much easier. Perhaps more importantly, waking up at 6 on a Monday morning won’t require an extra-large coffee with an extra shot of espresso.

Are You Cleared for Takeoff?

Let’s talk about pain today. We have all experienced it from time to time and to varying extents. Whether you just stubbed your toe, touched a hot stove, or rolled your ankle. One of the first things you will feel is pain. Why? Well, it's our warning system. Pain tells us that we are damaging our bodies. It might be saying “hey, stop touching that stove it’s burning your hand!” or “hey, you can’t walk on that ankle until I have a chance to fix the torn tissues”. We understand that pain very well, it’s for our protection and we could get severely injured without it. However, there is another type of pain that is less straightforward. That pain is chronic pain.

To start looking at pain we need to understand a little bit about how pain works in the first place. The best way is with an analogy. Imagine your brain as a flight control tower. Like a flight control tower, your brain has control of and is constantly communicating with everything around it. The control tower will tell pilots when to take off and when they are cleared to land. Just as importantly the pilots will communicate with the control tower to let them know if there is a problem. Let’s suppose one of the plane engines is not working right and the plane is not safe to take off. The pilot does their final check before takeoff and sees there is a problem with the engine. The pilot will call up to the tower and let them know that the plane is not safe to takeoff. After receiving the call, the tower will cancel the takeoff and direct the plane back to a hanger. This is great! A damaged plane has not taken off and there was no harm caused. However, I want you to now imagine that there is a bit of a troublesome plane. This plane has an engine failure every time it tries to take off. Every day the plain is scheduled to fly, but right before the plane takes off, the tower receives its call from the pilot and the pilot once again tells the tower that the plain is not safe to fly. Now the tower controllers are very efficient at their job. After weeks of the pilot calling the tower and telling them that there is an engine problem before every takeoff, the tower controllers stop picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. As soon as they see the call come in from the pilot they simply cancel the takeoff and send the plane back to the hangar. However, a few weeks after the tower stopped listening to the pilot, the engine problem was finally fixed! However, there is now a new problem. Now every time the pilot calls the tower to let them know that all systems are go, the control tower simply cancels the takeoff without ever picking up the phone to hear what the pilot has to say. The plane remains grounded despite the fact that there is no longer anything wrong with the plain. The problem is no longer a mechanical issue with the plain, it’s now a communication problem. In order to straighten the issue out, proper communication must be restored.

Ok, so what does this rather long analogy have to do with chronic pain? Well, believe it or not, this is very similar to what happens when a person develops chronic pain. If an issue lingers for too long, the brain will stop consulting with the tissue and just assume the tissue is still damaged. Recent studies have shown that most chronic pain is actually not related to damaged tissue and is in fact a brain communication problem. So what can be done? The brain must learn to pick up the phone again and talk with the tissue. When a new signal is sent from the tissue, the brain will pick up on that new signal because it’s not the one it usually receives from the tissue. One of the most powerful signals is that of motion. When motion is put through a tissue there is a signal sent to the brain. It's like the mechanic calling the control tower instead of the pilot to say that the plane is good to fly. After multiple calls from the mechanic saying everything is fine, the tower will eventually start picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. When the body receives enough motion signals saying that there is nothing wrong with the tissue, the brain will start to communicate properly again. This is how a chiropractic adjustment helps those in chronic pain! The adjustment sends a huge motion signal to the brain, after receiving multiple of these motion signals from an adjustment, the brain starts to listen and to communicate properly again.

I've Always Had Back Pain, I Just Deal With It.

Back pain is one of the leading causes of disability in Canada and the United States, and the number of people dealing with it is only growing. Back pain is also one of the most lucrative fields of healthcare costing Americans over 86 billion per year. While the cases of low back pain increase so do the number of pain killers, muscle relaxants and invasive surgeries. The results so far have not been good.

Pain killers are in no way designed to fix the problem and are at best pain suppressors. Basically, taking pain killers are like taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm while the kitchen is burning down. You may forget it for a while, but the house (your back) is still burning down. Eventually the damage and nervous system dysfunction will overwhelm the pills and your doctor will max out how many painkillers you can take. The damage will however, still continue and unfortunately the next step is often going under the knife where a surgeon will try and cut out the problem. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but regardless your looking at risky surgery a lengthy rehab program and permanent loss of motion and/or function in the spine. I have to return to the smoke alarm analogy at this point. Does it not seem like the better idea would have been to simply put the fire out when it had just started? This seems like a simple concept, but one that is often ignored. I think a large part of the problem is that most don’t realize the damage a little back pain can cause if left for years. The damage grows and becomes harder to correct as time goes on. Over time discs degenerate, muscles become fibrous, and vertebrate loose their structural integrity. Much of this damage is irreversible and why the end result is often surgery to either remove some completely degenerated bone or disc, or just screw a couple vertebrate together to correct for severe instability. This all seems to me to be a rather poor outcome.

I want you to make a shift in your thinking when it comes to back pain, I want you to think of it in the same way you think of pain when you get burnt or cut yourself. We know the extreme importance of pain when we touch a hot stove, it makes us snap our hand back, we do this because we are causing damage and the body is protecting itself. The same goes for cuts, extreme cold and even excess pressure. So why on earth do we suddenly think that back pain is different? Perhaps its because we can’t see the damage? Or maybe its because its not too bad right now. Either way its largely ignored until its not possible to ignore and its at this point we decide to simply turn off the fire alarm with some medication.

The reality of back pain is that when we get it, our body is telling us that something is wrong, we are in some way causing damage to our bodies and we need to stop doing whatever it is we are doing. Of course just what you are doing that is causing the back pain may vary greatly. For many the pain is caused, at least in part by leading a largely sedentary lifestyle, sitting in front of a computer all day, and then going home to watch Netflix on the couch until we fall asleep. For others it might be poor lifting patterns in a physically demanding job, and for others it may be poor functional movements that have developed due to a prior injury. Regardless of how the pain started, the best thing one can do is actively work at fixing the problem(putting out the fire). I continue to implore my patients and anyone else I run into with back pain to please not leave it until later, its always easiest to put out while its still just a small fire.