The Snooze Button
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How Your Race Impacts Your Sleep with Dr. Dayna Johnson
• 66 minDr, Dayna Johnson's review of how sleep is impacted by race is almost a year old; but it has never had more relevance than it does right now. Toward the end of the chat, you'll hear the one piece of data from the review that actually made Neil angry. Plus, we're joined by Dr. Michael Grandner in this first of his weekly visits to update us on the latest in sleep science. Some Key Takeaways: “So when you encounter experience discrimination or experience, an act of racism, you have a physiologic response, a stress response. And so then that can affect your sleep. When we sleep, there are many things that happen that are important for our health. So whether it’s hormone secretion, whether it’s rest for our blood vessels, whether it’s our memory consolidation, when we have a disturbance to that it causes our sleep to be disturbed, and then we have a poor health outcome.” “So if it’s memory, we’re thinking about cognitive decline, for example, or if it’s some damage to our cardiovascular system, we’re thinking about a higher risk of harm – hypertension or cardiovascular disease. And so if we have some groups of or some populations such as African-Americans that are consistently encountering discrimination and racism, other stressors, they’re they’re regularly at this and experiencing the stress at this high level, and then consistently have disruptions to sleep, which interrupt these other factors. And so it’s a linear effect. One thing happens and then another, and then you know, it affects your health overall.” “Black people tend to under-report insomnia. So they under-report problems with sleeping. Some of the reasons for sleep disparities – which date back to slavery times – were that pictures of black people sleeping were labeled as lazy. And so this stereotype has emerged, that if you sleep enough – but really the amount that you need in order to be healthy and operate and have a good quality of life – implies that you are being lazy.” LINKAPALOOZA Dr. Dayna Johnson's bio on the Emory University website Here's the link to the review referenced in the episode linking sleep quality with race. Click here for the Project Implicit test from Harvard that will privately and anonymously evaluate your unconscious biases.
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