Hi, and welcome to the August issue of Optometric Management. I'm Dr. Pam Theriot, the dry eye columnist for the magazine, and this month, we are talking about sleep's crucial role in eye health. I know as practitioners, it's often difficult for us to go over one more thing with our patients when we're in the exam lane. In the article, I give you a couple simple surveys that you might want to give to your patients if you think that sleep is playing a role in how they're progressing with their dry eye treatment. I've found over the years that my patients with the driest eyes sleep the least, so when I see somebody with significant dry eye disease, I'll ask them how many hours of sleep they typically get each night. And when that number is 4 to 6, I know there's something wrong.
At that point, you may want to give them a survey and have an actual number to go off of and see if they improve over time, but I think it's also a great time to give them a couple of tips to help them improve their sleep. I've gotten to using this quick tip called the 10, 3, 2, 1, 0 rule. Let's go over it so that you can just rattle off these tips with your patients the next time they’re in your exam lane.
Let’s start with 10: 10 hours is the amount of time that you want to stop drinking caffeine before your bedtime. So if your bedtime is 10:00 PM, then your caffeine curfew is going to be noon. You want to have 10 solid hours without caffeine before you try to wind down and sleep at night. The reason for that is that caffeine has a half life of 4 to 6 hours. So if you've had a cup of coffee that has 100 mg of caffeine in it, 5 hours later, you still have 50 mg of caffeine in your system. You can see how that 10-hour time limit really isn't unreasonable for us to stop drinking caffeine.
Next, we have 3: 3 hours before bedtime, you want to stop eating and drinking alcohol, so no food or alcoholic beverages 3 hours before sleep. That gives our digestive system time to finish processing the food before we lay down to rest.
Two is no screen time 2 hours before bed. That's probably the hardest for most of our patients. We can advise them to wear some blue blocker glasses or set their cell phone to a nighttime mode that'll eliminate the blue light coming off their screens as a way around that 2-hour rule. But all of us could really use a time where we put the cell phones and other digital devices away before bed.
Let's go down to 1: 1 hour before bedtime, it's time to start winding down, doing something that will relax the body and mind so we can get ready to sleep. You may want to read an actual book that's made of paper, do some journaling or writing, maybe some stretching or meditation, but that’s 1 hour before bed.
And finally, 0. We want to hit the snooze button 0 times to allow our bodies to wake up and get ready for the day. If we start setting our circadian rhythms where we get blue light in the morning, we get out of bed right away, and we train ourselves to get up at the same time every day and go to bed at the same time every day. Over time, we can really train ourselves to get that 7 to 9 hours of sleep that we need.
Thanks again so much for reading this month's article in Optometric Management, and I'll see you next time.
