If Eczema makes your sleep worse, what can you do?
If you have eczema, you may suffer a lot and cannot sleep well. How can you use food and nutrition to really help you? Today? We have Krista a nutritionist. She will share more about this with us.
It's a tricky topic for sure. Because so many people are affected by it. But our treatment options are. They're not very robust yet. So there's a lot of room for more information about it. And again, as I said, it affects a lot of people actually tend to 20% of kids and one to 3% of adults. So I think everyone knows someone with a skin issue even if it's not eczema, an itchy rash or a skin condition. I just feel like everyone knows someone who's affected.
Wet Wraps
A wet wrap in a child is basically it's a dermatology type recommendation. And there are different eczema, clothing companies, not a lot or you can do it with just basically gauze. So essentially what they do is they bury the child and then they put something on the child they put like different mullions or creams or oils or something like that. Usually, you don't want to put steroids underneath a wet wrap, because they think it permeates too deeply and can cause some other negative side effects. I don't know if that's really well known either. So I just want to mention that. So usually you put some creams on, and then they wrap so there's a couple of options. Sometimes they'll do a wrap and I've not actually done one, but they have clothing like eczema outfits that you can basically dip or just like an arm sleeve or hands or whatever different sleeve areas for different parts of the body. So they cover the body with these wet wraps. Or people sometimes do a do it yourself option where they kind of have like a pair of pajamas and dry pajamas, and I don't want to say it incorrectly.
So I'm going to be slightly vague on purpose. Because I don't want to tell you like oh yeah, the wet I believe that what goes on the bottom and the dry or actually they do the wet on the top, I believe and then they actually spray it and it just kind of calms the skin and some kids parents will say that they just seem like a look of relief on their child's face and then they can sleep. So that's like a nice when I'm addressing eczema. I always tell people so we really convinced Think about dreaming treating it really topically, right. But of course, skin grows from the inside out. So there's some internal messaging going on, that's creating the whole itch thing in the first place, and the waking and the sleep, waking, etc. But since it is still like external to an extent, right, it's on their skin. So it's on our shield our bodies, our bodies, our bodies armor for ourselves. I always say that you can do interventions from an external and an internal and kind of like a wild card or stress or like picking a different avenue as well.
Eczema and Sleep in Children
A lot of the research around sleeping exam has done in children because it's such a larger amount of people that are affected I guess, and maybe the parents are just really looking I don't know, you know why it is but at a basic level, there are just more people affected right. So it's easier to get study participants and it's pretty ethical to look at sleep in kids like you know, it's not like you're doing crazy stuff so so in kiddos there's a like one study I found talked about how 60% of those with eczema as a skin condition had disturbances in their sleep, but when they have a flare in their eczema it over 80% of them are have a night of disturbed sleep. So this is huge. It's like such a big deal. What I found interesting was they talked about circadian rhythms and the skin, which I think is a great topic as well.
They saw a large association of ADHD where Attention Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and children. They said it was associated with eczema, but only in the ones that had sleep problems, which I feel like is not fair, right? Because if you're not sleeping, of course, you're going to act out or feel differently or just like not feel good or not feel yourself and when that starts to become your normal, and people are like, oh, now you have this attention problem. Well, gosh, I just like I'm not getting good quality sleep in the first place. So I just thought that was interesting. It's related to children with eczema, but pretty much just in the ones that have sleep issues. It's so good when you can address things from the inside and fix multiple problems, rather than like, oh, I'm just addressing the one thing I guess. When you water the tree and the tree grows, rather than like cutting off the branch.
Circadian Rhythm and Light
Circadian rhythm is probably no surprise to anyone listening to this episode, but uh, you know, it's your sleep-wake cycles, essentially right? And to my knowledge, we have our, our sleep-wake cycles are affected by many things. I've literally been looking at how light affects this most recently and how that can help my different clients.
So first off, another symptom I like is fatigue, because there's a lot of potentials to improve that there's a lot of possible causes of that. And so obviously, fatigue is going to come along with poor sleep too. I think about fatigue, like a question I'll ask someone is, do they have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, even if they've slept well. So if they do, then I want to start looking at cortisol awakening response, or basically your bodies get up and go in the morning. And so if that cortisol awakening response is not very good, I will look at circadian rhythm signaling so like that's a fancy way of saying, Go get some full-spectrum light or look at the sun.
I recommend people go look at the sun the first 30 minutes of the day because when you look at full spectrum light are you which some people don't have daylight and so sometimes they have to use lightboxes in the morning. First, there are photoreceptors in both your eyes and on your skin cells, which apparently is a little bit newer on your skin cells, kind of when you see light, it's basically telling your body like oh, this is the time it is and it started kind of setting that circadian rhythm. And this gets so affected by I'm sure something you've talked about a lot by the effect of light. And so sometimes we get up and we look directly at our screens in the morning.
My knowledge is that that tells our photoreceptors in both our eyes and our skin that is now noon. And so if it's noon, it's a lot easier to feel tired earlier than if it you tell your body is now 6 am or 7 am or whatever time it is when you want to get up. So I always challenge people like if you're not waking if you don't if you feel if you had even a good night of sleep but you're waking if you're waking up and feeling real like it's hard to get out of bed The first thing I do is go get some full-spectrum light or look at the stuff 100 seconds, five days, see what you think. Like, I don't really have anyone who reports negative about this. And then other light experts will say, also get a little bit of light exposure, like around midday and then in the evening kind of when the sun's going down because it helps kind of reset those circadian rhythms. This is definitely an area for me. I like to learn new things. And I feel stimulated by new things. And so it's an area where I, I still have a lot of things I'd like to learn about the circadian rhythm that I don't know a ton about. But I'm like, I've got some books like old school books that I'm like, Oh, I wonder what was popular then and how we are still not addressing this now. But as you know, like, what happens or a thing I hear people say is they'll wake up in the middle of the night, there'll be scratching, and then they'll just go watch TV in the middle of the night, which can affect or interfere with their ability to go back to sleep because now they're taking in that blue light from the screens, and it's interfering with melatonin production. So people are gonna get up and do that. I'd really recommend they use amber glasses and apparently they have to actually be amber to actually block the light that's affecting the melatonin from the screens for nighttime.
So again, something I'm learning more and more about it's supposed to be red glasses in the morning or if you can't see the sun if it's just like a little bit before the sun comes up, I've got like a shortcut on my phone where I make it red screen. So I'm not getting like blue light from it. I'm looking through kind of red filters so I do that in the morning then midday you have computer glasses for just and that's been really good for eyestrain, because if I look at the computer all the time it affects eyes and then night Amber. So anyway, they're like, two, I don't have good analogies yet for the other circadian rhythm stuff in the skin, but it is in the literature about eczema, which I think is great. I love that they're talking about all of them all the potential factors, but kind of what I said what is one of the things I hear the most is people get up and then they're kind of disrupting melatonin production by kind of they're essentially like sleep hygiene factors which I get, like, what do you can do in the middle of the night? Sometimes you're like, I understand why that happens, but maybe try to include a little hack, like, maybe try to block that blue light with Amber glasses if possible, because otherwise, we're sort of insulting that circadian rhythm even more.
Listen to the whole podcast episode and learn more about the guest, you can go here: https://www.deepintosleep.co/episode/041
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