How to Get The Most From Your Sleep Cycle | Dan Pardi on Health Theory

you know you think of weight you think of food but it's very possible that even things like light might be having a a very large input here well you can then look at epidemiological research and shows that people that chronically get less sleep are much more likely to develop diabetes and we used to think that poor sleep was just a very common and early symptom of Alzheimer's disease but we now know that it might actually be directly involved in its pathogenesis everyone thanks for tuning in to this episode sponsored by our friends at Skillshare we've got an awesome offer for you in the description below so be sure to check that out everybody welcome to health theory today's guest is Dan Pardee he's a sleep researcher at Stanford who received his doctorate from Ladin University one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world he's got a very holistic approach to wellness and his areas of expertise include sleep optimizing cognitive performance and high performance in general as well as the role of diet exercise and fasting on her overall health and well-being additionally he's the CEO of human OS a company aimed at giving people an optimized operating system for healthy living now the place I want to start this whole idea of the OS for healthy living is really interesting to me but the thing I'm most fascinated by is that it started with your dad's battle for cancer yeah so walk us through that how did that inform what you're doing now yeah that's a it's one of the points that caused a refocusing remote evasion and dedication to this field of Health at the time I was doing research with a somebody named Dean Ornish who is looking at a multifactorial lifestyle program so all different aspects of lifestyle and how that if brought together could affect the progression of prostate cancer my dad was then diagnosed with cancer so I thought I'm in a unique position to help him a bit and so what I would do is go and just give him all sorts of information and it was overwhelming to him and he wasn't able to then make change that I thought could affect his condition I when he didn't make the change I'd get frustrated and when he passed away it really made me think about if I'm in this field wanting to actually influence how people live in their health you need to understand behavior you need to understand what is going to help somebody take up some of this knowledge that's out there and make it a part of their life so that was one of those aha moments and then from there I dedicated some serious time to understanding behavior created a model called the loop model to sustain health behaviors and that was really the basis of human ALS did you read the book change or die ahead of him so the the concept is pretty straightforward you tell people to change and most people don't so even if the outcome is hey if you don't take this pill and I think it was that simple it's like you have to take a pill once a day every day and compliance after like three months or something drops to like five percent yeah which is crazy but what I love is that you didn't hit that and go oh well that's just the thing and you dive into human behavior what did you learn in that discovery process about human behavior what's working against us how do we begin to take hold of it and then maybe most interestingly what is the loop method sure the idea is in order for somebody to adopt and sustain a health behavior for a long term not just a thirty day trial or 60 day period so this becomes a part of their pattern of living they should know why they are doing something how to do it if they're doing it and if it's working and you can see that each one of those four components independently will reinforce somebody's ability to pick something up and take and go with it so oftentimes what you'll see is that if somebody doesn't let's say change their behavior when information is given to them you might just lob more information provisions at them right oh there's more information but maybe they just didn't have the skills to implement that good idea or they tried it for a little bit and then their old behaviors were swept back up it didn't have any feedback to say this is actually are you living in accordance with your own goals or maybe they just didn't know if it was actually working or not and because one you know insidiously challenging aspect of our health is that a lot of things that are good for us might be what I call the meaningful but invisible they matter but we don't get that feedback to make us immediately detect its having a presence and it might be right you might have a significant improvement and let's say memory performance over a 12 week period but year but you might not recognize about time you get there it might actually feel like you're just performing as you've always been and that actually can go up and down improvements and decrements so is there a way to then use technology to then make people more informed about things that can help them more informed about their own patterns of living and then empowered to put all that into practice and I actually think that we need technology in this world to help us take care of our health wealth I found this so interesting in some of your talks in a define health yes so that question was posed to me a while ago and I totally stumbled on it it's one of those broad questions that is hard to define I think probably the explanation that I like the most is that it is the ability to maintain balance or homeostasis within the body so if you are challenged by some sort of you know infection or arm break your ability to get back to a place of balance is a marker of health but it is also more than that it is it is something that can we can use as a currency to realize our goals and aspirations in our life and I think if you take that if you drink that in and you believe it then all these things that can feel like friction might actually just be opportunities to live in according to the fullest version of yourself I love that definition so now let's say that I have that but I'm still struggling to implement what are the behaviors and like what are the behavior modification tools that people can put in place to comply I think the first aspect of this is to clearly understand the problem at hand right if you don't really know what your your challenge is your own efforts will be either inefficient or you won't really know if you're headed in the right direction even though you're spinning your wheels we're born into a time where the default settings around us and the expectations of our environment are the pressures of culture and work and even the built environment will predictably lead to issues with our health chronic disease we act will be a little bit weird we have to make a daily efforts to counteract those forces to affect our pattern of living so that we actually are being good stewards of our health it's not something that is just there until it's gone it's something that you need to cultivate and nurture the next you want to be a lifetime learner because 15 20 years ago circadian rhythms the gut microbiota things like that were not a part of any model that was used to predict or describe health we know information is changing regularly so I love that saying have strong opinions held loosely which means to me that you take the time to form an understanding now but you don't defend that at all in the face of new information so you need to be having the ability to upgrade that to uplevel that and then you have to be able to take big concepts that you learn about and personalize it into the fabric of your life your family your kids whatever that is how can you take this idea that you think is going to benefit you and make it real for you because if it's too if it there's too much friction and conflict you don't personalize it you follow rules you might be able to do that for two weeks three weeks but then you'll really likely to go back to whatever patterns you have previously what else I think your response to failure right failure is a part of the process a regular part of the process can you address failure with compassion for yourself and also with resilience where you're like what can I learn about the fact that I wanted to go to the gym four times this week but I went twice what was it about the week constant assessment to then just know how you can do better next week so interesting that as you're talking about how to get people to comply with health stuff that you're talking about mindset in the beginning so when I first started this film everything journey and talked through all these problems yeah it was why is the protein bar guy talking about mindset yeah and then when I exited quest and started impact theory and did all this mindset stuff and then I said guys we're gonna do a show called health theory everyone's like why is the mindset guy talking about health and it's been like this constant frustration for me for people to understand if you want to optimize for your health you have to optimize your mindset if you want to optimize for your mindset you have to take care of your health yeah and because I talk a lot about working hard and busting ass and all that and what greatness demands people think that I don't sleeeeep they think that I just grind my way to success yeah the reality is that it and you've talked really powerfully about this if you want to even have good decision-making abilities yeah you've gotta sleep run us through like a sleep 101 why it's so foundational to your work and what people should be doing yeah I left a company that I loved at a job that I loved to start a startup and my PhD and I thought it could all implode it would be too much for me to handle and so I thought if I'm going to upregulate my ability to show up everyday I need to then basically take care of the machinery that is doing the work so what is it that makes me feel sharp every day and sleep then is of course one component of that and what I've realized it's so it's funny we kind of encapsulate sleep as its this package thing but it's almost like uh me about daytime right that's a big window okay no and what sleep ends up being is a very great window into your soul you know I'm into the into the workings of the brain and how like what is happening physiologically so you really understand it gives you a window to that narrow the field a little bit to then understand how our physiology works in general if you had to make a hypothesis about two or three reasons why we sleep what do you think are the two or three most important things that happen while people are sleeping yeah it's a good question because it's been almost like definition of health under what is the solitary unitary purpose of sleep has been notably hard to define we know very important things can happen it's purging of energetic byproducts it's purging of potentially neurotoxic products that are a result of that it is plasticity that's forming it is reregulate of our immune system there's a lot going on and I there has not yet been one I think model that explains everything but we do know that incredibly important things occur so what are people doing that messes up their sleep yeah so that's a it's a really good question and they the common question that you get is how much did you need and how much time should I be in bed it's easy but the things that matter for sleeper our timing intensity and duration so duration is sort of the easy one it's that what I tell people is spend enough time in bed that you wake naturally that means you're not waking by an alarm and so what I like to get what I call complete sleep is aimed to spend half an hour more in bed than what you think you'll need so that if your body needs it on that night you'll get it mmm now you might not ever need it or you might not need it or you might need it rarely but allow for complete sleep to happen you also want the timing of your sleep to be regular so for instance you go to bed usually from midnight and wake up at 8:00 but tonight you got a bit of 4 a.m. and you wake up at noon it's eight hours but the sleep will not be as restorative as it was if you were sleeping in that same window every night because we now are introducing concept of circadian rhythms which are repeatable 24-hour processes so when you're getting REM sleep at 4 a.m. your body because of your past experience over the last several weeks knows do REM like activities at that time and so it'll be more efficient sleep itself will be more efficient and doing what it wants to do if you regularize the timing of your sleep and then you have intensity and that is really not something that you can take action on directly go sleep hard but you can do things during the day that then will facilitate depth and you can also create an environment that is less disruptive ok so talk to me what can I do during the day to make sure that I'm sleeping hard yeah so if you look at people that undergo bed rest because they have a broken leg or in studies that put people on bed under bed rest to then see what their sleep is like you know do they end up having a fragmentation of their sleep so they have more naps during the day and they have more periods at night where they are without adequate amounts of physical activity there is a fragmentation of your sleep you don't need a ton to then get better sleep but then where does that sensitivity sort of drop off you use running as an example because we can just define it by time you go regularly for a 20 minute run today you go for a 4 hour run you've now overloaded your system to a degree that might actually impair the amount of sleep that you get there's a bidirectional relationship there where a little bit of the stimulus aids and the depth of sleep and too much can overwhelm it no it doesn't automatically mean you will sleep poorly but you have a higher risk of doing so you might sleep like a rock and then there's temperature fluctuations so this is actually a newer area but we live in a very insulated world right even if we go outside and there's not much variation in the temperature we can layer ourselves so that our what we're being exposed to is very narrow we also know that signals from a wider breadth of temperature within the day camp might actually feed into that what's called a homeostatic collecting the signals of daytime usage that then help you sleep deeply and then a big important one is light so light coming into your eye will communicate with receptors at the back of the eye that are not actually communicating with the visual cortex that help us see but that are communicating with the master clock and it we spend 90% of our time indoors now so if we are not getting as much light as we used to so if you go outside don't wear glasses get outside for at least a half an hour sunglasses sunglasses yes yeah thanks and then in the evening you really just want to have whatever internal and light environment is reflect what's going on outside so as the Sun Goes Down dim the lights and then also change the tone so you're getting less blue light because that is the the blue is the major signal to these retinal ganglion cells that says to the master clock it's daytime yeah speaking of which I was listening to one of your talks and you talked about how the fact the fact that fat has photoreceptors or light receptors how is it possible probably like one of the coolest discoveries of last year but those same receptors that are in the back of our eye they're called opsin receptors and all obstinate receptors and there are many over a hundred they have the ability to transduce a light signal into a nerve signal of some sort so Peter light in Alberta researcher professor Peter light you have to be joking I know isn't that I mean he's that is that's hilarious yeah I rolled right over that one yeah Peter light who studies light I don't think there was a name change there I think that's his given name he did a screen to see are these receptors anywhere else in the body and he's found them in fat tissue Wow and he's like this has to be an artifact this can't be this can't be a thing and so he was able to test if light hitting fat tissue had an effect and he put his hand over the light and the signal went away he took his hand away from the light and the signal reappeared so we thought wow this there's something here and that made him investigated more thoroughly and what he found is that fat tissue has light receptors same ones in her eye and they respond to light and it makes the fat cells shrink become less inflammatory and they release a whole different profile of hormones and we might actually have a light deficiency not just for vitamin D but for our regulation of fat would we the conversation around fats regulation is oftentimes fairly uninformed we regulate fat tissue like we do temperature it is it is something that is not simply just a matter of did we you know the calories and calories out your body is making a lot of adjustments now those calories do matter but it is making a ton of adjustments to those calories to then say do I want that fat storage to shrink or to expand and you and it's trying to regulate it similar to how a thermostat would regulate temperature in home you said it at 72 this is super interesting so we can say that that the fat in our body works as a gland is that fair yeah you could say that it's yeah but is there logic to like the the hypothalamus that thermostat you've talked about fat trying to stay in range yeah that it goes up and down sort of regularly but it stays in that type and like this is so interesting to think of it as secreting hormones and being a gland walk us through the details of that yeah so we now know that fat releases I think over 50 different what are called adipocytes adipose fat kinds of a cytokine which is like hormone and so as triglycerides enter into our thatch issue then leptin is produced continuously so that flux of fats fat tissue fat leaving and entering the fat tissue will then cause leptin to be made proportional to that then that signal goes into the blood and there's various receptors for it so one in the brain in the brainstem you actually have micro pancreas as well but then in the hypothalamus so the brain is then detecting how much fat is circulating ah you've lost a little bit of weight less fat storage less leptin release be hungry get that fat stores back up and you have neurons in the brain in the hypothalamus and these and a lot of the hypothalamic centers will connect see of these discrete groups of cells that communicate with one another that then affect things like motivation temperature even sleep and so there's a balance of different cell types within an area called the RQ nucleus and depending on the signals that are present will then initiate this cascading effects that will affect hunger that'll affect energy expenditure all to try to keep your fat levels in a constant level now doesn't it have to be the exact same level but within a range now why do we then get fatter it's thought that this homeostatic fat longest at is much better at defending weight loss than weight gain make sense evolutionarily it was probably much more of a concern and there's also some thinking that those neurons actually get damaged by our environment our internal environment from the types of foods that we eat and challenges to them from even things like poor sleep so nutrient inadequacies things like that all these things can affect the health of that tissue and it's one of the reasons why I am favorable towards a kippah kind of diet because beta-hydroxybutyrate is one of the ketones and it can cause those those tissues within the brain to actually start to remodel and regenerate and so something that has diet induced obesity they they have a very hard time losing weight because even if they lose weight their body wants to get back to that setpoint and if you look at people that are on a ketogenic diet for a lot of them they just start eating to satiety they eat normally and yet they the weight comes off naturally now is there's no guarantee that that weight will stay off but I think you put yourself in a much better position you know if you lose weight on other ways not all the other ways but other ways if you look at somebody's physiology once they're 50 pounds lighter for a lot of people it looks like their bodies desperately trying to get back I'm in wait their brain will stay active seeking food so if you do fMRI and there's food on the table they will stay seeking even out even if they're full right everything is engineered all the different processes are engineered to get you back up to that way what are some of those processes that's so interesting like how so I've had a lot of these symptoms so I used to be 60 pounds heavier I lost that and I did it so stupidly you can't imagine I did it in a rabbit starvation diet and just insane amounts of cardio so my calories were probably between 1200 and 1500 a day as much as I could make it just pure protein as possible I was inflamed it was crazy my joints hurt my knees my wrists my elbows amused gnarly yeah but unfortunately I wasn't thinking hey listen to your body I was just thinking you're getting lean ooh you're getting leaner you're getting leaner but you want to talk about seeking food at all times like all I could think about it was when my next meal was but I never thought of that as like anything other than well your calories are crazy low but what are the mechanisms that like trap people because there are some people who will swear yeah but they can't no matter what they can't lose weight yeah and I've always if I'm honest I've always really discounted that well it makes me hungrier yeah so interestingly a ketogenic diet I'm very interested in the mechanisms by which it might be working and it and there the ketone beta-hydroxybutyrate might actually be turning on genes that help to reset those tissues that are controlling body fat effectively lowering your set point to a place that's healthier that's a possibility the other diet that can do that is very low energy diets that actually have very low energy people's at starvation low calorie low calorie yeah because you don't have to actually be on a kid rennet diet to produce ketones if you are in a state of fasting or in hypo caloric intake then you're gonna produce ketones too so give me the order in which the body burns calories and and include alcohol as the fourth macro which some people will say yes so preferentially the body will burn glucose and that is thought because the brain is a very very glucose hungry it is only 4% of our body weight and yet it consumes 25% of the calories we eat it's a very medical metabolically active tissue du macros always go into an order so here's what I heard this could be total number one that if there's alcohol in the system it will be been tabal eyes first yeah followed by glucose it dependent yes so actually it depends on your relevant relative status what type of macros have you been eating over the last couple of weeks and then what enzymes have been generated in response to that exposure okay so it's not like there's some set it's always going to burn them in this order see most studies are always looking at what is under this normal condition which is our standard diet it's not looking at under all conditions and under things like fasting or what might be evolutionarily more regular in terms of like you know not having breakfast until maybe noon we have what's called metabolic flexibility which is thought to be something that is a good state to try to achieve which means that you can readily burn different types of fuel sources so you know it's it's extraordinarily complex people give simple explanations for it but you know if this is actually one of the biggest public health needs in our world because the amount of comorbidities that associate with obesity it will bankrupt our society you know you think of weight you think of food but it's very possible that even things like light might be having a a very large input here and like like sunlight even right we're talking about that so if that is a regulated tissue and we are living fully clothed I wouldn't say that there is any silver bullet but there's a lot of different inputs and so I think overall one sort of perspective mine is to try to live more naturally but in a way that is actually going to work within the modern world one thing you said that I found so interesting is all right fat's a regulated tissue it is creating all these hormones it's responding to the environment it actually has light sensitivity which still freaks me out I know and hey by the way boys and girls you're staying inside all day you're closed up when you go outside guess what signal you're giving your it's winter time guess what the body doesn't winter it stores more fat yeah I wanted to literally stop my research at that point strip and run outside just to like shred up a little bit yeah of course it's not gonna work quite like that yeah so it's got fat as a gland as a regulated tissue do I understand it correctly to say that it's breaking something as you get obese you're more likely to get more obese and there's something that breaks that because like when you look at people their setpoint is riding with them as they're getting heavier and heavier which is already terrifying and then it's also secreting things that make you more hungry that delay you're where you're still searching for food longer one is all of that true like that I just explained that accurately yes but we're missing a very important part to the model which is that it's not the only thing that explains our food seeking behavior we also will eat food because it tastes good right independent of our hunger right we know that we're for instance somebody you know you eat a full meal and you're out and you're full but your appetite is renewed when the dessert cart is brought over and you're like oh I could eat that yeah let's get four of those that is another driver of food intake and we live in an environment that is really designed for overconsumption so it's very easy to overeat in our world because the palatability of food is one that will then promote overeating and it the design of food processed foods it also will make you feel less full per calorie so there's a delay before you even feel fullness all right we got to talk about that because you showed a visual in one of your talks it was so powerful and I've been in this a long time but for some reason that visual really hit me but when you showed the raspberry tart which is like a little raspberry pie it looks so innocent and delicious and then you showed the equivalent amount of calories in bowls of raspberries was like seven or eight yes a raspberry it was crazy than just like that actually is a lot of work for Barbara rolls and her book volumetrics which is it is stunning when we think about that how we condense calories into modern food products and that's what I want to talk about when people say processed food what they're talking about is making it hyper palatable so I want to overeat anyway yeah and then secondarily it it has a lot of calories per physical volume yes so our central nervous system preferences are designed to detect and prefer caloric density so it is different than eating that the tart versus the raspberries right we have now the ability to design food to make us want to seek it it's a very disadvantaged environment but the good news is that eating raspberries is also perfectly satisfying but the more of that highly palatable calorically dense food that you eat the more that it'll drive food seeking behavior so there is a behavioral element to this how it messes with your neural circuit what's going on mechanistically though so is it is it through that mechanism that it's it triggers the release of ghrelin instead of leptin like there's so many different molecules that are at play metabolically you're right ghrelin is released from what are called accent excels within the gut and it's very low after a meal and it'll rise and as it's rising between your meals that makes you hungry mmm it's the only gut direct peptide that actually promotes feeding versus fullness leptin is this what's called a tonic signal it's sort of operating in the background we call it a fullness signal it's not quite it's actually setting the tone of how full you'll even be from a meal so if you have low leptin you'll naturally be less sensitive to the fullness signals of a meal so satiety and long-term fat regulation will work together now independent of that you have this brain circuitry that's going on that can think of it almost like addiction to a rewarding signal the more exposure you get to it mmm that will then drive seeking food seeking behavior so you're not really hungry and yet you're craving a lot of people experience this in the afternoon you're bored and you're like I just want to eat something right we know it in our lives we can detect it instantaneously the easy example is when you bring something that is very quickly dense at the end of a meal and you're full but you now want to eat more it is not the homeostatic calories and fullness that's saying oh you should eat more it is pleasure and the pleasure that derives from caloric density well now let's really freaked people out yeah talk to me about the impact on willpower maybe a cheesy way to say it but decision-making if I slept poorly yes what we see is that not only do hormones change in response to getting inadequate sleep but our brain changes too so there's something called the neuro competitive model decision-making which means that if you look at that thing that tastes delicious this reward part of your brain will light up first it'll it'll respond to it before the executive control self-control area kicks in to says yeah you might love how that tastes but it's not good for you right so you can see that competition taking place it happens all the time that process of looking at the donut that you love but ordinarily don't want to eat then that is biased towards eat this now and it ends up creating a behavior we call effort discounting you then are there's much less likely to work at this thing that ordinarily you totally say I care about this so I'm gonna make an effort to just not have Donuts in my life and you're like a you know ethic like tomorrow I'll just have it now and that can actually translate to like whether it's going to the gym and the food that you eat and people live in that in that state where I care 95 percent of the day I'm thinking about eating well and in that moment of hunger and potentially prepared with sleep loss you make a decision that you're then disappointed in yourself in and you've talked pretty powerfully about like how much time do you have to lose a night before you start to see some of this declination yeah what I found is that reliably people that miss out an hour to of sleep have impairments in vigilance as you'd imagine so they're less objectively alert stay and they feel sleepier so subjective alertness is impaired too and interestingly independently so I'll talk about the study because it's quite cool I had people come in and when I cared about it was what they ate so we create a baseline and they had by the way eight different choices that range from like clearly unhealthy gummy bears to you know ostensibly healthy right so things like you know just cut apple slices or something and what's another criticism I've had of previous research is that the decisions of the helpfulness of the food were made by the investigators but everybody has their own opinion about food right if you think there's four different types of decisions there's I like it and it's healthy easy all right I don't like it and it's not healthy easy the two in the middle are the most interesting it's really healthy and I don't really like it which is sort of characteristic of health choices that we have to make sometimes and the most interesting one is I love it and it's totally not healthy right how do people respond to food that they recognizes or they think this isn't good for me but I love this and what we saw is that when people were subjectively sleepy they were much more likely to eat foods that they rated as high like low health so they were defecting from their own personal health standards you can say and now just a compound thing you've got all right you missed an hour to on sleep and now the sudden you're leaning towards the things that you have high like a little help yeah but also losing sleep makes you look at a blood level like a pre-diabetic and so you get this double whammy walk us through that like what's going on metabolically when you don't get enough sleep yes so that is still being investigated but it was one of the very first things that was discovered in response to sleep loss so they did sleep sleep deprivation studies and found that healthy young subjects ended up basically looking diabetic after either one night a total sip depravation or a couple nights of partial sleep prescription where you're not getting as much sleep as your body wants what's going on there so then that stimulated it some more investigation into that now maybe that is because of altered circadian timing it was hard to parse that because we know melatonin a darkness hormone will actually cause insulin resistance you want it because over the course of the night you don't want insulin taking blood glucose out of the bloodstream and storing it because then you'd go hypoglycemic and you'd wake up so rather the body it's a it's a beautiful dance when darkness falls melatonin is released melatonin travels to the pancreas and it prevents insulin from being released and you keep blood glucose levels stable at across the night so I think when some people that are waking up in morning they're looking diabetic they might still have high levels of melatonin at night from the night we also see that our fat tissue simply becomes less sensitive to the effects of insulin and so it's just not reading a signal of insulin and helping it to store glucose as well and so therefore blood glucose levels elevate and then you know whether or not that is pathogenic like does that cause diabetes well you can then look at epidemiological research and shows that people that chronically get less sleep are much more likely to develop diabetes so you have to look at acutely what's a mechanism and then epidemiologically what happens when people generally do this and then you have to just try to figure out what's going on in between but clearly there's an issue going on there and there's no part of the body that goes untouched when we don't sleep get this leg that we need all right so if I want to get into rad shape I know that I need to sleep I know that I need to both get the right kind of light exposure at the right time and I need to watch my cognitive impact on what I choose for food and then just overall what I choose for food yeah what's the role of exercise you've talked about how exercise may like on the surface it has some counterintuitive impact on weight loss which I thought was pretty interesting yeah it makes sense if you're burning more calories you'll just lose weight and for a lot of people that actually feels true probably twelve years ago at the Society for Neuroscience meeting I saw a very interesting abstract or poster where it was six months of chronic which kind of sounds bad but regular exercise so three to five times a week at least 50 minutes and what they were looking at actually was the brain and the brain's ability to make to have willpower essentially and what they found is that your ability to kind of traverse the world rife with many bad options for us becomes strengthened when we exercise regularly you have stronger willpower when you exercise regularly and we know that to be true do we know what the mechanism is yes so there's a couple of different isms so one of the mechanisms is acute and it has to do with blood flow to the brain and when you exercise regularly the signals that are generated by the demands of creating blood flow throughout their body end up supporting more blood flow access throughout your body so you can perfuse your tissues more easily including the brain exercise that's at sufficient intensity so at least 80% most studies show so 80% 80% of max effort will then stimulate in a variety of ways something called brain derived neurotrophic factor and this is essentially a fertilizer to grow new neurons so yeah it helps us with weight loss but in a way that is not quite what we expect it's not just through energy expenditure but it is through the signals that are generated from exercise that then keep our body functioning well there also might be some bio modality here where certain amounts of exercise generate more hunger but it's not exceeded by what you actually take in and that has a lot to do with individual susceptibility like there's what are different types of either eating patterns to some people are uncontrolled eaters so once they start they just keep going some people are really good at your stopping when they're full they'll leave food on their plate I don't understand those people so it is it is enormously complex the simple message I think we should seek that in a way but at the same time those who promote it as though it encompasses everything that matters you know I think that they're not adequately informed not adequately informed all right if you had 90 seconds to tell somebody who's a hundred pounds overweight what they need to do yeah to lose that weight yeah what would you tell them so I think there's two great strategies that I've seen be very effective one is to go on a packaged food diet one that is designed for weight loss so it's giving you an adequacy of nutrients in its design and it is a black box you're only eating what's on ICIC so it is this somewhere that you can actually get yeah there's a medically assisted weight-loss facilities across the United States that do this are there not compliance problems actually I mean most people get into a rhythm they do quite well okay they do quite well 100 pounds is a lot I wouldn't necessarily recommend that for people that needed to lose that but that is at a level where the excess adiposity your body fat is really health impairing now that's one strategy and it is effective another strategy is a ketogenic diet I've seen people lose hundreds of pounds with that style of diet and when I now that I've explored the mechanisms more I think it's my preferred style because you can actually have Whole Foods and you can eat the fullness and you can lose quite a bit of weight but at the same time eeen I've seen people that have gone onto that diet and haven't lost much weight at all but I think would you if you can construct a diet that makes it easier for the body to take in fewer calories comfortably and there are more ways to do it but if I'm trying to have people lose 100 pounds the simplicity of the keto diet is a great tool what do you think about cold exposure heat exposure yeah does it have a role in health longevity anything I think it does I don't exactly know its role but the bigger window in which cold and heat exposures fit into is exposure to stressors mm-hmm both cold and hot will elicit what are considered heat shock and cold shock proteins which are actually shot they're called chaperone proteins and they do multiple jobs within a cell one they will find miss fold proteins and they will magnetically bind to the miss folding parts of the protein and can sometimes move them back into a conformation where those proteins now remain effective it's like a key in the lock if they're too broken then they will help to aggregate those proteins they bring them together and they can deliver them to the lysosome for break down into it's part of the auto Fidji process you wear that so esophageal a queue mall of the different broken down proteins and it delivers them to the lysosome which then is the incinerator okay once it goes to the incinerator these proteins that have gunked-up and impairing the so the function of the cell you now just have created new substrates for new proteins to be built and so they can support health in that way and so that's quite interesting and it has neurological effects so there seems to be some improvement some mood it's very it actually is very similar to the effects of exercise on the body I interviewed a guy Yanni Lacan an and he's out of Finland so culturally people sauna their regularly and they have now been releasing paper after paper it's a 20-year cardiovascular study of 2,000 men and what they're looking at is how did how do these men fare depending on a variety of factors but in this case how do they they are dependent on their regular usage of sauna exposure so men that sauna four to seven times a week compared to men who only saw in a once a week because that's how common it is there they will have really a 65% reduction in their risk for all forms of dementia for myocardial infarction other forms of cardiovascular disease and for hypertension it's all like 64 to 66 percent reduction compared to men who saw the laser equally and I think that those effects are very similar to what you'd see if those people didn't sauna but just did exercise mm-hmm so for me how that's changes I've been exposed to this information I sort of think well I'm pretty tired today so I'm not gonna exercise I'm gonna sauna but it's I'm doing one or the other and so I'm getting regular exposure to that form of a stressor and then every morning I take a cold shower to so really interesting and that your talk on exercises what made me think about the cold and heat exposure because and this is soft it's not like the science-based cool stuff that you've been giving us but there is something to when you exercise every day you're you're toughening your mind like you're just practicing doing something hard and so I'll say there's I take a cold shower of your morning there probably is something I'll believe you that there's something going on biologically but just from I'm doing something hard every day my psychology I can feel adjusting my willingness to step into that cold shower even though I don't want to and having to do something to my mind to do it to either focus on this is my identity it's who I want to be these are the actions that I need to be to be congruent with myself yeah you know doing all of that stuff is incredibly powerful and and then because I've practiced that when I get in front of food that I don't want to eat it's the same thing eating that would be a violation of my identity which I've spent every day either in the gym or in the cold shower or both sharpening so that I'm always living in accordance with the things that I tell myself about Who I am yes so I find that really really interesting and I I do want to ask one quick question about GHB for anybody who thinks it sounds familiar it is the compound that was part of the date rape drug but it has some pretty fascinating effects and you said if looking at this compound it seems tailor-made to be effective against Alzheimer's yeah why is that and if that's true why isn't anybody talking about it yes I'm conflicted with this and let's get into it so gamma at GH b stands for gamma hydroxybutyrate and I'll give you a little bit of background in the 90s you can get it from GNC same what yeah you get really yep it was available in every health food store regulated and people would take it to sleep better bodybuilders got word of it because there's research behind it that it actually will stimulate the release of growth hormone but it does so because it elicits a form of sleep slow wave sleep that is where most of your growth as released ah but these Italian research just got researchers discovered that it's also released even if it doesn't cause sleep so then bodybuilders started to take it every couple of hours and that frequency of exposure can cause down regulation of the neural systems that it's activating and that can then develop a very serious withdrawal syndrome so we had multiple lines of stories that were developing around this drug one it can get you very lean and it helps with sleep others it started to be used in the capacity for date rape but that is a story unto itself rohypnol or roofies are very long acting benzodiazepine drug and those can be slipped into a drink and then somebody would have retrograde amnesia which means they couldn't remember the 15 hours before that in Ireland that was heavily banned GHB came GHB became the next because it was broadly available it became the next thing people that were looking to do that used and it absorbed a lot of the notoriety of Randolph but simultaneously narcoleptics had been put on it to affect how their sleep how awake they felt the next day and another symptom that they have which is called cataplexy which is a loss of muscle tone when they experience emotion which is so weird yeah yes it has to do with the fact that narcolepsy is narcoleptics are missing a protein in their brain and the circuitry with which that neural system hyper cretan is attached to happens to connect with our amygdala and emotion and so when people were about to tell a joke or the anticipation of laughter could make them go into a cataplectic attack and they could have sagging of their limbs or jaw or completely fall to the ground it's very interesting model to understand sleep - because you know a thousand eight hundred years ago you know you would do lesion studies you'd like block out some part of the brain and see what broke and it would bend your arm this might be in this apartment of brain might be important for this function well this happens naturally in narcoleptics we're probably due to autoimmunity this group of cells is attacked so anyway these people do not have a therapy for cataplexy and why is GHB so interesting because most hypnotics will put you to sleep they will prevent deep sleep from occurring so they get you to sleep faster and they might help with sleep continuity but you're not getting this deep deep sleep can be great in the short term but it's we're now discovering very problematic if you take that chronically so things like ambien and sonata why is deep sleep important it is during that time that physiological state will reap urge those neuro toxic substances and one of the two hallmark features of Alzheimer's diseases neurofibrillary tangles and the accumulation of beta amyloid this gummy substances substance that accumulates when we use it with high energy usage and if we're not purging that then that could gunk up but for the functioning of cells so this vicious cycle ends up happening where there's an area of brain called the medial prefrontal cortex that area the brain high energy usage during the day and it is also responsible for then generating deep sleep at night it's also a part of the brain that ends up accumulating panema beta amyloid first and so your ability to purge that has everything to do with how much slow-wave sleep that you get and then this accumulates there preventing slow-wave sleep from occurring so it's this feed-forward cycle and we used to think that poor sleep was just a very common and early symptom of Alzheimer's disease but we now know that it might actually be directly involved in its pathogenesis so why is GHB good not only does it help very uniquely generate the sleep the type of sleep that's needed to purge that and how much can we rescue somebody that's already developed it well it certainly might be preventive but it also because beuter rates if you think GHB is gamma hydroxybutyrate and i but we've been talking a lot about beta hydroxy butyrate those molecules are very very similar and butyrate s-- will actually turn on they do what's called epigenetic modulation - modification they will hurt they will turn on genes have been silenced and so in the brain you see that a brain protease called nopales n' is now up regulated when you take GHB and that can go to the b amyloid and so I mean perfectly uniquely suited and there's one more thing GHB can also be utilized by neurons as a fuel it can enter directly into mitochondria and one of the problems with this whole system is as you start to the mitochondria become impaired in their ability to generate enough energy to then satisfy all the cellular in AIDS and it's this downward spiral spiral because the mitochondria can't maintain enough energy production to main cellular integrity those cells turn into senescence more inflammation more disorder faster faster pathology and so ghb can clear that clear the proteins it can generate the sleep it can also serve as a fuel to keep our mitochondria functioning you know a big part of my own PhD thesis focused on this and I think that the argument is compelling I think that they have a epical there's an ethical consideration for them to pursue this because we don't have good therapies for Alzheimer's disease wow man I'll be very interested to see where that goes dude you've got so much interesting stuff tell these guys where they can find you tell them how they can find human OS I think it's all amazing and worth pursuing thank you yeah so human OS dot me we roll out podcast every week a newsletter we're constantly creating little short courses that are 20 minutes in length calling micro courses and we have them all peer-reviewed we're constantly rolling out how-to guides just make it easier workouts recipes so it's meant to support your lifestyle in a variety of ways so make you smarter over time help to make today easier and all of our thinking goes in there I love that all right what's one change people could make that would have the biggest impact on their health boy I probably should say something about light no what's the what's the truth is the most interesting thing even I I love the idea of fresh familiar fluent mmm-hmm be a positive force in your own learn and I'll explain what I mean there so at this model that I've developed for information we love the fresh that's why the tweet that came out today it's what's new but we live in a familiar which means we don't spend enough time understanding something so that we can explain it to a friend we are not the only person in our lives that is responsible for our health but we have a huge responsibility we can't outsource that it's not our doctors responsibility are though they are part of our care team but we are too so we need to up regulate our knowledge and we need to try test different things explore different things but what I would say is when you learn something try to learn it well enough to explain it to a friend so go to coffee have your little health crew whether its family or friends go to coffee with them go to tea go for a walk and try to explain something and you might fail but that's an opportunity to go back tighten up you're learning then try again and that I think will bring you to the place where you have strong opinions on loosely because you'll know why you thinks about something until it's modified by new info and I think you're much more likely to be able to exploit valuable information for your own benefit when you get to that place it makes total sense alright guys this is one of the more fascinating people I've come across you're gonna definitely want to dive into this world and check it out you will be richly rewarded and I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show thank you so much here if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care amazing hey impact abyss staying focused on your health and wellness is not always easy but thankfully Skillshare is coming to the rescue Skillshare is an online learning community with over 25,000 classes across almost any skill you can imagine they have courses on getting into ketosis science-based workouts mastering you meal plans and even meditation so you can stay healthy consistently year-round and today Skillshare is giving the first 500 people who click on the link in the description below to three months of their entire library of courses guys this is literally years worth of world class content so don't wait take advantage of this offer right now if you're anything like me and you want to be great it all comes down to skill acquisition and skill share is one of the best ways I have ever seen to do that so click on the link in the description below join the classes that are 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Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 176,307

Rating: 4.8892698 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, dan pardi, health theory, health, health show, how to get the most from your sleep, sleep hacking 101, hack your sleep, sleep hacks, sleep cycle, sleep 101, sleep research

Id: pyniJ_zwKG8

Length: 53min 57sec (3237 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2019