Kwik Brain Episode 025: Sleep Smarter, Faster, and Deeper with Shawn Stevenson

welcome the quick brain bite sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more I'm your coach Jim quick free your let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brains capacity I wasn't I wasn't wired just clear I knew what I needed to do and how to do it I know kungfu show me how do you believe smarter this is a question that is asked frequently in our private Facebook group how do I fall asleep faster how do I stay asleep how do I sleep deeper so why are we talking about sleep in a brain show well let me start by asking you a question when you get a bad night's sleep and tap into all of us how do you feel the next day how does your brain feel the next day right sleep plays a critical role in your quick brain performance your thinking your memory your learning we know that lack of sleep hurts all these cognitive processes in many ways first it impairs attention alertness concentration reasoning and even problem-solving this makes it more difficult to learn effectively second during the night various sleep cycles play an important role in consolidating important memories in your mind so if you don't get enough sleep you won't be able to remember what you learned and experienced during the day so if you or someone you love has sleep issues this is a must listen and must share episode I want to introduce you to a dear friend Sean Stephenson Sean and I have been friends for over a decade he's helped me personally to maximize my sleep especially overcoming sleep apnea especially when it comes to my crazy travel schedule speaking he's the best-selling author of sleep smarter and the host of the top podcast the model he'll show and he is a speaker at one of our recent quick brain conferences so whether you want to get into bed more relaxed or get out of bed more rested this episode will help you get there so let's get started my friend what are three quick tips our listeners can use to sleep smarter so first one was go with the super low-hanging fruit and I love these and this is something you can implement immediately and this was a study was done by Appalachian State University and this was a study on exercises they were looking at the timing of your exercise how would that possibly potentially influence your sleep quality and what they found was absolutely shocking so at one phase of the study they had the individuals to exercise exclusively at 7 a.m. over the course of that study period then they take the same exercises in another study period and have them workout exclusively at 1 p.m. in the afternoon a final stage they had them to train exclusively at 7 p.m. in the evening and so here's what's crazy at the end of the study they found that the morning exercisers on average spend more time in the deepest most anabolic stages of sleep which is what we talked about earlier and how important that is they found that the morning exercise was tended to sleep longer they tended to have more efficient sleep cycles which again that's what we were talking about here sufficient sleep cycles not necessarily sleeping more and they also found that the morning exercisers had a 25% greater drop in blood pressure in the evening compared to working at the other times and why that matters that's a kind of correlated with the activation of your parasympathetic or rest and digests system and a deactivation of the sympathetic kind of fight or flight and so all of that simply by getting some exercise in the morning and immediately some people like well I don't have time I work out after after work or maybe I'm not working out right now at all which is you don't have to stop doing what you're doing if you're working out after you get off of work if that fits better with your schedule what I am saying is that you could still take advantage of the benefit by getting you know even four minutes of exercise and in the morning and so clinically what we call this and why it works is it's something called a cortisol reset and sometimes we'd see people coming into the clinic where we'd see their you know do a hormone panel or just look at their sleep patterns and we would call them tired and wired and basically at night when they should be tired all ready to go to sleep their kind of wired and up and in the morning they're just like so difficult to peel themselves off of their mattress because their cortisol is too low in cortisol is not a bad guy that has to be said really quickly here it's if it's producing the wrong amounts or at the wrong time and so by exercise in the morning you get this cortisol and that sets their template because your cortisol should be elevated in the morning and gradually drop as the day goes on so it really works as simply is that getting that cortisol reset you can do Tabata which is a four minutes of exercise is ten seconds of rest so 20 seconds on 10 seconds off for four minutes you'll probably kick your butt it's really difficult maybe you just do bodyweight squats for that time period you're gonna get a great workout in you're gonna up regulate your metabolism and you're gonna be able to help your sleep at night so that's tip number one low-hanging fruit is to get in some morning exercise alright so for number two and this one is a little bit more in my in my field you know I'm a clinical nutritionist and I've had the opportunity to work with a couple thousand people in a one-on-one context and many you know hundreds of thousands of people now probably into the millions via you know my show the model health show live events and speaking and traveling and all these different things programs and what I saw was there there definitely was a correlation with what we're eating in our sleep and so I dug into the research and it was so fascinating really blew me away what I found out because when you hear the word melatonin which is this sleep glorified sleep hormone we don't tend to really think and it's what I was taught in a traditional University melatonin is secreted by your pineal gland end of story that's just how it is well come to find out that the vast majority of your melatonin is located in your gut alright we're talking like four hundred times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain and so when you could actually have a pine the electa me which is a removal of your pineal gland which I don't recommend I'm not saying that go do that after the show is over but here's the thing is that they still had the same levels of melatonin in their body after the pineal gland was removed crazy crazy stuff and so the environment in your gut and researchers at Caltech and some other organizations that I looked into for kind of compiling this data making it all make sense for people found that certain bacteria in your gut communicate with cells that are responsible for creating sleep related hormones and neurotransmitters so the environment in your gut matters a lot and the food that you put in there determines in a in a huge way what's happening in that environment your microbiome and so I'm gonna leave that piece with once one set up which is help to support the microbiome don't put things in your body that destroy your microbe microbiome if at all possible so avoiding unnecessary antibiotics chlorinated water processed foods that help to keep opportunistic bacteria in control of your ship so that's part one and this is much more in-depth in sleep smarter in this chapter seven never forget this chapter because it blew my mind writing this way but also we want to add in more what I call good sleep nutrients all right so there's certain nutrients that are kind of building blocks or seeds for creating sleep related hormones or neurotransmitters I'll just share two really quickly one of them funny enough is vitamin C so we hear about vitamin C for your immune system and things like that but it's actually important for rebuild regenerating tissues it's also important for your sleep it helps to regulate this process so and this was a Public Library of Science did a study and found that individuals who were deficient in vitamin C were much more likely to have interrupted sleep so these are people who tend to wake up more frequently during the night so by optimizing your vitamin C you can help to eliminate that and again it depends on you this might not be the thing that's going to fix that but it might be something to look at and I'm a big fan of botanical or food first so not going and buying like a vitamin C supplement some synthetic thing but get it from food first and or a natural food source supplement and I'll share one other one there's so many that I want to tell you about right now but one other one would be making magnesium magnesium is responsible over 300 biochemical I'm sorry 325 biochemical processes we're aware of many of them involves sleep and recovery and this is also the number one mineral deficiency in our world today so that's why this is a big big problem it's a kind of a stress modulating mineral it really deals with your body's kind of sympathetic nervous system a lot and so it's gets zapped from your system very quickly so you want to be adamant about getting magnesium optimal magnesium in your diet food first and then supplements there's oral supplements I would recommend people go supplement with this one too in addition to food however here's the issue if you take too much of an oral sup of magnesium it can cause what we call clinically disaster pens which is diarrhea that's another way to say diarrhea but in a more elegant way I guess so be careful with the amount of magnesium that you're takin in and I love topical magnesium it from our friend Ian Clark and his amazing company activation products so topical rubbing it into your skin is a great way to go about that so get more good sleep nutrients and final tip here so we covered exercise we covered good sleep nutrients this is something that I don't know if you talked about on your show yet but I know you've probably weaved it in and this is having a session a practice of brain training aka meditation and so it was so fascinating the American Sleep Foundation and the American Journal of Clinical sleep medicine they both correlated and put together studies and looked at the research and it was so fascinating to see this because you hear about meditation and we tend to think about all that sounds good for like relaxation and it's like it could be a little bit airy-fairy but you and I are very much the same in our thinking we're very analytical we want to know that something actually does work and so for them to come out and say that and I cited to study in my book sleep smarter as well that meditation is equally as effective as some of the best sleep medications that are out there is really fascinating number one it's free and number two we're not looking at some of the dangerous side effects that take place when taking some of these medications which I'm not going to name any names but you guys know what they are they're their songs and stuff now so here's what we want to look at there was one study and they took individuals and this was just an eight-week study and found that they were able to improve their sleep latency awake after sleep onset so they didn't wake up as frequently they improved their total sleep time basically they took insomniac s' and they were no longer insomniac after doing this meditation training alright and this was of course it's not 100% of the people but there was like 76 or 84% I don't remember the exact number effectiveness or improvement for people it's crazy and you look at some of the effectiveness for some of these drugs and it just doesn't even measure up so having a meditation practice each day and this is why it's called a practice and what they found was meditating in the morning can help you sleep better at night and to sum this up really quickly is why does this work well there's this saying that is you know my bed you're like you're ready to go to bed at night and it's a quote that says my bed it's this magical place that I go to remember everything I was supposed to do alright so kind of like your brain just is going on high gear and you really want to shut down and relax and it's happening more than ever today and so what we want to do is we have a lot of windows open on the computer screen of our minds and that's cool through the day because it helps you to serve it helps you to be able to do your job it helps you to be able to answer questions and to be there to help people but at night we want to be able to minimize all those tabs and just keep the sleep tab open and that's what meditation really allows you to do is to help you to support not to have no thoughts but to be able to focus your attention on sleep alright so there's three powerhouse strategies of course we could dive in deep on all of these things but I hope that provides people a little jumpstart to get going thank you so much Sean there you go three simple and effective actionable ways to sleep smarter faster and deeper you got exercise you have nutrition you have meditation I highly recommend you get your copy of Sean's book sleep smarter it's the ultimate guide to maximizing your sleep we will put links in our show notes as we always do to all the resources mentioned in this episode at quick brain comm and our private quick brain Facebook group make sure you subscribe so you can receive our next episode and until then sweet dreams want to double your brain speed and memory power if you'd like to learn rapidly and get ahead faster I'd like to give you my brand new quick brain accelerator program you will discover exactly what I teach my clients to learn read and remember anything and the time there is no charge as my gift to you for being one of our subscribers that's Cave wik brain dot-com or simply text the word podcast 291 6-8 to 270 246 and will send you a direct link that's 9 1 682 brain growing up struggling with learning challenges from a childhood brain injury it's been my life's mission to help you have your very best brain so you can win more every single day now one more quick brain here are four ways to fast-track your results and lock in what you just learned into your long-term memory remember fast FAS T the F stands for Facebook you're not alone on this journey I invite you to join our free private online group there you can connect with me your fellow brain lovers links to resources and even submit your questions for me to answer in future episodes go to quick brain calm that's K wik brain copy a stands for apply act on what you learn today remember knowledge is not power its potential power it only becomes power when you use it so use what you just learned the S stands for subscribe don't miss the next episode and other free brain training and finally the T stands for teach you want to learn faster now the keys to lock it in right away by teaching it to someone else when you teach something you get to learn it twice here's a simple way to do that leave a review on iTunes leave a review with your biggest takeaway from this episode you could also post and share this podcast on your social media it helps us spread our mission of building better brighter brains and of course tag us so our team could properly thank you hashtag quick brain kwi k brain mine is at jim quick kwi k on instagram facebook and twitter so what does fast stand for facebook apply subscribe teach I'll see you in our next episode of quick brain until then remember you are faster and smarter than you think

Channel: Jim Kwik

Views: 285,653

Keywords: jim kwik, kwik brain, kwik learning, shawn stevenson, sleep smarter

Id: IVk6OdQ8Mh4

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018