Sleep Smarter | Shawn Stevenson | Talks at Google

[Music] thank you everybody okay so yeah here's some cool stuff that I did here my team just made this slide for me and said I had to put it in so I put it in well so my mission today is to give you things that are very tangible and actionable and so I'm going to take you through some very specific points and we're going to learn today walk away things are going to be able to leave here with is how to improve your sleep to reduce body fat improve your performance I'm sorry your appearance what simple exercise you can do to instantly improve your sleep quality while you need to sleep more and exercise less to get the best fitness results how to feel more energized and refreshed on less hours of sleep why poor sleep quality depresses brain function leads to poor performance what mineral deficiency can cause severe sleep problems and how to fix it how to calm your mind so that you can fall asleep faster and numerous power tips to help you improve your sleep quality immediately now I'm not oblivious to the fact that sleep is a boring topic all right when I went to my publisher initially so my publishers Rodale who's like responsible like Men's Health magazine women's health magazine now like you'd be great with the diet book fitness book was like this is super important to talk about this and it's not a sexy topic but I really feel that I made it more sexy and coupled with Arianna Huffington her book came out right after mine and so it's kind of creating this whole sleep revolution thing going on so some of this information hopefully you've heard about because I've been talking about this for about five years and it's like a trickle-down thing when information get out gets out there on the internet you never know exactly where it's coming from so some of you probably came from me but you're going to learn some new stuff as well so what I like to do is to connect on a very visceral level so Google probably wanted me here to help you to be more productive you probably don't care much about that and you care about looking good so who here doesn't want to look good so that's what I thought so what we're going to do is connect on a visceral level and talk about how your sleep impacts your body composition and your physical appearance so today more than ever it's it's difficult there's a lot of there's a lot of barriers to being fit there's a lot of misinformation but one of the biggest missing pieces to this whole equation of having the body and health that we want is sleep there's two important studies that I want to share with you guys so number one this was recently studied I mean published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal they took individuals they put them on the same diet same exercise program one part of the study they're sleep-deprived so they're getting five-and-a-half hours of sleep the other part of the study they're getting eight and a half hours sleep or eight plus hours of sleep at the end of the study that found that the sleep deprived group lost far less weight and far less body fat nothing else different in their life a more important study this was done to the University of Chicago shoutout to unite shared this study all over the place but I'd like to I'm here in Chicago so it's cool they took individuals they put them on a calorie restricted diet and I went to a traditional University and I was taught that if you want to help a patient to lose weight you have them to expend more energy than they take in so basically exercise more eat less alright so they went through that normal modality put them on calorie restricted diet one phase of the study they have them on this particular diet but they sleep deprived them alright so again five and a half hours of sleep and this is going to be shocking five and a half hours of sleep another phase of the study same diet eight and a half hours sleep everything's tracked at the end of the study they found that the individuals when they were getting more sleep they actually lost 55 percent more body fat 55% more body fat simply from sleeping more okay you can't get this kind of number from CrossFit all right and the CrossFit is awesome ish you can't get this kind of result unless you're literally beating yourself to the ground every day all right just by sleeping more and this again this is kind of counterculture because in our world today in our mo and in our mindset we can't really get anything unless we hustled our face off and we can get it with an exercise program because you really beat yourself down you're like you're doing something proactive so I get a result same thing with the diet you know we try a new diet we can be meticulous in that beat ourselves up about it celebrate but when it comes to sleep it's very abnormal and kind of counterintuitive because you don't do anything and you get all these results so how is that even possible and this is really what I pride myself on in my clinic for many years is helping people to understand the deeper connection to this so first and foremost this is huge 55 percent more body fat loss simply by sleeping more and I'm going to teach you today it's not about sleeping more alright if you're sleeping more you're gonna have a tendency to get better sleep but that's not necessarily the case all right it's really about sleeping smarter getting higher quality sleep you can actually sleep less and feel way better than a person who gets 9 hours of sleep so why does this work how does this impact our fat loss number one human growth hormone and I don't know Sammy Sosa HGH rest in peace is career all right so HGH human growth hormone this hormone is very very powerful you produce the most the greatest amount of your HGH production and secretion happens during the first part of your sleep this happens during anabolic deep sleep all right so the more time you can spend in this anabolic state the more human growth hormone you're going to produce so a couple things about human growth hormone and how this impacts fat loss so number one this is a growth hormone so it helps to help you to build more lean muscle tissue all right lean and muscle is kind of the same word that would people say that so lean muscle tissue second it's protective its muscle protective so all the muscle you're working on in the gym it's very easy muscle expensive for your body to carry around so it's kind of trying to get rid of it and fighting against you because it burns a lot more calories so it's protective your muscle tissue third thing this one and one of the big reasons that athletes would take this is that it gives you a lot more energy it's also known as the youth hormone all right kids have a lot more human growth hormone thus they have a lot more energy and they're always running around all right while the parents are just you know if you go to the park for example you see the kids running around the parents are just sitting there on the bench get down Billy so human growth hormone this is huge all right you're producing you can't get this from a supplement you can't get this from squats squats are awesome deadlifts are awesome benchpress is awesome you can produce more human growth hormone by doing those things but not nearly as much as just getting some sleep all right so that's number one this is why that fifty five percent number happens to cortisol so cortisol has become this bad guy today and it's just not like that all right cortisol is actually misunderstood what's a good comparison sammy sosa no not that's not good comparison but so cortisol is actually something critically important to your health and your well-being first and foremost it's one of the things that just kind of helps you to get up and get moving alright it gives you this energy to do things if you're exercising for example you're going to be producing more cortisol cortisol is responsible for actually helping to build your thyroid hormone your thyroid is literally the metabolic center of your entire body okay so it's like the center control center of your metabolism so cortisol is important it's just if it's produced at the wrong time and it in the wrong amount is when it could become a problem all right so here's why this is an issue sleep deprivation immediately has an elevated correlation with elevated cortisol okay sleep deprivation immediately has a correlation with elevated cortisol so just if you're up to you know two three o'clock in the morning doing the laptop lap dance your cortisol is going to be elevated it's just the nature of the beat of the beast okay so cortisol is not a bad guy here's why this is a problem cortisol is an opposite of human growth growth hormone and that it breaks down your muscle tissue okay it has this interesting process called gluconeogenesis which essentially means Genesis is created glucose is sugar so you can break your muscle tissue your proteins and turn them into glucose which then elevates your insulin which then is kind of like a key to open up your cell and store more fat all right thus sort of turning your muscle into fat which biochemically doesn't work directly like that but this is how this is the trigger is cortisol melatonin when the world does have to do with fat loss this is fascinating we're at Google you guys are nerds too and I dig that I'm a super nerd so I'm looking at medical journals so in the journal the journal pineal research which there's a journal for everything by the way like there's a total melatonin was found to actually have a huge impact on fat loss crazy enough this glorified sleep hormone so melatonin was found to increase your body's is something called brown adipose tissue or bat okay so can call it like bat fat alright so brown adipose tissue brown adipose tissue functions a lot like muscle in that it burns white adipose tissue or wet white adipose tissue or wet fat okay so by increasing your body's ratio of brown adipose tissue you're effectively increasing your metabolic rate alright and melatonin has been found to directly increase your body's level of brown adipose tissue which is really really fascinating but if you're not getting adequate sleep you're not producing the adequate amounts of melatonin and also honoring a day and night night cycle which we'll talk about in just a moment two more I'll share with you really quickly leptin I first learned about leptin from dr. oz and his co-author dr. Michael Rosen who was a friend of mine so leptin is your body satiety hormone and Stanford University discovered that just one night of sleep deprivation one night of poor sleep quality leads to a dramatic suppression of your body's leptin so your satiety hormone that keeps you from just crushing a bag of chips or you know eating a whole pint of ice cream sitting there watching Game of Thrones or whatever it is leptin is that's a tidy hormone that keeps you from doing that stuff all right so we get into this battle of our willpower versus our biology and so leptin is key here all right so the other on the other side it's ghrelin okay I refer to as the gorilla and gremlin ghrelin is your body's hunger hormone so there's another study that I came across that found that just one night of four sleep quality leads to a 15% increase automatically in your body's ghrelin levels so there was also a correlation with individuals who have a poor night's sleep about eating about 200 to 250 more calories the next day all right because your body your brain is trying to get more energy to keep you up because you're tired so I hope this is creating more of an understanding with some of these hormones and how this connects with fat loss and sleep and why this is so important a little bit more of a visceral connection all right and on that note I do want to talk about the productivity I do want to talk about the brain health because this is really what I'm passionate about so a lot of people are showing up at work like this and it's like don't talk to me until I have my coffee alright and so what's going on here well first and foremost so this is UC Berkeley and they did some brain imaging to actually see what's going on in the brain we're sleep-deprived as you can see on the right side of you guys there's increased activity in the amygdala which is more of the primitive reptilian brain and this part so what's theorized that we basically have three brains that have evolved on top of each other the amygdala the limbic brain and the more evolved prefrontal cortex and so the amygdala is like lit up alright just 24 hours of sleep deprivation this part of your brain is like on fire so much activity going on and coupled with on the left side here decreased activity in the frontal and insular cortex okay so this is the more evolved human brain it's the part of your brain responsible for decision making for social control for distinguishing between right and wrong all right that part of your brain starts to go cold there's a lot less activity there all right and you put those two things together and we've got a recipe for some problems the big thing here in this equation is glucose so glucose is your brain's main fuel source and what they also discovered is that there is a six percent decrease in glucose reaching your brain when you're sleep-deprived all right but now all that's not even equal is 14 percent of that is from your prefrontal cortex again the part of your brain responsible for your willpower decision-making distinguishing between right and wrong so here's the issue is that when your brain starts to starve this is this is basically a evolutionary problem all right this is something survival mechanisms going to kick in because every even though we're at Google and we've got like cool clothes and we've got out you know if people have iPhones here is that Google phone I don't know I don't know the politics we've got fancy equipment and tech our design is very primitive still so a couple thousand years ago if there was a lack of glucose reaching your brain this could mean death this could be your inability to procure your food to find shelter to protect your tribe so your every part of your body every single cell in your body is going to compel you to get that glucose back to your brain all right immediately as soon as you can so if you've ever had a cookie in your life you've ever had tortilla chips if you've ever had ice cream your brain knows you can get a quick source of glucose from those foods all right so this is why you're going to be compelled to eat those type of things late at night tell me if I'm wrong tell me if I'm wrong have you ever been up at one o'clock in the morning watching Game of Thrones or hostel cards whatever you're into hears like you know what I want a salad right now have you ever done that it doesn't happen you go get the little snacky foods because again you're tired your brain is going to compel you to eat that stuff so so many people are failing and struggling their diet with their nutrition because there's they're tired alright and I call it hungry tired and hungry alright so like there's this hangry thing so look for that coming soon so what happens is we're sleep-deprived our brain we get an amygdala hijack basically all right so this more primitive part of your brain that's only concerned about survival of self kicks in alright and this is why and I've also I did an entire show on this talking about sleep in and relationships and how sleep deprivation impacts your intimate relationships and it's crazy crazy so basically a more primitive angry selfish version of yourself shows up and I think I see some nodding going on when people have arguments late at night they tend to be like the worst arguments and stuff doesn't get resolved and so there was a study that found that couples if just one of the people in the couple I'm sorry one of the individuals in the couple got a poor night of sleep the night before there's a radically increase in to just one of them radically increased incidents of arguing the next day and for that argument to not be resolved right because that higher-order part of your brain isn't isn't on alright the more compassionate rational version of yourself alright and oftentimes you look back on the argument like you know a month later whatever you literally have no idea what you are arguing about because if something so stupid but that Magdala doesn't care it just wants to have a problem alright and it wants to eat cookies so to avoid going to the dark side we need to make sure we're getting adequate sleep so as a study that I saw excited and sleep smarter that discovered and I just couldn't believe this and so I actually went and looked at the study in depth and looked at all the numbers and it was crazy so they found that college students who are you know who describe themselves as poor sleepers who get less than six hours of sleep per night performed as poorly on tests as individuals who were binge drinkers and using marijuana on a consistent basis alright and they were more likely to drop out of school and to I'm sorry to drop out of classes and to drop out of college as well as this huge correlation just like blew my mind there's this new term now I don't know if you've heard of its called cyberloafing and so in a follow-up study what they did was they monitored into the individual sleep the night before so the college students they monitor their sleep the night before in every hour of sleep that they lost correlated with the 20% greater increase of cyberloafing the next day this is basically when you're supposed to be like doing your work and just like I'll just check Instagram for a minute and it's like 30 minutes later and you get sucked into the internet blackhole or it's not Instagram Facebook Twitter whatever you're into at cyberloafing and it's so much easier for us to just go and just open up that app and not think about it when we're sleep-deprived so here's a big thing with performance is memory and what's so shocking about this and about the importance of sleep in your memory is the fact that your brain whoa I don't know if you guys remember from school the lymphatic system right you've got the cardiovascular system then you've got the lymphatic system it looks very similar if you have four times more lymph than you have blood and your lymphatic system is basically like your cellular waste management system all right so it's very very important the issue is that for your brain there's the blood-brain barrier so your lymphatic system doesn't connect directly like you would think all right so the brain was recently this is just in the last ten years has been discovered has its own system for getting rid of metabolic waste and your brain is doing like a million processes every second there's a lot of metabolic waste and a lot of dead cells and a lot of stuff to get cleaned up and now Alzheimer's has been found to be heavily correlated with an inability of your brain to detoxify itself so it's just building up all of this waste that it can't remove all right what's responsible for that waste removal is called your glymphatic system all right which is run by the by your glial cells it's a special shout-out to these these cells that run this system so what's so fascinating is that during sleep your glymphatic system is ten times more active than during the day all right so your brain is always trying to clean itself but it's ten times more active when you go to sleep to get rid of all of the stuff that it's building up to make room for new cells also they've been found that there's a 60% decrease in your brain cell size so your brain cells literally shrink when you go to sleep to make more room for detoxification that's how important it is this is evolutionary advantage here all right so if you're not sleeping your brain isn't detoxifying itself properly and you're getting closer to an early date with memory loss dementia Alzheimer's all right this is the opposite of a productive brain so this is particularly important to me because working in my clinic I've worked with a lot of individuals who had their lives just fall apart because a family member forgetting who they are but in our day to day lives this has some very tangible applications because I don't know if anybody seemed to hang over before everybody so with alcohol consumption and I'm not I'm not anti alcohol by any means but what's so fascinating is like but when you drink alcohol there's this interesting process that happens it's called a rim rebound effect so what I teach and sleep smarter is how to drink alcohol but still be able to good good sleep that night because this is where the whole concept of a hangover comes into play and is the next day you don't feel well it's because your sleep is so heavily disrupted and also your memories can be disrupted okay because of this REM rebound effect so in essence if you're drinking alcohol close your your bedtime and what's happening is your REM sleep which is and I just want to give you guys a really important take away here so it's during REM sleep you guys probably hold just in case you if you haven't heard this before so sleep is really it's weird it's weird all right it's very very weird you're like pretending to be dead it's very strange but how we're sleeping what that really equates to being is a change in your brainwaves okay that's really what it is all right Beta Theta Delta it's a change in your brainwaves this is how scientists are able to monitor somebody's sleep and see what's going on is fluctuations in this so right now we're all in beta all right we're all in a beta this waking state but what happens with these different stages so I mentioned earlier about human growth hormone most of that production happens during Delta sleep that's that deep anabolic stage 3 & 4 sleep all right that's non REM sleep REM sleep or rapid eye movement sleep and the name rapid eye movements because your eyes are moving which is super creepy but did you do that REM sleep is when you're dreaming with primarily is when you're dreaming and this is also in this very fascinating process called memory processing happens so this is the stuff you're learning right now in this moment gets converted into your short-term memory becomes more solid and then of course can move to your long-term memory when you get sleep alright so this is why sometimes some people in here have had that experience where they go out they drink a lot the next day they don't remember what happened I'm not saying any names but it has happened before all right it's because your REM sleep is heavily disturbed via the alcohol all right so we're going to maximize our memory potential we got to learn to just adjust and streamline some of the things that we're going to do on a daily basis whether it's consuming alcohol or even something like caffeine all right I'm a I'm a caffeine fan I'm a fan of caffeine bigtire but it's just doing it in an intelligent way so I want to share with you guys a strategy with caffeine okay so caffeine has a half-life of about eight hours depending on your metabolism so that means after eight hours just say you drink a basic cup of coffee it's about 200 milligrams so after eight hours 100 milligrams is still active in your system it's half of that and then after eight hours and half of that it's still active in your system so there's one study that I cited in the book that found that literally taking caffeine they have the individuals take caffeine right before bed three hours before bed or six hours before bed and even six hours before bed led to lead lute them losing one full hour of sleep via sleep monitor okay their subjective thing they wrote down in a journal they thought they slept for it just say eight hours but they actually lost a full hour of sleep because of what caffeine was doing with their bodies a very powerful nervous system stimulant so we want to do is give yourself a caffeine curfew all right if you can make sure to get that in the earlier part of the day I recommend by noon all right it's not that caffeine is bad it's just the way that we utilize it the other day I was out at a restaurant and I never really noticed this before it was dinner was with my wife and it was like I don't know we were about to leave it's like 9 o'clock and then the waiter came around he's like would you like some coffee outside people do that like I didn't even I never thought about it before but a lot of people do we just don't think about it right and then the next day we're in that kind of we get into that vicious circle to where the next day you need caffeine to get you going again so that's number one and I break down the book how caffeine actually works with adenosine and all that stuff and it's very similar to alcohol and number two is to cycle it so use caffeine in different stents okay so I give some strategies on doing that caffeine effectively is detoxify from your system it takes about 72 hours all right so if you can maybe be on for four days give yourself three days off then you actually feel it again because that first time when you have coffee like the first time ever it's like it's something special I you just like this exists but then that over time you don't get that feeling anymore you know wouldn't you like to have that kind of magical when we first met kind of thing with coffee you can do that by cycling it and it's really that simple just your body because it builds up a resistance to it alright your body your receptor sites down regulate so let's get into some more power tips here alright so one of the things that everybody's probably heard about now is this issue with blue light and again I've been talking about this for five years so but I'm going to show you a little something a little bit deeper that you probably haven't heard before so everybody that does have iPhone and that's okay right it's not like okay alright so you've got the new iOS update and there's a tool on here called nightshift right built into the phones now okay and this effectively pulls out the most troublesome spectrum of light from your screen automatically based on the time of day in your particular area all right apples not going to do this for no reason alright this is a multi-billion dollar company everything has a purpose personally just a little conspiracy theory and throughout here I think it's really because like the McDonald's lawsuits you know there's like they people start suing them like you made me fat even though you ate it but it's your fault and because of all of these issues coming out about how sleep deprivation is linked to cancer is linked to heart disease is linked to diabetes it's like your device is destroying I sleep right so they're being proactive about this stuff because they know there's a serious issue and on that note before I get to these sleep tips I want to share with you because I seen I saw this a lot in my clinic a lot of cancer a lot of cancer all types breast cancer prostate cancer cervical cancer and what's so fascinating the World Health Organization has come out and said that shift work or a overnight shift is a class 2a carcinogen okay working overnight is a cancer-causing agent that sounds totally ridiculous why is that well being up at night you're suppressing your melatonin and melatonin we already heard about it's a sleep hormone we already heard about its relationship to fat loss but it's almost powerful quite possibly our most powerful endogenous anti-cancer hormone that we produce and if you're suppressing that you're losing a lot of this defense for your body so it's a pretty serious issue but Harvard researchers recently confirm that yes blue light does suppress your melatonin and here's the correlation that they found for every hour of use of your device at night not during the day it doesn't affect your cortisol or melatonin according to research but at night every hour of use leads to 30 hours of suppress melatonin okay every hour abuse 30 minutes of suppress melatonin so this is brings up the situation where you can physiologically be passed out you can just go to sleep from exhaustion but you're not actually getting optimal sleep cycles because your melatonin is not being produced properly alright so you're not producing as much human growth hormone you're not producing as much of these anabolic recovery hormones and enzymes you just passed out from exhaustion you're not getting actually high-quality sleep that's what I'm teaching is how to get great sleep when you are asleep so they found that blue light yes super suppressive but they found that all light isn't created equal and how it impacts your body so blue light is twice as suppressive to your melatonin disruptors to your sleep cycle than green light they found that red light was negligible in how it impacts your melatonin so red light basically had no impact and if you look at evolutionary biology again thousand years ago if we did have light at night what color would it be be reddish orange from fire right so we still have that same hardwiring so you can hack this all right and that's what I recommend night shift if you have that iPhone use it super easy to push a button you don't think about it if you have Android people have androids Twilight is an app that you can download and use all right I've done a lot of research on this stuff some of those for the Android are still kind of sketchy there and figured it all out yet but Twilight is pretty solid for your computers I'm always curious who uses flux to people it's amazing all right yeah I'm just gonna say you're welcome in advance all right so go to just go to Google so cool I get to say that all right so go to Google type in FL UX all right and there's this free app it's called flux I've been using it for about three years I absolutely loved it before my book before getting out and really sharing this with the world I was using this app and I absolutely loved it so this does it for your your laptop and your desktop automatically based on your time zone it knows what to do it'll pull the most troublesome spectrum of blue light from your screen and as you can see from this picture when you're sitting there in the dark you're seeing like this magical world of colors so it's like what's the big deal with the blue light it's the it's the strongest lightest most similar to sunlight alright so it tells your brain that it's daytime blue light equals elevated cortisol period automatically at night that's what happens in cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship when cortisol is elevated melatonin is suppressed and vice versa all right so use flux it's super easy to install just like a couple clicks and then if you need to look at a design or something like that you can just disable it and turn it right back on all right I before I even knew about this impact with sleep I was recommending it to tech you know people who work in the tech field that would come into my clinic that have migraines just from staring the computer all day and would help them to get rid of migraines it was amazing okay to let you bask in this okay so that's one another hack is blue light blocking glasses all right so what about the ambient light what if you're watching a movie or something like that and you've heard it here first I know it's going to happen on TV as well they're going to make this on televisions whether you can pull out the blue light but until that point you can wear some blue light blocking glasses in the evening and so there's some really ugly ones can get on Amazon for like five bucks and I've got a whole collection by the way so like the first year this was like four years ago and I'm wearing these like big construction glasses and my wife she still liked me apparently but I don't know why I looked like I would just build a birdhouse or something when people come over is just super weird knock word but I've got some really cool ones now they're called Swami's but you guys can check that information out later but the big key here is giving yourself a screen curfew this is like after this after this I promise it's just going to be all super low hanging fruit easy stuff to apply this is the hard one all right this is like to rip the band-aid off we're like at a AAA meeting all of a sudden okay we're addicted all of us are addicted you're addicted and it's okay okay you're addicted it's okay so what's going on here well there's this powerful compound our body produces called dopamine and what scientists have discovered is that it's all about seeking alright and it drives us to seek and it's part of our evolutionary design we wouldn't have evolved as humans if we didn't have dopamine because it makes us look for things the issue is that the Internet is perfect for that because there's infinite amount of things to seek and look for all right but we'd go crazy if you just look and look and looking you never find anything so every time you find what you're looking for you get a little hit from your opioid system like a slow drip of morphine all right again the Internet's perfect for this because Instagram seek find seek fight seek find seek find you get hooked super quick like I'll never use Instagram next thing you know you're like scrolling all day alright so it's difficult to tell your brain ok I know I need to get off my device to you know wind down for my day it's very difficult to do that when your brain is addicted so if you if you don't hear what I'm saying and you try to do this tonight and get off your device an hour before bed you're going to get the Internet jitters alright you're going to be like tweak in just I just want to look at one post just one post alright I don't want that to happen to you so what we have to do is first understand that you're addicted first step is awareness the second step is you have to fill it with something of greater or equal value okay so I know it's this is going to sound crazy but you might want to actually instead of being on your device talk to a human like an actual person okay face to face alright there's anybody married in here there's like the main people who don't know what I'm talking about so talk to your spouse talk to your kids hang out play a game what happened to games taboo um pictionary do something fun I can't just sit there idly and wait for the time to pass all right fill it with something good sex is another option all right there's a whole chapter on this when you have an orgasm release a cocktail of chemicals oxytocin prolactin vasopressin all of these things clinically proven to help you to sleep better it's why it's called sleeping together you're welcome all right so give yourself sleep curfew I recommend just a minimum 30 minutes okay you can actually work on your goals for the next day do some journaling read a physical book fill that time with something that you enjoy and you're going to sleep better immediately okay low-hanging fruits now super power tips here all right this is huge this is my favorite I can't say that so one of my favorite chapters in the book so this was fix your gut to fix your sleep we talked about the relationship between sleep and your gut health all right you might have heard some of this stuff out there in the interwebs before but not this one all right crazy thing melatonin when I was taught this in a university setting it's produced by your pineal gland there's 400 times more melatonin in your gut than your brain okay so this is where the whole show is actually happening it's in your belly okay so we have to take care of that environment and researchers at Caltech found out that there certain bacteria that communicate with these the cells that produce these hormones okay so if that bacteria cascade is off automatically we've got a huge issue with our body's production of melatonin okay so we want to do number one we have to take care of our gut environment by making sure we'll get we're taking care of the friendly flora and that's a whole like we could talk a whole talk just about that one of the other things we need to do is to feed them the right way so we need prebiotics not just probiotics you need probiotic foods first not just supplements and then prebiotics so they can actually have something to eat and keep them in power third thing is we need to eat good sleep nutrients all right there's a whole list of good sleep nutrients clinically proven all of them and sleep smarter I'll share a couple with you one super low hanging fruit potassium all right potassium this was in the journal sleep was discovered that individuals that were deficient in potassium were more likely to have interrupted sleep so this is an inability to stay asleep once you fall asleep all right directly linked to potassium deficiency so what can we do about this what some good sources of potassium banana Chiquita is like brilliant marketing like it's got us bananas are not that great source of potassium all right avocado said that we're what's your name we're best for instant okay so avocados way better source of potassium than bananas and you're not dealing with the hybridized super sugar bomb that you're eating with a banana okay little fun facts side note is that bananas are actually incredibly hybridized real bananas have a lot of seeds in them but ours are bred to be like you see in tiny little teeny seedless little duds that are in the banana and actually our conventional bananas even if they're organic they cannot reproduce in nature on their own they have to have human intervention now alright sugar bomb alright so potassium is one there's so many I can share with you but this is the biggest one the biggest deficiency that I mentioned that very beginning is magnesium alright magnesium is responsible for over 300 biochemical processes in the body alright so that means there's 300 things your body cannot do or can't do properly if you're deficient in this and the real kicker here is that around 90 percent 80 plus percent of our population is deficient chronically deficient in magnesium alright magnesium is really known as this kind of anti stress mineral so by you getting your magnesium levels optimized you're going to be able to start sleeping better immediately and so here's the issue is that it's an anti stress mineral so it gets zapped from your system very quickly even in the more just literally driving into work you can start to siphon your magnesium if you're stressed okay so there's something we need a consistent application of I I'm food first in my clinic all right been this way since the beginning I do recommend supplementation for this one all right there's some good supplements out there but the issue is that oral supplementation there's like a great one called calm magnesium calm you probably see it like Whole Foods and stuff like that the issue is that if you take too much oral magnesium it pulls more water to your bowels so can call we call clinically disaster pants okay so diarrhea guys this is their diarrhea it can happen so we want to use an topical application all right so magnesium spray so I use something called ease magnesium II ASE I've been using it for a little more than three years every night I travel with it it's absolutely incredible I get more emails about that product than anything else I've ever recommended it's really incredible so magnesium is really powerful by optimizing your magnesium levels it's going to help you sleep better at night epson salt is one of those things a lot of people know about its magnesium sulfate it's a form of magnesium so when you get three to five servings of these good sleep nutrients in so the foods that have these different nutrients there's a whole list again I'd like to share with you guys all of them but I want to do a quick Q&A as well here so stress just really quickly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis okay so your adrenals are producing this cortisol but the problem starts upstream with your hypothalamus is your master gland that's reading your environment it's the interface of your endocrine system in your nervous system okay so this part of your brain the hypothalamus is known as this master gland and what it does is operates based on your perception of reality okay your perception of reality so something might not actually be stressful but we can perceive it as stressful and it can cause us problems it can cause us to short out you've ever had I don't know like you're walking in the park and then like you see a stick and just like think it's a snake you know it scares you but it's just a stick or any kind of weird stuff like that like we can perceive the environment wrong and cause us to have more stress so you have to work on our perception but also basic strategies that we need to employ every single day and that's why I love talking here Google because you guys are at the forefront of this stuff some practices to help to keep stress in check so this is a normal cortisol rhythm so your cortisol supposed to be elevated in the morning between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. and they gradually decline and bottom out in the evening clinically well what I want to see is people that we call clinically tired and wired is where their cortisol was too low in the morning thus very difficult for them to peel their selves out of the bed and at night they're just wired they're awake ok so how can we reset this so here's three ways and this has to do with stress so cortisol is that stress hormone number one exercise if you exercise time your exercise the right way you can actually improve your sleep quality so Appalachian State University did a study they had exercise of training three different times at 7 a.m. in the morning 1 p.m. in the afternoon and 7 p.m. at night they found the morning exercisers spend more time in the most anabolic deepest stages of sleep they tended to sleep more they had more efficient sleep cycles and they had a 25% greater drop in their blood pressure at night which the correlation of the parasympathetic rest and digests nervous system all right all that to say we need to get some morning exercise in because it resets your cortisol rhythm that's how it works ok who here works out in the afternoon ok cool I did an experiment and I worked out in the afternoon at like 4 or 5 o'clock for a year and I still did 5 to 10 minutes of exercise in the morning it did not impact my gains because I was very concerned about my gains from training in the afternoon my testosterone went up strength numbers went up reaction time went up everything improved so for those who are really inclined and I care about their physical health and their performance this morning exercise isn't going to impact that okay so if you're if you're already a morning exerciser that's that's awesome but this is again it's a part of a strategy you can exercise in the morning but you're like jamming down Ben and Jerry's you know watching daredevil at night it's kind of counterproductive alright but if you're getting this piece right so what I recommend is at least 5 to 10 minutes of exercise in the morning all right clinically proven to work just 5 to 10 minutes what does that look like even four minutes does anybody know it's about it is yeah ok so tabata four minutes of exercise awesome super-hard okay it's 20 seconds of activity 20 seconds of rest done back-to-back for 4 minutes sounds like whatever but it will kick your butt alright so he could do bodyweight exercises you can do mini trampoline or rebounder I have one in my office I use that a lot at a time NASA said this is the best form of exercise for humans there's some literally rocket scientists okay rebounding is pretty good you can do a power yoga session just do something to get your cortisol moving in the right direction exercise one way to reset that stress rhythm number two smart sunlight it's a little bit of an issue for us folks up here in Chicago certain times of the year getting sunlight so you need to take advantage of this as much as you can so one study that I cited in the book found that individuals who get who got sunlight between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. just 10 minutes had this interesting thing happened where their cortisol dropped later in the evening because sunlight on your skin sunlight exposure through your optical receptors increases your cortisol again it's not a bad thing it helps to reset your cortisol rhythm so you're less stress in the evening by getting more sunlight all right I've got strategies on how to do this in the book as well last thing is meditation okay you guys have like meditation stuff here like what can you tell me about it there's some classes gee boss gpause that's like a rapper name I like that so but Google is at the forefront of this stuff and it's as far as workplace integration with meditation so I'm a scientist so I want to know something actually works so an American sorry the American Association of sleep medicine sighted this I'm sorry I cited this in the book this is it blew my mind 20 minutes of meditation in the morning for this group of insomniacs all right for eight weeks essentially all of them were no longer considered clinically chronic sleep deprived all right or aka insomnia acts how so what you're doing is you're manipulating your brainwaves when you meditate okay so some advanced meditators can actually get into Delta all right it's like Dali Lama level whatever I'm not talking about that it's very difficult but you can get yourself from beta to alpha or even theta okay and you're starting to simulate what's going on in your brain during sleep and getting more into that recovery and a Baalak supportive to your memory all that kind of stuff by doing meditation so what they found in this study that I cited was improvement in sleep onset so he fell asleep faster decrease in interrupted sleep so let's wake after sleep onset overall increase in sleep I'm sorry sleep increase overall and also they found that there were all of the individuals in the study who had clinical depression they all had improvement in their symptoms as well okay so five to ten minutes of meditation in the morning okay it doesn't have to be anything like you don't have to sit cross leg in the closet and you know and find a cave or whatever this is practical I call it brain training okay you can throw on a a nap you know headspace or something like that our guided meditation take advantage of this because it works and this is something that can help you to manipulate quiet your mind in the evening because you're able to manipulate your brainwaves all right so with that said last thing Tai Chi and Qigong is I really recommend these for really busy minded individuals can employ this and these are both clinically proven to work and I've cited different studies and sleep smarter as well shocking shocking benefits from Qigong increasing melatonin metabolites your body literally in create literally produces more melatonin from doing these practices super powerful stuff at Superman alright so take advantage of these strategies alright there's some very practical things here to implement in your life and also at some point to consider ripping the band-aid off and giving yourself that screen curfew because I think that can have the biggest impact on your sleep quality immediately all right but all these other things put together in a cohesive strategy can be very very powerful there's a 14-day sleep makeover and sleep smarter as well and I appreciate you guys so much for having me out and then we could do Q&A as well and I appreciate it thank you so we have time for five minutes of QA so I think we get about two questions in come up to one of each of the mics and just ask away I can ask one um so I think there was a point in what you're going to go over uh how to avoid hangovers well before going to sleep yeah is there any methodology that you would suggest okay yes so one of the first things is if you can give yourself a little bit of more of a curfew so drinking alcohol a little bit earlier in the evening because your body eliminates alcohol pretty quickly thus you peeing so much all right if you've ever noticed you pee a lot more when you drink alcohol so if you can give yourself a little bit of curfew maybe go to happy hour instead of like all night type thing kind of like diet fun I guess as far as drinking and that's one strategy and other strategy is just to drink help your body with that detoxification process have a pitcher of water on your table and drink a lot of water as well it's going to help you to eliminate the alcohol quicker thanks so much for doing this this was really incredible um the question I had was in thinking about say you're able to like reset a little bit to improve the quality of your sleep and then you have to travel or you have you have to pull an all-nighter for work or whatever the reason things get upset yeah are there any strategies you'd recommend for like resetting or coming back to like at that good quality of center that's such a great question because it happens to all of us then all of this stuff is really it's progress not perfection alright we're going to have stuff that comes up especially if you have kids after kids and they're like professional curveball throwers like you think you're getting one pitch and they just like trick you and mess your stuff up but it this is actually really simple so a lot of people like the next day what should I do after poor night the night before the first thing that I found to be most helpful so for example me changing time zones speaking on the west coast and the East Coast is getting up and doing some exercise to reset my cortisol rhythm alright and also it's really as simple as just we have this thing this concept in culture now it's called sleep debt and your body is very resilient and paying back sleep debt from a night or two of poor sleep it's just when it becomes chronic is that it's the issue all right so to get back on track as quickly as possible is really the solution you know just do this stuff right the next day get to bed on time all that kind of good stuff it's really as simple as that but for me definitely like if you travel your sleeps off even if you're tired get up and do five to ten minutes of exercise to reset that cortisol rhythm so it gets back on track and it's really simple as that hey thanks kind of already answered this question a little bit but I was just wondering if you are in a situation where you only have three or four hours of sleep whether it be over kid crying or you're traveling are there any foods or supplements you'd recommend when you know for sure that you're only gonna get like three or four hours of sleep to help you get into that deep sleep right away yeah great question big key here is especially in a city environment is make sure you have blackout curtains make sure your room is as dark as possible because it's not just your eyes that pick up light so mask is cool but your skin has photoreceptors it's how you can actually your skin can change color from sunlight so your skin has photoreceptors and there's a study at Cornell that was done in court at Cornell and they took this individual and they had him to sleep in an otherwise dark room at the subject so the room is dark and they put a fiber-optic cable with the light about the size of a quarter behind his knee that's the only light in the room covered up right behind his knee and that was enough to disrupt his his sleep cycle just that little like behind his knee it's crazy but if you understand humans we have not we've evolved being with a very specific light and dark cycle and your body doesn't really know how to handle if there's this external artificial light so blackout curtains super-important and you can get go leg tarp tarjay get some you know go to you know Amazon or whatever just order some but blackout curtains if it's not moonlight okay it's artificial light so if you don't have an issue with like your neighbor's porch lie there's streetlights outside it's not as important but that's one thing I would definitely do is get make sure that I'm sleeping in a blacked-out room so you can produce adequate I mean you're gonna produce a lot of melatonin when you're sleeping in a dark room another thing is the magnesium would be super important for me because your body's going to have that elevated cortisol magnesium is going to get depleted very quickly so I use topical magnesium and just everything else stack conditions in your favor to do all the other stuff right because you know like I have three kids so I've been there but it's just doing as many of the right things that you can and not beat yourself up about it too you don't get too neurotic all right thank you very much thanks Sean thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 192,583

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Sleep Smarter, Shawn Stevenson, How to sleep smarter, understanding sleep, The Model Health Show, Advanced Integrative Health Alliance

Id: Fu6lbDBEnlY

Length: 55min 49sec (3349 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2016