The 5 REASONS Why SLEEP Is More Important Than DIET | Shawn Stevenson & Lewis Howes

when people were sleep deprived they were deemed to be less attractive they were deemed to be less healthy and they also decided like i would be less interested in socializing with this person just in two days of sleep deprivation why is it so hard to go to sleep it's just the environment that we live in today you know and it's looking again at the question so what is sleep actually losing out on sleep is one of the worst things you can do for your health and in this video shawn stevenson breaks down the importance of sleep you got 21 strategies and what i want to do is when maybe we cover 10 strategies let's do it um so maybe i'm going to look through the chapter outline and i'm going to i'm going gonna go through ten um let's do one of them here is get more sunlight during the day get more sunlight during the day so tell me about why is it important to have sunlight awesome yes so uh first thing to understand is that serotonin right serotonin is a neurotransmitter and it's supposed to be like a feel good kind of compound this is why so many antidepressant medications their serotonin reuptake inhibitors to help keep serotonin active in your system longer here's what's so cool is that serotonin gets converted into melatonin and we already talked about how important this is this is the anti it's a precursor to that right and so exposure to sunlight boosts your serotonin immediately but also uh exposure to sunlight helps to set your cortisol rhythm so cortisol is it's been getting a pretty bad name in the media lately because it's like glorified stress hormone we've got like 50 hormones and cortisol is the only bad guy now but cortisol is incredibly important and valuable it's just when it's out of balance right it can become a problem sure and so sunlight is clinically proven i cited one of the studies in the book to help to normalize your cortisol rhythm alright so it helps to keep your cortisol lower in the evening if you get sunlight during the day which will elevate your cortisol okay and cortisol melatonin have basically an inverse relationship so when cortisol's high melatonin is low right when melatonin's high cortisol is low so it helps to get that on track again and it's it's not like rocket science you know like we know that sunlight is valuable to human health but we've been dissuaded in the media because of you know photo agenting of the skin and skin care things like that and i actually talk about in the book and kind of demystify some of that because then we get into conversation about uva and uvb and all this stuff but bottom line make sure you're getting some exposure to sunlight every day it's going to help you sleep better at night and this can also be through your photoreceptors so through your eyes as well and just getting light in the room natural sunlight you know every day and that's going to help to kind of set your circadian rhythm in chicago in the winter and there's no sunlight for or st louis and there's no sunlight for three months check this out so and i do recommend i share some hacks right there are light boxes that are used clinically to help to address things like seasonal affective disorder okay right there are earbuds that shoot light through your ear canal right there's visors you can wear and they're clinically proven to be effective sunbathing in a tanning salon or or not that actually does work if it's the right right so you need more uvb actually and really depending on where you are in the world pretty much the united states period is not getting uvb at certain times of the year all right so we want to be proactive with this but understand it's not just the exposure on your skin is what i'm talking about your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light but just the exposure in your in your room all right so making sure you are have have an office with windows access to windows there was another study done and this is crazy because some people work in like a cubicle dungeon dungeon yeah you know and what they found was that office workers who were not exposed to windows actually got 173 percent less exposure to natural light and they ended up sleeping 46 minutes less every night as a result of that and they saw this correlation which was so interesting and they reported more physical ailments less energy and also a higher propensity towards diseases wow right so this is super important even getting some exposure to sunlight on an overcast day is like 50 times more valuable than any fancy light you can get exposed to but those things are great hacks for sure there's so many things there of course okay that was the first one the second one avoid screens before bedtime and i think this is probably uh something that a lot of us are at a fault with i know you're kissing that phone good night yeah you know i always tell myself like okay shutting it off by a certain time and like not having it in the room and all these other things but it's a challenge man it's definitely a challenge here's why dude like this is in with this book i was able to dissect that because i knew that that would be the the toughest one of the 21 strategies this one is the toughest because we're addicted we are in fact addicted here's why here's what's happening so there's this interesting compound called dopamine right and it was once thought that dopamine was related to pleasure but it's not it's dopamine is all about seeking it's driving you to seek right and so this the internet is perfect for this because there's infinite seeking instagram is perfect for this because you're continuously going and just there's more to see but every time you find you get a little hit from your opioid system so it's like a slow drip of drugs i seek i find i seek i find and you get looped in and it's very difficult to break that pattern yeah and everybody's had this happen where you're like i'm gonna check my instagram for a minute i'll check twitter for a minute right and then it's 30 minutes later an hour later and you're still scrolling this is what's going on like our brain is hardwired to get addicted to stuff like this and these awesome social media apps know how to manipulate our mind and take advantage of that so this is a call to take your brain back i'm not saying i love this stuff i absolutely love it but it has a place and it's being more aware now that you're aware you can catch yourself and break the pattern so here's why it's an issue at night in particular so there was a study done in wrestler polytechnic that found that just two hours of your device usage before bed was enough to suppress melatonin secretion all right so again wow you can pass out before just being on it two hours before you know like that span and so you can um go to sleep or pass out but that doesn't mean you're getting that rejuvenative sleep so this is why a lot of people are sleeping eight hours but they're still tired when they wake up in the morning because melatonin is suppressed because they're on their device right before bed and it's this blue spectrum of light that's shooting out kind of pouring into your optical so if you can stop that that spectrum is there yes shades this is their screen protectors is their glasses there's all of those things so now is that okay then if you have the hat it's a hack it's not the optimal but it's the better than yes so absolutely everybody today can get flux f f dot l u x sorry f dot l u x which basically cools off your screen uh you know pulls off that do you have troublesome of course so i've got it on my channel to see what it looks like or is it just like just a film that's like goes over the top yeah so it's a cool app it does this automatically it's an app yeah so you just download it on your phone yeah and it does this automatically based on your time zone oh wow and the time of year all that stuff amazing so it pulls out that most troublesome spectrum of light and so harvard researchers found that it's not just light exposure it's the color and it's the luminance it's the the strength of the light yes you know so green light was like three times less impactful to your sleep than blue light in their studies wow so cool stuff like that so flux you can get the blue blocking gl glasses basically they're like sunglasses use those too with the orange tint yeah i do yeah watch tv or something yeah you know like if you're gonna stay up late and watch the movie a little bit later yeah you know but the whole thing is to not make that a habit because these are of course you know these are hacks but the best thing is and this is so important especially for for for our audiences you know who are really about taking their life to the next level and they're missing out on this key component which is you have to find something that's of greater or equal value to the device so people you know actually connect actually real people yeah you know yeah yeah you know playing games with your with your kids talking to your family have sex you know there's other things that you can do to sleep well yeah i talk about that in the book too but you have to find something that fills you up because that addiction is so strong and that's really the best tool which is to avoid the screens in the first place yeah okay that's uh number two number three uh have a caffeine curfew so what time i mean here's the thing i feel like i don't have that much caffeine and i almost never drink coffee except for about a month ago i started doing some intermittent fasting testing until i have bulletproof in the morning yeah uh it's like what time is it it's almost two o'clock i still haven't eaten today and um but before you know if i'd have like a cappuccino after dinner or something it would never affect me like i never felt like oh i'm wired now like i could always fall asleep but i'm assuming that it still does something to my brain or my body even in my system yeah not allow me to fully rest so what is the optimal time to how many hours before you sleep should we not have any caffeine got it and by the way the hours before with the screen time 60 to 90 minutes that's all i recommend so with the caffeine thing you just said it perfectly you can definitely go to sleep but your nervous system can still be active because caffeine has something called yeah yeah it has a half-life of about eight hours so if you have 200 milligrams of caffeine eight hours later 100 is still active in your system wow and so this can keep you out of normal stages of rem sleep and deep sleep alright so you can be physiologically laying down and think that you're getting eight hours sleep and so this study that was done uh they gave people caffeine right before bed three hours before bed and six hours before bed and they found that even six hours out was enough to have noticeable and they use like monitoring systems you know measuring their brain waves to find out that whoa their sleep is actually getting interrupted because of the caffeine and then there was the subjective so there's objective and subjective parts of this test and people thought like hey i got enough sleep like i feel great but in actuality their body was lacking that rejuvenative sleep and what that does is you have this false sense of being well rested and you automatically unknowingly start using more caffeine at some point during the day because you're going to have more daytime sleepiness all right so and that creates that whole vicious circle with caffeine to keep you going sure okay so how many hours before i recommend and i'm a fan of caffeine right um just do it in the morning do it in the early part of the day it depends on how sensitive you are before way too yeah before no really would be ideal you know but some people are hypersensitive to caffeine everybody's metabolism is different some people might need to lay off of it completely but that's a whole another whole another book on how to how to make it sure okay so no caffeine afternoon um this is my fourth one that i see here that i like this is one of my favorites that i was doing that i needed before i learned about this power and the importance of sleep and that's be cool yeah i remember growing up in ohio my dad we did not have air conditioning in our house and my dad was just like well i don't want to spend the money on this and it's only two months in the summer where you got to deal with it but st louis is the same as ohio yes and man it was miserable in my language i couldn't wear sheets or anything i just be laying there sweating with the fan on and my dad would make me turn the fan down because he didn't want me to get whatever i don't know and um right so it was just misery and i couldn't sleep i'm up all night and i wish my dad would have read this book so you could understand the importance of being cool well what is it what does it mean to be cool what's the optimal coolness that you should be in or does it matter yeah absolutely man and my story is very similar with yours uh my bedroom was upstairs at the top of the freaking house you know heat rises drops so that's why our basements are tend to be cooler yeah upstairs i would literally see those heat waves oh my gosh walking up there 100 degree st louis weather and so i would spray myself with the water bottle and then lay there naked i hope my brother doesn't come in the room you know when i'm trying to sleep but yeah man it's not good sleep no and so this is really simple you know your body goes through a process it's something called thermal regulation and it does this every night and we'll just say around 9 pm average it does this process to lower your core body temperature to create the ideal environment for deep sleep all right your body cools you off to sleep better right so you want to support it and not work against it so here's some simple tips and it's going to sound a little frosty to some people but ideally your room temperature is going to be and this is according to research what experts say 62 degrees to 68 degrees wow for sleeping all right and some people like two no way like my wife is actually she's from kenya so hot climate no she's not having that so i find a happy medium you know you're at the top you're at 68 69. like 69. you know but um and also you know our friend kelly starrett dr kelly starrett he had a pretty big struggle with this with being too hot and he got his cold in the room but it still was enough and he didn't want his wife to suffer so he got something called a chili pad which basically sits on your side of the bed and he's like he swears by it underneath the mattress right on top of the mattress right the sheet exactly but it just keeps you cool underneath you yeah interesting has been a game changer for him you know so just cooling your body temperature yeah uh even just one degree difference it's huge it's huge it's huge okay cool so be cool at night um doesn't mean you you can still you can still wrap yourself up yeah blanket but it shows the room cool yeah gotcha i like that okay so that was number four uh number five let's do is uh get to bed at the right time so why why is it important to be at the right time yeah should we be at the right same time every night and what is that optimal time good good question man so timing your sleep is like timing an investment if you invest a lot at the wrong time you're gonna get paid but if you invest even a little bit at the right time you get some big rewards and so according to research our quote money time sleep is between 10 pm and 2 a.m and why that is is this is when you're gonna get your greatest increase of melatonin which is going to help you to go through your normal sleep cycle and the greatest secretion of things like human growth hormone as well so more recovery more anabolic growth and development between 10 and 2 a.m that's right yeah this is when you should be going to sleep or that's when you get that's optimal right if you can get some sleep in that window and some some experts say that it's like twice as much value per hour wow right so so if you go to bed at 9 30 9 45 yeah and you're you know asleep in that window that whole time that's the optimal time yeah and people will notice this when they tend to get to bed a little bit earlier they're just like wow i slept really great right you know i see your face like yeah when that happens but it rarely happens you know and so that's the kind of money time window but it's not again it's not about being perfect if this doesn't fit your lifestyle stack the other conditions do the other things yes you know because the timing does matter because your body's wired up to work with nature yeah you know and only recently can we basically manufacture a day time you know and our art systems are our genes are expecting a night cycle for us to get cozy to get sleep but we can throw on the you know do the laptop lap dance all night long today you know watch youtube videos and netflix yeah be on our social media but our genes are not different from our ancestors even you know 100 years ago let alone thousands all right so we can evolve through this stuff you know like some x-men stuff but it's going to take a little bit of time i hear that man um here is a good one i mean there's so many good strategies here but i'm only going to pick 10. uh get it blacked out yeah i think this is number five is this number five that i'm saying now i don't know number five let's say it's fire get it blacked out now why is it i no i did this after i talked to you a while ago and i got you'll see in my room it's got like blackout pretty much blackout there's a little light that comes through in the morning but it's pretty dark yeah um why is this important to have a room you know pitch black so you came and see your hand awesome yeah so uh again so that normal sleep cycle just helping to support that and your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light and even the littlest amount of life yeah there was a study i put in the book that they the the room was otherwise pitch black but they put just a tiny light behind somebody's knee no and it was enough yeah shut up it was enough to take them out of their normal stage of sleep it's crazy right it's crazy and so because again we've evolved in darkness and it's not all light it's unnatural light like moonlight if you look at the lux and i put a lux chart in the book it's not even a problem but that unnatural light and so your skin has photoreceptors that pick up information and basically send it to your brain to secrete more daytime hormones namely cortisol all right so your neighbor's porch light you know street lights outside that kind of stuff this unnatural light it's been dubbed light pollution now so getting your room pitch black can keep that stuff out of your room but also the internal light too so if you've got an ugly alarm clock staring at you you know that kind of stuff you might want to consider you know getting a dimmer shut off or you know throwing a blanket over it or something i like that okay that was actually number six got it uh so this is number seven let's see uh train hard but smart number seven what does that mean awesome well i think a lot of people know that a good workout can help you sleep however is the difference between going to sleep and passing out you know as we've mentioned so a lot of people you know i just i talk with rich roll and if he doesn't do one of his you know he's like running for days you know crazy if he doesn't do one of his workouts like he says his sleep isn't isn't the same and he's it's because of his cortisol rhythm which he's changed but that's a whole other story bottom line is there's a difference number one between going to sleep and passing out and here's how to do this the right way so this study done with appalachian state university they broke exercise up into three groups group a exercise at 7am in the morning group b 1pm group c 7pm at night group a spent up to 75 more time in deep anabolic sleep early in the morning so early in the morning if you can get a workout in it doesn't mean it has to be the time you hit the gym you can work out in the afternoon but that initial morning activity is important because going back to our evolutionary biology it encourages that normal cortisol spike so getting up and taking a walk yeah you could do a power walk you can do four minute tabata session do some body weight stuff or you can do your full weight squats yes some stretch yoga stretching whatever it might be you're helping encourage that movement first thing in the morning yeah first hour or something yeah exactly interesting and then what about the full workout what about if you're like okay i'm gonna do my hour workout today when should that optimal time be if you want to do it in the morning perfect if it is in the there wasn't much benefit to the afternoon as far as sleep is concerned but in the evening there was some benefit but it has to be the early evening all right so if i do work out in the evening it's okay if it's the early evenings so six seven you need about four hours so if your planned bedtime is eleven you need about four hours for your cortisol to get normalized and your core body temperature to come back down which we talked about how important that is yeah cause i'll i'll work out and then i'll take a cold shower but i'm still sweating an hour later yeah but cold shower is a great great help though to help to lower your body your core body temperature it's still the you know the burn is just like yeah you know a big guy just you're still sweating so that makes sense okay so four hours after the workout you should take before you go to sleep right right some people are like hitting you know their jujitsu class at like 8 p.m and then right trying to get to sleep at 10. that's not optimal yeah it's not but it is good you still get benefit if you go up till seven o'clock or four hours before right okay just try and time it different you know a lot of times that we get in issues with this is because we tell ourselves there's not another option right you know we're infinite beings that have plenty of different ways that we can change things gotcha okay um i believe that was seven okay so number eight you smart supplementation what does that mean oh man this is a this is a great chapter man um this whole working in a in a clinic people would sometimes see me like allopathic treatment like what can i take you know so i'm having problems with losing weight what can i take for that what can i take from my sleep and that sent me down a path of research and some stuff and some of the stuff i found wasn't it didn't feel good one of the first things in the biggest supplement for sleep is melatonin we talked about melatonin a lot already just because you could buy it at a natural food store doesn't mean that it's okay not all melatonin is made equally no not that this is a hormone man this is a hormone like you're taking a hormone and so i cited a study in the book that right now and there's a lot more being done on this but right now what's what's seen clinically is that taking melatonin supplementation decreases the function of your melatonin receptor receptor sites so they start to down regulate basically your body stops being produced no you can produce it but your body won't be able to use it oh all right so like taking creatine where you like take so much creatine back in the day and then it stops using it because it's something like overload of creativity okay but yeah man so you shouldn't be taking melatonin ideally not not consistently you know and this is coming out uh dr michael bruce is somebody i mentioned in the book uh board certified sleep specialist and really smart guy and he's recommending people to back off the the melatonin but i say everything has a place everything has value if you're changing time zones if you're wanting to just kind of for short term to help to set your normal sleep cycle it can be okay but getting that dependency on it and using too much the the amount that's in a normal just everyday supplement is way too high right and your body will start to down regulate and so what do people do they'll take more so melatonin is not the way to go the ideal way is to start with things that are natural first things that have a storied long lineage of use through the human to the human body you can start as simple as chamomile tea can be really helpful clinically proven to be effective uh kavakava is another one that's the national drink of fiji which tony robbins always come to mind when i think of fiji but it's been shown to be a mild sedative as well as valerian so these are three options then we can get into the chemical isolates which i would do that later but 5 htp is effective l-tryptophan 5-htp is a precursor to melatonin so gives your body the chance to do a step still and produce it versus you taking the end product and lowering your ability for your body actually use it gotcha wow that's powerful okay uh so that was number eight number nine go easy on the bottle [Laughter] so this was a this is one of the funnest chapters of the book and wow just some of them talking i'm assuming you're talking about alcohol this is alcohol yeah yeah what about my late night glass of wine or going out to the bars and drinking until i'm passed out that's not gonna help me sleep better so here's what's so interesting is that the research shows that drinking alcohol before bed does in fact help you to fall asleep faster hands down no doubt about it that passes you out right what also has been found is that you're not getting into normal rem sleep in particular your sleep stages are broken this is why you wake up with what's known as a hangover right because it's interrupting your sleep cycles so you're passed out you're you're you're physiologically sleeping but your brain isn't doing the right processes why not right the alcohol interrupts those prices so one of the things that i mentioned earlier and i didn't want to get into it but adenosine which we talked about uh in the book with in regards to the caffeine all right so adenosine is this end product from your body it's producing this compound to basically nudge you to go to sleep and caffeine sits in the receptor sites for adenosine so you don't really know you're tired even though you are all right alcohol does something similar to that so it makes you feel tired even though physiologically you might not be ready to go to sleep for some people so this has a lot to do with it with the impact with the adenosine as far as alcohol is concerned and so it does work again to put you to sleep but getting good sleep not so much one of the other things that was fascinating about writing this chapter was looking at how similar sleep deprivation is to being drunk and actually seeing right there statistical uh correlation between and when you see this man the uh national highway patrol and all of the deaths that occur every year due to people falling asleep driving while drowsy is shocking because there isn't an easy test for that yes as there is with testing with blood alcohol and it was a great mythbusters episode that i talk about in the book that actually showed wow like you can actually be even worse off with your sleep deprived of course if you can't open your eyes exactly right i mean you know i'll wake up sometimes and i'll feel like drowsy and sleep-deprived i've never been drunk in my life so i don't know what the feeling is yeah but i think a few nights ago i woke up you know i was coming back from an international trip for two weeks so i was just waking up at 3am and it was just all off yeah i woke up and i remember just like walking around the room like hitting the wall and i'm like man i feel so drunk that's what drunk is that's what it feels like man i don't know what it is so like i can only imagine you know when you don't have a stable footing and you're just like where am i um that's interesting so yeah but there are benefits to drinking especially like you mentioned uh drinking wine you know red wine the resveratrol there's a lot of great benefits it's just how about we go for a happy hour or how about you give yourself the opportunity to talk about how it's like it's four hours before you sleep like that couple even two even two and drink plenty of water to help your body to essentially flush it out you know uh when you're drinking alcohol you don't know this but uh you tend to go pee a lot your body's trying to eliminate the poison you know and so just encourage that you know just by drinking getting really hydrated and just giving yourself a couple hours before you go to bed very simple gotcha okay cool so that was number nine uh number 10 let's do early to rise be early to rise why how about let's do the get grounded correlation let's do it get grounded this was the way your book kicked off right yeah and this is the way that mine wraps up i like it and it means uh psychologically but also physiologically and wow this was some of the most fascinating research that i got to dig into and i got to talk to dr jeff spencer who's he's not been on your show right yes yes so and he was he's he's directly connected to like 40 national championships olympic gold medals tour de france victories combined you know all together with the with his coaching and his uh being a team physician for the tour de france for example one of his leverage points and his kind of secret uh sauce was through utilizing grounding and earthing uh equipment and so what is this so getting grounded basically means getting your body connected with the earth's surface and again me being very analytical i'm not you know i don't like to get to unicorn you know but respect to that there is some of that relevant in the world but i want to see the science like i want to know how it works and so the earth itself is brimming with free electrons okay and so your body is really operating off of this this interesting um combination of protons and and electrons for events to happen so positive event in your body is an inflammatory event basically and you need inflammation to get better you know to grow right to develop inflammation is actually good but we don't want to go too far bringing an electron molecule into an inflammatory process because what happens today is people are having too many inflammatory over-reactions right so this is like autoimmune condition when your body's doing too much and bringing an electron in basically neutralizes that inflammatory event so one of the things that's seen is when you get grounded and there's so much cool research on this inflammation goes down your parasympathetic nervous system kicks on right and so there's a study done and this was a journal of environmental and public health and i cited this one in the book that found that as soon as you get grounded instantly your parasympathetic nervous system is turning on and your sympathetic nervous system is turning off so what are those parasympathetic is basically your rest and digest system sympathetic is fight or flight and most of us are chronically in this it's a binary system it's either off or on you're not a little big uh sympathetic so getting grounded immediately does that and why does that work human bodies conductive you know like it's not some magic right now you know if somebody might be listening to podcasts you know matter of fact let's use a different example scary movies right one of the worst ways to go out is like you're taking a bath and here comes freddy krueger and he throws an electric device in the bathtub yeah right don't suck it sucks right because we're conductive we can be electrocuted because we're conductive we can electrocute each other just with static electricity you know it happens every day you're very very conductive so that should help to kind of buffer that disconnection of like what's going on you just can't see the electricity the electrons coming from the ground but they're there so conductive surfaces are mainly like grass dirt you know soil concrete is a little bit conductive asphalt is not uh bodies of water is why we feel grounded and ideas come in the shower yeah yeah all right because those pipes are grounded sure all right um sand things like that so getting your body in touch with those things that's why people feel so good when they go to the beach they feel relaxed to get better sleep some people fall asleep at the beach of course yeah absolutely you know because your body's actually getting re it's setting the circadian timing is getting back on track so that's one thing and also getting grounded and this was so cool that i saw this clinically proven and so let me preface this so what dr jeff was using was grounding equipment so this is equipment that basically connects to the grounding uh prong in your outlets and it's basically like sheets that align with this particular material that sends that energy basically to the human body and so there's grounding mats like i think you have one i got one for buddy john lee dumas that he uses all the time uh i have a mouse pad there's grounding sheets there's all this other cool stuff that basically connects you to the electrons that the earth is is emanating and so by there was one study that i cited getting grounded using this equipment number one it lowered nighttime cortisol so they monitored the person all night i'm the people all night long in the study lowered nighttime cortisol all right and also it helped to normalize cortisol during the daytime so they're not hyper fight or flight just by getting yourself grounded right all right so super powerful stuff the the inexpensive way to do it which it helps if you're in california you know it's so great to be i was shoveling snow the day before i came home but um it's easy to get grounded but other places you know depending on the time of year can be a little bit more difficult but i encourage you to explore you know if it's a little chilly outside and you've got a patch of grass in your backyard still get out there roll up your roll up your uh your pants and and do that or you can get yourself some of the earthing equipment that i talk about in the book why is it so hard to go to sleep it's just the environment that we live in today you know and it's looking again at the question so what is sleep actually we have to start there what is it so this is this thing we're chasing after we're trying to get more of it we know it's important but sleep is really first of all it's very strange you know if you look at some of the characteristics from the it's like you're unconscious you know what i mean you lay there for hours you're vulnerable you're not really moving your senses are dulled and gone down you know obviously your visual senses are reduced or just none unless you're weird and you have your eyes open but you know even your auditory your sense of smell your sense of touch all those things reduce and your but what's different from that in like a coma is that it's easily you can come out of it if somebody nudges you enough or you know you have something that goes it's a light coma yeah it's like a little minor mini hibernation you're like a baby bear for a minute you know um but what what we see in the inside and this is what's so cool now is that we can track and we can study the brain and see what happens we know you're sleeping based on changes that happen in your brain waves and so right now we're in a kind of normal waking state of beta frequency in our brainwaves maybe a little gamma if we get to like you know bruce banner like amped up a little bit but from our normal waking state of beta we shift into alpha it's just a slower pattern and alpha is really aligned with what we would refer to as like getting in a flow state right it's just a calm relaxed state of presence and we naturally transition into that state when we're getting close to sleep this one a lot of creativity can kind of manifest so when we're getting ready for sleep we get into alpha yeah okay this is why it's said to it's very good to like you know uh when you first wake up because you go in reverse when you wake up you know to you know focus on your day your goals for the day because okay so we move from beta to alpha and then we go to theta and theta is a really strong transitionary state and theta you're in what it would be considered if we looked at it as compared to something like a hypnotic trans all right and theta theta and so this is when you're asleep this is when you're not asleep you're this is a transitionary state very close to sleep and when you're in a hypnotic trance like we were just talking about marissa peer i was just talking to her the other day but we're kind of trying to manipulate that theta frequency to kind of get in there deeper in the brain and to give a good analogy like kids up until the age of about seven are spending a lot more time in theta and so you're very impressionable right this is where why kids like believe everything you know right i'm not gonna throw out any names you know santa claus and anything like that i'm not gonna say it's not real but you know like everything is just taken in very deeply right and this is where a lot of our programming that even lasts into our childhood takes place right so theta you're very impressionable and then from there we transition into delta and so this is when we know that we're in sleep and then within our sleep there are four primary stages we have the big two that people know is non-rem sleep and rem sleep right so rem sleep that's rapid eye movement sleep this is when you're getting your dream on and this is when your eyes literally like it is freaky really this is just a weird weird thing yeah so it's rapid eye movement your eyes aren't moving and that's the best type of sleep no okay i'm not gonna say best it's a part okay you know we need all of them and this is the point we're going to come to and so this is when a process for example during rem sleep is when you have something called memory consolidation this is where things that you're learning even right now get converted into your short-term memory right so it gets filed away and becomes more of a permanent potential thing in your brain you need sleep in order to remember stuff really yeah and so there's a study recently and what they did was they had folks to do a memory test and they had one set of the participants take the the the study take the test in the morning and then they had them to repeat the test at two hour increments for 12 hours and then they tracked their results okay then they had another set of study participants they had them take the test and then they had them just you know kind of wait all day get a good night's sleep and then retest in the morning without doing it over and over again and they performed 20 better on the memory test only testing once and then getting a good night's sleep and repeating all right we tend to think that we need to keep hammering so we're trying to we shouldn't even know we shouldn't do the overnight stay up all night uh testing and quizzing ourselves we should be actually practice for an hour get a good night's sleep and hopefully have better results yeah i mean they're pulling all-nighters the thing is you know we've been in a situation where we're pulling all nighter because we don't know anything we don't know nothing we got to study the whole book so yeah man but that's that's not that's rem sleep and then we have non-rem sleep this is it's considered more of the anabolic deep sleep this is where a lot of the anabolic hormones like hgh get secreted right and it's also known as the youth hormone so kids have a lot of hgh right up until around 18 to 20 we have a big sharp decline in our hdh production how do we get more of that sleep you produce the greatest amount of hgh because we secrete it during the day all of our hormones are based on the time of day and this is another really important point is that we're lined up with nature's clock but we just don't realize it because humans have the unique ability we can cut ourselves off from it we could shut all the the blinds and you know we could just create a eternal daytime in this room if we wanted to you know what i mean but all of our hormones are getting released in a cyclical pattern and human growth hormone our great greatest greatest secretion or skeet of the hgh happens during sleep and specifically during that first stage of sleep when we go for the first time into deep delta uh non-rem sleep that's when we're producing hgh we're creating more of it the biggest secretion happens then okay yeah and so if you're not getting optimal sleep you're missing out on this powerful vital hormone and whenever i would hear hgh when i first started doing this research you know uh getting close to a decade ago i would think of barry bonds and like jason gianna yeah yeah a-rod no disrespect yeah i just respect marion jones but it's because of espn just seeing the highlights in the news but human growth hormone is something that we produce you know within our within our own bodies right you know what i'm saying so how do we produce more of it it's only through sleep no no we could with exercise okay you know especially like resistant drivers of anabolic growth so resistance training but more so like power lifts you can get a really good power lifting will produce help produce more hdh yeah and so what does hgh do for you when you have that's what i was going to go to so the benefit of hgh it's not that what we tend to think is that it makes you perform better specifically makes you bigger right that's what you think if you see the transformation of somebody like barry bonds's body it's not that it just makes you bigger and you can hit the baseball faster they already have these skills it's the recovery it helps you recover a lot faster my son my eight-year-old son can get out and run do sprints with us like crazy where we're just demolished the next day and he's totally fine he doesn't feel a thing he's just producing hgh sleep he's healing you know he's healing so it helps with healing it does help with protein synthesis and also uh retention of muscle mass so this is huge this is something we tend to lose as we get older as our muscle mass and i think it's really important for us to understand when we're talking about body composition weight loss fat loss all that stuff muscle is your body's fat burning machinery really that's on your feet you have more of it if you want to burn fat yeah because even as we're sitting we're not training right now but depending on the amount of muscle mass that we carry on our bodies has a huge impact on how many calories we're burning just sitting here you know our resting metabolic rate right you know so hgh helps you to retain that muscle that you're out there working hard to build you know so those are just a few of the things so what are the main lifts that you would say oh man i'll tell you straight up deadlift is like it's money in the bank for producing hga you're talking like heavy heavy or is this just like if you're doing it it's 70 80 percent you know i mean even 80 80 is pretty good you know but we're talking like getting up there close to your max really you know yeah absolutely and that's it for a lot of people it's like that might be a little bit of fear comes up like i don't want to lift that heavy i'll tell you right now for my pr i've been in this field for almost 20 years all right and what i've seen people don't get hurt dead lifting people getting hurt picking up a feather you know they're getting her picking up a pillow why is that just because our bodies are so conditioned to to sitting and not performing and we're not doing the things that kids do that keep them healthy right one of those things jumping on the couch or just running around or just picking up stuff when do we do that we do it as a kid and then something stops and we're just like you know our environment starts to say stop playing yeah stop playing so much especially from where i'm from it's like leaving that's something we say you play too much wow you know man you play too much but you should play along you should play a lot you know what it does and this is the thing this is why you know both of us love sports yeah it's a dimension of that that's still socially acceptable but we love it you learn boundaries you learn how to communicate in different ways besides just vocally you learn how to move your body in space and like things like proprioception this is the awareness that you're about of your body in space you improve your proprioception your neuralception all these different aspects of our bodies interacting with our environment and also our internal environment and if we're not playing we're missing out on this vital part of our development yeah you know what are the best ways we can play you think as adults oh man is it sports or so just go out and throw football or play frisbee or what's what are the activities you think are best it's such a great question man you know i've been this is so funny i've been thinking about this like the last two weeks i have so i i didn't realize i was doing this because i have my two sons live with me i have three kids my daughter's oldest mom has two sons living we have a 19 year old son and an eight-year-old son that live in my house and we just have a culture of like we're dancing every day you know like i don't know why we just do it uh we're playing every day um just the other night my sons we had you know we sat down and ate dinners together and then afterwards they were fighting for like 20 minutes but it was like you know they're play fighting sure but and there's with you being a parent after a while she's like would you shut up you know like stop you know like we start getting irritated you play too much but then i catch myself like they're just having a good time they're learning how to have those boundaries how to play with each other how to move in space how to grab somebody and not hurt them versus hurt them you know what i mean so and they're playing they're having a good time and i'm the thing is i'm the one who usually initiates it i just want to do it for couples like this right now you know what i mean and so that's one of the things is if you have children play with your kids is that what's that mean play wrestle one of the great exercises and what i used to do with my uh son i mean you know we just moved out to la so i don't know the landscape as much but i would take my son to the park and then i would just follow him and do whatever he does whatever he wants to do yeah run around going through the tunnels climbing stuff i follow you he's the boss you know simon says you know what i mean that's one thing okay by the way your wife has some like some of the best home cooking i've ever had with your wife at your place yeah it's amazing i can't remember what it was specifically but it was something like casserole type oh the casserole yeah so good man the buffalo cabbage oh man it was amazing and then she made cookies and i know you were both like so dude and this you know cookies can always eat those cookies that's my downfall sugar yeah how bad is sugar for sleep mmm that's such a great question man because that's the only i want to say it's the only but it's one of the the negatives about me is that i eat too much sugar and then i'll go off of it for like 60 days right i'm like stream yeah i'm all in on a bag of cookies i can't just do one yeah or i'll do nothing for a long time but i think that deprivation can lead to the rebound behavior probably because i mean now i need it yeah yeah it's so here's the thing so uh there was an incredible study that was done and there's it's difficult to do human studies when it comes to addiction because of the implications right but there was a fantastic study done using rodents using mice and what they allowed the mice to do was have free access to either cocaine or sugar and they picked sugar 96 percent of the time that cocaine was not enough right they were so addicted to the sugar and they took sugar probably taste better too right they took rats that were already even addicted to cocaine and they quickly progressed and shifted over to an addiction to sugar wow it's that strong and like we humans we are hardwired if we're just looking at our biology we're hardwired through evolution to crave and to enjoy sweet things for our biology it's an implication that there's a lot of dense carbo i mean uh dense calories there it's a dense calorie source it's not a calorie rich it's not like a healthy calories right right not necessarily but even the sugar we be exposed to through our evolution would be something like the biggest gift we'd run into maybe with some honey you know but today we have everything 24 7. it's a whole we're not we're not wired up for this exposure that's the yeah honey was probably like a nice it was probably so strong and you just put a little bit on yeah to add not like you dump the whole thing right there like a winning pool or something it's just like i'm looking out of the jar because i can drink a whole jar of honey yeah but i wanted to you know what i mean i was so addicted to honey nut cheerios like that was oh my god those were so that little bee man it was like my bestie man but even when i met my wife and i was like shifting like i changed my health and i've been working as a personal trainer for like a year and a half but that was my thing i was like eating organic whatever but i had my honey nut cheerios was my midnight snack right but here's the thing with the milk tastes amazing afterwards the milk oh my gosh it's so good getting started i haven't had cereal in a long time that was one of the things that was the hardest for me to let go of but it's something i eliminated the century from my diet yeah and i just replaced with cookies or something yeah man it's crazy dude this the the culture again that's the big thing but just on that point of how does this affect our sleep i think it's a really great question and so the first thing to understand is the impact that sugar has on various hormones if we're thinking about you know um cortisol for example or you know stress response and basically what happens is when we eat a high concentration of sugar we get this hit and it feels good you know we like we get like a serotonin you know and this is why some carbohydrates like if we are select selectively getting our carbohydrates it can be a good thing right but it's just when we go too far and we go uh we have a hypoglycemic response right and so we get a blood sugar spike and then a blood sugar crash and that for us that's emergency to our biology because when your blood sugar goes too low you have reduced brain function and your body if we're talking about survival in the conditions that we evolved in you're not sharp you're tired exactly and you can be more of a victim right and so our prey and so what happens is you get a response from your sympathetic nervous system and your cortisol levels uh norepinephrine you know adrenaline all those things start to spike to lift your blood sugar back up again so you're not vulnerable exactly exactly so that you're just sharp and ready and okay and prepared so you're just your body's just going up and down all day as opposed to a steady and maybe a spike when you eat a little bit and then steady and right we're talking close in proximity to sleep that's going to really mess your sleep up so when you know there's all these different people that talk about intermittent fasting or when you should stop eating by what does the research research say about eating before sleep anything whether it's healthy a snack dark chocolate wine i don't care what it is is there a time limit you should stop eating by before sleep and is there certain foods you can't eat before sleep that'll actually benefit or or not yeah this is a good question i've been looking into this for quite some time now so we let's address both of these things let's address wine let's address alcohol and let's address food all right so when it with alcohol so what we do know is that alcohol does in fact help you to fall asleep faster this is a fact across the board yeah it relaxes you it's a sedative you know um and that's all good the issue however is that we experience something with alcohol in your system and how your body metabolizes alcohol it's called a rim rebound effect right rim rebound effect and so what happens is we go into when we earlier we talked about those sleep stages basically you're unconscious but your sleep stages are fragmented and broken and so we'll go into a deep sleep what's the main what are the stages again of sleep so we're transitioning as we go from your way waking state to sleep we go from beta alpha theta delta but within our sleep we have these four stages so we have non-rem sleep rim sleep and some transitionary stages and so some of these stages when we're actually asleep and unconscious get broken and so our rem sleep is suppressed right and remember rem sleep is where a lot of memory processing takes place so if you're drinking a lot at night you'll have less memory is that what i'm hearing do you know anybody who is drunk before they went to sleep and not remember what happened lots of people yeah yeah wow because of the sleep so it doesn't matter it doesn't matter that you got sleep it's the quality of your sleep that matters yes yeah and you can literally forget what happened you know this whole so many people say that i don't remember a thing yeah yeah it's because their rim sleep is damaged wow but then there's a big rebound effect with the rem sleep towards the end of the sleep cycle if we if somebody is getting eight hours of sleep on alcohol and so again but this is not to say you can't drink it's just i would recommend giving yourself a little bit of a curfew with alcohol of a couple hours if you can like if you plan on getting to bed at midnight you know maybe just stop drinking around 10 give your body your body metabolizes alcohol relatively quickly for most folks and you can accelerate and support the process by having some more water is it is there a thing is having too much water before sleep if peeing is a problem you know yeah like so many you know people come into my clinic and they're just like you know i keep getting up in the middle of night when they don't drink water all day then they guzzle before they go to bed you know but there are obviously there are some situations where folks have issues with you know their bladder and surgery and things like that but for most folks if you're drinking water before bed and you're waking up once even once messes up your sleep is what i'm hearing i mean it can but i don't want to make a psychological big deal out of it because it's okay there's even research now and it's come out recently just in the last couple of years about um humans having basically two phases of sleep you know there's gonna wake up for a moment and then go back yeah so what would happen if we're talking you know a thousand years ago let's go back even further 10 000 years ago yeah when folks are you know you're living in tribes you've got a hut going right so you go to sleep you know but first of all we would go to sleep earlier because when it gets dark yeah safety right you're not out and about on the tundra you know what i'm saying where the the lion can see you can't see it right you're pretending yeah this is and even if you think about sleep because again like i've been just processing this stuff for the last few years if it wasn't as valuable as it is we would have evolved out of it a long time ago just if you think about how vulnerable you are right it's just so much magic happens when you're sleeping that we just can't get anywhere else and so anyways we would go to sleep when when the sun goes down and wake up maybe so just say somebody goes to sleep at nine o'clock they sleep until maybe one you get up maybe have a little snacky maybe have sex maybe you know if you got fire maybe you right or read by fire but today phone right if we get up midnight snack beaming light coming out of the refrigerator crazy right and you know and we're grabbing the bathroom you know what i mean but then you go back to sleep and you have time to get another you know three four hours of sleep in addition to that so it's what i'm trying to say is it's not a problem that we wake up at night and i've seen so many people get just very um uh just psychologically troubled messed up that yeah you know that i wake up at night it's okay it's okay we have to relax into it understand that you know things happen our bodies but for some folks it is chronic it's a chronic issue and it usually has to do with what's happening with their hormones and if we did a hormone panel we'd see that a lot of times we call them clinically tired and wired where even though they're physiologically tired their body's wired at night cortisol is spiking way too early in the evening because your cortisol is actually supposed to elevate first thing in the morning like between you know like when the sun comes up yeah that's how we are hardwired cortisol is not a bad thing and i that's another thing i want to make clear today none of our hormones are bad we wouldn't have them you know but it just gets all of the bad press now but cortisol helps your thyroid to work right your thyroid is regulating your metabolism you want to burn fat you need cortisol all right it's not a bad guy it's just if it's producing the wrong times or the wrong amounts it could be a little bit of a problem okay you know it's kind of i i think of it like hulk you know in the avengers you know it's like he's got a role but you know he might smash some stuff on accident he's like giving too much responsibility you know what i mean right so yeah so if we're looking at alcohol just to go back on that yeah on that two hours before don't be excessive with it yeah i'm assuming right you'll get drunk yeah if you're getting if you're getting drunk you better believe like you're screwed no matter how much time you got yeah the hangover is a result of the sleep damage that's really the big thing really yeah so if you get a great sleep you shouldn't have a hangover absolutely yeah but it's hard to have great sleep if you're drunk yeah you could forgo i mean forget about it but also and i know that a lot of people experience this that you can handle it more when you're younger right yeah but it's still you're not gonna remember things yeah i'm not saying that that part yeah but also we're accelerating our aging when we do stuff like that sleep deprivation i don't know if you talk with her but i was talking with alyssa epple and so her her co-author of the telomere effect they um uh dr elizabeth blackburn she won the nobel prize for the discovery of telomerase and so telomeres you need them to be longer for you to have a longer life telomerase is an enzyme that can add length back onto your telomeres essentially reversing the aging process essentially it's very complicated but just as essential but what shortens your telomeres faster than anything apparently is sleep deprivation so if you're pulling all-nighters you're doing four hours of sleep only and you think that's cool it's not cool it's not cool you're you're accelerating the time that you're going to kick off you're gonna die quicker diabetes heart disease we used to see this stuff in folks who we describe as quote in the elderly population arthritis then it started happening generations younger and younger and younger now we even have children who are getting adult onset diabetes we had to change the name to a type 2 diabetes right because it's no longer just adults getting it all right and so just to make that clear and i know this from experience because this happened to me i had arthur basically arthritis of the spine when i was 20 right in track practice in st louis at i was doing a 200 meter time trial and i broke my hip from running because my body i was i accelerated the aging process so much really because of the way i was living my life you weren't sleeping well nothing was well but a big part of me is for me is like what are you making your body out of which we know we get into and talk about another time but you know if you're not giving your body the raw materials to build your house your physical house it's just gonna do a patchwork job you know i was i don't remember you saying this you broke her hip in practice at track practice no no trauma nobody hit me 200 meter time trial broke my hip man paul jackson up in here dude i ran i ran before 540 when i was 15. wow you know what i mean like everything was looking great but just what were you doing man i was made out of like true story i was made out of probably like five percent emo's pizza you know what i mean like it's so good though clayton missouri man in those pizzas that's so good like i barely ate i didn't eat a salad until i was in my 20s like i didn't eat salad until about five years ago to my 30s man yeah but you were sneaking other stuff in though i was doing veggies i was doing other stuff yeah i didn't eat a salad because i was a picky i'm still a picky sob right now but it's like every year i evolve more and more and i try new things but i figured out a way to make a salad taste great yeah because i never liked the dressings they always smelled bad for me but sweet green have you been a sweet green yet i don't think it's amazing there's got to be one by you sweet green it's kind of like a just to build your own salad so it's like i can throw some chicken in there or i can throw something else but it's got a dressing i found one dressing that i like it's like this cashew spicy cashew and that made the difference for me so i'm just like fill up all the veggies in there and just a tiny bit of cashew dressing it's like i'm good and i try to eat that almost every day oh so now we know your secret man so it's the cashew spicy casserole not too much because i don't want to be drizzled with calories and all this stuff it's just a little bit and what's in the salad so i put uh i put romaine and and arugula and romaine or baby spinach i mix up that three combination usually just do two of them sometimes i do kale but it's a little too hard for me now so i do arugula and baby spinach usually and then romaine and then i put carrots onions sometimes squash cauliflower broccoli uh sometimes sweet potato based on what i'm doing then i'll put yeah then i'll put chicken and um and a little bit like cashew sauce and that's it man congratulations you were adulting adulting right but it's like those are the only ingredients that i'll put in the same thing over and over i've been studying the brain for a new project i've been doing and a recent study this was done at chicago's rush university and they compiled all this data they had thousands and thousands of study participants and they found that test participants who were consuming two servings of green leafy vegetables a day had brains that were 11 years younger than the rest of the study participants who weren't getting that much in wow crazy right so leafy greens every day two servings yeah and this this was done on elderly folks so you can keep your brain 11 years younger by getting in two servings two servings a day so let's get back to the um what should we eat before sleep if anything and when should we finish eating before we go to sleep perfect perfect so we talked about alcohol yep yep don't have too much don't get drunk but you can have someone if you want to a couple hours before yeah don't drink too much water because if you're gonna wake up all the time that's not good either yeah yeah so what about food so with food there's a there's contradicting information out there on this you know and so some of the best data shows that having a little bit of carbohydrates for your evening meal for your dinner so i'm not saying like eat a chocolate dial and then go to bed i'm saying like you know if you have dinner at seven eight o'clock having a little whack of carbohydrates it helps to produce serotonin what are the best carbohydrates like sweet potato you just mentioned this sweet potato or i mean you know vegetables are carbohydrate dominant foods but you know some a little bit denser you know so we could say sweet potatoes uh there's quinoa when we get into these things everybody's different okay you know there's like saponins in you know the uh quinoa that might be trouble for some people it could be white rice brown rice it could be you know a little pasta you know it depends on the person there's different kinds of pasta now exactly you know there's like cauliflower pops they make pasta out of everything yeah zucchini pasta right zucchini pasta i think i saw like there's some coffee pasta i don't know i'm just kidding yeah that would be crazy though pasta okay so you can have a little bit of carbohydrates for your meal fruit that's another obviously carbohydrate uh dominant category foods so how will that do for you so this this causes a boost in serotonin when we have a little bit of carbohydrates and so i know the big you know there's a big keto movement which again is a wonderful framework i use all these different frameworks in my in my nutrition practice as a consultant and as a nutritionist for again you know almost 20 years now i've been in this field but um and i would base it on what the person needed right and it's always dependent on you and where you are right now which might change and so when we're getting the conversation about keto you can even have a certain percentage of carbohydrates on the keto you might even just reserve those for your evening meal really right and so beans could be another one you know depending on your digestion how the beans prepared and so with that said so serotonin here's what's so cool about it serotonin is a precursor to making melatonin right so your body produces this kind of glorified sleep hormone but man when we talked earlier about how our bodies lined up with nature and how our body is secreting hormones on a pattern or cycles melatonin is arguably the biggest controller of your body's metabolic or circadian rhythm your circadian clock that's determining when you're producing all your hormones melatonin is not just about sleep it's about regulating your whole body that's why there's so many supplements coming out melatonin supplements that are doing so well right yeah but you got to be careful like that's straight up hormone therapy you know what i mean it's such a big regulator controller and you know just talking with the bosses in space you know talking with uh dr oz and dr michael bruce and all these guys and having these conversations we've seen clearly that folks that get dependent taking too high of a dose or taking melatonin too frequently the and here's what we thought it was just a hypothesis we thought that like some other type of like taking exogenous testosterone it might reduce your body's production it doesn't reduce your body's production of melatonin which we've got we got to come back to where this is happening but what it does is is it depresses or shuts down your body's receptor sites for melatonin so you still make it but your cells receptor sites can't engage and receive it and turn on the sleep related processes and everything else okay problem right the great thing is that we do have access to these supplements which is wonderful i'm a big fan of using them in uh micro doses and or even more so for me would be in spot cases right just use them temporarily of something uh b12 or whatever it's like take this for a few months until you feel like you're cop to speed our sleep is so important with so many things and so if you just need to get on track right but we just don't want to create a dependency i love it for travel like if you're changing time zones you want to get back on schedule if you've had a couple of rough nights of sleep you know maybe it's work or whatever that's a great experience yeah okay so melatonin has its place but just to go back to where this is produced and why even taking a supplement you still continue to produce is that and this is crazy because in my conventional university class i was taught that your pineal gland produces melatonin that's it we now know today that there's 400 times more melatonin in your gut in your belly than in your brain all right so this microbiome all the science and all of this discussion happening now it really is the final frontier when we're talking about health it's the interface between the outside world and us you know it's like what we're taking and putting in our bodies that's the most intimate experience in the world and what's happening in microbiome determine what becomes you yeah and what is waste you know so that's a whole other conversation but i just want people to know that that we have to take care of our gut health and we'll come back we'll talk about that another time but yeah so melatonin is is tied to all these things but with serotonin with getting that little hit of carbohydrates can be helpful for producing serotonin and melatonin in the evening now there was a study that was conducted and they found that when folks who were overweight ate close to bedtime they had a greater secretion of cortisol all right so upwards of like over 50 percent greater cortisol secretion all of us by the way produce a little bit of cortisol when we eat a meal because it's a big like all hands on deck experience because again you're taking stuff from the outside world and putting it in you your body got to make make sure that you're safe it's gotta simulate it it's gotta you know check it all make sure it doesn't throw it up or yeah everything like it's so much that happens but if you're the folks who are overweight in this study who consumed right before bed had like over 50 percent higher secretion of cortisol and the problem with that is that cortisol is kind of like the antithesis or like has an inverse relationship with melatonin so if cortisol is high melatonin gets so you're not sleeping well if you're eating right before bed yeah if you're overweight obese there's a higher propensity and this is why there's some efficacy behind the statement of don't eat before bed i don't like that statement as a blanket statement across the board i don't however i do like to look at the research it's saying you know so just to be a little bit more mindful of that but the problem is like number one if you want to have something have something yeah that's it's more stressful try not to have a snack if you want a snack but also part of the reason we might want to have a snack you know at 12 o'clock at night is because we're up you know netflix and chilling you know what i'm going to be asleep buddy right you should be asleep so that's part of it's just our pr our practices and our culture around food and us not getting the nutrition we need but it's just it's our culture around food and so it goes back to like you need to be sleeping a sleepy brain is a hungry brain really a sleepy brain is a hungry brain if you're tired you're hungry absolutely i call it tungry you're hangry and hungry i think that that just happened yes an angry brain is a hungry brain too right absolutely absolutely so why is that why is a sleepy brain hungry for food oh man this is so crazy listen to this so there was a study that was conducted and they found that eating a meal i'm sorry let me get a drink so sorry get a little cotton mouth okay so there was a study that was conducted and it was crazy in what happens with the brain and your nutrition and glucose reaching the brain when you're sleepy and so across the board even though we can use ketones for processes in the brain we all know this but there are certain parts of your brain that can only run on glucose and so what the studies found what the study found was that when folks were sleep deprived just one night all right so one night of total sleep deprivation was used in the study so this basically if we stayed up for 24 hours from now until the same time tomorrow they found that there was a 14 i'm sorry a 12 reduction in glucose reaching the brain all right so this is literally your brain is starting to starve and what happens when that happens when we go back to that evolutionary perspective it's danger right all hands on deck cortisol response adrenaline response it is a dangerous situation yeah and they found specifically 14 of that carbohydrate reduction or glucose reduction reaching your brain cells was from the prefrontal cortex so that's the most human part of your brain responsible for executive function social control distinguishing between right and wrong so your ability to even choose whether or not to eat a food is dramatically reduced because your brain is like starving if you've ever had ice cream if you've ever had cookies if you've ever had a candy bar your brain knows hard wiring i can get a dense source of glucose to shoot it back to my brain because i need it yeah and so that's when we get into a battle of our biology versus our willpower your willpower is going to lose out eventually that's true you know even for the toughest among us you know what i'm saying so but why stack conditions against yourself and we do that when we're sleep deprived and so that's what i want people to know is that it's not a lot of times these things aren't necessarily your fault when you're trying to battle it out and not eat a food it's because our brains are usually a so what would you say is your is the optimal evening routine or the one that you do yeah that's a great question man great question it's it's evolved you know what i mean and that's what i want people to take away too is that you can change there's so much cool stuff that we can do today you know you got meditation you got journaling you got you know tai chi you know what i'm saying there's all this stuff you could do you know uh playing board games there's that cool have you played the heads up oh yeah that's great right you know so you've got all these cool things you could do to hang out with your friends you know spend time with your significant other how do we fit it all in well you don't have to do everything or you can do each thing in a microwave but so for me my current evening routine is um number one just kind of the hallmark thing for me is giving myself some tech free time before i go to bed before i lay my head down at least 30 minutes yeah we all can do this and harvard researchers have confirmed i talked about this and i've pushed this in the culture like the last five years hard so people have heard this you know where it came from all right i've been really working to get this out here and this week we've got them right here man we got the new iphone it's got three cameras sick it's fun to play music right but this this device is the greatest deterrent for our sleep quality today so yeah and so harvard research has confirmed that the light exposure blue light specifically in white light uh that's that kind of shoot out from our devices that we can't really see if we're sitting here and they're wet this light around us is ambient light but if you're in a dark room and you see that phone right it's like emanating like this bluish alien light right and so what they found was that this light does in fact suppress your melatonin secretion and dramatically increases cortisol and they got numbers on this so what they found is that approximately every 30 minutes you're on your device at night you suppress melatonin i'm sorry i said it wrong every hour you're on your device at night you suppress melatonin for 30 minutes oh all right every hour you're on your device you suppress melatonin for 30 minutes so if you're on your device three hours melatonin suppressed for 90 minutes wow right and so again even though you might be unconscious and go to bed and you're you're not aware anymore you're not going through your sleep cycles efficiently so that's what it's really about is optimizing our sleep cycles and we do that with the way we live live our lives and so just to go back on that point with me just 30 minutes at least no phone at least i ideally want to see more like 60 minutes 60 90. yeah i mean then we're like this ninja you get into that place of like what do i do though you read a book you hang out with your friends you go to bed some people just aren't trying to hear that man so that's no phone and no tv yeah so no you can't watch your show or your movie here's a here's a here's a couple of hacks and a lot i'm sure the glasses on you got the blue light blocking glasses you've got blue light blocking apps for your phone like it's built into the iphone now you know and folks who have android they have like a night shift i'm sorry um what is it called twilight yeah is another thing i believe that's what it's called okay so there's some things you can do yeah so there's things that you can do to kind of reduce that experience and for many folks and i know myself included i definitely do feel like sometimes even it's a neural association just putting putting the glasses on excuse me i would um get sleepy you know what i'm saying just by putting the classes chilling out yeah or we can also you know dim the lights around us you know um maybe even change some bulbs a couple of bulbs in your house candlelight that's sexy you know what i'm saying so you just change and then we evolve with those kinds of lights in the evening those tones right these kind of warmer colors and so that's what that's what i do i give myself a 30 minute curfew and i really love to just kind of take some time hang on my wife will talk you know i'll do some reading this is when i you know but we again like got it's a light dimmer yeah lights a little bit dimmer i'll do at least probably 10 minutes of reading 20 minutes sometimes if we're not you know spending some time together so we have that and then for me i love if i get a chance to do a magnesium bath in the evening so this is a this is a big one man so magnesium has been found to be responsible for over 650 biochemical processes in the body many of them related to relaxation and sleep all right so magnesium is needed to like contraction and relaxation of your muscles so the relaxation response of your muscles like if somebody's cramping that kind of thing magnesium helps a lot okay right so but also it relaxes your nervous system so you it helps to shift over from your sympathetic fight-or-flight nervous system magnesium helps to shift you into the parasympathetic rest and digest part of your nervous system and so people have been doing this for centuries like epsom salt baths has helped to improve sleep and relax sore muscles help you to heal faster all that stuff it has some credence now we got some like supercharged magnesium salts and really so you do this almost every night no a couple times a week you know what i'm saying but even once a week can be good yeah what i have also i have a topical magnesium spray so i use that almost every night so i'll just like massage rub that in and that's another thing that you could do too get a massage all right if you can or sleep from your significant other or self-massage you know there's even acupressure points and i talk about this and sleep smarter because i'm very analytical and how i think i'm like ah you could like touch a point and you know but there is some evidence that this you know um they did this in a clinic i'm sorry in a hospital and so what they did was manipulate this acupressure point and they saw higher levels of melatonin metabolites in their urine by manipulating this pressure point so it's it's doing something with melatonin with massage you produce endorphins serotonin right so this all helps with that relaxation response i don't know anybody that's ever gotten a massage and like god numbers like i'm so ready to fight now you know what i mean like right you just want to chill for another few hours yeah that's it man okay so if i can you know my wife like i massage her feet or if she wants to massage my feet that's so great man by the way or i got like a little tennis ball and i'll just like put that on the floor and rub that around on my feet you know the bottom of my feet uh so there's another couple things and so some of these things are not as consistent consistent things for me is screen curfew reading time with my wife and magnesium those are my things i know with food at a certain time probably right yeah i don't even think about it because i'm nourished and i don't have a hungry brain so if i eat you know we finish eating it you know seven or eight whatever it is like i feel good like i don't need to jam any food before bed um but the other thing i do as i'm walking into the bedroom is i turn the thermostat down make it cold yeah and we've talked about this before and so 69 yeah it's gonna keep it out man every night yeah it's so good it's it is you know and this is goes back to that evolutionary process evolutionary biology we have a natural drop in our core body temperature at night one to two degrees yeah and what the theory is because again like a lot of stuff we don't know specifically why but is that our body uses a lot of energy to try to keep us keep our temperature up so by bringing that down a little bit more energy is being dispersed to do things like memory consolidation like um detoxification of your brain via the glymphatic system like um there's like a changing of the guard that happens in your gut microbiome like all this energy is needed to bring you back better yeah right and so if your environment is too hot no matter where you live on the planet whether if it's like chile or it's um you know um antarctica yeah it it gets well that might not be good enough but during the daytime and during the night time the temperature is different the temperature goes down a little bit at night no matter where you are and so if you artificially keep it high your body's going to kind of be trying to fight to bring itself down so help it a little bit today we do have access a lot of us to regulate our thermostat yeah at least you know like during this time of year here in l.a like you can get down you know 50s and 60s like you can just open a window yeah you know and so um yeah so that's what i do i turn the thermostat down or turn the heat off if it's been on sure yeah amazing so that's your evening routine yeah i love it man what else do we need to know about sleep you know we've talked about sleep sanctuaries and making sure you have the snake plants and all these other things do you still do the snake plan i have not got we just moved so i haven't gotten my whole thing optimized except like we got some blackout curtains because you know when you came to my house like we were out in the woods yeah i mean dark it was dark dark dark heat black out you got you got it it was like you know maybe little moonlight but that's our bodies we evolved with that you know that's a natural spectrum of light and the lux is so much less than what's beaming out of your telephone in the sun but now you know kind of you know we're like in a neighborhood so i got some blackout curtains again um but something else that i would i think people would be interested in is still the buy-in like why does this matter why should i be looking at optimizing myself for 2020. yes you know like this is a new decade this could be the best decade of your life but it's also with all these opportunities and work harder mentality and be more productive you're going to get less sleep less quality sleep if you have that mentality as well right if you're like so many opportunities it's a new decade let's crush the decade that type of thinking uh could make you hurtful in sleep right when you say crush i immediately thought of gary vee of course and he's like the guy everybody seems like you know he's you know he's out there just just dominating his thing now that he's out talking about he gets seven hours of sleep at night yeah i talked with him maybe four years ago we're having dinner and this is when this is beard garyvee yeah i don't know he did his little moment of beard yeah and so and i was just like inquiring like hey man so what's with your health practices like you're trying to play the long game you're talking about buying the jets how you going to do that if you're dead yeah d-e-a-d exactly so what he was like you know he's hired a trainer to travel with him because he like he knows himself to keep him accountable in that end and he gets to sleep despite what people think right and so just keep that in mind the people that you're looking at and the people that even the ones that are saying you know sleep is for suckers i promise they're sleepy i promise it's gotta be you can't operate or and also they might not be sleeping enough and they're not reaching their full potential you know what i mean so be very careful about that because what you want to do you don't want to just execute you want to be the very best version of yourself to get up and execute you can accomplish so much more when you feel well i think i saw uh steve harvey talk about he he's mentioned something he said i think he said sleep um sleep is for those who are broke or something yeah yeah did you see this i know what you're talking about yeah i think he said something i don't know if that was steve it might have been him yeah he said that he said this recently i saw a video came up about a month ago he's like sleep is for for broke people for broke people or something like that where he's like you got to work harder yeah than people if you want to make money right you got to spend extra hours and things like that but yeah again like i know a lot of these people have these messages and even you know another really good friend of mine and yours too eric thomas right he's another person you know out there but what he and he shared this he's like i wake up at 4 a.m or 5 a.m but he goes to sleep early like we've been we've been hanging out for a long time sleeping like 8 8 p.m right right he's knocked out all right but he's getting up and grinding right he's get when he's up he's trouble so his thing is sleep get enough sleep but don't sleep in don't over sleep don't be lazy yeah that's the difference it's not don't sleep that's killing yourself and that's you're not showing up as the best you as we kind of gone through today is there too much sleep absolutely yeah we can and i know but many of us have experienced this where we maybe we sleep longer than normal and we're tired like we're super tired when we get up and like tire for a while and a big part of that is just kind of even how we're interrupting our sleep cycles you know but that's a you know really unique conversation what is the optimal amount of hours for most people who live busy lives who are pushing the envelope on work family activities they're doing a lot of things yeah they're trying to fill it all on their plate you know achieve their goals and do everything what would be the optimal amount of hours of sleep for those types of people i'll tell you right now that eight hours is is not enough for some people all right for some people for some people it's six for some people it's seven for some people it's nine it depends man it's the answer that nobody wants to hear yeah because you know these so-called experts are like giving people these cookie cutter answers like you get eight hours of sleep i think that's wildly uh negligent to tell people that because you come become neurotic about something that you don't even really need what it really boils down to if you're getting eight hours of shitty sleep for me i like in sleep minutes to calories like today most people are well aware that it's not just the quantity of calories it's the quality of those calories yeah for same thing it's the quality of those sleep minutes not just the quantity right so you can get like if you're looking at um what did i mention earlier chocolate dial yeah right versus uh wild caught salmon or you know lewis's salad is there a name of the salad i should call it uh louis it's a great salad or something because it's a custom bowl it's a greatness bowl the salad of greatness yes so a chocolate dial versus a salad of greatness it's gonna have wildly different impact on what it does to your metabolism yeah right and so the same thing with your sleep minutes you can be getting like eight hours of chocolate dial sleep because of your blue light exposure because of you not uh tapping into thermal regulation because you having uh issues with blood sugar regulation and listing goes on and on and on some of the things we talked about or you can get an incredible optimized version of that sleep that only takes you six and a half hours where you're going through your sleep cycles efficiently and you're waking up feeling like a beast right the answer is it depends the quality of your sleep and who you are and what you're doing right now yeah because there are times in your life when you know you've had to sleep more right if you're like somebody's training for whatever your body just needs a little bit more sleep maybe you're under a lot of stress whatever the case might be it's going to change then we have to honor our bodies obviously i'm a big fan of routine because your body's always looking for routine but when you're up life is dynamic like things are going to happen and so i allow myself to change my sleep schedule a little bit and i try to stay within a nice framework but if something's going on like and i know that i'm stressed it's like man you know like i really need to back off i need to recover i don't need to push it down more and this also just comes with experience too sure you know what i mean so that i can wake up recovered and get back on my grind you know what i mean and so but just a little quick thing that i want to share with people that's like another big buying point is that our sleep quality affects our appearance right specifically you know our everybody nobody's waking up like you know what i just want to be super ugly today like it's possible you know what i mean i want to scare children you know what i mean and there was this really cool study that was done recently so this was just in 2017 you know swedish researchers and what they did was they had study participants take a picture after a full night of good sleep and then they had them take a picture after sleep depriving them where they're getting about five hours five to six hours of sleep for two days all right so they sleep uh deprive them for two days take their picture again there's a mixture of pictures that uh these raiders the people who were raiding all the people's beauty and what they did was they looked at all the different pictures and this is looking at what's happening in our brains just again through evolutionary biology when we see people we get feedback and what they what the scientists were wanting to do was to find out the sleep deprivation cause a hesitance to want to be around somebody wow right and so what the raiders found was that when people were sleep deprived they were deemed to be less attractive they were deemed to be less healthy and they also decided like i would be less interested in socializing with this person okay just in two days of sleep deprivation and another study by swedish researchers found that just five days of sleep deprivation you know just getting less than six hours of sleep led to 45 percent increase in fine lines and wrinkles in the face it aids you wow very quickly but the good news is it reverses not as quickly the rebounds yeah wow it's called beauty sleep why don't we talk about this more sure what i mean it's called beauty sleep for a reason there's there's real rejuvenative magic in this in sleep you know what i mean and so looking at how we feel about other people and how we're showing up in the world like your sleep has a big impact on that and tell people about sleep debt i mentioned this before if you've if you've gone 25 years of just horrible sleep can you oversleep for 20 years 25 years that's a long time like you know a few years five years 10 years you know if you've been bad in your 20s and you've been partying late nights and you're a promoter and you get horrible sleep every night can you rebound and put more sleep in that bank debt and recover and the way that we think about sleep debt it doesn't work like that um the good news is again this kind of goes back to the conversation about telomeres once we change our habits and our practices you can do things to start to reverse that aging process in some aspects right by lengthening those telomeres by doing good things for your body which includes getting more sleep so you burning the candle at birth both ends or burning the telomeres at both ends you can reverse that process that's the good news that's good now in the context of sleep debt so if you're accumulating if you're just sleep deprived for you know just say you're going like months at a time getting you know four whatever hours your incidence of heart disease is skyrocketing heart attack stroke diabetes all this stuff is going up chances are you're not gonna make it very far some people that even people listening like well i'm fine you gotta be careful about that now that sleep debt is a lot to pay back if it's like a day or two maybe three four days at the most and you kind of catch up you know you know maybe on the weekend that can be helpful but it's still like you're not getting back as much as you're taking out if that makes sense yeah so the best strategy is to get high quality for the keywords high quality sleep more consistently and then if something happens where it throws you off like you know you go out whatever you know like you got an event for a couple of days all good but guess what you're gonna probably be pretty destroyed and you're going to want to sleep more every quarter yeah of course i mean but if you're constantly dipping into that bank account you can't readily pay it back yeah as much as we think why did you decide to talk about sleep in the first place wow because you talk a lot about health too you got the model health show right but why sleep why is that your expertise yeah um why well man it was really uh i'm a very analytical person by nature you know and so working in my clinical practice seeing incredible results with people over the years um for example working with people with type 2 diabetes and seeing help helping people to get off things like the metformins and potentially being on insulin things like that and we had over 80 success rate it was pretty shocking but there was always this category of people who weren't getting the results it was like a thorn in my side you know maybe you know 20 30 of my patients and so after doing a deeper dive in a deeper introspection myself i start to see hey there's a problem going on with stress or sleep with these people and after we get their sleep dialed in then all of these results will come flushing in and so that was number one number two having my show you know the model health show uh we were about 50 episodes in we were still a baby at the time and i did three episodes on sleep and i looked at the downloads and they were in the top ten those two episodes so it was like people want to know about this wow and that's when i put the initial book together and like you said it did amazing it just kind of took off on its own but you know even hearing the name sleep smarter a lot of people like yeah i need that you know kind of the best form of marketing is a great product you know absolutely so what i mean were you a sleep expert before or did you just start saying okay my audience wants this information i did a couple podcasts on this so um you know let me just put out a book or did you say okay now i'm actually going to dive and do the research are there other sleep doctors or experts who add to this information that you learn from what makes you credible in this space so for the first thing is personal experience always you know i tell people you don't truly know anything until you've done it yourself yeah and little did i know that you know my story really was coupled with a change in the way that i was sleeping helped to transform my body and my health so when i was 20 years old i was diagnosed with something called degenerative bone disease and degenerative disc disease so the disc in between the vertebrae and my spine were breaking down and my first physician told me i had the spine of an 80 year old and i was 20 right and even take a step back before that you know you being from st louis playing high school sports there uh i went to lafayette which is the number one uh school in the state currently yeah for a couple of things and nobody's deal yeah you know you know but at the time so when i was 15 years old i ran a 4-5-40 right before the football season so football went through yeah when i was 15. and so but i was really in the track like that was my thing and so at track practice i was doing a 200-meter time trial and as i was coming off the curve into the straightaway my hip broke broke just i broke my hip wow no trauma some bo jackson stuff right there you know so random right but you know i just thought i pulled the muscle you know being a hard-headed guy just kept coming to practice for a couple of days until my coach made me go and i got a scan done and there was my iliac crest like the tip of my hip bone and just broken off oh and so standard of treatment ultrasound um instead yes i stem ice crutches for a couple weeks got to get out of class early yeah so i thought it was cool but nobody stopped to ask how did this 15 year old kids hit break just running and this is something usually reserved for people when they're older you know and um generally people think that people fall and break their hip but in reality they break their hip then fall and that's kind of what was happening with me so i was so malnourished would just kind of cut to the chase that my bones were just breaking down rapidly wow it wasn't until five years later when i got that diagnosis and you know being an aspiring athlete it just kind of made my whole world come cr crashing down very scared you know especially getting the diagnosis that there's nothing i can do about it and this was an incurable condition according to my physician i was smart enough to get multiple opinions but it was the same story so uh two and a half years went by until things changed and i definitely dip into a state of depression for sure you know kind of mingled around in that and gained about 50 pounds of unsexiness and i was fluffy version of myself man just was definitely off track in my life but ultimately things changed when man i just really decided to get well i got the the last note from the last position i saw and he said the same thing the other ones did and it's just like if i don't change my life now i'm never going to change so and most people never make the decision to get well that's the issue you know it's like i'm going to try like you i'm going to try to hit the new york times bestsellers no this is done you know so when you make a real decision about something you know it's from the latin day meaning from and kaideer which means the cut so you cut away the possibility of anything else and so i made a decision to get well and that really drove me into when i initially went to school it's so funny taking a pre-med track you don't have to take nutrition but i just happened to take nutrition the first semester and i remember it's so clear there's a big auditorium style classroom and the teacher walked in but his belly came in first wow and i was like oh he's going to teach me a nutritionist yes it's funny when you see a big doctor you know it's like just overweight and trying to tell prescribe you something about your health you're like kind of ironic in a way but you know the thing is these are generally really great people and they're doing what they're teaching yeah what they were taught too and a lot of people don't know this but a lot of nutrition programs in colleges are funded by general mills you know so there's a vested interest to get people to eat you know the bottom of the period the pyramid right which is the number one kind of glycemic loading food you know the highest spiking food which is a tragedy you know so people are just chronically elevating their blood sugar which is keeping insulin turned on which is keeping them storing fat you know really simple things i think i heard recently that the the government just put out an updated version right they just put out an updated version of saying well actually you're not supposed to this much grains or whatever it is like they used to say as a staple you're not supposed to have this much milk or something yeah it's slightly slightly different but still there's a lot of work to be done but with the podcast world with what's going on online millions of people are getting connected this information every year and changing the way that they're eating and so for me man it was were you just eating a lot of sugar yourself before i was on the college diet so i'm like there's something called the papa john's special so it's five bucks i love papa john's baby yeah i would crush a large pizza by myself on a regular basis uh mcdonald's breakfast if i got a good time you know that's how i was living man i had no idea that food matters no vegetables no fruits no send me my life rarely would a veggie pass my lips yeah exactly and you know it's because really you don't know what you don't know and at that time i didn't know that there was a difference with food i just thought if you can eat it it's healthy of course and that's what a lot of people kind of fall into that that reality you know and so once i understood and by the way i asked my first doctor i don't know to this day if it was like my spirit animal or like my future self jumped into my body but i asked him does this have anything to do with what i'm eating you know this disease that i have and he looked at me he just cocked his head and like shook his head he's like this has nothing to do with what you're eating really he's like you were born with this is this is something you just have to deal with i'm sorry yeah and so yeah but that was it never sat right with me because he told me this has nothing to do what i'm putting in my mouth but then he wrote me a prescription to put some drugs in my mouth right so that's the level of you know but i didn't know what to do i just knew what he told me to do yeah and that's the experts yeah and it's effectively like we just mentioned dr lisa rankin who i just talked to it's a nocebo effect which is giving somebody a negative injunction saying there's nothing you can do about this or you know you've got one month to live and seeing people who walk into the hospital are wheelchair-bound within a day after getting a you know terminal illness diagnosis right and so the power of our minds is very powerful man but for me so to kind of wrap up the story and see the light at the end of the the tunnel i'm a very analytical person by nature like i mentioned so it wasn't like i made this decision and unicorns came out the clouds parted i really dug in and decided i remember going to school and learning this stuff but i was taught a lot about disease you know and problems i'm going to learn everything that i can about health and human body so there was basically three things i did number one i changed the way i was eating you know funny enough number two i started to move again and it's shocking how many people are diagnosed with something and the doctor tells them to be careful don't do anything bed rest your body requires movement in order to heal itself so i started to exercise again and the third thing is so not actually resting in a choir's movement yes that's true there's this crazy study and i'm actually mentioning in the book it was done on horses and you know a racehorse can be potentially you know millions of dollars the value yeah of course and if they break a bone that's grounds for the animal to you know get put down quote put down yes and so there's a really vested interest in keeping that bone that horse's bones healthy and so with the study they had the horses start taking calcium and other supplements to increase the bone density and there was some change but there was even more change more radical change if they walked the horses and gave them the supplements so there was a study with you know so one group of horses just got the supplements improved walking and supplements radical transformation because go ahead no this is because your body really assimilates nutrients through movement not through sitting there and resting right i mean you can do some stuff but when you really move your body it's actually turning on activating uh biochemical pathways for your body actually assimilates stuff no if you have a broken leg of course you're not supposed to be more and especially you know if you have an acute situation where you know you just got hurt take a couple days off but then from there you need to do what you can a little bit of movement at a time right do what you can not like to extreme pain yeah that's just silly it's a little bit of moving around okay i just want to make sure we're clear like oh i broke my back you're telling me to run not today yeah not today yeah you wanna you wanna take your time but you wanna do what you can some movement and it's also especially you know being an athlete you start to fall into a victim status very quickly you know that something's wrong uh things are just going bad now and we start to self-pity instead of just being proactive it's easier said than done but a big cause of you getting well is you know you usually hear about cause of problems a big cause of you getting well is you being active for sure okay so you and what was the third thing so the third thing and really quickly so with the nutrition piece and that's really my domain that's where i've been operating uh for a decade and a half now clinically a man um it was really simple man i did the low-hanging fruit so instead of eating like a mcdonald's burger and fries i'd go to you know shopping at whole foods which just opened in st louis which the midwest is kind of late to getting a lot of stuff really it just opened there yeah it's been there for a while yeah this was let's see yeah this is about 16 years ago gotcha i was like no he said it just opened up back there too now but when i was first started shopping there was like me some random old guy and then like a lady with this guy yeah and so but i thought it was so cool it's like all of this stuff and of course i would meet a lot of uh uh major athletes there as well like isaac bruce i'll bump into regularly there um so it was really interesting and kind of changed my paradigm so i started to eat grass-fed beef instead of whatever conventionally farmed factory farm beef or mcdonald's a sprouted grain bun instead of fries i'd get a bunch of broccoli you know i just did small changes that i could and i was drinking water like i was getting paid for it you know and so here's the thing this is this is so cool guys this is this is really what transformed my body so i started to ask the right question you know questions are so powerful so i asked what is my spine actually made of and then dug into the research and i was shocked because when you think of your bones what's the first mineral nutrient you think of calcium exactly exactly i'm ignorant though that's no this is where everybody lives the majority of us there's other there's like 200 other factors that are equally as important that's just the big marketing one right right and so it's things like magnesium silica uh i needed vitamin c to help to regenerate tissues i didn't know that sulfur bearing amino acids all these interesting things i'd never heard of and no way was i getting that via papa john's and sunny delight you know so i changed the way that i was eating and i was like mcmuffin wasn't bringing the nutrients around no it was missing it man it was missing the mark and so i started to look for the foods that had those things in them and then there was a radical transformation in my health so um the last piece was sleep rest in recovery man when i started to do all this good stuff for my body and training again and and again i just started where i could i started off on an elliptical then a stationary bike walked picked up the weights again and i naturally fell into a normal sleep pattern and six weeks later man after making that decision i lost 28 pounds the pain i'd been experiencing every day for two and a half years was gone ultimately about nine months later i got a scan done and i had two herniated discs that retracted on their own wow i i lost three-fourths of an inch in height and i'd re i grew half an inch back which was crazy right and the degeneration was starting to essentially be reversed and the last position i worked with he was just standing there looking at the picture you know the mri is just like wow son whatever you're doing keep doing it i haven't seen things before you had no clue yeah and so that's when i fired my doctor wow but uh with love with you sure but um yeah i i kind of got what i needed from that experience and even when i went to get a scandal i already knew i was well it was just kind of an affirmation so and that was the birthing of my career man amazing people at my university saw the physical transformation that took place i didn't look like a guy who lost weight i looked like a guy who was healthy and i remember walking out of class and my professor stopped me who had seen me you know prior the semester prior and he was like what happened to you you look so healthy i was like is that wrong is that a problem he's like no what did you do and so i started to work with him i started to work with my fellow students and working at a university i had such a great bank of people from different cultures and different countries to work with and it really taught me a lot and so since then you know i've worked with thousands of people clinically but you know hundreds of thousands through you know the podcast speaking and all that good stuff through books and it's just been an amazing ride man amazing man okay so you when did you really dive into sleep as like i'm gonna understand every you know you're an analytical guy you go all in with something you do it to like the max and they know what's in that water how is processed but you have everything like don't water doesn't touch your body unless it's filtered a specific way i know that about you don't take a shower unless it's filtered away so everything is like to the extreme in the way you do it so why don't you say okay i'm going to know everything about sleep like more than anyone else in the world i'm going to learn from all the experts when would that happen yeah so that was that was about five years ago and seeing this transformation in my in my clinic and seeing it with people you know firsthand what type of clinic do you have so this was a nutrition consulting practice so i've worked with a lot of physicians would bring their patients over to me chiropractors things like that and so i would help their patients gotcha and you know it's a great team great network of people sure and just seeing some really remarkable results but across the board man and by the way you mentioned about you know physicians not necessarily being healthy it's because it's the way the system is set up some of the most important people and the smartest people in our culture you know our physicians are brilliant yes but the system really beats them down you know and puts them through a lot just to be able to survive stress yes of course of course and so all of us teaming up and it really kind of opened the door for me to do this to do this research sure and right off the bat man um i started to understand why i got well and so i dug into that first like what's going on during sleep that makes you recover faster and so here's what's so cool if you and i right now we go to the gym after this interview and we're standing there looking at the gym where it's like we're going to have the best workout of our lives we're going to crush it we're in better shape then then after the workout all right after the workout if we go get some blood work done and i'll get you a hormone panel done it might look like there's something wrong with you sure you know your cortisol is gonna be elevated blood sugar is gonna be wacky um your inflammatory biomarkers are going to be up but the only thing you did was just it's called a hormetic stressor you just did a workout and your body will recover from that when you sleep all right sleep is really where your body comes back better from that workout sleep is where your body helps to convert food into you a big portion of that and most importantly is to eliminate the metabolic waste products to get stuff out of the way so you can have more room for growth and actually same thing with your brain and this was some some of the new research that went into the book dude this is so crazy because your brain creates your body but when you're sleeping so there's something called the lymphatic system right your lymphatic system is basically your extracellular fluid you have four four times more lymph than you have blood all right so this is kind of the body's channel for eliminating waste if that lymphatic system gets clogged nasty stuff is going to start happening you know just kind of like your intern you're plumbing in your house like if it gets backed up stuff's going to get kind of gross right and so but your brain has something called the blood brain barrier and so stuff can't just readily get there matter of fact your lymphatic system basically stops at your neck so your brain has its own lymphatic system it's called the glymphatic system which a little shout out to the glial cells in your brain that control it and you're it's for the purpose of eliminating and your brain is doing like millions of processes every second eliminating all the byproducts from all this change is constantly doing and it turns on the lymphatic system is 10 times more active when you're asleep than when you're awake all right and your brain cells actually shrink about 60 while your sleep to make more room to eliminate waste it's really important so what they're finding is that conditions like alzheimer's is probably an inability of your brain to eliminate waste instead of compiling all this stuff right so i started learning all of that you know but i didn't i didn't talk about all of that stuff publicly but because it's just it was too much man there's so much information out there that people didn't know about unless they start to ask the right question sure sure you know so crazy okay um what actually happens when we sleep what is the process like what is our body doing specifically just so i'm aware in terms of how does it take in the nutrients or burn the fat or whatever it does like what happens how's it recovering sleep is so weird though you know it's and this is part of the reason that culture looks down on it in a way in a weird way like if you've got 10 things to do sleep is one of them yeah you know you need to sleep yeah sleep when you're dead exactly hashtag no sleep yeah right you know and the only thing that's like about your honor like right who slept less it's just accelerating the day to when you are sleeping when you're dead you know because your body's really transforming itself while you're asleep so sleep is sort of weird because i think they did it before you go into that i think uh some documentary i saw i think it was unhappiness talked about like the happiest people in the world are the oldest people in the world they one of the things they say is like we slept a lot and the people like people over 100 years old like the key to living a long life is sleeping a lot taking naps or whatever it may be and also getting like eight hours of sleep every night yeah and so that's one of the things too is that you know at no point in the book do i say you need to get blank hours it's more about the sleep quality quality you know making sure that your body's getting the natural normal stages of ram and non-rem sleep because that's really what's what's changing you so uh we can start we'll start with the brain first so this interesting process happens it's actually it's called memory processing with your brain so you've got these synaptic connections that happen just from people right now listening this data is changing what's going on with their brain and becoming physical structure you know so this is why number one you want to mind what you're listening to by the way yeah but then there's this myelination process that basically makes these connections like a super highway and a lot of that is going on while you're sleeping all right so this memory processing especially during rem sleep is converting your experiences into short-term memories all right and then eventually long-term memories but if you're not sleeping you know you're going to miss a lot you're going to miss a lot of that process so this is why it's really important for the brain as far as physically man there's so much going on here let's just talk about uh the whole weight loss thing you know because we we know how our society is doing right now it's not the best but a lot is changing for the good and there was a study done it was published in the canadian medical association journal two groups of exercisers and they put them on the same diet group a got to sleep eight plus hours a night group b they sleep deprive them so they're getting like around five hours of sleep per night group a lost far more weight and body fat than group b only difference was the amount of sleep they were getting so again just kind of piggybacking on the point that your body is changing physically while you're asleep one of the big reasons for that is something called human growth hormone which people already probably know about thanks to you know barry bonds and you know mark mcguire jason yeah big mac jason giambi marion joe if you listed the show hey shout out to you guys um but it's just understanding that this is an endogenous hormone that your body produces and so human growth hormone is also known as quote the youth hormone right so kids have a lot of it that's why they have so much energy right and a lot of parents are just kind of sitting there watching their kids you know running around at the park like they're crazy you know and it's just they have so much of this human growth hormone going through the system and according to research when we get around the age of 18 we have a pretty sharp decline in human growth hormone but my argument is that that's not necessarily the case when we're around 18 we go to college and we stop doing the things that help to encourage human growth hormone production because like you know mom you can't tell me what to do anymore you know i'm gonna stay up and you know do whatever we're doing because it's college you know and you you're getting the biggest secretion of human growth hormone when you go to sleep all right so this is helping with um lean muscle growth this is helping with um a lot of anti-aging factors and speaking of that another one is melatonin so melatonin is like the quote sleep hormone but it's not really that it really is a get good sleep hormone it helps you to go through the normal stages of sleep properly and here's another thing though is that melatonin is quite possibly our body's most important endogenous anti-cancer hormone okay so this is why there's a study that i cite in the book done on nurses who work overnight there was like a over 50 increased incidence of them having breast cancer no way yeah and then so that's what i do man it's like crazy here's the research and why it's a problem but here's why it actually is happening it's because of melatonin you know and just if you're throwing off your sleep cycle like that you're missing a lot of these benefits you want to learn about the key foods you need to eat to master your health make sure to watch this video right here in stress all those are contributing to disease but by far the biggest cause is food by far uh and and it affects i mean we what's amazing is it's not it's not just like a little bit

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 585,907

Keywords: Shawn Stevenson, Shawn Stevenson interview, shawn stevenson sleep, shawn stevenson ted talk, sleep smarter, lewis howes, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation, shawn stevenson health theory, health theory interview, health tips, how to improve sleep quality, how to improve sleep schedule, matthew walker sleep, matthew walker joe rogan, motivational video, inspirational video

Id: uwmZcux-zZI

Length: 112min 42sec (6762 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020