Why Sleep is More Important Than Diet | Shawn Stevenson on Health Theory

I know now that our sleep quality is more important than our diet and exercise combined when it does for our health and also literally our physical appearance everybody welcome to health theory my mission in life is the pull people out of the matrix by helping them build an empowering mindset but the reality of personal empowerment is that while mindset is critical the body and the mind are so interconnected that if you don't get your health in order you will never unleash your full potential to that end with this show I'm bringing on the world's most important thinkers on a wide variety of health-related topics so you can learn how to maximize your potential today's guest is the bestselling author of sleep smarter host of the model health show one of the most popular and longest-running podcasts on health and fitness and he's one of the top nutrition experts in the country additionally he's the founder of advanced integrative health alliance a functional medicine clinic as well as someone who's been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine Men's Health magazine and countless other major media outlets including ESPN he's also a frequent keynote speaker for numerous organizations universities and conferences so please help me in welcoming the man who cured his own incurable degenerative spine disease Sean Stevenson thank you for being here man I'm very grateful grateful so I'm super stoked to have you we've flipped before where I had a chance to be on the other side of you asking me questions which is a lot of fun and now diving into your world and I think virtually anybody starting an interview with you would start with the sleep stuff but I want to flip it I want to talk about sprinting we're coming around the corner we hit that final stretch and your hip breaks yeah what happened and then what were the the knock-on effects Wow you know this was make sure that this is this is incredibly important for track practice I'm coming around the curve onto the straightaway and I broke my hip and there was no trauma involved nobody hit me I didn't fall it just broke because you know cut to a few years later I finally get diagnosed with this degenerative bone disease and at the time being 16 years old you know you have the hormones of like a Greek god you know so you know you get the kind of standard of care you know take these insides stay off the leg you'll get better and I did but nobody stopped to ask a question how can a young man break his hip just from running and once I finally got this diagnosis it was it felt good to know what what the issue was but also it kind of sent my world into a tailspin yeah that it's pretty crazy that it broke it's really crazy that they didn't ask why it happened but the thing that I find most interesting in this story is that you decide to ask the question what are my vertebrae made of yeah and taking that ownership which you must have been like your late teens about yeah so this is cut tooth so this was 20 years old when I finally get the diagnosis and I'm in college at the time and you know I went from like a chronic kind of nuisance of a pain to chronic debilitating pain over the course of a few weeks and this is important for it and I always like to share this whenever I can my very first position you know he put my MRI up for me to see and he told me that I had a spine of an 80 year old man you know I had two ruptured discs and my vertebrae were deteriorating and so when he says this to me you know I'm immediately like okay so what do we do like let's fix it you know and he's like you know I'm sorry son there's nothing you can do about this and what happened and I know you've heard about this several times the placebo effect is something where you get a positive injunction from somebody who's an authority figure and you proceed to have certain symptoms happen or changes in your physiology and a lot of people don't realize this but placebos are actually 33% effective that's the power of the mind but what he did for me was something called a nocebo effect this is giving somebody a negative injunction that something bad is going to happen and your physician your physiology begins to change from that and so I spent the next two and a half years in a lot of pain a lot of drugs prescribed and over-the-counter and just laying on my floor you know because not only was this painful but it was embarrassing you know I went from kind of being one of the cool guys to like I'm walking around campus with a back brace and just you know really kind of losing myself I saw different doctors I you know went through the whole gamut of why me this happened to me why won't somebody help me and really playing this victim role and it wasn't until I actually decided to get well that everything changed and most people never do that with their bodies with their health with their relationships it's mostly like I'll see what happened wishful thinking I'll give this a try but when you really decide something you're cutting away the possibility of anything else but that thing and I'm a big student of lexicon and the word decision is from the Latin day meaning from and Qadir which means to cut so you make a real decision about something you cut away the possibility of anything else but that thing and so I decided no matter what I'm going to get well and that said me and it wasn't like you know the clouds parted and like the sunshine and everything is okay I'm a very analytical person as well and so I put a plan together I decided and now it's time to do something you know number one put a plan together and that plan until three specific things I changed the way I was eating which giving my body the actual raw materials that it needed to regenerate me was important and I was on what I called the tough diet at the time which is typical university food so I'm no joke I'm eating pizza daily my vitamin C is coming like from Sonny B and so it's no wonder I was made out of like I was made of terrible stuff you know and so I asked this really important question which you mentioned okay if my spine is deteriorating if my bones are deteriorating what what is it actually made of and that set me down this incredible path of discovery because what we hear in kind of common culture is you know if you want strong healthy bones drink milk and come to find out calcium is one of the least important things and even getting it from your diet it doesn't exactly work in your body the way that we're marketed to to because it's marketing and so I found out that things like silica magnesium sulfur bearing amino acids all these things are in some cases even more important so I start to get all those nutrients in my body through food primarily once I really got it like food is gonna and was that so how did you get that because that's where it's it's becoming a lot more popular now but when you would have been going to this people and really think like that yeah and I mean this is the time I was thinking if I was eating licorice and it was fine because it was fat-free right and he said well I think if you eat too much sugar it turns into and like that didn't even make sense me as like how would that be possible yeah especially I'm from the Midwest and so like there was like a Wild Oats market whole foods just opened and so I think it's really important the environment you know and I had some friends they would take me to the stores and then you know that gradually got me into like not just the supplement aisle and so I just began to flood my body with all these important nutrients and also hydration oh your discs in between the vertebrae in your spine and you would think like if I want these to be more hydrated I need to drink my water but it doesn't work like that your discs get hydrated through a process called remote diffusion and so literally it's like the last place in your body that gets nutrients and hydration and so you need to really super hydrate yourself make sure your body has an abundance like an overflow of nutrients to make sure they get to the right place so that was number one was nutrition number two was movement and so exercise is really about two main things number one is assimilation and I came across some research that showed that when you actually are doing walking while taking on specific supplements for your bones your bone density goes even higher all right because that walking helps your body to assimilate number two is elimination you know elimination of toxins because your lymphatic system which especially when you're getting healthier your body is trading out a lot of stuff and there's a lot of dead cells there's a lot of metabolic waste products and so how do you get that stuff out of your system you have to move because your lymphatic system doesn't have a pump like your cardiovascular system does and you actually have four times more lymph than you do blood and so that movement was so important in healing and here's the problem is that oftentimes when you have you know an injury or an issue like this we're told not to do anything that's often the worst thing you can do because things will start to atrophy if you don't use it you lose it and so I just started to Innis of course if anybody's dealing with like an acute problem right now like take a day or two off but I encourage people to do what you can in an intelligent way and so for me I could barely walk properly and so I started off on a stationary bike progressed to treadmill I started jogging a little bit eventually I picked up the weights again and you know just to jump really to the end of the story I had lost 28 pounds in the next six weeks and the pain I've been experiencing for two-and-a-half years was gone but the third and most important part now I know was the rest and recovery right it seems like I was resting a lot by not doing anything but it really wasn't you know it was a lot of suffering and my greatest struggle was at night going to bed because the pain was so bad it would wake me up and so I was on you know various medications and I basically to drug myself to not wake up and so it was like a pseudo sleep and it would take several hours before I really like felt like I was awake and the things that I was doing during the day changing my lifestyle showed up for me on the pillow because what I really wanted to promote for people is this understanding that if you're not sleeping well you're not healing well and this is where your body releases the vast majority of human growth hormone of the you know these various anabolic hormones reparative enzymes so when my sleep got improved I got better so fast and so I shifted all my coursework over to biology and kinesiology and eventually opened a clinical practice and you know often times I would get those people who they were told there's nothing you can do you know you have type-2 diabetes blood sugars 400 without metformin there's nothing you can do about it and consistently seeing these folks be able to naturally regulate their blood sugar oftentimes get off their medications and some things like that because where there's a will there's 10,000 ways but it's also understanding that it first of all just acknowledging that it is possible hmm and that's what I love about your story man that like hearing you tell that the and I've heard you quote the Einstein quote before that the most important decision anyone will ever make is whether or not they live in a hostile or friendly universe which a most people don't recognize that as a choice or a decision and then to that from that then people will take action because they believe that they will get an outcome how did you come to that decision that you live in a universe that's gonna work for you yeah when the doctor is the one telling you multiple doctors in fact cuz you said the guy was you know conscious of going and getting multiple opinions this wasn't one guy they also the same thing so how in the face of that do you make that decision one day I am going to get better I think it's really valuable to understand the the benefit of rock-bottom you know like for me after getting those the words to meet other doctors that you know there's nothing do you know the same diagnosis I had a choice to make I'm either gonna buy into this and continue to live as a victim or I'm gonna do something about it at least try you know but for me it's beyond try like it's the decision right and so how I got to that place really was you know I had nothing to lose at that point you know I can continue as things are and continuing this suffering and I think it was just a matter of like realizing that and I think this is really important even though there are other people in our lives that might care for us they don't walk in our shoes you know so when the physician would tell me that you know there's nothing that I could do I knew like it hit me like they're not laying at home thinking about me I'm thinking about them and why they can't help me I have to really take responsibility for myself and it's just basic logic you know if somebody's saying they can't help you believe them you know and so I made the decision like if I'm gonna get better I need to do it you know I need to take action it doesn't mean I'm not gonna have great people to support me along the way but you know as Jim Rohn says no one can do your push-ups for you you know so I really had to take action and it became you know and also I want to share this is that if you really want something you should make a study of it you know especially if you don't necessarily have a blueprint for a successful relationship make it a study if you're not doing well with your finances make it a study and how what does that look like for you I generally go right to the medical journals you know I dig through there and another quote from Einstein is that you know if you can't explain it simply you don't know it well enough and so I really strive to make sense of these things that can be incredibly complex but for no reason it wasn't until I really honored my own voice and my gift and helping these things to really make sense for people and so I'll dig around in that data and that's the first thing I'll do and then I'll look for some anecdotal and evidence as well you know people telling stories about it but here's something else I do I also and this is the scary part I also look at the problems with stuff I also look at the things that are against what I might be believing most people don't want to do that like we believe this particular supplement is gonna work and it's the best thing you know since sliced bread and then there's these other things that say hey wait a minute this might not be the case you have to have the courage to look at this - and come - and a truly well evolved thought construct you know we all have that opportunity but we tend to just want to believe what we believe and look for things to affirm that you know you got to be careful with studies that do the same thing and who's funding this study as well so I really get to that level most of the time in my research it's really interesting to me how and look like you said that look at the benefits of rock bottom but it's really interesting to me how early you came to a lot of this and I find how people tell their own story to be fascinating beyond all measure and the opening of your bio says the beginning the first half of my childhood was spent in an idyllic suburban neighborhood and the second half of my childhood was in the rough-and-tumble inner cities around gangs and drugs and you said the power came from both places and it really helped me understand perspective how much of that if it all played into your ability to sort of see through the trappings of everyone telling you it can't be solved in a way that I you say it's just logic but I think most people fall prey to that and they live there for 6070 years so how much of that mindset that you got from that sort of dual beginning do you think played into it and that really hit an emotional chord here and you say that you know that initial environment was really it lays a foundation well before the age of about seven were in like a theta brainwave state where a lot of things kind of get deeper into our psyche and our subconscious our programming and so it's really important especially for for parents you know and people who are just that can be involved in kids lives to really understand how impressionable they are and so I really got a great formatting kind of formatting disc from my grandmother who really kind of instilled this greatness she instilled the value of education I love learning like I love the process of learning and so I really picked up early on that you don't want to just learn stuff you want to become good at learning and when I shifted my my residency you know going from this very protected safe loving atmosphere you know I'm in an environment where you know there's a lot of abuse you know physical abuse towards myself and my two younger siblings you know abuse with my mother and stepfather in the fight you know physical fighting you know holidays were not like they are now like get-togethers and family fun we know the holiday is gonna be police is gonna show up you know that that environment also taught me something really really valuable which is you know even though things aren't going well even though we're it was short on money there's always a way to figure it out no matter how bad things look we're gonna be okay so that really was a powerful seed and combine that with the the sense of greatness the sense of the value of education the sense of there's always a way to figure something out really helped that that moment of insight to take place of that decision that the moment of decision and this is the first time I've articulated this but that's really how those two things come together and I'm stoked that you shared that that's um it's so powerful and in taking you as a whole in watching your show and watching on other people's shows there's this incredible zen-like quality to your delivery to your mission to what you want to do like everything about it is is so even keel right because what I find with people that make that transition is it normally breaks them and one of the things that I'm most intrigued about in life is and we're just have the chills we were just talking about this before we started rolling camera where you were saying with schools right do you go to one ultra tailored or do you go that's going to be the hardship where my kids have to adapt and I don't know what's better because the number of people that are broken by the inner cities that the centage has got to be absurd right in 89 TI it's just crazy yeah but the people that make it the ones that find that Center whether it's to be self-centered or not they find that sense of self when you said that that really hit me that finding that sense of self not letting the outside world dictate who they're gonna be like now all the sudden adversity is not such a big deal because you've got like that compass inside of you and you know where you're going that feels to me very appropriate for what you've become known for which is sleep which even your own publisher was like write a diet book and you'll be a huge and famous and we'll all be rich and you were like but that's not the truth that needs to be told yeah did that play in like was that a moment of Shawn being knowing who he is and what he's trying to do and he's just gonna get to that end no matter what mmm you know what Wow yes that definitely was you know I don't want to cut corners I wanted you know it's integrity is a big word for me and I wanted to take righteous action you know this was this is all bigger than us you know the impact that you're making the legacy that you're leaving you know is so powerful and we're part of like a big change that happened that's happening with our culture overall you know and I knew that this particular topic is and me being a nutritionist like I was all like Food Matters food first food is the most important thing but in my practice and seeing people coming in that you know we've got these folks over here you know 80% of the time are able to reverse type 2 diabetes heart disease get off their lisinopril and all this different stuff and then we've got this category of people who just like literally sometimes would ironically kind of keep me up at night like what is wrong like I'm doing all these things right are they lying to me in it it wasn't until I started to ask people about their sleep that it just like it changed everything and this was about six years ago and so then and here's the key I can't just tell people they need to sleep more you know this like people don't want to change that much like we won't change but we want to little bit right and so I found clinically proven strategies that are super easy to implement almost things that can happen on automatic to help them improve their sleep quality right and once we did that it's like the floodgates would open for people you know had been struggling for sometimes you know 15 20 years with their weight finally the weight comes off you know and seeing people struggling with heart disease or high cholesterol you know the so-called bad cholesterol and seeing those numbers finally get regulated once we got their sleep optimized and I knew that this was incredibly important part of the conversation that was left out and as we will talk about I know now that our sleep quality is more important than our diet and exercise combined when it does for our health and also literally our physical appearance fascinating stuff how much more fat you lose when you get optimal sleep it's it's insane that's a bold statement so walk me through what are some of the the just core benefits that I'm gonna get assuming that I'm sleeping sub-optimally like why is that a problem since that's probably one of the most celebrated like things like when you get a little sleep people like champion you normally I'd sleep 5 to 6 hours a night with no alarm okay I haven't set an alarm in 15 years so that's just that was my cycle I go to bed early very consistently my diet is on point my exercise is on point and so I'd wake up feeling awesome yeah and so I thought this is cash money but because I don't set an alarm that my sleep cycle will change and right now I'm getting like seven ten nine hours out of nowhere and super consistently and I literally have no idea why I'm warmer now so I used to be freezing cold at all times and then at the same time that my and I don't know correlated causative no idea I've started being warmer while I sleep and then during the day so what are like the core components of sleep was something bad happening to me or less than optimal when I was only getting six hours even though I felt good yeah any correlation between those he told us there's there's there's a lot to unpack there number one what's so interesting is that you you were doing something exceptionally right as far as what the research shows with improving your sleep which is you were going to bed kind of consistently a little bit earlier than other folks might and so what we caught what we call this is this anabolic window or what we call money time sleep and this is generally between the hours of Tim and tube because it's more lined up with their natural melatonin secretion so if you go to sleep during those times you actually spend more time in the deepest most anabolic stages of sleep and you tend to produce more human growth hormone than other folks so you were already winning with that this is why you have a tendency to feel better even if you're getting less sleep because this isn't called sleep more right its sleep smarter and there are many people who sleep you know eight to nine hours and they wake up feeling like straight ups you know hot garbage you know what I'm saying and they're just wondering why it's because it's the quality of sleep and when I say quality of sleep what does that mean let's break that down so your sleep is regulated by changes in your in your brainwaves it's really fascinating stuff and we still don't know really what sleep is trying to define sleep is like trying to define you know and Forrest Gump's like life is like a box of chocolates sleep is like pretending to be dead we don't really know right but we do know the changes that happen in the brain we cycle from kind of a normal waking state with with gamma beta but probably in beta right now we move to Alpha Theta Delta is where the deep anabolic dreamless sleep takes place and we need all of them and there's a certain percentage we spend in each that helps to rejuvenate our mind and bodies and if you optimize certain things you'll do it more efficiently one of those gearshifts like if you think about your body like this kind of manual transmission is melatonin like people hear about melatonin is a sleep hormone it just helps your body to efficiently go through your sleep cycles and if your melatonin is suppressed by various things you know I'll share a couple then you're not going through those efficiently and you can wake up feeling like a pinata after the party the next day even though you're spending all this time on the mattress so that's number one number two there's this interesting process called regulation there's a natural drop in your core body temperature at night to help facilitate sleep for all of us if things are running properly but what was fascinating and I shared a study about this is that they tested insomnia accident everyone in this particular clinical study all had to high body temperature at night it would not go down and so what they did was they fit them with these thermo suits right that lowers their skin temperature not even their core temperature just one degree and virtually eliminated all their symptoms of insomnia whoa ambien can't do that all right and it's as simple as paying attention to how your body temperature influences your sleep and so with your body temperature changing like that it's kind of feeling more of an insulation as a result of having more sleep there's a ton of different things it could be correlated there so I'm not gonna say that the sleep is a causative factor but it's really interesting how your body does change in a quarters of sleep there's a natural rise in your core body temperature as the day goes as I'm sorry as the night goes on that helps to kind of wake you up so what I did want to share though when I said that kind of bold statement in the beginning when we're talking about how sleep influences your body composition I think everybody needs to know this there was a study really blew my mind and this was done the University of Chicago and they took people and they put them on a calorie restricted diet kind of typical stuff again I'm taught in college to see the impact on weight loss when they're sleep-deprived or getting enough sleep all right so they put the people on this particular diet monitor everything one phase that study they're getting eight and a half hours of sleep all right and then they track all their metrics another phase of the study same exact diet same exercise they don't change anything else but now they sleep deprived them and they take away three hours of sleep so now they're getting five and a half hours sleep versus eight and a half hours sleep at the end of the study they found that when individuals were well-rested they burned 55 percent more body fat just by getting more sleep and so the question is how does this happen melatonin when I talked about this a little bit earlier it's not just that it's involved in sleep it's also involved in fat loss in this study that was done in the journal pineal research found that melatonin production helps increase your body's mobilization of something called brown adipose tissue right this is a type of fat that burns fat all right the reason that it's brown is that it has more mitochondria so it's very energy dense right these mitochondria just for people who I'm sure people have heard of this but it's like these energy power plants and yourselves that are creating the energy currency of your body like how you experience energy the energy exchange something called ATP and so when you are producing adequate melatonin you're producing and mobilizing adequate amounts of brown adipose tissue which just puts you in a metabolically advantaged state all right but if you're not getting the melatonin production which you've got to meet two requirements number one you need a biological night so that means this could actually be during the day but it's a consistent cycle of when it gets produced but the other requirement needs to be met that you need darkness your body produces melatonin exclusively in darkness and so that's one also how did it how did they get that body fat change HGH production which we talked about to human growth hormone is muscle sparing and it's a big driver of energy it's also known as a youth hormone kids have an insane amount of HGH being produced this is why they have so much energy we have a pretty sharp decline in our production right around 18 to 20 but my argument is that around 18 to 20 we generally in our culture like leave the house who might go to college that kind of thing and we no longer have structure we no longer have rules and we're not going to produce as much HGH third thing really quickly is and this is all has to do with the diet and the food choices is leptin all right and I know people have talked about lefting before but Lefton is your body's kind of glorified satiety hormone and so when you're producing adequate amounts of leptin you feel more in control right you feel more satiated but when when leptin kind of falls off the map or you have leptin resistance can take place then we're going to have some pretty big issues with you regulating your cravings your appetite and so Stanford University research has found that just one night of sleep deprivation radically suppresses your leptin and now I hope folks to start to pay attention whenever you might not get the best sleep how're your cravings changed the next day you're gonna have a tendency to want a number one eat more number two who want to eat more kind of the starchy crunchy salty sugary type things and I remember my wife who's actually here when we had our son and I he's never seen me eat this food I was sitting there like waiting for the baby to come I was eating chocolate-covered raisins I'm just like and I didn't even realize I was doing it you know it's like 3 o'clock in the morning you know and so that's another thing and last one I'll share and there's so many that create that change in your body composition but this one is incredibly important it's cortisol cortisol has been drug through the mud recently you know it's getting blamed for everything but it's not really a bad guy it's just misunderstood all right cortisol is incredibly important for example cortisol is important for your thyroid to work right and that's kind of like the metabolism regulator of your body but here's the thing just one night of sleep deprivation radically increases your cortisol and suppresses melatonin actually as well but this rising cortisol has a really powerful ability to start to break down your muscle tissue which your muscles your body's kind of fat-burning machinery and so it can convert your muscle tissue into glucose it's a process called gluconeogenesis as a kind of fight-or-flight response because your physiology doesn't know why you're not sleeping you know must be some danger about you know and so understanding those major hormones and there's many others you start to see the picture that gets painted with just how much your sleep quality impacts your physical appearance it's really crazy I've always known you need sleep but I didn't know why and so getting into or transitioning I should say because I always knew you needed sleep because if I didn't get it I felt terrible but that was sort of the the end of it and I even let myself just stop it though we don't really know why you sleep but not diving into the real break down was just really fascinating so what are things then that people can do to actually optimize their sleep yeah this is what it's really all about you know I like to start with the low-hanging fruit first and something really really fascinating is simply changing or embracing the time of day that you exercise can improve your sleep quality and so Appalachian State University did a really cool study and they wanted to see what time of day exercising various times a day hazard impact or sleep quality and so they had the study participants to exercise exclusively at 7:00 a.m. and another phase exclusively at 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon another phase exclusively at 7 p.m. in the evening they compiled all the data and at the end of the study they found that morning exercisers spend more time in the deepest most anabolic stage of sleep so they're producing more human growth hormone they have more efficient sleep cycles or we've been talking about they also tend to sleep longer and and this is the one that kind of can get glass passed on average they had about a 25% greater drop in blood pressure at night so what's what's up with that that's correlated with a deactivation of your sympathetic fight-or-flight nervous system right so you're actually able to shift gears get to that parasympathetic rest and digest calming down by getting some exercise in in the morning and so how do we employ this though that's the question because some people is just like you know I can't exercise in the morning and there's also people who exercise in the morning who might have terrible sleep and it's because this is not like the Magic Bullet this is a thing that stack in your condition if you're doing this and then messing up the one I'm gonna talk about next you're probably not gonna have the best sleep so here's how to employ this just five minutes and I tested this each morning I do this 5 minutes of exercise you know might be just jumping on a rebounder you know mitten little mini trampoline for 5 minutes go for a quick power walk do some Tabata which is just 4 minutes and a little mobility work and guess most people don't know it's about it is high-intensity interval training basically it's 20 seconds of exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest repeated over and over again for 4 minutes and in his clinical studies this was found to outperform you know traditional cardio like the kind of moderate intensity 45 minutes of exercise in 4 minutes the change in your cardiovascular benefits body composition and also change your mind Andreea as well this is why it works it does something called a cortisol reset all right we talked about cortisol but again it's a good thing if it's in the right time and the right amounts clinically I would call these people tired and wire that would come in on looking at the hormone panels and the cortisol would be really low in the morning and high at night thus they have sleep problems so you naturally if your heart if your cortisol is on a natural hormone rhythm it would be elevated at its peak in the morning right around 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and then gradually decline as the day goes does that have to do with what time you wake up sort of I mean the cortisol will kind of tend to nudge you out of sleep but also will tend to notice that as the day is that your sleep goes on it becomes lighter and lighter anyways right this when you tend to remember your dreams like they at the end of the sleep and so getting this little boost like helping your body to propel and get your cortisol up the exercise helps to reset that rhythm and get you back on track so that's why it works so that's number one low-hanging fruit just get in five minutes of exercise start in the morning no matter what just five minutes that's all you need it's gonna help to create this snowball effect of good things for you you know five minutes if this is the time you do go to the gym and do your full workout so be it all good but everybody who's not already doing that just get that five minutes in and the second one and this one is more of the tough love and there's the most difficult but this is the most important one in our culture today and it has to do with our tech all right so Harvard researchers have confirmed that blue light exposure from our favorite devices you know iPads iPhones Androids tablets televisions they do in fact suppress your melatonin substantially because that your body essentially thinks the sun's out is that the problem so we have photoreceptors that are always trying to gauge what time it is right because our bodies are wired up to be in sync with nature but only recently like literally just the past few decades have we been able to manipulate and basically create a second daytime right so your body's just it doesn't really know how to figure it out and so the blue and white spectrum specifically are the ones that are more similar to daylight and so what it's doing is and so here's what the research is found basically every hour you're on your device at night suppresses melatonin for about 30 minutes alright so if you're on your you know you watch a movie three hour movie for example your melatonin is gonna be suppressed if you go to bed right after you're not producing adequate melatonin for about an hour and a half and so again you can be unconscious from sheer physical exhaustion but you're not gonna go through your sleep cycles efficiently and so just be mindful of that what I encourage people to do is to give yourself a screen curfew just 30 minutes all right I don't want to make this complicated just 30 minutes but here's the rub we are addicted to our devices like straight up we just need to be on it I am we all are you know basically it's because of this dopamine loop right dopamine is so powerful so interesting dopamine is one of the things I truly feel has helped to create our civilization as it is because it drives us to seek right dopamine drives us to seek and to grow and to find to discover the Internet is perfect for manipulating this because every time you look for something you find something especially social media you seek fine seek fine and produce the dopamine it drives you to look but why do you keep going is every time you find something you get a little bit of a hit from your opioid system it's like the slow drip I have morphine and so it starts to like feel really good and to the point where you might be doing your work and like you've got a deadline and you just like I check Instagram real quick before you know it's like 30 minutes later you fall into the internet black hole just like it just pulls you in so be aware of that I'm not saying again our connection with tech is just gonna grow so I'm not bashing that it's just be aware of it and that when you try to abide by this principle which will really really help your sleep quality to give yourself a screen curfew you can't just sit there and twiddle your thumbs because you'll get what I call the internet jitters all right you'll start getting like a little bit of a withdrawal effect like let me just check why it's one one post what we have to do is this you have to replace it with something of greater or equal value it's really that simple hopefully is what I encourage people to do this is that opportunity to connect right connect with your significant other your kids the people like physical like have a real conversation with somebody right I know it sounds crazy but it really works it's really really good and also this is a great opportunity if you you know if you're in a relationship or not whatever you're into you could you know utilize and I have a chapter on this as well intimate time because there's a big connection between sex and sleep and there's also big connection between sleep and sex and how it impacts your sex life and so when we have an orgasm for example we produce up chemical I'm sorry cocktail of chemicals including oxytocin norepinephrine prolactin and oxytocin for example has been found clinically to basically combat the effects of cortisol and hopefully sex is more interesting than Instagram but you know I don't know it depends on how you doing it and so that's what I want people to do a screen curfew and or use these hacks utilize some blue light blocker blockers and so for your desktops laptops things like that you can get an app called flux that pulls out the most troublesome sleep sucking spectrum of light from your screen and basically cools your screen off and it's a simple app you set it and forget is totally free just go to dr. Google type in F dot Lu X and a couple clicks and it's on your device I've been using it for maybe five or six years I love it and for your telephone you know your cell phone we've got on the iPhones built-in now is night shift with androids the best one out there from my research is one called Twilight you know so there's options for everybody then what about the ambient light at night or if you're watching a movie again I don't want to get don't get too neurotic about it but if this is a problem for you and you're not sleeping as well as you could be or your results your body composition not changing you're not getting that blood pressure down you're not having that focus you need through the day then you might want to address this but another little hack is to get some blue light blocking glasses the first ones I had was straight up like I just built a birdhouse but now there's some really cool stylish ones that you could Rakesh it's a matter of fact you'll create a neural Association when you put the glasses on and you'll start to get sleepy it's nuts and that is another thing right there is to create an evening ritual right your brain is always looking for patterns a lot of successful people especially listening to the things that you're putting out there have a success ritual in the morning but a great morning starts the night before you know a truly great morning and so a couple of quick things people can do is the thermal regulation piece turn down your thermostat all right now this one's again this is gonna hit a pressure point for some people but according to research between 62 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal for sleep and so for some people that's gonna sound a little bit frosty but lowering the thermostat a little bit can it have incredible benefit for your sleep but this doesn't mean you can't use your covers and put on some warm socks that kind of thing so cooling off the star mist at making sure that your bedroom ideally I call it a sleep sanctuary and so that when you walk into your bedroom at night if your brain has a neuro association when I go into my bedroom I'm watching television I'm working those channels are gonna fire because of the myelin getting laid down over the years of you doing that behavior or even months it can get laid down and so you might have the intention of going to bed but if your TVs in there your brain is gonna be firing expecting to watch television and parts of your brain will be waking up in a way and so I encourage people to get the tech out of your room have your sleep have your bedroom be a sleep sanctuary you know or someplace that's just for the the SS which is sleep insects here's also a really interesting reason why there's an Italian study done they found that couples who have a television in their bedroom have 50% less sex really yeah yeah and you know this is a little bit more middle-aged little past middle age the people in the study but and I know some people like it's not true have sex all the time you probably do it at a snowstorm it doesn't matter where you are like you're a human rabbit it doesn't matter but for other people it's like a distraction right it's a distraction and it can also you know create all of those kind of chemical suit issues that we've been talking about with elevating cortisol and those kind of things so I I deal II get your television out of the room the the other tech and last thing with the sleep environment I'll share when I talked about melatonin he goes through two conditions biological night you also need a dark environment and so if you're in an environment where you're maybe in a suburban or city environment where there's like neighbors porch lights coming in there's LEDs outside cars coming up and down the street as crazy as this sounds that it's that small amount of light well we're now dubbing light pollution can have a significant impact on your sleep quality and here's here's why we know this Cornell University I think did the best study on this and they took a test subject and had them sleep in an otherwise dark room and they took a light if I brought the cable and a light the size of a quarter and put it behind their knee and that was enough to disrupt their sleep cycle because your skin also has photoreceptors that are sending information to your brain your nervous system your internal organs to try to tell your body what time it is is trying to figure it out you know so we want to get rid of that artificial light exposure now does this mean moonlight stars no humans have evolved with those things and their Lux like I actually put a Lux chart in the book it's so small compared to even the weakest fluorescent bulbs and so get yourself some blackout curtains if that external light is an issue internal light you know your alarm clocks and you know like you know lamps you know some people still are sleeping with their lights on and things like that be mindful of that and also what you can do is just change the bulb color you know if you still have issues with the dark which some adults do and that's okay you can change the bulb cover cup color and I actually had some NASA scientists or people that work with them to send me some different bulbs because folks in space they don't have that biological clock and so they would experience all these different health challenges they had to try to figure it out and I knew that it was a issue with their sleep and so they start to give them different bulbs for different times of day in a way you know even though they're in outer space so it's really cool which you can do with these little hacks but bottom line is you want to have a dark cycle so you can produce melatonin and you know those are just a few those are just a few of the different things people can do it's really interesting because you've talked about like the light behind the knee it's you've got these photoreceptors and they're communicating there's a lot of signaling going on you've said that the brain makes the body and then you've also said that food is data talk to me about what do you mean by food is data I think that's a pretty powerful concept yeah definitely this was a big game-changer for me early on when I realized that you know food the food that I was eating wasn't just food is it was information and every single bite of food that I was eating and this is something that I've been studying now for over 10 years I absolutely love this is something called nutrigenomics and it's a study looking at how every single molecule of food that you eat impacts your genetic expression food is that powerful you know in several other epigenetic factors like sleep which might be the biggest epigenetic influence you get to choose what kind of copies are being made of you you know your genes are basically blueprint to print out certain copies and there's upwards of like 4,000 different variations that one gene can do and you get to have a big role a big part in how those genes are getting expressed so understanding that when we eat you know a particular food it isn't just I'm just eating this thing it's setting off a cascade of events and it's incredibly empowering but also can be really sobering and again I don't want to give people into the neurotic state because I've been there but it's more like the majority of what we want to do is things that are hormone healthy things that are healthy for your DNA things that are healthy for your genetic expression because you know you again you have a big influence on that and so you know early on really kind of having that that light bulb go off it really empowered me to start making food decisions that can help me because you know if you really think about this I had the spine of an 80 year old man when I was 20 years old I'm in some ways I'm like Benjamin Button all right like I'm aging backwards you know have you guys talked about telomeres yet on the show no so telomeres are basically the most the most valuable asset that we have to basically tell us how long we're going to live alright and so what do I mean by that your telomeres are like these little the eaglets at the end of your shoestrings that keep your your shoe strings from unraveling that's kind of like how telomeres work there the end caps at the end of your chromosomes and as life goes on your cells divide and those they keep getting clipped clipped off those telomeres get clipped off shorter shorter to the point where your DNA basically unravels right and so the crazy thing is that sleep your your sleep spectrum you know whether you're getting high quality sleep or sleep deprived could be the biggest influence on your telomere length alright so literally aging you faster when you're sleep-deprived so because you know when you're younger were like sleep three hours whatever it's no big deal and you can quote get away with it and you can but what you're doing is accelerating your aging process I know that when this was happening even before I got the diagnosis sleep just wasn't like I wasn't something I thought about you know and so I was accelerating my aging process little did I know another huge player in that is the information that we put into our body you know the food and the water and also a big player is our environment you know our relationships the people around us and if you were to ask me you know sleep is the is more powerful than exercise and nutrition combined on your physical appearance in your health but your relationships are the biggest governing force over all of it because that is the most influential thing on the decision you make with your sleep on the decision you make with the food that you eat on the decisions you make on whether or not you're exercising or when and how you do it you know so it's incredibly important to be mindful of for looking at ways that we can stave off the aging process stay young vital healthy happy as long as possible we need to be mindful of all of those things and again I don't want to create a neuroses today but there is a way to go about it and I think that the foundational piece is listening to people like you you know constantly you know every day getting that daily dose of like getting your mind right getting your inner game to and immersing yourself in information like this and carry that with you into the world and do your best to get around people that are uplifting you that are supporting you in you being the person that you want to become no question so before I ask my last question where can these guys find you online awesome so the my big place that people find me is generally through my show it's called the model health show and so people check that out on anywhere you listen to your podcasts and I guarantee you're gonna love it my home online is the model health show calm so they can find the show there as well we can find sleep smarter there too and my social media is there and also people can find sleep smarter just you know where you buy books Amazon all the good stuff where you can go to sleep smarter book calm nice alright and now my final question if you could recommend people to make one change but only one change to their life to have a massive improvement on their health what would it be you know what's so funny it really does go back to the last thing I said the number one thing the very best thing that you can do is to get yourself around healthy people you know you everybody's heard the statement by now you know you're the average of the five people that are closest to you it has a tremendous impact and I always like to support everything I say with science but Princeton University did a interesting study and they had individuals get together and create rapport right just basic little small talk conversation and within just a couple of minutes their brainwaves synced up all right they're the frequency at which their brains are moving literally started to match that happens all the time you're syncing up with the people around you so if you the number one thing you can do to transform your health is to get yourself around healthy people get yourself in the environment because it's very difficult to go to McDonald's if you're with a healthy person like you know you guys like out you know just came from the gym and you know they're on their way to Whole Foods or whatever you like you stop grab me a McCrea you know it's like highly unlikely that you'll do that you know just from a logical sense but from this kind of even metaphysical deeper level you really are a prod of your environment and the great thing about humans is that we're not just a product of our environment we're creative of our environment so you can consciously choose that and that's what's gonna help you to take your things to another level I love that Sean thank you so much for being on the show man that was incredible guys this is I'm telling you somebody that you are absolutely going to love diving into the world that the fact the way that he answered that last question tells you everything that you need to know about Sean Stephenson he should have said sleep because sleep moves more books but he didn't he said being around the people getting around healthy people he talked about relationships because that's the truth and when somebody is far more interested in the truth than they are in moving units that's when ironically they actually moved more units because you know that you can trust them and they really build credibility within their community his show is amazing and that is but the tip of a very large iceberg of somebody who cares very deeply about actually helping people and that's what you're gonna see as you dive deeper and deeper into his world is not only is he trying to get things back to by science but this is stuff that he's experienced in his own life he's worked with thousands of people in his clinical practice seeing how it plays out with them he doesn't look away from the things that disprove what he believes in fact as he mentioned earlier he stares right at those things goes after them because he wants to continually update his thinking which makes him an incredibly powerful mind that I hope that you guys will really go and learn from because he has so much to offer all right if you haven't already be sure to subscribe my friends and until next time be legendary take care [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 993,761

Rating: 4.8917222 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, shawn stevenson sleep, shawn stevenson, habits of sleep, stop insomnia, why sleep is more important than diet, sleep smarter, Sleep Smarter, how to sleep better

Id: 4Mtw3vBQYOg

Length: 52min 51sec (3171 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018