A short YouTube monologue by Aaron Hartman, MD describing how homeschooling unexpectedly helped his children’s brain health by allowing attention to foundational health pillars—sleep, gut health, and stress management. He emphasizes widespread sleep deprivation among children and adults, how inadequate REM/deep sleep impairs memory consolidation, learning, mood and may worsen ADHD-like symptoms, and argues that basic lifestyle factors must be optimized before advanced therapies.
Chapters
I never thought that homeschooling our kids for all those years would help heal their brains. Now, you probably don't know what I'm talking about, but as I've studied functional medicine, integrative medicine, I've learned one thing. What's one of the foundational things that you have to protect? I call it the triangle of health, Gut health, stress and sleep. Sleep well, when did kids. Kids are busy, they're running around, they're doing stuff, they're activating their brains all day long. When do you solidify memories from the day that you've been learning in school? When you get into REM sleep, you need good quality sleep. The average kid in our country is sleep deprived. What time do your kids get up to go to school? What time they go to bed at night? It's amazing how the school cycle, when kids go to school, when the bus comes by, when they get home, all those things really are causing the average kid to be sleep deprived. And I actually talk about this and give some statistics and incurable. It's amazing. The average kid is sleep deprived, Average adult is sleep deprived. I did my training in family medicine. We started learning how to evaluate for ADD and adhd. One of the things we're supposed to find out is does a kid have sleep apnea because kids with big tonsils that can actually give you adhd or make it worse and make it need to be medicated. What about all the kids who just don't have sleep apnea because of big tonsils and adenoids, but they're just not getting enough sleep because the school schedule, because of technology and all these things that's going to affect mood, debility, anxiety, adad, add, ADHD symptoms, but also how your body heals. If you're trying to get your kids to self heal, self repair, to learn, actually for the learning education to solidify in their brains, they really need sleep. And that's something that is. It's one of the super foods. I mean, I know it's not food, I get it, but it's one of the super things, superchargers is sleep, getting adequate rem, deep sleep. And kids, when the newborns, they sleep like 16, 18 hours a day, right? They're sleeping something up to 20 hours a day. When the kids are about 2 to 4, they're sleeping 16 hours a day, 14 to 16. By the time you're in elementary school, the kids are sleeping about 10 hours a day. High school students need nine to 10 hours of sleep at night. How many of our high schoolers are getting nine to 10 hours of sleep. And then adults, us, we need seven to eight. How many Americans are getting that? And the answer is, most of us don't. And so what's the point of this little, this little thing is that we have to perfect the basics. You can talk about all the cool therapies, lipid therapy and, you know, PONS and PEMF and hyperbaric and stem cell and all these things which are really cool, but you got to perfect the basics. You got to get accurate sleep, you need to monitor stress. The home needs to be a safe environment. Your kids need to be in safe environments. They need real food, they work on the gut health and so need to perfect the basics. We talk about a lot of the cool things that are incurable, but I want to just mention the whole sleep thing because that is something that literally our school system and schedules are set up in such a fashion to actually be a detriment to kids. Sleep work on sleep. Environment's important. Talk to you soon.
