8 PROVEN Steps To Improve Sleep, Reverse Your Age & LIVE LONGER! | Mark Hyman

There's something you do every single day that can dramatically impact your health, can help keep you happy, lean, keep your blood sugar balanced, improve your sex drive and more. And I'm not talking about what you eat. I'm talking about sleep. Unfortunately, in this stressed out, super busy, hyper caffeinated modern world, most of us are not sleeping. And when we are sleeping, we're not sleeping well. You know, among the numerous responsibilities we juggle every day, the quality of of our sleep often takes the back burner. And those repercussions show up in our health. The idea that sleep is for the weak and that we need to burn the candle at both ends in order to be successful is slowly killing us and just wrong. One study found that just one partial night's sleep could create insulin resistance, which is prediabetes, which then leads to diabetes and many other problems. Others show that poor sleep contributes to cardiovascular disease like heart attacks, to depression and mood disorders, to poor immune function and frequent infections, and to lower life expectancy. Sleep is how our body repairs itself. Simply put, sleep is a major cornerstone for an energetic, joyful and healthy life. Now I know it's easier said than done to get quality sleep. And as a doctor with a family and 10 jobs and multiple clinics and lots of travel, I. I've skipped out on sleep more times than I'd like to count, and I always pay for it. I realize that lack of sleep adversely affects my health. If I don't sleep well, I'm anxious. I'm just not as nice to the people around me. I start to crave junk food. Yep, I even eat carbs. When I don't get enough sleep, I just don't show up to be my best self. Now I know many of you can relate. In my practice, sleep problems are abundant. Insomnia, sleep disorders, sleep apnea. Every day I have at least one patient that tells me they get poor quality sleep and this lack of sleep is interfering with their lives. Now, I created this course because I believe that sleep is the most underappreciated aspect of health and wellness. And although it might seem as though getting good sleep as as simple as putting your head on the pillow and closing your eyes is actually much more complex than that. With five trusted experts, we're going to walk you through the pillars of sleep so that you can start getting the sleep your body deserves and that your body needs. Today, we'll walk you through all the major sleep disorders and why sleep is so important. We'll also talk about conditions caused by lack of Sleep, as well as key areas of our health that affect our sleep, such as our gut health, our nutritional status, our hormones, our immune system, environmental toxins, and lots more. And finally, we'll take you through a 10 day sleep reset designed to focus on the most important parts of creating better sleep. No one is immune to sleep deficiency. Did you know that over half of Americans report getting bad sleep? And it's probably more than that, considering people ignore their sleep challenges. You see, sleep disorders have become an epidemic. So let's dive into the sleep disorders. Sleep disorders go far beyond the question of do I have sleep apnea or not. Sleep disorders actually exist on a spectrum. And even catching minor symptoms that you have now can prevent you from developing things like sleep apnea in the future. So let's talk about why sleep is so important and the spectrum of sleep disorders.

60 million Americans complain about insomnia. They can't go to sleep. Half of Americans complain about being very tired. The problem with that stat, of course, is that, and I speak for myself, when I had sleep apnea, not knowing it, I never complained that I was tired. I would maybe take a nap or I would just deal with it. So that number, that 50% number, could be much higher. This is a $411 billion problem in the United States. I mean, healthcare costs are through the roof. They're increasing.

If we could just fix the sleep, we could drop these numbers and these stats. Here's the stat that you may find surprising, that 75% of people that suffer from depression also have a sleep disorder. There are some researchers, there's one in Berkeley, there's one in England that are seeing something more than that. They're seeing a 100% correlation between some form of mental illness or mental disorder.

Mental health issue, and they're seeing sleep, a sleep disorder that's related to it. So figure 70%, maybe even 100%.

Sleep is essential for health for so many reasons. And when I talk to my clients, the first thing I talk about is the hierarchy of the foundations of health. So foundations of health means your nutrition, your exercise, your sleep, stress reduction, all of these things that we have to take take into account. But on the top of that pyramid is sleep. It's before nutrition, it's before exercise, it's before supplementation, for sure. And the reason behind this is it affects every single cell in our body.

Without sleep, we couldn't, after two weeks of not sleeping, they've done studies, people cannot go on, People feel completely depleted and everything changes. The sleep touches every part of us so when we sleep, we're resetting our nervous system. We're letting the brain reset. We hit the reset button. The brain is detoxing at night, so it's making sense of everything that happened during the day. During sleep, our immune system heals. Patients can't heal from an immune condition if they don't have quality sleep. During sleep, we also are allowing our body to detoxify when it comes to liver toxins and environmental toxins. This is how we pull a lot of our toxins out, is through resting. When we're sleeping hormones, certain hormones increase, like human growth hormone and melatonin levels. Testosterone levels go up, which allows our body to grow, to transform, to create new cells for children growing up. As they're growing up, you need to sleep in order to create more growth hormone. Without it, we couldn't develop, we couldn't create new cells. So sleep touches really every part of us. Our gut function, our intestinal tract is very connected to us having problem, proper sleep. Without sleep, our volume, our flora, our microbiome actually becomes more toxic and more depleted. So the sleep button that we hit at night is shutting it all down. We change our minds, our state of our mind, our state of our body to reset everything within us. And I have never seen a patient that was in good health that did not, that was, that was not sleeping. So in reality, you can't heal someone or really achieve health if you're not getting proper sleep. So I would say from anything that my patients, when they come to see me, one of the number one conditions that I see people for at my clinic are insomnia or sleep issues. And without addressing their sleep, they're not going to be able to heal. They can't balance their hormones, they can't lose weight. Women that have trouble with weight problems, they are not going to be able to heal and manage their metabolism if they don't get enough sleep. It also impacts our heart health. So there's a huge connection of lack of sleep with leading to heart disease, strokes, heart attacks, also a tendency towards diabetes. When we sleep, we're resetting our insulin, our glucose pathways. And without proper sleep, patients become pre diabetic and eventually diabetic. So as you can see, asleep touches every endocrine system, every organ in our body, detox function, immune resetting, and impacts our mood greatly. People that don't sleep have more problems with anxiety, depression, concentration problems, learning problems, attention deficit disorders. So sleep touches all parts of us.

So there's two types of sleeping issues that we have. Either you can't fall asleep. And that's called sleep onset insomnia or you have a hard time staying asleep. These are called sleep maintenance insomnia. So those are the people who say I have no problem falling asleep, I'm exhausted, but then I wake up around two or one or I wake up early every morning. That's a very common one I hear nowadays I'm up at 5 or 4 and I can't fall back asleep. Some people have both, but the majority of our patients will say that they have more of an issue with one or the other. So for sleep onset insomnia, those are the patients. As you can imagine, like my story, if something acutely happens, you have conflict, a stressor, a deadline, a presentation, a test. So mentally or emotionally, if you're aroused or stimulated or worried or stressed, that's going to make you not be able to fall asleep. So typically I see six causes for sleep onset insomnia. The number one would be sleep hygiene, which you've all heard of. Every, every magazine out there, they list the things that we should all be doing to avoid being able to fall asleep easily. So sleep hygiene is things like not having bright lights at night, not eating too late, not having stimulants like watching T, or having your iPad or your iPhone on, things like that. So sleep hygiene is probably the number one thing I work on with patients to make sure, first and foremost, do you have all these down? Second would be mental emotional stressors. So things like worrying, you know, scheduling some worry time or having a notepad by your bedside. So just dump everything that's in your head onto that piece of paper. And sometimes this is much easier said than done. So you might have a death in the family, you might have someone who's had, who's in, you know, the hospital and you can't be there and you're worrying about that it's not going to be that easy. But often conflicts and emotional or mental stressors are reasons why people aren't falling asleep. Other causes might be the heart. So in Chinese medicine we talk about two causes for sleep issues and people who have a difficulty falling asleep. We say in Chinese medicine there's a disharmony of the digestive system which affects the heart. I won't get into that too much, but it's very interesting to look at herbs that actually have double blind placebo controlled studies done in Chinese medicine. And a lot of these herbs are helping the spleen and the stomach, which then help tonify the blood for the hearts. Because the heart at Night, when you sleep, rests, the heart rate goes down, the blood flow goes down and the heart tries to get all that blood to the periphery. Because you've been standing up all day and getting it, your fingers, your toes. And it's supposed to have sort of a rest. You can imagine if your mind is very active, that the heart or if let's say you have digestive issues and not getting really good quality blood to that heart, that it's going to have issues. So that's another reason why some people might have sleep onset issues. So that's number three. Number four, we talked about stress. And so stress isn't always worrying and having things on your mind. Stress in medicine we call cortisol and testing your cortisol is huge. Some people have high nighttime cortisol and that might make them not fall asleep. Even low cortisol, super low cortisol, you actually need a little bit of cortisol at night to be able to fall asleep. And sometimes people's adrenals are just flatlined and they have very, very little cortisol. And that can also be a stressor to the body.

Obviously pain is another one. Restless leg syndrome is another one. Restless leg I would say can be both. Sometimes people will say they feel like they have things crawling on them. They need to get up and they need to stretch. That might be one. But if it's happening in the middle of the night, they might not even be aware of it. Poor circadian pathways and rhythm. So I always say sleep is not about nighttime, it's about daytime and that diurnal pattern of the up and down of your day and that cycle. So if your circadian rhythm is off and you've been almost too on all day, it's going to be hard to turn off at night.

The most common sleep disorder is insomnia. It seems that even though this is an innate thing that we don't really need to learn, that it's built into us, the rhythm of sleep and the capability, the ability to sleep is in us neurologically. We still can't sleep. And that's as I mentioned earlier, that's half of America. We can't sleep. I mean, what's going on there? That's not right? Maybe it was 10%. That would be understandable. But so insomnia is the largest, biggest category as far as sleep disorders. Right behind that, of course, is obstructive sleep apnea or sleep disorder breathing. And that is the obstruction of the airway, of air getting in and out of your airway. And you're not able to breathe at night. And as you get closer to deep sleep, these muscles that give you tone in the airway collapse, only your diaphragm is working, your heart muscles working, of course. And when that collapse occurs, that paralysis occurs. The collapse of the airway is more likely, especially as you get older, especially after menopause, and then you start waking up and then you can't attain that deep reparative sleep that we all require. And insomnia actually is linked to two not sleeping well enough. That may seem counterintuitive, but people that are very tired sometimes can't fall asleep. So the question is, why are we seeing more of this collapse of the airway? This is below the upper part of the pharynx. This is past the tongue. If you look at sleep endoscopy type of images, that's a moving image of someone that is asleep. You'll see this airway. The airway is, is frightening when you first see it. A good airway is maybe the size of the opening of a tapioca straw. It can get smaller than that. And that's during waking hours. That's when the muscles around that airway have tone. So what happens when you're on your back, you've got your heavy mandible and your tongue pushing back on the upper part of the airway. That whole airway is being compromised and you've lost the tone of the muscles that allow it to be pulled together. This again is the Bernoulli effect, being pulled together by a big volume of air coming through the mouth.

Why is that happening more? Our ancestors didn't have this issue. Well, it goes to the fact that our airways are developing, they're into a smaller space. The bone structure, the capsule or that box that I referred to, the airway box, is smaller. Hence, given the amount of tissue that would grow, there normally has less room for it to exist in that space. So our airway is getting smaller. We are developing, or evolving, if you want to say, into a species with a retrognathic jaw. Our foreheads, our heads are supposed to be enlarging a little bit. Our brain capacity is supposed to be increasing. I see very little signs of that. But the jaw is getting smaller. And because of that, our airway is literally under attack, it is under fire, and it can function the way our ancestors airways did.

So let's talk about sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is actually a very common condition that I see in my clinic. And a lot of people believe that sleep apnea only happens with older patients or overweight patients. And that is not true. Sleep apnea actually can happen with young adults, with women, even children can have sleep apnea. And what is a sleep apnea? So sleep apnea is, is when breath is paused, is stopped during sleep. There are episodes throughout the night where instead of breathing normally and getting air through your airways to your lungs, this process stops temporarily. And pause of sleep of apnea can actually last somewhere between 10 to 20 seconds. And patients can have constant pauses, constant episodes of sleep apnea. There's many kinds of sleep apnea. The most common is obstructive sleep apnea, but there's also a central sleep apnea, mixed sleep apnea. But obstructive sleep apnea is what we see the majority of my patients. And with obstructive sleep apnea, what's going on in there? So the air, literally the air that we're breathing, that we're meant to get through our nose, go down the passages, go down to the throat and enter your lungs. Somewhere in this process, the breath stops. And we call it obstructed because there's an obstruction that's happening. So it's either the air is not flowing through the nasal cavity, maybe it's not going down correctly through the pharynx, through the throat, maybe there's a blockage in the tonsils in the throat, and then the air doesn't reach the lungs. So during sleep, when we're sleeping, where the body, the autonomic nervous system, controls this breath, we're not meant to be thinking about breathing. So as a pneumatic process as we sleep that we're breathing correctly, whenever we have an obstruction in this process, sleep apnea occurs. And what causes the sleep apnea? There's many causes of it. So in the obstructive, I have seen patients that have a sleep apnea because they have chronic seasonal allergies. Sometimes their allergies are so bad, their environment they're living in can be polluted, toxic, or they have seasonal allergies to the outside pollens that it blocks their sinuses. And they can get quite a bit of congestion, of congestion and start experiencing sleep apnea as a result. They can also can also occur when someone has very enlarged tonsils. So even a child, I've seen children that have very enlarged tonsils from chronic strep infections or chronic viruses, also eating the wrong diet, having a lot of dairy and sugar can inflame someone's glands. And the obstruction of the gland at night can cause episodes of sleep apnea. We also see this as patients get older, which is true. As we get older, our risk of sleep apnea is higher. What's going on is that the muscles that are surrounding the airways, the breathing space, all these muscles in the inside, including around your throat, they start to collapse. Even the tongue starts to collapse. So the tongue can fall back and obstruct the airway. So air is now flushing through. So somewhere in this process, the air is not moving through. But as we are getting older, the tones of the tonality of our muscles, our muscle tone starts to decrease and everything starts to fall into each other. So when we're sleeping, it is common that a young adult can have just an episode of sleep apnea if they have drunk a lot of alcohol. So when someone drinks a lot of alcohol, the body over sedates and the central nervous system doesn't regulate our system as well. So you're overly relaxed for that period of time and everything just drops and falls back in closing the airway. So alcohol can cause a lot of episodes of sleep apnea for patients. And if you have sleep apnea, drinking alcohol is probably the worst thing you can do because you're already encouraging a problem that exists in your body.

Now I want to take a moment to talk about our breath. In our day to day life, we rarely think about our breath, and yet how we breathe is vital to our sleep and our health. Ideally, we breathe through our nose throughout the day and when we're sleeping. Yet have you ever looked at your partner or someone sleeping near you and noticed that their mouth was wide open while they were asleep? Well, this is pretty common and the problem is that when we're breathing with our mouth and not our nose, we aren't getting quality sleep. When you breathe through your nose, you're more likely to activate the part of your nervous system that controls deep rest and digestion. That's your parasympathetic nervous system versus your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight response. So breathing through your nose makes you feel relaxed and calm and it prevents a host of issues. Now let's turn back to Dr. Mark Burhenna for a lesson on mouth breathing and upper airway resistance syndrome.

I think, and in my practice I see a 30% rate of sleep disorder breathing and the national stats are between, I've seen as low as 6% to about 20%. And I think this is what's happening. I think a lot of this is flying under the radar. And I think there are three reasons for that. One is uars, upper airway resistance syndrome. That is a condition that most young, thin, healthy, premenopausal women have.

A lot of Asian women that come to America and start eating the western diet seem to get it very quickly. It flies below the radar because.

You'Re not exhibiting apneas or hypnos. Apneas is no breath for more than 10 seconds while you're sleeping. Hypno is a low volume breath for more than 10 seconds. And those are all considered interruptions that would cause you to be alarmed, your body to be alarmed, you're not breathing the way you normally should be. The upper airway resistance syndrome, there are something called the reras. It's a respiratory effort related kind of interruption and it's even less of a volume of reduction in volume of breathing, but it's enough to wake up the person. My point is that a lot of these sleep studies don't pick up on that.

And that's a shame because those women will get full on obstructive sleep apnea suddenly when they reach menopause or even perimenopause, because their drop in estrogen and progesterone, which are hormones that are actually protective of the airway muscles, is such a sudden drop that all of a sudden they've caught up with their male husband or male partner, he's been snoring gradually all along. And then all of a sudden women catch up suddenly when menopause appears. What is mouth breathing? Mouth breathing is someone who is taking in all the air through their mouth at night when they sleep during the day. Obviously when we talk and we eat, and less so when we're eating, because if we're good nose breathing, we can eat and breathe through the nose. But typically if someone cannot breathe through their nose, they are mouth breathing. And mouth breathing leads to all sorts of dental stuff like higher cavity rate, drier mouth, increased incidence of gum disease. But it goes beyond that. It goes beyond the dental implications. The most important one, I think, is the regulation of your breathing rate. And at night that's important. I use a device, a ring that measures that and I can actually measure the difference or see the difference between my forced nose breathing by taping and not being able to tape because I'm congested. I can actually see that reflected in my results the next morning in terms of respiratory rate, heart rate and even heart rate variability. So if you're breathing through your mouth, you're breathing in a different way. You're breathing in a way that is not conducive to, to feeling well.

So.

To make it Simple. If you can breathe your nose, you're not over breathing CO2. Breathing is as much bringing air in than it is as well, expelling CO2. And if that mix isn't correct and optimal, which nose breathing tends to do on its own, then your blood ph will change. It will become more acidified. That will because the base of the brain is looking at CO2 levels in the bloodstream, not O2 levels, to determine how quickly you should breathe. It's going to want you to start breathing faster, to get rid of some of that acidosis. But if you're mouth breathing, then you're borderline hyperventilating. So that can have an effect on your brain, it can have an effect on your sleep, which in turn will have an effect on your brain and your body. So mouth breathing is something that is unbelievably overlooked, but so actionable. And it's as simple as taping your mouth shut with the right tape. Now, there are some people that cannot breathe through their nose, and that's another great reason to try mouth taping, to see if you are one of those people. And if so, that can be corrected. These are things that will help you sleep better. It'll also be something that makes you feel better during the day, just being able to use your nose for what it was meant to do, and that is to take in air and to expel air as well properly. In mountaineering, when the partial pressures get very low at high altitude, it's very important to breathe properly. As an athlete, it's very important to breathe properly. But when we're sitting around, a lot of people think, oh, it doesn't matter how we breathe. It does.

You just heard about something called mouth taping. This might be a new concept to you. We're going to dive into mouth taping and ways to start breathing through your nose later in this course. For now, I just want you to understand the importance of breath. In the course materials for this lesson, you can find one of my favorite breathing exercises that you can do today to calm your body and prepare you for sleep. So the key to getting better sleep lies in addressing the root cause of our sleep challenges. Are we having difficulty breathing at night? Is stress preventing us from better sleep? Is it our hormones, our blood sugar, our allergies, or environmental toxins affecting us? In this course, we're going to talk about each of these root causes. But before we dive into that, let's talk about the stages of sleep. This is important information that will help you understand what happens each night when we shut our eyes.

Sleep starts off with stage one, which is very short. It only makes up about 3% of your sleep. And this is just the transition into sleep. Stage two is actually the majority of your night is spent in stage two. And this is when your heart rate slows down, your breathing rate slows down, and you start the recuperation process of sleep. Now stages three and four are also known as delta or deep sleep. And this is slow wave sleep. So this is when your body starts to heal any of the physical traumas that have occurred. In slow wave sleep. You also filter out all of the unnecessary information that you accumulated throughout the day. The billboards that you saw, the commercials, the TV shows, everything that you don't need is kind of dropped in stages three and four of sleep. Now, REM sleep is your rapid eye movement sleep pattern. And this is when you have a paradoxical reaction occur. Your heart rate increases, there's increased sympathetic tone, and REM sleep is important for memory consolidation. So you're taking things from your short term memory, things that you tried to learn during the day, and you're putting it into your long term memory. This is why REM sleep is so important for mental health. Waking up without anxiety or irritability is also dependent on your REM sleep patterns.

So these are the three stages of sleep that are very important for us to understand. And in conversation with my patients, we are always trying to increase the amount of deep sleep, REM sleep more than quantity, quality is really important. Of course, the ideal for an adult is between seven to nine hours of sleep. And everyone has unique demands. I have patients that do great with six and a half to seven hours as they get older. And patients that need nine to 10 hours, you can have the same 50 year old patient that needs different amounts. So a lot of it has to do with their physiology, what their demands are of the body. But achieving the deep sleep state and REM is ideal. And if light sleep, light sleep, you're going to actually wake up in the middle of the night through light sleep, and that is normal. Tossing, a little toss and turn is part of what's important for sleep. This can create actually a lot of anxiety for my patients when they think they have to just close their eyes and open their eyes the next morning. And the body's not meant to do that. So there's that, you're going to do that. If you're in deep state of sleep or REM during the light phases, you're going to have some shifting of positions, some turning and that is normal. As long as your body is falling back into sleep, that's what's expected. So teaching people that they wake up a little bit during the night and they fall back to sleep, that is normal. We're meant to be in the lighter state and that is a healthy part of our, our system. Our sleep cycle is not something that should be continuously managed. If patients just want to close their eyes and open their eyes the next day, this is why we see a lot of people doing prescription medications. You will get that with a prescription med. But with proper sleep, you still might have a little waking up your body. That is part of the light sleep cycle. As part of our sleep cycle, the body goes between the deep state, the light, the remaining within 90 in a 90 minute cycle. And this keeps happening throughout the whole night. Most of the deep sleep is actually achieved in the earlier hours of the night. So when your parents tell you to go to bed early, yes, it's true, we should be going to bed earlier. If you're sleeping by 11pm Between 11 to 2 is when we are able to achieve the deeper state of sleep. So someone that goes to bed every night after 2am, their body naturally is not going to hit that deep state of sleep. So getting to bed earlier is very important for that reason. So that state of deep sleep, light, deep REM changes, goes every 90 minutes. And the longer you are sleeping, the more you go into rem. So your REM cycles increase more.

Through the evening. So when you're about to wake up, you might be hitting your longest state of REM and that's when you're dreaming the most. So a lot of people that have an alarm clock to wake up, if the alarm wakes you up and you have, you were in the middle of a dream state, that's when you're hitting the rem. And patients asked me about dream recall and they say I just can't remember my dreams. So most people, if they're hitting REM sleep, are having some state of dreaming, but they're probably not going deep enough in the REM that they can recall their dreams and remember the memory is, it's processed and integrated and sharpened during the REM phase. So if they are not getting enough rem, they're not going to recall a lot of their dreams. But most people do dream. It's just the recalling and their ability to spend on rem. So tracking someone's sleep is interesting because when you track sleep, you're able to see how much time someone spend on REM versus Deep and light states of sleep.

That was a brief lesson in the stages of sleep. And I know this is a lot of information, but it's important to understand why sleep is so important and how sleep can impact everyone at any stage of life. The good news is that the earlier we catch these problems, the better. And it's almost never too late to fix our sleep. I know what it's like personally to get really bad sleep. When I was dealing with some serious health issues, I felt wired and tired pretty much every day. My body needed sleep, but there was so much dysfunction and disharmony in my body that I couldn't actually fall asleep. My mind was racing, my heart was racing. I would wake up multiple times throughout the night. Now, I know so many of you can relate, but I don't want you to stress out about your lack of sleep. I want you to arm yourself with all the knowledge and the tools that you need in order to get better sleep. Now, if you've been struggling with sleep, I want you to remember this. Your physiology is made for optimal sleep. If you think you've tried everything and you're still not sleeping well, this course is for you. We're going to cover the most important and most overlooked aspects of sleep. Every video and every written lesson comes with actionable steps that you can take right now. This lesson was just a brief intro on this vast subject. Starting in the next lesson, we're going to dive deep into action steps that you can take today to get better sleep, starting with our circadian rhythm. What is that? And how can we live more in alignment with our body's natural rhythms? Now, we've been able to do miraculous things with advancements in technology. We're able to communicate with and work with people all over the world. We're able to run entire businesses from the comfort of our home. We're able to stay in touch with loved ones, regardless of where they are in the world. However, these advancements have also come with a big price. We have now extended our day significantly with the use of our phones, our tablets, computers and laptops. And this means we no longer leave our work at the office and pack it up at 5 o'. Clock. We're able to work well into the night by keeping all of our lights on and exposing ourselves to blue light from our devices, which is not good. Unfortunately, this is damaging to our health and our sleep. Now, in this lesson, we're going to talk about your circadian rhythm. Now, if you've never heard of this before, you're in for A treat. Understanding this natural internal rhythm is an essential part of any sleep course. You're also going to walk away with practical tips to reset your circadian rhythm. These are things that you can start doing today. So a circadian rhythm is a natural internal process that regulates our sleep wake cycles. This 24 hour internal clock is influenced by lots of things, mainly light and our eating habits. Our circadian rhythm also influences our lifespan. That's right. The more in alignment we are with our natural rhythms, the healthier we will be. In her book Chasing the Sun, author Linda Geddes explains that almost half of our genes are under circadian control, including ones associated with every major illness investigated so far, including cancer, Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, schizophrenia and obesity. Circadian rhythm expert Dr. Sachin Panda says our genes are no longer our master conductor. Our behavior is the master conductor of all our internal rhythms. This is good news because it means that we are not at the mercy of our genes. Our behavior and the things that we do daily and habitually can transform our health, our genes and our sleep. It turns out that more often than not, sleep problems are not just a nighttime problem, they're a daytime problem. All the things that we do during the day, our habits, the time we exercise, the foods we eat, when we eat, all influence how much we sleep and the quality of our sleep.

So your body works on something called the circadian rhythm, and this is your internal clock. So how this works is light exposure goes into your eye, it hits your retina, and from the retina, it's transmitted to the suprachiasmatic nucleus. This is an area of the brain where serotonin is going to be produced into melatonin. This is also where your pineal gland is. Melatonin production is going to make you feel sleepy and it's going to help you actually fall asleep. Now, on the flip side, your circadian rhythm is also regulated by cortisol. Cortisol is your wake up, get up and go hormone. Cortisol gets a really bad rap, and I'm not sure why, because it's essential in your health. This is the one that makes us actually want to feel like we can do things throughout the day. It's our driving factor. This balance between melatonin and cortisol is what makes up this circadian rhythm. Now, the circadian rhythm is important for a bunch of reasons, but first I want to talk about one of the most important driving factors behind the circadian rhythm, and that's light exposure. Light exposure is actually more Important to your circadian rhythm than melatonin production, which most people don't know. One study looked at three groups. They put people into three different groups. One of them was an exercise group, the other one was a light exposure group. So these people got light exposure within five minutes of waking from a light box. And then the other group was a sleep hygiene group. So they just educated this group about what really can help you with sleep after a prolonged period of time. They tested this group and see which one did the best, and what they found was really interesting. The group that did the worst was actually the sleep hygiene group. This group decreased their sleep duration throughout the length of the study. The exercise group found a 17 minute improvement in sleep duration. But the light exposure group that got that lightbox within five minutes of waking saw a 54 minute increase in sleep duration throughout the length of the study. That's incredible. Prolonging sleep by a full hour every night can do wonders to your overall health. So bright light promotes sleep in a few different ways. And the two mechanisms that are well established, its antidepressant effect, as well as its ability to shift your circadian rhythm. So we know that sleep is really important at preventing depression, and we know that depressed individuals actually have poorer sleep. So this is one reason why light exposure during the day might be essential to promoting sleep at night. Light has also been shown to shut down the pineal glands production of melatonin. So you actually need light exposure during the day so that you're not producing melatonin, so you're not groggy all day long. And you can think about this like in the sitcom, the mom comes in, opens up the curtains and exposes the child to light so that they wake up and they get out of bed so that they can go to school. And this actually has a physiological mechanism behind it because you need that light exposure to come in to hit the retina, to actually shut off melatonin production so that you're not sleepy all day long. And this is one of the reasons why light exposure trumps almost everything when it comes to sleep hygiene. And it's the driving force behind your circadian rhythm. Most of us don't get enough light exposure during the day. The average American gets about 20 minutes of light exposure throughout the day. So I want to start challenging you. If you want to regulate your circadian rhythm, then you need to be exposed to light 30 minutes, twice a day, minimum.

Once I realized through studying the circadian clock system, what I was doing to my own health, I just made It a simple tip and a simple routine where I don't have to think about it first thing in the morning. Don't get on your phone, don't check email, don't do any of that. Just step outside. And, you know, I travel a lot, sometimes 70 flights a year. I haven't been in a situation where I've been unable to do this. You know, even in a hotel in New York, Seoul, South Florida, Korea, I mean, wherever I've been able to just get out. And it really kickstarts your body's circadian rhythm. Now, I know this sounds like a weird tip because most people are like, okay, you're doing this in the morning, but I have problems with sleep. And this is where, again, it circles back to this whole circadian clock system that we've been talking about. You have to entrain and get the gears of the clock working right in the morning to foster the neurochemicals and the biochemical changes to create that sleep pressure so that when the evening comes, you're tired. And again, a lot of people are not getting light in the morning. They're getting in their car, they're getting in the subway, they're going right to work. They're not exercising. Maybe some days they're having breakfast. Maybe some days they're skipping breakfast, right? So you can start to see how the peripheral clocks are getting confused because the meal timing is all over the place. The central clock is not getting that adequate sunlight and the good light to keep things going. So there's a mismatch between the circadian clock system, which ultimately will help to create the hormonal milieu that causes us to not only feel sleepy, but to actually stay asleep. The hormones, melatonin, adenosine, these different neurochemicals that help us not only get to sleep, but also help our brain and our body recover from the day that we, when we're awake. So super important.

So we often hear melatonin being an essential nutrient for help patients fall asleep. And it's true. With our circadian rhythm, as we are exposed to light in the daytime, to sunlight, to direct light, our circadian rhythm, which is our mechanism, our biological clock that regulates our sleep cycle, the exposure of light allows our brain to start getting ready for building melatonin in the evening. So in the morning, the body knows that the light is stimulating to not make melatonin at that time, but it preps itself for the evening. So as the light goes down, if we're living in the natural rhythm of nature.

If there was no Light around us or electricity the evening, the darkness triggers the pineal gland to release melatonin. So melatonin is a, we call it, it's a naratus verb, also a hormone. So a narrow hormone that it's an essential part of helping us fall asleep at night. So without the proper night and darkness surrounding us, the pineal gland is not able to create enough melatonin yet. It needs the sun in the morning and it needs to the darkness at night. So as melatonin is released, that naturally helps the body fall asleep. It encourages the sedation in the body. And the more we sleep, the more melatonin we make. So melatonin is a really important antioxidant for the brain. Melatonin is not only helpful to help you keep sleep, but is one of the most important antioxidants to keep the brain healthy and young. It's really an anti aging nutrient, or I like to call it graceful aging nutrient. With melatonin is being shown that.

As we age with chemicals around us, environmental toxins, we can end up with what's called a leaky brain. The blood brain barrier gets slightly broken and it allows for all the toxins to go into the brain and we end up with a toxic brain. But melatonin actually helps patch up these little holes. So melatonin is an antioxidant, but it also helps heal that brain layer. So sleeping at night is essential for healing a leaky brain. And often patients that are not getting enough sleep, they're not going to get enough melatonin. And as we get older, naturally our melatonin production drops. So it is essential as someone is aging that they could supplement, supplement with some melatonin, sublingual melatonin, oral melatonin. But melatonin levels should be titrated slowly if you're going to consume melatonin. And I also prefer to have patients do what's called a sustained release formula, so it can stay in your body through the evening if melatonin is going to be used. A lot of my patients say, I take melatonin, it doesn't help me. The problem is that they're not, they're using a quick dissolve versus the sustained release in their body. So that can make quite a big difference. Melatonin is one of the most important nutrients. Again, it's antioxidant. It has been shown to have anti cancer properties. When patients have low melatonin levels, tumors can grow faster.

Part of a cancer regimen. Patients will always go on melatonin to help the immune cells. So it's also helping the immune system and it does have anti cancer properties.

So now that we understand the importance of daylight in the morning to really entrain and optimize our body's circadian clock system, another element, and this, the flip side, the yin and the yang of light is darkness. And darkness really fosters sleep pressure. The downside is unless you live out in the country, a lot of us know that like it's, it's virtually impossible to get pure dark. And so it's important to change your home environment. I know a lot of people are probably like, oh my gosh, you know, you want me to eat healthy organic food and move and exercise and all that. And now you need to modify our home. And that's really important. So one of the things that I figured out, you know, for a long time the fluorescent, compact fluorescent light bulbs were considered like more energy efficient than the incandescent or the, you know, the older style light bulbs. But they're very blue in terms of their hue and the wavelength of light that they admit. Again, that sends signals to our central circadian clock system that it's morning time. It's very important for people to switch back to these incandescent light bulbs or also called the Edison light bulbs. And people will notice it's much more of an orange type hue, which is actually the color spectrum and wavelength that the sun in the evening will emit. That's going to signal to our brain more adenosine and release of melatonin, decreased cortisol and different wakefulness hormones. Because it's not just about the neurotransmitters, it's about the peripheral hormones as well. And so again, modifying your home, customizing the home and having some really good boundaries around tech, computers and television. I think that's especially for business owners and parents. And now that work is pretty much 24,7 for most people. Access to email and all that. I mean, it's a blessing and a curse, right? We can work mobily and remotely, but work is always with us. And I think the biggest thing that people can do is put their phone and having. And I learned this from Ariana Huffington. She has. She puts her phone to bed, right. It's a great tip, right? A lot of us, you know, we, we. And what I mean by putting your phone to bed is airplane mode. Put it away. It's create these really, it's boundaries around tech. You know, as we talked about, tech's amazing. We can't live without tech and, and texting and being Able to communicate with people in the world. But it's also a curse in that it's very stimulating. It's triggering that uncertainty, that dopamine release. And it's also emitting light. And so you can change the hue and the color on your iPhone and the accessory in the settings. Maybe we can do a demonstration. That's what I personally do. You can wear blue light blocking glasses, but just having hard stops around when you stop tech. And for me personally, in our house, where we recommend to our clients as well, 8:00pm, it's like, no matter what, unless there's like a catastrophe or family emergency, phones go in this drawer, they're charging. We can get to them in the morning. Whatever it is that's pending can wait. And we go for an evening walk. And so that's just a great way to like, again, you're having building in these routines and these habits.

So the cue for melatonin, we all know comes from darkness. And so I often tell my patients, if I walk into your bedroom in the middle of the night, I should be able to walk into, like, nothing. Like, I cannot see anything. It's pitch black. And I will walk into walls if I have to get to the bathroom. So I am super, super Nazi. Like, every little light is blocked in my room and my kids room. And one thing I hate about hotels is all these little tiny gadgets and all their lights. And I'm the one putting all the pillows on everything and blocking everything so that it is completely pitch black. And what I love is in school. We learned about this article in the study they did where people think if they cover their eyes and they have a mask on that their melatonin will get released. But they actually put some light at the toe of the person under the COVID and they found that the melatonin levels come down. So there are receptors from melatonin throughout our whole body. It's not just about putting an eye mask on at night. And look at nature. I mean, blue light, we know, gives us energy. That's what tells your brain it's morning wake up. That's what tells your little tiny area in your hypothalamus release cortisol. Get the energy up so that this person can perform. Sunsets are orange and red for a reason. So that orange, red light is what tells your brain, please bring that cortisol down. And the opposite of cortisol is melatonin. Get that hormone up so that we can get sleepy. And throughout the night, that melatonin should still be high. So it's not just for sleep, sleep onset, it's for sleep maintenance. And that all has to do with that circadian rhythm that I talked about that is probably so off now with all our technology and modern world where we're not getting that light and that sunset. And one of my favorite things to do when you're out and if you can, is go and watch the sunset every night and the sunrise. That will absolutely reset your circadian rhythm. You know, if you're really struggling with sleep, just do this for two weeks and it will reset something that you cannot reset with food, you cannot reset with drugs, you cannot reset with all these gadgets that we have. But seeing the sunrise and sunset is what we used to do. You know, that's how we got up and that's how we knew to go back to sleep or go camping, you know, go out in nature, like just book a week or two off and not be surrounded by all these artificial light that is affecting us.

When we talk about circadian rhythm, we also have to talk about sleep drive. This is another factor that helps us fall asleep at night. So sleep drive is driven by this adenosine molecule. Adenosine is produced after glucose is metabolized by the cell. One of the byproducts is something called adenosine. And as the day goes on and as your metabolism continues, continues, you build up adenosine. Adenosine builds up and up and up. Just like you get more hungry, more hungry, more hungry until you eat. It's similar with your sleep drive. You get more tired, more tired, more tired, until 10pm comes around and you fall asleep. So this sleep drive is really important and there's things that affect sleep drive and then there's things that actually promote sleep drive. And we're going to talk about a lot of those throughout this course. Caffeine, though, looks really, really similar to adenosine. It's only a few molecules off. This means that caffeine can go and attach to those adenosine receptors and block them so they don't have their effect. This is why caffeine can keep us up and energized because it's blocking our sleep drive. It's blocking our ability to feel sleepy, even if it's at night. Now, caffeine has about a seven hour half life. This means that it's in your system for a really long time. There's a ton of people that are drinking caffeine past 2pm, even past 6pm or having a nighttime coffee before bed. And while if those individuals are still able to fall asleep, they might not be getting quality sleep. So this is something you have to take into consideration. I recommend that people stop consuming caffeine by noon to 2pm so that they can fall asleep at a normal time around 10pm without the caffeine in their system.

In Chinese medicine, there's a belief that we have a circadian rhythm and every organ in your body has a physiological clock. So your kidneys have a physiological clock, your heart, your brain, your liver and the liver's physiological clock. And what that means is that physiological clock is when the organ is the most active. That's when the organ cleanses itself, it has the most energy to regulate itself and go into homeostasis. So the liver biological clock is between 1 and 3am, the gallbladder is between 11 and 1, and between 11pm to 3am that window where we should be sleeping is where actually where the body is doing the most detox. And we're not even counting the brain yet. The glymphatic system is active at night, so there's three, suddenly three. So systems that are very active. And then the lymphatic system wakes up at night, 60% more active. So the body goes into a full mode of detoxification at night, is being busy all day, processing, digesting, breathing, helping you operate, think, live life. And then when you close down the body to rest at night, the body's very smart and it has its own ability to self regulate and dump the waste out. So if we don't properly sleep at night, we're not able to remove the toxins that our body needs to clear off in the evening. So let's go back a little bit to the liver. So the liver is the most active between 1 to 3am and many of my patients that come in to see me, they say I always wake up at 1am or 2am or 3am if you're waking up in during those times, your liver is detoxing, is doing what is meant to do. But it means that there's too many toxins that are waking your body up. So we're supposed to be sleeping through that time. The body's not meant to be waking up through that detox period. When the body wakes up during those times, there's a overcharge, there's too much, what we call Yang energy. There's the yin and yang. The Yang energy is that there's too much fire, too much toxicity, too much inflammation in that liver that is waking, is calling all systems to come help. And your body naturally wakes up during that time. So an increased exposure to toxins to our environment is going to attack our systems. And this is why, let's talk about alcohol. When patients drink alcohol, they don't sleep as well. Their, their brain is not hitting REM sleep, but also their liver is up at night trying to break down all the alcohol molecules. So the, the body is busy detoxifying.

Long story short, there's this master operator, the master circadian central clock system. And then the peripheral clocks are influenced by non light mediated factors, for example, meal timing, exercise, timing, things along those lines. And so let me just give you an example of how you can perturb both your circadian, your central clock and in your peripheral clocks. Let's say you eat, say your biggest meal at midnight, right? For example, your peripheral clocks within your GI tract are saying, hey, this is a time when we're sleeping, you're eating food. So then the tissue's literally kind of getting confused as to what time of the day it is. And that's going to have negative feedback inhibition on the entire circadian clock system. And so long story short for people to understand the take home message is when we eat, like the meal intervals, the consistency when we eat has a big influence on that night's sleep and also our entire circadian clock system. And so I think it's important to talk about this because at present intermittent fasting varies, one meal a day, time restricted feeding are very hot strategies that a lot of people are implementing to improve their health, potentially enhance longevity. But they can also be strategies when used appropriately to foster deep sleep. Because if you're having your meals, let's say you just do two meals a day or even three meals a day, keep it very simple. For most people, your body starts to anticipate, it's called the cephalic phase of digestion. So your body is anticipating that food coming in. And this is partly mediated by this circadian clock system. And so if we just get the peripheral clocks in sync with the central clock, then we can start to foster deep restorative sleep. And then when say 9, 30, 10 comes around, people then are, their bodies are saying to them, hey, it's time to go to bed, you know. Instead, you know, certain people will tell you like I love, I would love to go to bed at 10, but I'm just wired. Even though I'm tired, I'm wired. Because the circadian clock's system is imbalanced, the adrenals are raising cortisol and noradrenaline for Example, when they shouldn't be, those hormones should be down because they should be higher in the morning. And there's a lot of reasons why that can be. It can be from light exposure, being on the computer, watching stressful, you know, television news, you know, caffeine, things along those lines. But another big part of that could be missed and imbalanced meal timing. And so I like to underscore that as a, you know, a sleep enhancing strategy. A really good question comes up is what's the best time to eat to enhance and foster deep sleep? And I'm a little bit biased. You know, I used to do endurance athletics, semi pro bike racing and the mantra among cyclists, because in cycling you want to be strong, but you also need to be lean. Like your power to weight ratio really governs like literally who wins a Tour de France or not. And so an easy way to do that is to get in your calories that you need earlier in the day and stop eating as early as you can like. So athletes would train, you know, early in the morning, have a big lunch and then cut off. So they're fasting for large part of the day. And so I think for a lot of people, and again, I like to just add a little caveat here, context. I don't want people to change anything if what they're doing is working, only if these things are not working. So if you're struggling with sleep, if you're struggling with body composition, then try this. Try eating earlier in the day and starting your fast, if you will, your last meal as early as possible. And what I found through promoting this online, and this isn't just me talking about it, I report some of the time restricted feeding studies that have been conducted by major universities throughout the world in the past 10 years is they've found that early time restricted feeding enhances things like autophagy. It affects favorably mtor, which is a growth factor that can be linked with cancer and other diabetes and obesity and neurologic disorders. By eating earlier in the day and starting your fast earlier, that coincides with these peripheral clocks that we've been talking about within the GI tract, within the liver, within the muscle tissue. It seems that our GI tract about right now, when we film this at 10am roughly, it's when our GI tract and our juices and our motility is at its peak, right? It starts around 10, depending upon the study that you read between 10 and 4 is when your digestive function is optimal to receive a meal. Now what are most people doing? They're eating at 8pm, 9pm they're going out on the weekends after the bars. They have pizza, you know, things like that. And they wonder why their health is kind of a wreck and why they can't sleep.

So, yeah, to make a long story short, I think there's a lot of evidence emerging and I think it's a great tool if people have the ability to have the willpower to cut off their feeding window early enough.

So let's take all of this and put it into practical steps you can take today. First, I want to ask you some questions about your daytime routine. Do you get outside in the morning or do you go from your house to your car car to your office to the gym and then back home? I mean, if you go to the gym, that's good, but it's not bad. Can you today commit to spending about 15 minutes outside every morning without sunglasses so the light hits your eyes and goes into your pineal gland which regulates your circadian rhythm? Can you eat your lunch outside? Can you take a few walks throughout the day a few times a week? Can you exercise outside instead of inside? I mean, even if it's cold outside, it's so important to spend some time outdoors in the winter. I still prioritize time to go outside. I go cross country skiing. I go for long walks in the neighborhood or in the woods. It's good for my body, it's good for my brain, and it's great for my sleep. Getting sunlight is also vital for one other very obvious reason, vitamin D. Now, deficiencies in this vitamin affect over half the population and has been linked to to many cancers, to high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, depression, fibromyalgia, chronic muscle pain, bone loss, and autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis. Several studies have shown that low levels of vitamin D in the blood are associated with more sleep disturbances, less sleep and poor quality sleep. For now, I want you to commit to this before you check your phone or turn on your favorite podcast, the Doctor's Pharmacy. Obviously, I want you to step outside, even if it's just for a few minutes. Maybe you'll go for a quick walk or a jog. Maybe you'll meditate outside. Maybe you'll enjoy a cup of tea or coffee on your porch. Whatever it is, take a few minutes in the morning to embrace the power of sunlight. Now, let's talk about your nighttime routine. Are you still looking at screens until you fall asleep? Do you keep all the bright lights in your home on until you fall asleep? Do you work in bed. I want you to commit to this. Spend one to two hours before bed without screens. You won't believe how powerful this simple action can be when it comes to your sleep. If for some reason you can't commit to avoiding screen time before bed, I recommend wearing blue blue blocking glasses. Although nothing will be better than avoiding screens completely before bed, they can help also if you have to look at your computer or laptop at night. Also download something called F Lux L U X, which eliminates blue light from your screen. That's F lux. As far as light in your home, I like using orange or red bulbs or simply dimming lights in my house. Sometimes, if it's safe, I use candlelight. Remember when it's dark Melatonin, often known as the sleep hormone, is synthesized by our pineal gland right here. Now, if we're constantly exposing ourselves to light at night, it's going to be a problem. In her book Chasing the Sun, author Linda Getty says it's important to dim our nights and to brighten our days. And this means getting more sunlight during the day, especially in the morning, and minimizing our exposure to light, especially artificial light at nighttime. This might be one of the most important tips for resetting your circadian rhythm. Next, let's talk about when you sleep and when you wake up. Can you commit to going to sleep and waking up at roughly the same time every day? I know it's not always possible, but for me, 90% of the time I try to get in bed by 10 and I'm up at 6 6. And if I break this routine for a couple of days, I definitely feel it. Now, while it might seem boring to have this routine, it's a great way to set your circadian rhythm and to optimize your sleep. And finally, let's talk about when you eat. We're going to get into this more in the next lesson, but for now I want you to commit to enjoying your last meal at least three hours before bed. If dinner time falls around six or after, try to keep this meal lighter and your heaviest meal in the midday or the morning. This might seem completely abnormal to your typical routine, but it's a great way to prepare your body for bed. Also, if you enjoy coffee or tea, try to have your last cup before noon or at the latest before two. And if you're caffeine sensitive, you might try quitting it altogether. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about what to eat. We're going to dive into all things nutrition, including balancing your blood sugar and how to time your meals to get better sleep. We're also going to talk about the connection between our gut and our gut health and our sleep. Have you ever had a big heavy meal before bed and then had a poor night's sleep? How about a few drinks before bed followed by a night of snoring or tossing and turning? Or maybe you deprioritize eating whole balanced meals and that blood sugar dysregulation kept you up and hungry at night, maybe even gave you night sweats. Most of us have experienced the direct effects of food and alcohol on sleep. But what we eat and when we eat has a profound impact on our sleep in more ways than you know. Today our experts are going to walk you through the importance of nutrition and how we eat and when we eat and how that can be a powerful tool or a foe depending on the choices we make. We're also going to dive into the world of gut health. How does our sleep impact our gut and how does our gut impact our sleep? We'll find out in this lesson. I truly believe that the two most common culprits threatening your sleep wake cycles are unregulated blood sugar levels or poor nutrition status and chronic stress. We're going to talk about our chronic stress in the upcoming lessons. But for now, let's turn to our experts for a lesson. Nutrition, blood sugar and sleep.

Nutrition affects our sleep in so many different ways. One of the biggest things that I see is when women come into the practice and they're actually restricting their calories so they're just not eating enough food. I call this under eating. And a lot of women and men are under. What happens when you don't eat enough calories is that you actually get a reduction in your slow wave sleep. This makes a lot of sense from an adaptive perspective. Slow wave sleep is when we produce about 70% of our growth hormone. Why would we need to produce growth hormone if we're not building tissues? Right. If you're in a catabolic state, meaning you're not eating enough calories, the last thing you need is a hormone that helps you build tissues. However, growth hormone is essential for so many other things. And if we're not getting the benefits of growth hormone, then it's really detrimental to our health. Growth hormones needed for bone mineral density as well, decreasing fat mass, improving lean body mass, and overall anti aging. So if you're restricting your calories too much, I would say less than 1500 for a woman is not enough calories for sure. Then you're not getting the benefits of growth hormone and the benefits of slow wave sleep. The other factor of nutrition is going to be your ability to regulate your blood sugar levels. Blood sugar regulation is key when it comes to nutrition. And this is something that I hammer home all the time because it can make a huge difference in your cognitive performance, your emotional regulation and your overall health. You see, most of the neurotransmitters in your brain actually require stable blood sugar levels to, to be produced and released. These are things like dopamine, serotonin, gaba. These are your happy neurotransmitters, your motivation, neurotransmitters. Everything that's gonna affect your mood throughout the day relies on a stable blood sugar all day long. However, blood sugar also affects your sleep at night. So if somebody comes into the office and they say, you know, it's really weird, I wake up at 3am every single night and I have no idea why, a little bell goes off in my head and it says, okay, likely a low blood sugar issue. This is because if your blood sugar declines, your body's natural response is to increase cortisol and adrenaline. These are two hormones that can be literally life saving. They increase your blood sugar in response to low blood sugar levels. They want to get you back up to baseline. However, these two hormones are also responsible for waking us up in the morning. And you don't want to be woken up at 3am, which is exactly what happens when blood sugar dips at night.

So a lot of individuals aren't aware that they have a blood sugar issue and they're waking up out of survival. Their brain is actually waking them up because their blood sugar has dropped and their adrenals, if they're not working well, is releasing a little bit of adrenaline. And it's that adrenaline that wakes you up to say, please go eat now. Some people will say, I wake up and I'm hungry. And that's a clear sign that their blood sugar was probably low. But sometimes that's not the case, that they're still just in bed and they're flip flopping and they're trying to fall back asleep and they can't. Sometimes people will say, I woke up to urinate. But it's not truly that the urination woke them up, it's that they wake up and then they think they have to go urinate. So blood sugar is a huge one. And one of the tests for that is I actually say, please have a handful of nuts or have some sweet potatoes or some quinoa or something like A complex carbohydrate right before you go to sleep. And just try this for a few nights and you'll be amazed at how many people say, I slept a lot better when I eat right before bed. Now, usually we tell people, don't eat before bed, you know, but if someone has an adrenal issue and they eat dinner at 6 or 7pm, the sugar from that meal lasts about 6 hours. And then after that, your liver has to kick in and get that sugar, sugar out and use it so that your brain sustains that nice blood sugar throughout sleep. If it can't do that. And let's say your liver is not working well and that doesn't mean you have liver failure, but let's say that process is difficult to do. Or the adrenals can't release cortisol, which is a glucocorticoid. The whole purpose of cortisol, which is your stress hormone, is to help the body maintain that blood sugar. If it can't do that, it releases the that adrenaline that's going to wake you up. So how do you fix that? You don't want to go and just keep having sugar before bed. Or these complex carbs, you have to look at your blood sugar control throughout the day, and that starts from your breakfast to every meal. So one of the things I recommend for my patients, especially if they're women and they've been on the keto diet, which I find a lot of them feel great, they've lost a lot of weight, but they can't sleep well. And it's because they have no carbs. And we need carbs. We need a little bit of carbs. And it can absolutely affect your sleep if you're not getting enough carbs. So sometimes I'll say either cycle some carbs in or make sure that you're having a complete meal or have a handful of something right before bed and see if that's the issue. So finding out the cause of that is much better than taking an Ambien or taking a sleeping aid, because that's not fixing the problem.

What your ideal plate should look like for blood sugar stabilization is this. Half of your plate should be non starchy vegetables. These are things like spinach, kale, arugula, broccoli, cauliflower. All of these things are really, really potent in antioxidants, vitamins and minerals that we need for sleep, which we'll talk about soon. But they're also lower in carbohydrates, so you're not getting spikes in blood sugar. That can then lead to dips later on. A quarter of your plate should be those starchy vegetables. These are things like sweet potatoes, yams, squash, all of that good stuff. I say about a quarter of your plate should be comprised of that. You're going to change the amount based on your goals and your body type. So some people can eat way more carbohydrates than other people, and it should be based on your carbohydrate tolerance. Your physician or your doctor can help you work out what that is for you. But you don't want to be gaining weight and you don't want to be losing weight. And that's one that you can tailor. Based on that, the last quarter of your plate is going to be composed of your protein source. And this can be anything from grass fed beef, pasture raised chickens, wild caught salmon. Any of those things are going to make about the palm size of your hand for protein. Now, protein is essential for sleep health for a few reasons. And one of those reasons is that tryptophan is the precursor to 5 HTP, which is the precursor to serotonin, which then gets converted to melatonin. And melatonin is going to help you fall asleep at night. So really, the tryptophan from your protein is the building block for melatonin for sleep quality. The other reason that protein is important is what we just talked about. It's really important for blood sugar regulation. So you need enough protein in your diet to help regulate your blood sugar throughout the day so that you don't dip too low at night. The last component of your plate is going to be fat. So things like olive oil, ghee, coconut oil. You need at least one to two tablespoons of fat on all of your meals to help stabilize your blood sugar and produce enough of the Omega 3s that help reduce inflammation, which then also help affect your sleep quality.

Sometimes having a high elevation of sugar can wake you up as well as a low glucose can wake you up. And I see this a lot with my patients that have diabetes. I'm going to share this example. One of my male patients, a 48 year old male, Steven, he came to see me and he was already diagnosed with sleep apnea, but he had very high blood pressure, had atherosclerosis already, so he was building plaque in his arteries and he had uncontrolled diabetes. His hemoglobin A1C was 9, which should be again less than 5.7, but and hemoglobin A1C measures how one manages glucose over a period. Of three months. So his levels were very elevated. He was on metformin, he was on prescription medications, he was taking supplements. He was taking alpha lipoic acid, and he was doing.

Curcumin. He was doing cinnamon and chromium. He was doing all the tips we tell our patients to take for managing sugar. He was exercising one hour a day, and he wasn't really. He was on a keto diet, so he wasn't even having any carbohydrates. And his sugar levels on waking up were consistently high. For he shared. Stephen said that in the morning, on waking up, his fasting glucose was over, always over 300, and he couldn't get it to come down. And even despite everything he was doing. So the clue here was that he had sleep apnea and he was not using his CPAP machine. So when I asked him, are you using your CPAP machine? He said, no, I hate the machine. I don't want to use that. He actually believed that he didn't have sleep apnea. He said, it's just the test is wrong. And his wife was at the appointment and she said, no. He wakes up, I can hear him snoring, choking, gasping for air at night. So he sleeps much better when he has the sleep apnea, when he has the CPAP machine for the sleep apnea. So the connection here is that Stephen didn't realize the importance of sleep. When he doesn't sleep at night, his insulin levels go up. And when the insulin goes up, the glucose levels also increase. So we end up with insulin resistance. The cortisol levels go up because the body is under a lot of stress. And the more cortisol you have at night signals the cells to relieve more, more, more glucose. So the glucose goes up and then the cells. Cells are not conversing with each other. Insulin is not hearing glucose, so we have to put more and more and more insulin. So he has ended up with insulin resistance and diabetes that is uncontrolled. And he wakes up, he couldn't understand, why do I wake up with such high glucose level. He said, I go to bed, my glucose is 85, I don't eat through the night, and then I wake up with a level of 300. What's going on at night? And I see this a lot in my patients that have diabetes. And the key factor here is asleep. He's not resting at night. It's becoming a stressful process. He's developing more insulin resistance. The body's under a lot of stress when we don't sleep. It becomes a Greatly stressful process to our body. One of the worst stressors for our health is not sleeping. The body goes under a lot of stress. Adrenaline goes up, epinephrine goes up, cortisol, and there is all signaling that the body to go on sympathetic overdrive, which means pull more glucose from the storage, pull glucose from the cells. But the body doesn't know what to do with this glucose. So it's just an elevation, he's not burning the glucose at night. Once we made the connection, he saw the importance of sleep and sugar management. He started using his CPAP machine and we also guided him to do some of the exercises to strengthen up. He also got a mouthpiece to help from time to time. If you want to take a break from the CPAP machine, he had a dentist made a mouth guard unique for him to help him keep that palate higher and the tongue relaxed so he could get more air in. So he. The CPAP machine sometimes can be uncomfortable for people. They do have a pillow form as well, but so he rotated from now and then using the mouth guard. But within three months of just using the CPAP machine and working with bringing more breath into the airways without changing anything else, he was sleeping and his hemoglobin A1C levels had dropped down to 6.4. So it was a drastic change. He was already exercising, he was already eating right, but in here for him, he wasn't sleeping and nothing else changed. So for a lot of patients that have uncontrolled glucose or pre diabetic, getting quality and restful sleep is really important for them.

There are a few key nutrients that we need for sleep. So let's start with iron. Iron is a nutrient that we need for virtually every process in the body. And that's because iron's job is to attach to our red blood cells. It holds oxygen. It holds oxygen and it delivers it to all of our cells in the body for energy production. So iron is crucial in general health. Iron is also needed as a cofactor for melatonin production though. And so when we say we need iron for health, we have to think about who doesn't have enough iron. And menstruating females are one of the main groups of people that don't get enough iron or they get enough iron, but they're bleeding monthly so that they're losing too much iron. This is why every female who is premenopausal should be getting their ferritin levels checked. Ferritin is your storage form of iron, and if your ferritin levels are below 30 nanograms per deciliter. This means that you don't have enough iron to optimally function your mitochondria and produce hormones like melatonin. So a ferritin level of less than 30 is actually not deficient. It doesn't mean that you have a frank anemia, but you still might not be functioning optimally. If you have a frank anemia, meaning your hemoglobin, hematocrit, red blood cell cells are low, then you definitely need more iron. You need to be including iron rich foods in your diet. Things like spinach, red meat, liver, or you need to be supplementing with an iron as well. Now there's other factors that are called methylation factors that are important for sleep quality. These are things like B5, B6 and same. These are a few of your methylation cofactors. Methylation is the process of adding a methyl group to a compound to either turn it on, turn it off, or excrete it from the body. Methylation is well known by the gene mutation mthfr. So MTHFR is a gene that codes for your body's ability to methylate. And it's well known that MTHFR has a variety of effects on the body. However, I think that these are weighted way too heavily. Some people get the diagnosis of an MTHFR SNP mutation and they think that all bets are off and they're not going to be able to detoxify to sleep, to produce neurotransmitters or to balance their hormones. This is not the case at all. Having an MTHFR mutation only means that you have to be extra careful about implementing lifestyle and dietary changes to prevent the expression of that MTHFR mutation from ever even coming to fruition. So what this means is eating a bunch of leafy greens, three cups per day of leafy greens can help reduce the extra expression of MTHFR mutations. Other things are improving sleep quality which we're talking about. Also reducing stress levels can really help minimize the expression of mthfr. Now when we talk about B vitamins, one other B vitamin that's essential in sleep is B12. B12 is one of the vitamins that we need for virtually every process in the body. We need it for energy production, we need it to to produce new red blood cells. We also need it for methylation. So B12 has been linked to your ability to have appropriate sleep quality as well as sleep duration. B12 has been one of the most studied nutrients for sleep optimization. You can get B12 through your diet in forms like clams, beef, liver. However, vegans and vegetarians are much more likely to be deficient in B12 complexes because they're coming from animal sources. So vegetarians and vegans need to get their B12 levels checked and ensure that they have adequate levels for sleep. The last nutrient I want to talk about is vitamin D. Vitamin D is essential for sleep for a few reasons. Vitamin D receptors have been found in the brain stem, and when vitamin D docks to these receptors, it increases the production of acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that's needed to induce the paralysis that occurs naturally during sleep, between phases. Now, we're not really sure why that paralysis occurs, but we're sure that it's there for a reason and we need it for high quality sleep. And did you know that about 40% of the US population is deficient in vitamin D? This is a huge number. That's almost half of the population being deficient in a key nutrient. And when I see that somebody is deficient in vitamin D, I not only want to supplement them with vitamin D to get their levels back, but I also want to consider, are they also deficient in sunlight? So vitamin D deficiency is one key that people are not getting outside enough in getting sunlight. And we know that sunlight exposure is the driving force, the number one driving force to regulate your circadian rhythm. So if you're not getting enough vitamin D, you're not getting enough sunlight, your circadian rhythm is likely thrown off. So the best thing that you can do Is aim for two 30 minute sessions outside per day to get your vitamin D level up, but also to get that sunlight exposure in.

Now let's talk about our gut health. Our gut bacteria regulate many of our body's functions, from creating vitamins, to controlling our immune system, to our brain function, and of course our metabolism and weight. They are critical to our long term health. Unfortunately, modern living and our bad lifestyle choices have been hard on these little bugs in our gut. The standard western diet is impoverished of the things our beneficial gut bacteria require to thrive. All the chemicals from processed foods. The environmental toxins we take in, like glyphosate, only make the situation worse. Our guts become damaged when you eat a processed diet that's high in sugar and starch and don't eat enough of the right fiber and the right prebiotics, or take too many gut busting drugs like antibiotics, acid blockers for reflux, anti inflammatory drugs, hormones, and lots more. Think of your gut as an inner Garden. Just as with any garden, when you let the weeds take over, you get into trouble. Now let's hear from our experts.

Serotonin is another neurotransmitter and that we talked about, that is a precursor for melatonin. Serotonin typically is needed and it can be stimulating, right? That's what people taking their antidepressants or they're trying to get the serotonin levels to stay high in their body. But sometimes there's a huge link between depression and serotonin deficiency, which causes infection, insomnia. Or is it the other way around? Is it that the low serotonin caused the insomnia which then leads to the depression? I'm going to group them all together and say serotonin is huge for sleep. And one of the things I use in practice to see if this is the cause of the sleep issues or the sleep maintenance issues is give patients the precursor to serotonin as a trial to see if this theory is correct. And that's 5HTP or HTP. 5HTP is a supplement that we can readily get. Obviously, talk to your doctor because you cannot take it if you're on SSRIs or medications that also increase the level of serotonin in the body. But serotonin is made in the gut. And what we're seeing is this epidemic of the microbiome of the gut being off, which again we've seen when you don't sleep well, different bugs grow and that can throw it off. But also the bugs in your gut, like equal E. Coli and enterococci, they actually make five htp. So if you have an imbalance in your gut and you have that dysbiosis we're still in, that is a chicken of the egg. Is the insomnia causing that? Or is the change in our, you know, from our food and the environmentally, you know, toxic world we're living affecting the microbiome of the gut? And that's making us depressed. Low 5 HTP, low serotonin, low melatonin, and making us not see sleep well.

Other neurotransmitters that we have are GABA and glycine and L theanine. So these neurotransmitters are called inhibitory versus excitatory. So we have two kinds. The ones that over the ones that stimulate you, that wake you up, such as dopamine, taurine, and then we have the ones that calm you down to allow you to rest and sleep. Similar to what we talk about with the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. We have neurotransmitters that allow us to be sharp, alert, focused. And we have neurotransmitters that allow us to calm and relax at night. So GABA is probably one of the most important neurotransmitters. GABA is a natural, we call it as a natural. Xanax is the relaxer for the body, and GABA is also produced in the evening. Gaba, the neurotransmitter GABA is also made by the bacteria, by your friendly, good bacteria in your gut. So if someone doesn't have a healthy gut or a healthy microbiome, they're not going to make enough GABA in their body. And lack of GABA leads to a lot of anxiety for patients. So neurotransmitters also L theanine is another one that calms the brain and calms once a cortisol level. So theanine is used to reduce cortisol and calm all that stress in the brain. So L Theanine, GABA are some very important neurotransmitters that if someone is low on, they're going to experience a lot of anxiety and not be able to cope with stress. Serotonin is very connected for depression support and L theanine and GABA for anxiety. Those are the neurotransmitters that I always want to make sure my patients have proper levels in order to support pathways of sleep. Again, when we don't sleep, we don't regenerate those neurotransmitters. So again, is the cycle, the lack of them causes you not to be able to fall asleep. But not sleeping also depletes the body from it. So a lot of times when we have a broken cycle of sleep, we do have to supplement with GABA with L theanine with 5 HTP or melatonin to allow the brain to reset and calm at night until the body starts to make it on their own. We have to correct the gut biome. We have to work with diet, with the gastrointestinal tract, clear, whatever's not right in the gut, work with food in order to shift that. But often it's like, where do you start? You do have. Often I find that I have to supplement my patients until they can sleep, because once they can sleep, they can make a lot of these nutrients on their own. They can heal and reset. So it's a step that often has to be done.

In Chinese medicine, everything starts in the gut. And what we love in Western medicine is you will see patients when they have a sleep disorder and they don't have sleep apnea, or they. They can't figure out what it is, they'll either get sent to the gastroenterologist, they'll get sent to the psychiatrist or the psych, you know, and get a medication for anxiety, depression, or be labeled as mood disorder, causing the sleep issues. But one of the main things I see is these people have digestive issues, you know, and so it's not that digestive issues cause insomnia or insomnia causes. Because every single system in your body is connected. So it's not just this. We love to say the gut brain access, or the heart, this access, but there is an access between every single part of you. And everything starts from the gut because all your nutrients come from the gut. And one of the most important things I look at deficient in almost every patient I see are minerals. And minerals come from our soil, from our vegetables, and they're so much lower nowadays than what they used to be. So we find a lot of our patients, almost everyone I see, doesn't have enough magnesium, which is a smooth muscle relaxant, which is so important for sleep. Zinc, iodine, copper, manganese, all these minerals, even iron. Iron deficiency is a huge cause of issues with sleep, especially restless leg syndrome. So they've done research finding your ferritin levels, which is a indirect measure of iron, your stored iron levels. If they're below 50, the cutoff is usually 10 or 20, really pretty much lower. But if it's below 50, they found that you're going to have more restless Lexin syndrome. And when they increase the Iron stores to 60, they found that that improved. So minerals, which come from the way you absorb and digest and assimilate food, which is all your digestive system, is huge for sleep. And often I will use minerals for patients at nighttime or in the evening. I'll say stop your multivitamin. So vitamins are more stimulating. I like vitamins to be taken in the daytime, and I like to take my minerals separately and have patients take minerals at the nighttime. I always also find there's a yin and yang to everything energetically. And so vitamins are more yang, right? They're supposed to vitamin B12, it gives you energy and then magnesium and a lot of the minerals supposed to calm your nervous system down. So gut health, a lot of times it doesn't have to be that you have diarrhea or constipation. Constipation or sibo, or an actual huge disorder. It might just be that you're not digesting very well. And I've seen this when I eat heavy and I'm bloated or I can't just don't feel good at night. That will absolutely have an effect on the quality of my sleep. Because my body's role at night is to clean the cells and repair DNA. Repair the cells, especially in the gut, which usually turn over every three days. But if my gut doesn't have the nutrients the body needs to do that, or it's full of food or, you know, alcohol and it can't do that, I'm going to have poor sleep, which then makes my digestive system weak the next day. There's certain strains of probiotics that, you know, there's some research showing that can have an effect on sleep. Or people, people who are more anxious have this, these lower. And so sometimes we'll use that, or sometimes I'll say if they're okay with yogurt, to have yogurt in the evenings and see how well they're sleep. Even if they have a dairy issue. Sometimes I find yogurt is okay for a lot of my patients because it's already fermented and the protein's been broken down. But it's really for the probiotics in there that I'm trying to assess is the gut effective affecting the brain, which is telling the body to sleep. So one of the things that we can do for helping digestive flow of juices is making sure you're very relaxed and in almost a meditative state before you eat. So looking at your food to the point where you are salivating so that I know if you're salivating, there's probably other juices coming out elsewhere. And spitting your food out once and just seeing how can you tell what. What you just ate. So did you chew really well? And it all starts in the mouth. If someone does have low stomach acid, and some signs might be that they crave sugar after they eat, you know, or they feel really heavy if they have a lot of protein like meat, or they even avoid meat because they feel so full after they eat, that could be a sign of low stomach acid. Sibo might be the same thing. It's. It's bacteria is coming in because it's not very acidic. Or even if someone tells me they drink a lot of water with their meal, well, they're diluting a lot of that stomach acid. One of my favorites is to use bitters, herbs that are bitter, Swedish bitters. So me just saying bitters, I started to Salivate, Right. So my brain knows that if there's something bitter in my mouth, juices are going to come out. Stomach acid comes out. Gentian, radicchio, a lot of these, even Italian salads, are bitter. To help them digest the heavy meal or the meat they might eat. Apple, cider vinegar, you know, that you can put in a little bit of water and have a shot of that before you eat. Or taking actually digestive enzymes like HCl, pepsin, bile. But talk to your doctor about that. A lot of people get worried. Oh, I don't want to get dependent on taking digestive enzymes. And I always say it is so much better to take something that's going to actually break down the food that you just spent money on or made to get the nutrients right. Well, that's why you're eating, is really to give your body a message. And if that message can't even make it there because it didn't even get broken down, then we are worrying about the wrong thing. So it's more important to make sure you have enough stomach acid. And as we age, stomach acid production goes down, it does not go up. So if someone gets put on an acid blocking agent at the age of 60, it's not because they have too much acid, it's just not possible. It's because the sphincter is loose and that acid is coming up, or it's because they don't have enough stomach acid and that food that came in there is sitting there in their stomach. It's not getting digested and now it's backing up and that's what's causing that burn.

So I would say for digestive health is really looking at what you're eating throughout the day and taking and digesting digestive enzyme or apple cider vinegar or bitters before meals to really see if that can help. Taking minerals at night can help. And making sure your water is clean and you're not drinking with your meals and alkalining. You know that stomach acid that's supposed to burn your finger? If I put my finger in your stomach when you're eating, it should burn, but I'm, I'm probably going to say it won't because you're having a lot of things with it. Keeping alcohol and fruit away from meals to make sure again that food gets digested. If you have to have a drink and you're used to having drinks at night, please keep it away from bedtime. So it absolutely has an effect on sleep quality. So have it earlier, have it at 6pm you know, cut it off at 7pm so that by 10pm your liver's had enough time to get that alcohol out of the system. System.

Having problems in our biome can actually cause us to have anxiety and insomnia. So it goes both ways. Either the biome itself can cause you to stay up at night, or the lack of sleep can impact your biome. So let's first talk about how having potentially an imbalance in our gut flora will keep you up at night. Having a flora that is depleted of the essential immune soldiers that come out to help you fight infections and detoxify environmental pollutants. If you're low on your microbiome and your flora is not right, you are likely to have overgrowth of other infections and other microbes such as yeast. I see very commonly in my clinic that people that struggle with Candida or Sibo, which is small intestinal bowel overgrowth and parasites as well, can have a lot of issues with sleep. So when the biome is not happy, you're going to see that a patient, as a result of the biome not being strong because there's a connection of another infection in there. The imbalance happens in the gut where you're not able to fall asleep. So first, patients that have parasites can have actually quite a bit of a problem falling asleep. Sleep. I'm going to give you a case study story. One of my patients that came to see me as a 25 year old female, Jennifer, came to see me and she had had trouble with bloating, gas, she was having a lot of diarrhea, canker sores, she was having acne, she had some hemorrhoids, a lot of gut issues. So it was obvious that something was going on with her gut. And she had already seen three gastroenterology, she even had a colonoscopy. She had seen from time to time even blood in her stool. And they couldn't figure out what it was. She had even changed her diet, she wasn't eating gluten, so they had worked up her gut issues. And on taking her history, she mentioned that she was having a lot of insomnia. And she said that she had trouble falling asleep, but she would always wake up also in the middle of the night with racing thoughts, a lot of anxiety, her body was just up and she couldn't fall asleep. She also mentioned that she had a very difficult time around the full moon. That's when her body had the most difficulty staying asleep and falling asleep. And she said her anxiety was just really increased around the Full moon. So on knowing her history, I had her do a stool panel to see what would show up. And when we do a stool panel, we like to do a comprehensive analysis to know what's the biome doing. I was very interested to see what's her microflora. Does she have enough digestive enzymes? Is she lacking nutrients to modulate inflammation? Is the gut toxic? And we're also reading parameters for parasites, tapeworms, yeast, bacterial infections. So when her stool panel came back, she showed up with extremely high levels of, of parasites. And she also had her flora was. This is one of the worst cases I've seen of someone very empty under their biome. Their flora was very depleted. You can actually measure. So her little soldiers were down. She was, she had an overgrowth of parasites and very low markers of her flora. And she had a lot of inflammation markers. Culprotectin levels were really high, beta glucuronides were really high. Those are two inflammatory markers that show up on someone has inflammation in the gut. So I could see clearly that we have a case of a patient here that has a gut infection that's not sleeping as a result of the volume keeping her the, the parasites waking up. Parasites also tend to wake up at night. A lot of the bacterial overgrowth wakes up at night. The gut cleanses at night. How we mentioned that we detox our lymphatic system, the brain deliver. The gut is ultimately the final place where all toxins that we have pulled out of the body go through and the gut goes to wakes up to detoxify. So the gallbladder we mentioned between 11:00pm to 1:00am is the most active. So it's pulling all the toxins from the liver is clearing infections, it's clearing any toxicity. And the gallbladder is dumping all that bile into the large to the small intestine to be given to the large intestine later on before we wake up in the morning. That's when the large intestine is the most active, but through the night is detoxifying. So when we have an imbalance of flora, the flora, the flora wakes up at night to clean up, clean house, so it cleans out the intestinal tract. And if there was an overgrowth of a bacteria or a parasite is going to wake your body up because there's a lot of enzymatic activity and it causes a lot of inflammation. So someone waking up is the gut brain connection. You're waking up because there's an imbalance in the flora. So with my patient, she had Parasites. We did a parasite cleansing regimen for her and finding out what the source was of the parasites, how she got exposed to it and really replenished the flora. After we healed some of her leaky gut issues, but remove the infection, we were able to support her to giving her a lot of also prebiotic and probiotic foods. And when it comes to rebalancing one's flora, if someone has an infection in the gut or just not the best balance flora. I really love to use food to heal the gut. I do love using probiotics, which are great, but a lot of patients, sometimes they can't tolerate even probiotics. Their gut might be too sensitive. So I love to use prebiotic foods and some of the ones I had her do where chicory root chicory is actually is a form of dandelion. So you can get it in the green form and saute. So she was eating chicory daily. I love to use artichokes, so getting some artichokes, even if you get some organic frozen artichokes and saute with onions, cooked onions are very healing for the gut and the flora. So probably it will increase your probiotic density. Also doing asparagus is another one to add to the diet and garlic and onions. So she was eating daily these foods. And then we did a lot of probiotic foods. So I was having her eat sauerkraut in her meals, just about a tablespoon at lunch and a tablespoon at dinner. And as we're including all these foods to feed the biome and killing the parasites, we put her in an herbal protocol to kill the parasites within four months. Parasites can be hard to get rid of, but within four months, about 80% of the load of the parasitic load was gone. She obviously also did some colonics and some sauna. But increasing her flora and getting rid of the parasites, her sleep changed significantly. That's the only change we did was to treat her gut. And her body was able not to fall asleep. By the fourth month, she was no longer waking up during full moon. She said she was actually afraid of the full moon because she knew she was going to be up and her anxiety was going to be up, but her body was able to rest. And eventually by just getting the volume and the flora up to normal, inflammation markers came down in her stool panel and she was able to regain back her sleep. Anxiety went down. So this is a clear case of how gut imbalances can really alter the sleep cycle because the volume is not happy. But the other way Happens as well. If you're not sleeping enough, you were lacking enough sleep. If we're not conscious of our sleep cycle and really shorting our sleep, we are going to see that our gut gets very unhappy. And the studies are showing how lack of sleep depletes the amount of flora. And they did a study in Japan where they were tracking students.

In med school and they were about to take their exams. And a month prior they were measuring, they were tracking their sleep, their stress level and patients that and gut symptoms and volume. And patients that were getting full sleep, the full seven to eight hours before their exams were able to perform better. Obviously their brain function was better, but their volume, their microbiome were higher, their levels were higher. In their gut, they were healthier versus the group that was lacking on sleep. Their microbiome was, the levels were changing and they, they saw the level of toxins in the gut increase. So the, the bacteria itself can actually get quite stressed out. And if it gets stressed out, it secretes a lot of.

Enzymes that can trigger anxiety for the body that makes it harder to fall asleep. So the lack of sleep will also change your microbiome, it will rob your biome. And that starts a whole cascade of problems with, we can't digest foods anymore. We're not making healthy neurotransmitters. Gas, bloating, learning is compromised. They follow these students that got the full sleep and the students that didn't get the full sleep and saw a change in their volume. We can truly impact gut health by the amount of sleep we get. This is very important for patients that have ibs, patients that have ibd, inflammatory bowel disease. Some of these conditions are hard to diagnose. They, a lot of my patients have ibs, they have poor sleep. And by correcting their sleep, you always see the gut healing. The gut is able to regenerate and cleanse properly at night and have better flora. And again, the liver is cleansing at night. So they're all working together. You, when you talk about the body, you can't really separate it. You have to look at as the whole totality that it is. And gut health is really essential here in connection to sleep.

So what we eat and when we eat matters as well as the quality of our gut health. Here are some steps you can take today to balance your blood sugar and to optimize your nutrition and gut health for better sleep. There's a saying that goes, eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and supper like a popper. That means you eat your biggest meal early in the day and your lightest meal at night. We typically eat our heaviest meal at night when our bodies are least capable of handling it. Now, you don't necessarily need to have your first meal early in the morning. Some folks practice time restricted eating or what's called intermittent fasting and have their first meal around 10, 30 or 11. That's fine if it works for you. What I don't recommend is having your first meal at noon or 1pm and your last meal at 8pm 30 or 9. Try eating breakfast earlier in the day and your last meal before seven whenever you can. Next, try to keep at least a 12 hour window between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the next day. This means if you eat your Last meal at 7, your first meal the next day at breakfast, literally breaking the fast would be at the earliest 7am Speaking of breaking your fast, what you eat, especially in the morning for your first meal is really important. The winning combination for keeping any meal to keep your blood sugar balanced and keep yourself from crashing later in the day is healthy fat and protein and fiber in the morning. Instead of carbs and sugar, which is what most Americans eat for breakfast in the form of cereal, bagels, bread, muffins. You know what? For example, a great breakfast could include eggs with lots of veggies and an avocado or a protein shake with greens and nuts in it. In the materials that go with this lesson, you can find my two favorite breakfast recipes. Also, keep that combination of healthy fats, protein and fiber for lunch and dinner too. My general rule is that 75% of your plate by volume should be plant foods. I call that plant rich eating. Things like kale, arugula, broccoli, peppers, brussels sprouts, lots more. And then you want about a fist size full of protein that's like your palm essentially, and a healthy servings of fat. For me, I like to have a big green salad with wild canned salmon for lunch. I drizzle a bunch of olive oil on top. I don't worry about the fat. For your best sleep, you want to avoid foods that spike your blood sugar and then fuel cravings and get you on this vicious roller coaster. And that means you should avoid things like processed sugars and refined carbohydrates from bread and pasta and other flour products. If you're going to eat grains, eat whole food grains, not flour or ground grains. Whole grains like wild rice, black rice, quinoa, millet, buckwheat. You want to eat foods that are rich in the nutrients that help your sleep. Things that our experts discuss such as vitamin C, iron, magnesium, zinc and make sure your vitamin D levels are optimal and that means at least 45 to 75 nanograms per milliliter. If they are lower, you might need to supplement now. Unfortunately, many of us, probably 80% of us, are insufficient or deficient in vitamin D. For a full list of approved foods for your 10 day sleep reset, check out the lesson materials as our experts mentioned and some individuals might be experiencing blood sugar dysregulation at night. And if you get up between 1 and 3am and you're hungry or you suspect low blood sugar is causing your sleep problems or you're having hot flashes at night, try having a little bit of sweet potato or maybe some almond butter before bed and see if that helps. When it comes to caffeine, have your last cup of coffee or black or green tea before noon. Now if you're sensitive to the effects of caffeine, you might want to quit it altogether. You might be able to have a little green tea later in the afternoon, but keep the coffee and black tea for the morning. If you're sensitive to caffeine or you're dependent on coffee to get up in the morning, I want you to consider weaning off it for a bit. Try going from multiple cups to one cup, then half a cup, maybe a quarter cup. Then switch to green tea so you taper off and you don't get that caffeine withdrawal headache. Just try it for a few weeks and see if your sleep improves. Now as mentioned, there are a few important things we can do when it comes to improving our digestion and our gut for optimal sleep. First, as Dr. Afrouz mentioned, be present with your food. You shouldn't be multitasking when you eat, you should be just eating. Also, listen to your mother's advice and chew your food. This is going to allow you to create some strong digestive fires that you need need to absorb the nutrients in your food. In fact, your enzymes in your mouth start the digestion process before you even swallow, so make sure you chew. Also consider taking bitters or digestive enzymes. I recommend some of my favorite in the lesson materials. Next, avoid gut damaging foods. Things like processed sugar, refined carbs, artificial sweeteners, refined oils from soybean and canola oil and all kinds of fish food additives and chemicals and thickeners that mess up your gut. You can also increase your consumption of polyphenols. These are all the colorful compounds that give fruits and vegetables their color. Recent Research is starting to unveil the importance of polyphenols for the gut. Now, when my gut was damaged a few years ago from antibiotics and mold, I had put together a protocol to repair my microbiome. One thing I've been doing is upping my polyfill phenol intake. I've been using cranberry and pomegranate concentrate in my smoothies combined with a full gut protocol, and so far I've been feeling awesome. You can find my gut Healing shake in addition to my favorite supplements for optimizing the gut and gut health in the course materials. If you suspect deeper gut challenges, you'll want to work with a good functional medicine practitioner to identify if you're dealing with something like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth or parasites. And they can help you design a protocol to heal your gut. In our next lesson, we're going to dive deep into the complex world of hormones. Your hormones are intricately linked with your ability to sleep, or not sleep. You might have noticed that there's one key factor that connects all the different topics we've been discussing in the Sleep Master class class. What is that factor? It's our hormones. Our hormones help us maintain optimal health and they keep us happy, focused and peaceful, unless they're out of balance. Then the opposite. They control everything from your stress response through your adrenal glands to your blood sugar balance to your pancreas, to your thyroid hormone via the thyroid gland, to your sexual behavior and function through our reproductive organs. Hormones are also there to control our growth and our sleep and our mood and lots more. Unfortunately, most of us are living out of harmony with our natural biological rhythms, which is causing an epidemic of hormonal dysregulation. Understand how and why these systems get out of balance, and you're going to go a long way toward understanding why Americans are so depressed, depressed and tired and overweight. The symbiotic relationship between sleep and hormones holds the key to unlocking better health and better sleep.

So many of our hormones are affected by sleep, and actually a lot of them are affected by our circadian rhythm. They're pulsated depending on where we are throughout the day. So I want to start first, though, by talking about some of the hormones that influence our metabolism. You see insulin, leptin, ghrelin, all of these are hormones that influence our appetite and our metabolism throughout the day. And they're also based on our circadian rhythm. So they're going to be affected by our sleep patterns. One of the easiest Ways to see how our hormones are affected by our sleep is to take a subset of subjects that we know have a dysregulated circadian rhythm. These are night shift workers. So night shift workers are often studied so that we can see the effects of sleep and sleep quality that have on our body, our hormones and everything else. One study looked at shift night workers and they found that they have a greater incidence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. These are all disease processes that are related to your metabolism. So we know how important not only sleep duration, but the timing of sleep is on your metabolic health. Let's talk about thyroid hormone first and how that affects your metabolism. Metabolism. So your thyroid hormone sets your metabolic set rate, meaning that every single cell on your body has a receptor to your thyroid hormone. And when that thyroid hormone docks on the receptor, it sets your metabolism for that cell. So your thyroid produces two hormones, produces T4 and T3. These are both thyroid hormones and it produce mostly T4 in terms of volume. However, T4 has to be converted to T3, which is active thyroid hormone. You see, T3 is actually the one that docks and produces the effects on your cell. T4 is not turned on yet. What's interesting with sleep is that melatonin, which is produced during sleep, helps activate that transition from T4 inactive thyroid hormone to active thyroid hormone, T3. So sleep is essential at setting your metabolic rate. The other thing we have to consider with hormones is insulin resistance and insulin sensitivity. So insulin sensitivity occurs at night. Your body becomes more sensitive to insulin during sleep. This is so profound that if you look at people who are sleep deprived, what you see is that they have a decrease in insulin sensitivity. So just one single night of sleep deprivation causes a 40% reduction in your ability to handle your glucose. Insulin sensitivity also helps regulate your cravings. So we'll talk about that when we talk about appetite. But it's really important for your metabolism. Cortisol is another hormone that's related to your metabolism. And when cortisol is increased for a prolonged period of time, meaning that maybe you have a chronic stress response that's bothering you. This is when we see an issue with cortisol and metabolism. You see, cortisol should be highest in the morning, which is natural, gets you up, gets you going. However, when you have that prolonged increase in cortisol, your body thinks it's under stress. Say for instance, a tiger is coming at you. Your body wants to increase cortisol so you have enough fuel to run away from it. The issue is, though, our stressors Never require us to run away any anymore. So what we're left with is high glucose levels, high blood sugar levels for prolonged periods of time, which then cause that insulin resistance that we talked about before. Sleep also has a huge impact on our appetite. So when we talk about metabolism, we're really talking about weight maintenance and we have to talk about appetite. So we have a few appetite hormones. We've got leptin. Leptin makes us feel satiated, feel full. Ghrelin, on the other hand, is your hunger hormone. So when ghrelin increases, hunger also increases. These two hormones are paired with our circadian rhythm. So we know that if you don't have enough sleep at night, you're not going to produce enough leptin. And without enough leptin, you're not going to feel satiated. The reverse is true as well. You're not going to, you're going to be producing too much ghrelin with sleep deprivation. And an overabundance of ghrelin means that you're hungrier. So you're hungrier and you don't have the satiety feeling. This is going to increase your craving for food in general. We also know that with sleep deprivation you're more likely to consume sugar. So that's going to have a direct effect on your appetite and our craving levels over time.

Sleep is so important because it's where we repair biologically. So there's various hormones that increase and decrease throughout the day. And in my estimation, one of the reasons why I think sleep is so important is because human growth hormone and much of the repair that goes on with within the brain. Matthew Walker speaks eloquently about this. You know all the different neurochemicals and neurotransmitters that are created through wakefulness within the brain and also the body are detoxified, eliminated. Various neuronal pathways that help us with consolidating memories happen during REM sleep and while we're sleeping. And so much of this so called neurologic pruning that occurs within our brain occurs while we're sleeping.

Human growth hormone, HGH is our anti aging hormone. And why this is so important is it has a variety of effects on the body that help reduce our aging capacity. So human growth hormone is produced during night mostly. In fact, 70% is produced during sleep. And this is only if you're getting quality sleep. This happens during slow wave sleep. This is the phase of sleep cycle where it's restorative and helping our body repair physically for the next day. It's also known that growth hormone is released within the first 70 minutes of falling asleep. So we'll talk about how alcohol affects your sleep later. But note that if you have disruptions in early phases of sleep due to alcohol consumption, then you're likely not producing enough of that growth hormone. The effect that growth hormone has on the body is extraordinary. Growth hormone increases your lean body mass. It also helps you burn fat for fuel. Growth hormone improves bone mineral density and overall protects your body from aging. So this is one more reason why we need to prioritize sleep to optimize our hormones.

So I myself had experienced many problems with sleep. It actually started when I was very young, and I recall being 7, 8, 9 years old and having a lot of difficulty falling asleep. I recall being up until like 1 and 2 in the morning. And this pattern for me continued as I got older. And really, it wasn't until my late 20s that I got my true first night of sleep. And growing up, I had a lot of anxiety. There was a lot of anxiety in my body. I had a lot of fear, and many, many issues caused that. And as I got older, my sleep became worse and worse, and it was very difficult for me to close my eyes and feel safe. There was a lot of a lack of safety as I was sleeping, and I remember feeling a lot of anxiety and my mind was just racing. My mind couldn't calm down, and I was literally afraid of the dark. So I couldn't fall asleep easily. I had to sleep with the lights on, and there was really no proper sleep. So as I got older, I just assumed this was a normal pattern. And I grew up with a lot of fatigue. So as I slept so little during the evening, in the morning, I would wake up very tired. It was very difficult for me to wake up. I remember my parents in the weekend, during the weekend, they had to wake me up often and literally shake me to wake up because I could not wake up on my own. I wanted to just sleep. And my body was so fatigued. And as I got older, it wasn't until my twenties I realized that I had a progesterone deficiency in my body. And progesterone is a very important hormone that allows the body to calm down, to relax. It supports sleep. And my progesterone levels for a female in her twenties should have been somewhere around seven to ten. And I had a progesterone level of zero. So my body was very empty of this very important hormone that allows the body to relax and reset. And it wasn't Until I started treating my hormones, where I really started to sleep. And I remember the first night that I slept after I had taken some natural compounded progesterone. And I woke up the next day feeling so alive. I didn't know people could actually feel this good in the morning. So that's when I started my journey of understanding how I had really struggled with insomnia my whole life growing up. And it wasn't until my late twenties where I started to understand sleep and treat it and see how important it was and how it really changed everything around my life. How I felt in the day, in the daytime, I wasn't sleepy anymore. During the afternoon, my mind shifted. My concentration, my ability to think, to remember. I remember in school when I couldn't sleep at night, I would go to school, and I had trouble remembering, actually, my first year of school. In first grade, the teachers thought I had a learning disability. They said, she can't read. And it wasn't until second grade that I learned how to read because my body was so deprived of sleep. And it wasn't really a learning disability. It was just lacking true sleep and not resting my body. So that was my personal journey, really, with sleep that actually led me to understand my body better and find ways to. To heal my body in more natural ways.

So I always say progesterone is like the chill pill neurotransmitter for your brain. It keeps you calm. It is the precursor to cortisol. So that's the one that comes before your stress hormone. So if you are stressed or your brain thinks you're stressed, it's going to take up and. And convert that progesterone to cortisol so that you can survive and be alert and not sleep. So think of it as like caveman times when there was a threat, you couldn't sleep, you had to protect the family. And so it would convert that progesterone and have that higher nighttime cortisol. But you might see this happening more with women just before their cycles. So I see. I'll ask them, you know, how was your sleep a week or two before your period? And if it's going down and it's not as deep, or you're more moody and you're irritable, you know, it's not just pms. There's a reason, and it's often because there's not enough of that progesterone hormone, or they relatively have too much of the other one, estrogen, and there's an imbalance of those two. So Progesterone deficiency is huge, and I'm a huge advocate of looking at that, especially for menopausal perimenopausal women who come into my practice and, and they'll have heavy periods, they're tired throughout the day and they're not sleeping very well and they're waking up and I'll ask them, have you had a sleep issue in the past? And they'll say, no, I always slept really well. But gradually, with hormonal changes, now they're finding that their sleep quality isn't as good.

So let me share a story. One of my patients that came to see me, Iris, came to see me. She was at age 54 and she. She had gone through menopause. She had. Her cycles had stopped already, so she was about two years post cycles and she had been working with other doctors on her sleep. She originally had had some hot flashes, some changes in her energy, her mood, and all of that had been addressed by giving some hormone replacement therapy. But her progesterone levels, when she came to see me, they were at a zero. And ideally, even for a female that's going through perimenopause or menopause, I still want to raise her levels to about a 5 and 7, between 5 and 7 to give her that quality of sleep and rest and relaxation. So when she came to see me, she had had terrible insomnia. She was not falling asleep until 1am, up every hour and waking up early, very tired. So she had some fatigue and she did have anxiety and depression. She was managed for the most part, but she was just not optimal. And she had tried many therapies for her sleep and could not see results. So I ran the progesterone pathways for her. I also checked her estrogen levels and she was taking a little bit of estrogen. She had been giving us sublingual estrogen and a cream of progesterone. And her body was just. The levels were not racing, even though she was on hormone therapy, which naturally estrogen and progesterone will help women with falling asleep, encourages the sleep cycle. Her levels were still not rising, which would explain why she couldn't fall asleep. So on doing farther analysis, we found out that she actually has some deep gut issues. A lot of the hormones are being created after menopause. Your adrenal glands have to support, but the gut is very important in helping you also regenerate the healthy hormone in the gastrointestinal tract. So she had actually quite a bit of parasites and a lot of yeast and her estrogen metabolism is the other test I run with her which measures one's ability to break down hormones. And even though she was taking a very low dose dose of estrogen, her body was not breaking down her estrogens and her metabolism was off. She was making a lot of bad estrogen versus good estrogen. So she's a patient that had very high bad estrogens with no progesterone. Even though she was being supplemented, the levels were not going up in her body that would support her sleep. So what I had to do with Iris is I had to help her cleanse her liver, so so her body can metabolize estrogens better. And this is why, when environmental medicine comes into practice, that we had to help her change a lot of the estrogens that were coming into her body through outside sources, which are called xenoestrogens. They're the toxic estrogens. So things such as plastics have behave like estrogen. So anything that's bpa, plastic, water bottles, BPA can be also in your clothing, on materials, around your house, so Tupperware. So we changed a lot of her BPA in anything that contained BPN in her regimen. Phthalates and parabens are the other two that increase bad estrogens in the body. And phthalates and parabens are toxicants that are often used to make makeup. There you find them in champagne, shampoos and conditioners and any beauty products or personal care products. And I measured her xenoestrogens and her levels were very elevated for her, which was leading to the higher bad estrogen. And when she had the bio bad estrogen, it was suppressing her progesterone that she was taking to support her sleep. So her body was not able to use even the hormones that she was given because her liver was too tactical. So we had to work with her. When she was able to actually start absorbing now the progesterone and utilizing the bacteria in her gut, the liver, both communicating with each other allowed her to change that equation. She was no longer estrogen dominant, but she was able to get the progesterone levels up. Her progesterone levels slowly came up. I did switch her from a cream to an oral capsule, sustained release capsule that stays in the body through the evening, and she was able to fall asleep easier, go to bed and stay asleep throughout the evening. So for her, the key was that she was missing progesterone in her body. And even though she had attempted herbals to increase progesterone Such as Vitex or Chase Tree. She had taken a homeopathic, she had done acupuncture, many modalities that would help. She could see still not raised those progesterone levels, but it really had to do with her gut health, liver health. And once we cleaned that, her progesterone levels came up. So it took her about five months. And within five months her levels had gone up to about a five, which I was very happy from a zero. And she started to sleep. Her body started to go into the relaxation, the parasympathetic mode, the resting mode, and the brain started to rest and keep heal. So her mood actually increased drastically. Progesterone, for a lot of women that went through menopause or perimenopause, they experience anxiety and depression. Most doctors are putting them on antidepressants or Xanax. And progesterone is your natural alternatives, like your natural Xanax, your natural antidepressant. And it really is a modulator for the brain. It helps increase the serotonin levels and GABA levels. One of the quickest ways to get someone's anxiety levels down is to give them some natural bioidentical progesterone, which also increases GABA in the brain. So her depression and anxiety clear by increasing her progesterone. But many patients do take progesterone, but often the body doesn't register that has entered the body because there's blocking mechanisms such as gut or liver. If they're not working well, the hormones cannot be properly balanced. So I see this very commonly in my clinic. The hormonal changes are happening and insomnia happens, anxiety happens, depression. And this is out of our control in a way because the hormones are being lost in the quality of sleep. The amount of sleep will change. So for women, some can handle natural progesterone. I obviously advise you to see a practitioner for that to get tested and understand your levels. And there's many gentle ways to supplement. You can do Vitex and you can do a natural support. You don't have to do a replacement of hormones, but your liver has to be working correctly and your gastrointestinal tract has to be working correctly in order to absorb the hormones. But a case of deep anxiety and insomnia will be connected to low progesterone and is not only connected to one women that are in perimenopause, but also younger women. There's this belief that only older women have hormone changes. And I personally had my levels tested in my mid-20s. And I had zero progesterone, so that was contributing to my anxiety, to depression, to insomnia. So younger women, women that have pcos, polycystic ovarian syndrome, there's a correlation as their ovaries are not ovulating, they're not making progesterone. Progesterone is made when we ovulate and is the hormone that helps us also have healthy cycles, prevents us from having estrogen dominance. So a lot of women that have PCOS have insomnia and anxiety. And you can be in your teens and have zero progesterone. I've seen this women in their 20s, their 30s. So an overactive mind, it's assigned a lot of progesterone. Women that have restless leg syndrome tend to have low progesterone as well. So I see this in my 20, 30 year olds. I also had a lot of restless leg before I got my progesterone back into alignment. And restless leg is when the nervous system is overstimulated, it normally shows up at night. So your limbs, it could be happening in your arms, but it's mostly in your legs. They become activated, the nerves are over stimulated and they're shaking and the body naturally has the desire to move. So how do you know you have restless leg? It's just a clinical diagnosis. There's no measurable test. But if you're having, if you feel the sensation of your legs are itching, moving or you need to move, you can come as a nervous pain inside, deep into the legs. That is a diagnosis of restless leg syndrome. And it keeps people up at night. A lot of young women wake up in the middle of the night because their legs are shaking and you have that need to get up and move. And when we get up and move, the nervous system rebalances itself and then you can make it go away. But it really disrupts the sleep. So progesterone, a low progesterone level can lead to restless legs because the nervous system is not nourished. Progesterone is the hormone that nourishes your nerves to help helps the brain, it helps the sleep. But also your all your nerves are run through your body neuropathies. A lot of people have nerve pain, can have low progesterone levels. So a treatment for restless leg for a woman would be to help her raise her progesterone levels and also mineral deficiencies. That's a very important one, having low levels of magnesium, calcium or potassium. Any problems in the mineral department will, can make it more Difficult for the nerves to properly communicate with each other. So low magnesium would be associated with restless leg. Be also conscious that a low progesterone would be because of high levels of stress. So stress management and moving through life in positive ways. There's the autonomic nervous system. Research is showing now that we can actually retrain our nervous system and we need to help increase the response resilience of our nervous system. So we want to put it on a bit of a, of a training to help realign the HPA axis to help also the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is one of the most important nerves that helps you activate the parasympathetic, that yin relaxation state for the mind, for the brain to go to sleep at night. And if we can work with our vagus nerve, we can do a lot of work through breath work. So I love also talking about a lot about breath because through breath work you're able to activate that HPA access to help it work better. So the brain is communicating better with the adrenals and with the ovaries and also help heal the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the nerve that comes from the, the spine in the back and the cervical area. And then it's running both sides right and left and is communicating with organ systems to help us calm and relax. It helps us with digestion. It helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system. So it's involved with breathing with sleep at night. The vagus nerve also helps the adrenals. And a lot of people that have adrenal fatigue tend to have compromised vagus nerve or gut issues like IBS or diarrhea. Food allergies can be a problem with your vagus vagus nerves. So breathing techniques are very helpful to help someone activate the parasympathetic state of the body, which is what we need to be in when we go to sleep at night.

So testosterone is a hormone that's produced by men and women. It's not just produced by men. And it's essential in our motivation drive, also our sex drive and libido, but our ability to recover from exercise and maintain lean body mass, all of these things are what we need testosterone for. What's interesting is that the majority of your testosterone is actually produced during sleep. So 39% of men over the age of 45 are deficient in testosterone. That number is huge and it's only growing. I see a ton of men come into the practice. They're in their 30s, early 40s, and their testosterone levels are below 200, this is not acceptable. Let's talk about what testosterone levels should be though. So optimal testosterone levels for a man are above 600. For women, I like them to have free testosterone levels, meaning the bioavailable testosterone of at least 1 to 2. Their total testosterone levels should be about 20 to 30. When I do replacement therapy for a woman, I'm aiming almost more towards 60. So there's a lot of different factors for women that have to be taken into consideration. And that's where working with a doctor who understands hormones is really important. Now we know where testosterone should be, but let's talk about how sleep affects testosterone and how we can optimize our testosterone levels by enhancing quality sleep. So there's been some studies done on obstructive sleep apnea. This is when you wake up at night and you can't breathe. So it actually wakes you from your sleep because you have a decrease of oxygen consumption, which might be due to a variety of factors. It could be due to your head and neck muscles, it could be due to you being overweight and so your airway is narrowed. The research found that in people with obstructive sleep apnea that were put on a CPAP machine to help restore oxygen levels, these individuals had had higher levels of sexual desire and improved sexual function. So for men that means erections. Now we know that this is all so important in health because you need to have optimal sexual health. You also need to have optimal testosterone levels for health and longevity. Let's take Todd's case for example. So Todd is a 50 year old man, his testosterone is 240, he is pre diabetic, so he has an elevated blood sugar level and he's also exhausted and overweight. So Todd has come into the practice and what we found is that he has obstructive sleep apnea. So what we did is we put him on a CPAP machine and he comes back in six months, his testosterone has increased, he's no longer pre diabetic, he has more energy than he has had in years. And this is all from the use of a CPAP machine and just grab correcting his sleep issue, which is sleep apnea. One of the misconceptions is that you have sleep apnea just because you're overweight. However, you can be overweight because you have sleep apnea. And that has to do with the relationship of just needing oxygen throughout the night to be able to have a metabolism that's healthy and a sleep cycle that's really healthy. So we need to Correct both things in order to help people obtain optimal health.

Obviously, women have much lower testosterone levels than men. But testosterone is the hormone that allows for women to also relax at night, is the hormone that strengthens our adrenal glands. And if we have proper adrenal function, we're able to regulate our cortisol levels better. And I see this in my clinic. When patients have low testosterone levels, often is the first hormone, one of the first hormones that tends to. To drop before going into menopause. So women in their mid-30s and 40s coming with problems of insomnia, they haven't really lost their cycles yet. They're not in menopause, they're still making estrogen, they're not having hot flashes, but they're coming in with a concern of insomnia and also problems with concentration, with thinking, with memory, problems with maintaining muscle mass and problems with their libido. And often I see when patients, this is the case, that their testosterone level is going to be depleted. I had one of my female patients, she was just in her mid-30s and she came in with inability to sleep. She was not able to put muscle mass on. She was working out, cleaning, eating very clean, exercising, and her body was just gaining weight and she couldn't build muscle. She was very frustrated that despite lifting weights, the muscle was not forming. She also had a very low libido and increased anxiety as well in her case. But insomnia was a big part of her complaint. So on running her hormones, we know that she's not in menopause at this point. We run her hormones and her progesterone level was actually normal for her. Her estrogens were great. She had no problems in the metabolism of estrogens. Her problem was that she had a low testosterone level. And for a female, I like the levels to be somewhere between, depending on the test, somewhere around a 35 to a 50. Her level came back at a 2. So a level of testosterone that is that depleted is going to greatly impact one's brain and ability to reset the nervous system. She also was having. She was having difficulty building muscle. Testosterone helps you maintain muscle mass, but it also supports bone health, so it prevents someone from getting osteoporosis. Very important for the aging of the brain. Testosterone is neuroprotective. It protects the brain from aging. Patients that age quicker in their brain and they have more Alzheimer's dementia. People that have more insomnia problems tend to have a connection with low testosterone, as we saw earlier with some of my male patients, again through REM sleep, we make a lot of testosterone. So this patient had very low testosterone. And as a result of the lack of sleep, she wasn't getting rem. She wasn't being able to build her levels. So in her case, it was actually quite easy to get the body restored back into alignment. And we did supplement some bioidentical testosterone. But I also changed her lifestyle, what she was doing, exercise, changing how she was exercising was very important. Through resistance training or HIIT training, women are able to build more testosterone than doing cardio, continuous cardio. So a lot it really matters what kind of exercise one can do to rebate build our body. But testosterone is often misunderstood and just seen as men needing it. But most women, one of the fastest ways that I can help a patient get back into sleep is to replenish and help them create more testosterone in their brain, in their adrenal glands, in their ovaries. So through sleep, the patient was able to, once she got to really sleep better, she was able to regenerate more testosterone on her own. And again, that testosterone was used just 10% temporarily until she was back to normal. And then the brain gets that mechanism going where it makes its own testosterone through sleeping time. So it's a very important hormone to talk about.

Now, there are a few key principles to follow when it comes to hormones. Obviously, if your hormones are suffering because of your lack of sleep, you should understand by now that prioritizing sleep is one of the most important things you can do. Late nights at the office, drinking coffee at night, drinking too much alcohol, staying up late can wreck your hormones. So first and foremost, prioritize your sleep. And that means you should have a bedtime and try to stick to it daily. Now, when it comes to optimizing your hormones for better sleep, there are a few things that you can do. First, eat a hormone balancing diet. And this means a diet that is low in sugar and high in healthy fats and proteins. Now, my own Testosterone went up 500 points when I cut out processed sugars and carbs and started eating more healthy fat. Next, bulk up on fiber ground. Flaxseeds provide optimal fiber and lignans, which are phytochemicals in the flaxseeds, which help balance your hormones. Even two tablespoons a day to a shake or a salad can help you. It also helps your digestion. You want to eat fiber rich organic fruits and veggies and lots of veggies. Also, be sure to poop daily. Constipation is bad for your hormones. Take magnesium, citrate and vitamin C and probiotics and flaxseeds every day to help you go to the bathroom every day. Next, limit or remove alcohol. Excess alcohol can compromise your liver and kidney function, which inhibit detoxification and create lots of hormonal imbalances. They create high triglycerides and alpha fatty liver, although sugar is the worst cause of fatty liver. Alcohol can also interfere with the beginning stages of sleep, which are essential for growth hormone, which helps repair your tissues and body and keep you young. Also, you want to avoid xenoestrogens. You can find these toxic xenoestrogens everywhere in skincare products, plastics, processed food can conventionally raised food, pesticides and household items. I mean, I don't want to scare you, but the key here is to eat organic foods as much as possible. Choose clean skin care products. When you visit the Environmental Working group's website@ewg.org, you can find their Skin Deep guide and you can also choose which household products are safe to use and which body care products are safe to use. Instead of using plastic containers or water bottles, use glass or stainless steel bottles or containers. Breast cancer has been associated with regular consumption of alcohol as well as exposure to chemicals in plastics and exposure to light at night, which we talked about in lesson two. In fact, all the things that we discussed to help optimize your sleep will help you prevent cancer. Next, prioritize exercise. Exercise helps balance your hormones. It reduces toxic estrogens in your body. It increases testosterone which helps you lose fat and build muscle. You need to find out what works for you. I like a mixture of cardio high intensity interval training and twice a week I try to play sports with friends or do yoga. Now we're going to talk about exercise in detail in lesson six.

Finally, manage your stress. Stress is probably the number one thing that wrecks your hormones and your sleep. In the 10 day sleep reset, we'll talk about active ways to manage your stress every day. But for now, do something that you love every day. Active relaxation does not mean watching Netflix for five hours straight. You want to do can do something, especially before bed, that is really relaxing and doesn't stimulate your mind in a way that causes worry. You can meditate. You can listen to calming music. You can take a hot bath with Epsom salt. You can get a massage foot rub. You can use topical magnesium or oral magnesium. All these things help to reduce your stress levels. My wife and I like to listen to music and play backgammon before bed and and take a hot bath with Epsom salt Lavender oil brings us together, connects us, and also helps us sleep really deeply. There are lots of things you can do to wind down and lower your cortisol, which is the stress hormone. And guess what? Scrolling through Instagram is not one of them. Unless, of course, it's my Instagram feed. Just kidding. Now, if you suspect hormonal dysregulation, I always recommend working with a practitioner to test and not guess. In the lesson materials, I share some of my favorite tests that help give me insight into my patient's hormones. You can discuss these tests with your physician. In our next lesson, we're going to discuss an overlooked and vital component of our sleep health, environmental toxins. We're going to show you ways to reduce your toxic burden at home so you can improve your sleep. When I got sick a few years ago, my sleep really suffered. I was tired all the time, but I couldn't get a good night's sleep. Turns out that I had toxic black mold in my house, which led to a host of issues, including a really bad cough that I couldn't kick. I can't tell you how much better I slept when I removed myself from the environment and I used the principles of functional medicine to heal my body and my brain and my sleep. I hear this story often from my patients. They come into their house and then they feel super sluggish and tired and they wake up feeling groggy. It turns out toxins lurking in your home can interfere with getting quality sleep. Now, I know that talking about toxins can be scary. It seems like everywhere we turn, we're being bombarded with environmental toxins that we can't escape. But I don't want you to feel helpless and hopeless when it comes to the subject of because we can't live in a bubble. Nor should we. But there are things you can do to minimize your exposure to toxins and improve your body's ability to get rid of toxins, all while improving your sleep. In this lesson, we're going to talk about toxins. We're also going to discuss our immune health, which is intricately linked to our sleep. Bad sleep habits are going to weaken our immune system. And you guessed it, getting better sleep can strengthen our immune system. Immune dysregulation is something I see almost daily with my patients. A runaway immune system can cause systemic inflammation that, if left unchecked, can cause heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, autoimmune disease, and lots more. If you're inflamed, you're probably not sleeping well, because when Your body's inflamed, so is your brain. So let's dive into these topics. Topics starting with a discussion on toxins.

Environmental toxins are some of the worst aggravators that really can disrupt one's sleep. We are now exposed to so many toxins in our environment. Toxins are coming from our air. So air quality is very important for us to understand when we go to bed at night, but not also in our bedroom or our home, but also outside air. So quality of air is one. The second source of exposure is the food. The foods that we consume can have high toxin levels. Also the water we drink can be full of toxins and products that we use in our personal care. So toxins are absorbed through our skin. So those are some of the four ways that toxins can enter our system. And toxins can really disrupt one's sleep. When it comes to sleep, I want to talk to patients about what is their sleep environment like. A lot of people actually don't fall asleep well because they're living in a toxic environment. And one of the most toxic items one can have in one's home is actually a mattress. Is a mattress from anything that you're exposed to could be the most potential danger for one's health. If you get a conventional mattress. A mattress takes seven years to off gas. So eat off gases while you sleep. And while you're sleeping, your body will get warmer, you can sweat at night, you're warming up the mattress to release more toxins. And mattress mattresses have a lot of what are called voc, volatile organic compounds. These are solvents, anything that off gases. So they have a lot of formaldehyde, they have flame retardants, they have toxins, benzenes that have been used to create the safety of the mattress. But all night you're sleeping in a pool of toxins. And this is the same for your pillow and your, the sheets that you use, your comforter. If you're using regularly regular sheets that are not organic cotton or organically made, you're gonna have a lot of herbicides, pesticides being released at night. But your mattress is probably the, the biggest item that if one can make a change to have better sleep would be to get an organic mattress. Or if your mattress is older than seven years old, then don't change the mattress by getting a new mattress. It takes a long time for it to off gas. I had a case of a patient that came to see me and this patient had moved into 35 year old female, Stephanie. She had moved into A new home. And she had gone through a lot of new construction. There was new carpet, new paint, there was new furniture. Everything was new in her home. And by the time she came to see me, she said that after moving into this house within five months, she started not to sleep as well. She was having difficulty sleep.

Not falling asleep, and she was waking up very tired. And she was waking up with migraines and headaches. She had a lot of brain fog in the morning, she would describe it as. She said that she felt like she was waking up drunk. She said, I felt like I had a bottle of wine last night and I'm waking up through the night. She even described having some flashes of heat. So first she said, am I going through menopause? What is happening in my body? Because I'm waking up very hot, I'm sweating, I'm waking up anxious, but I can't fall back to sleep easily. In the morning, she felt like she was drugged. So on taking her history, I did what is called an environmental history to understand what had changed in her environment. I also ran her hormones. And surprisingly, her hormones were fine. It wasn't a lack of hormones that was causing her to wake up. So on understanding her history, that it was so connected to having moved into a new house, she also had gotten a new car. So she had a new car, she had a new mattress, she had a new home, and she had carpet in her house. Fresh paint, new furniture. And I decided to run with her an environmental toxin panel that measures one's levels of solvents, measures chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, any chemicals one could get exposed to through breathing, again, drinking, eating, or touching your skin. And I also run with her genetic marker to check to see if her glutathione pathways were working correctly. And glutathione, I like to call it the boss of detox, is a really important nutrient to help us metabolize toxins, to bind toxins. And I wanted to know what her genetic mutation was or if there was one. And I also measure her glutathione levels to know where are we at with this patient? And the reports came back, and her levels of benzene, which are the solvents, were 10 times higher, the upper limit. So she didn't really have the pesticides, no chlorines, but the solvents. So benzenes were very high for her, the volatile organic compounds. And in assessing her history, we knew that she had gotten a new car, a new mattress, carpet, new paint, which all are constantly releasing the volatile organic compounds which are the chemicals that are used to make all these materials, but they take years to off gas. And she also had a new car. A car takes on average about 18 months to off gas. So she was moving through the day in a car that was full of toxins. And at night she was coming and sleeping in a bedroom that was full of toxins. And the carpet was also off gassing. So her levels were very high. And her glutathione levels were also very depleted. She had been around 1500 and she was around 500. So her liver was very empty of the essential nutrient to detox. And it was waking her up at night because the liver was going to cleanse, but it didn't have enough support. So we make the connection of how she was missing a lot of glutathione from her body. And when we run the genetic marker for her glutathione gene, she actually had an absentee on what is called a GSTM1. She was missing that gene. So first she's missing the gene. Second, she has low glutathione that she's depleted because of the toxins. And now she's constantly exposed to these toxins. And her body, her liver cannot clear those out. So it was waking her up at night. And. And the solvents cross also the blood brain barrier. So solvents go into the brain. That solvents are being associated with depression, with fatigue, brain fog. Very high solvent levels can show up almost as dementia for patients. And the feeling of. She felt like she was drunk. She was drunk on solvents. So the first thing I had her do is get an organic mattress and she right away change her mattress. I also, because her case was so extreme, I also had her remove the carpet from her bedroom and put wood. So she removed the carpet and she got a filter, an air filtration system to put in her bedroom. Since she had also new furniture and new paint, I had her get. I like the brand iQair. There's many brands, but it was a HEPA filter and she was. I had her run it throughout the whole day and at night just running on a setting of one. So a low setting so it wasn't loud. So she. I also also had her open windows to get fresh air in. And I had her some of her pieces of furniture that she had. I had her put it outside in the sun. In Arizona, we have sun all the time. So she. The sun also helps off gas and pull the chemicals off the furniture quicker. And she also off gas her car. So she went back to using her old car and she there's something called cooking, a method of releasing solvents out of new furniture and new cars. So I had her cook her car. So in essence, over the summer, she just parked it outside and let the heat close the windows and let the heat rise. Heat pulls toxins out of furniture or of mattresses, of cars, of any material. It moves it quicker out of the material, so it of gases rather quicker. And she cooked her car for three months to let all the solvents out. And once a week she will just open the doors to let it out, close it again. So after doing this for about four months, we were able to and supplemented her with glutathione. So she took liposomal glutathione every day and was doing also sauna. I had her do sauna to, to pull the solvents. When we sweat, we're able to move a lot of solvents out of the body, a lot of toxins. But I had her take some charcoal afterwards to bind what was coming out of her so it wouldn't recirculate through her body. And so she was doing a lot of sauna, a lot of charcoal, a lot of chlorella. She changed what she was doing in her environment. I gave her some intravenous glutathione levels to raise those levels. And I also advised her to add a lot of foods that can help you in increase glutathione levels. So she did a lot of cruciferous vegetables, so your broccoli, your cauliflower, Brussels sprout, cabbage. She also increased avocado consumption, asparagus and all the allium family, leeks, garlic, onions. And the combination of all those foods helped her body make more glutathione. She also took some fiber, so flaxseed is a great binder, and up her intake of vegetables to just get a lot of fiber in her body. So I increased her body's ability to bind to what was coming out as she was doing sauna three times a week. And the sauna was helping her sweat out a lot of these toxins. And then as we were raising glutathione, she was cleansing her liver, binding what was coming out, but she had to remove what was the aggravator, otherwise we couldn't cleanse her body. If you're living in toxins, you can't really detox. You're just moving the equation in the same direction. So after doing this for a few months, we retested her solvent levels and her solvents had gone down to about 80% and she had significantly reduced the amount the glutathione levels came up. Of course, her genes are not going to change once you know what they are. But what was interesting is that her case changed so drastically. She was no longer having insomnia. She was sleeping through the night and she was not waking up with the feeling of feeling drunk. Her headaches went away, migraines went away. She didn't take any hormones. She didn't take any other supplements. She changed her environment. She also changed her sheets and her pillow. She bought everything organic and got in a habit of also opening windows in her bedroom over the weekend just to get fresh air. And it's important for patients to know that air quality, your indoor air can be 10 times more polluted than outdoor air. We have industrial pollution outside, but we have wind and sun to move it indoors. You're just trapping all the toxins. And the body's just. Then the body's just taking all this off, gassing. So having a filtration system, it almost acts like a liver, a backup liver in your bedroom that's taking everything out so it doesn't hit your body. But it was a very drastic shift on her to see how just changing what was going on in her surrounding and supporting her body, she was able to regain her sleep back and also improve her brain function, her energy, her mood the next day.

Next, I want to talk about a source of toxicity that you might not be thinking about that much. I'm talking about EMFs or electromagnetic frequencies. They're everywhere. Have you ever thought about the electronics that are plugged in your house all the time, especially in your bedroom? Making the switch to lowering the amount of EMFs we are exposed to can be life changing when it comes to our sleep. Let's hear from our experts.

A story I like to tell often to my patients is the story of this young woman who in her early teens was having a really tough time in so many areas, was unhappy, wasn't thriving in school, despite her wonderful abilities. Her parents were having issues with her. It was a difficult time for her. And there was no sign of any kind of sleep apnea. I looked and we checked and we got the sleep studies. And she passed all her sleep studies, you know, with flying colors. So what do you do with a patient like that? And that may be you. I mean, people will have tested you, your doctors. You may have complained about not having slept well and what is the reason for that? So my message would be, don't give up just because you have passed. A true psg, not a home study, but a very good sleep study doesn't mean your sleep is not being interrupted. This young woman was sleeping. Her head was next to the back of the main electrical box in the home.

And so the panel opened on the other side. But her head was right at the level of the main panel for all the electrical conduits and wires going into this house. And it was an older house, so it didn't have as much shielding. It was not up to date. It wasn't grounded. I went into her home because I was very curious at this point what was going on. I looked for dark curtains and blackout curtains and allergens and carpeting that was old. And, you know, she had a great sleep environment, but she was always tired. I took my EMF measurement device, not knowing that the junction box was on the other side. And as I walked over to that part of the room, this device, which is a very simple device, you can get it on Amazon, they're $10 to $20, just lit up. And her head was sleeping next to this huge source of EMFs every single night. Within a week, a week and a half of having moved the bed to the opposite side of the room, a lot of her issues were going away. And the first thing she reported was, I don't remember. After the time I went to sleep, I don't remember anything. And when I woke up in the morning, I had no idea how long I had slept. I thought it had been five or 10 minutes. She was finally getting deep sleep just by moving her bed. So I use that story with my patients, especially the ones that do well on a sleep study, that have been tested, but they still are tired during the day. Keep looking. There's got to be a reason. There are many other reasons why you may not be sleeping well.

EMFs and radiation and technology. So our cell phones are the Bluetooth, the towers. All this has been shown to affect the pineal gland. And we talked about melatonin, but that is where it's made. That's where the signaling comes for our circadian rhythm. It comes from that pineal gland, and it is affected by what's around you. So one of the best things to do, I say, have a docking station. We have one when we come in, in the kitchen, everything stays there at night. Nothing makes it to your room. The bed is just for sex and sleep. It is not for a place for you to do any kind of work. No cell phones, no laptops, you know, really keeping all that away. And if it's in you or on you. It should be on airplane mode and command completely off because that will affect how much melatonin is released and it will affect the rest of your. That. That circadian rhythm. There are a lot of gadgets out there that I'll get into that people wear. You know, the watches that track your sleep. I'm wearing the Oura ring, which will track your sleep and tell you the kind of quality of sleep that you're getting, not just the hours. Please make sure they're all on airplane mode or you're not actually adding more harm by measuring your sleep, but then getting all this Bluetooth and, you know, radiation that's going to actually disrupt your sleep. So most of these things you can. They like the Oura ring. I'll put it on airplane mode and I'll go to sleep. And then when you're awake, you can put it back on. But stay away, you know, don't be right around it. You need. You need some distance so that you don't pick that up. And I'm seeing this in because I help so many couples have babies that moms and dads, especially moms, when they're pregnant, their entire time the cell phone is on the belly and they're holding it. And that's absolutely going to affect the baby and the future child and their sleep, you know, or these baby monitors that are on and giving off EMFs and then the coil in the bedding of the baby and their sleep. So I learned a lot about this when my kids weren't sleeping. And the sleep hygiene that has to go into children is very different for us. But if we're not aware of it and don't understand that that coil is a metal detector, and it's going to amplify the EMF that's given off by that baby monitor or anything else that might be in that space or that room or the electricity or the magnetic field even. So I had all this stuff measured and I was blown away. So I had to change the. The bedding because we had spring coils and, you know, building. Biologists can come to your house and measure these things and tell you. And it's amazing how much of people's fatigue and insomnia is affected by what's around them because these affect the sodium, the chloride channels in our body. And one of the medications that, you know, is prescribed for sleep is Xanax, which is given for anxiety, which affects gaba, and GABA is affecting your chloride levels and the chloride channels in the body. And we know that these EMFs, that's how what they're also affecting. So it's amazing how all this is linked and we're just so oblivious to it. And if I could go to everyone's home and really clean out how much dirty electricity and how much all this, all the stuff is affecting your energy and your ability to completely let go and have a deeper sleep, I would.

I know we are living our phones and computers, but try to minimize whatever you can do. So be conscious on getting maybe a protection screen on your phone to block some emf. Change the lighting on your phone. It's very important that we are not exposed to a lot of blue light which the blue light is stimulating. The blue light blocks the production of melatonin. So we're not going to make enough melatonin if we are constantly exposed to blue light. Sunlight helps us produce melatonin. One of the techniques and tips I tell my patients is put your phone on night shift. And I actually put my phone on night shift starting at noon. I don't wait until nighttime. If I'm looking at my phone, I want that red light. So when I'm looking at my screen, I'm not looking at the blue light. So there's many devices that you can apps that you can download or if it's a computer, you can also download a software for to install so the lights change and you're not constantly emitting to the blue light. I know patients sometimes can wear glasses as well. So having glasses to wear at night that block that blue light is also helpful. So a lot of my patients don't like wearing the glasses. Sometimes they find them uncomfortable. So at least getting a blockage on your phone and minimizing your exposure throughout the day. As we said, if you're in a car, put your cell phone on airplane mode and and be conscious, be constantly conscious of why do we need to yet be stuck and attached to our phone all the time? Create really a practice of having boundaries around our phone. Our phones have become quite addictive and all of us experience that is a constant gratification and something to hold on to. It's our new form of smoking. So being very conscious and clear how to create boundaries around your phone. When do you check your your email? When do you check your text? How available are you? Before we had cell phones we were not this available. So really blocking that lighting, that blue light and emfs are two ways that we can restore that natural rhythm within our body. So being conscious of that many of.

The companies that make these Blue light blocking glasses, then they make them for children. And here's what's unique that a lot of parents should understand is children are much more susceptible, susceptible to the negative health effects and the consequences of evening blue light exposure than, than us as adults. It has to do with how their eye is shaped and structured. And so several sleep lab studies throughout the world have, have conducted research and they found that Even just like 45 minutes of exposure to an iPad for a kid is before bed. They need like three or four hours of separation between exposure of that light before they go to bed because the melatonin in production goes down significantly, significantly compared to an adult. An adult. For example, you or I could be on our iPad and then stop at 9pm, right? We could be on it for 20 minutes, 20, 30 minutes and go to bed at 10. It would impact our melatonin, but not that much. Maybe it would cut it in half.

Right.

For children, if they did that same thing would have a like 100% reduction. There's been a few studies that have come out in 2018 to show this. And so the point that I'm trying to convey here as parents with children that have devices that have tech, that watch TV or have their phones and iPads, blue light blocking glasses are very important in addition to creating those boundaries around the tech. Now I can understand trying to police this if you have a teenager could be quite challenging. So maybe you could just make a rule in the house. Look, if you're going to be on your phone at night, you know, in your bedroom or whatever, please use these, these blue light blockers because again, the shape of the eye, it's not totally developed and can't mitigate that harmful blue light exposure. So yeah, I mean, three years ago it was weird to wear blue light blocking glasses when you're out in public, but now it's like we had to go to the mall the other day, the Apple store, and tons of light from all these, all these things. And we just walked in there. My daughter had them on, my wife, myself. And it's like this. It's like wearing your seatbelt when you're driving. It feels weird or foreign. You know, I'm sure when seatbelt belts, you know, in the 1970s was weird when people actually started clicking them on because they've driven without seat belts forever. But you know, people used to smoke in airlines, right? I mean it was like common. Everyone would get secondhand smoke. And now we know that. And again, I'm not against tech or light, but it's the timing of it is just bad. It can be deleterious at night. And so mitigating that with filters on the devices or the blue light blocking glasses, especially for children, can be super helpful.

Now let's talk about immunity. Chronic inflammation and poor immune health can lead to depression, insomnia and lots more. Our immune system relies on good quality sleep. Let's hear more about this from our experts.

Immune cells. The immune system at night goes to regenerate itself. It goes through a cleansing mechanism and we create a more healthy immune soldiers immune cells during the deep state of sleep. So when someone is ill or they have illness, a cold or flu, or even like a chronic condition like Lyme disease or chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, you want to try to get that deep sleep, but it's often lost for a lot of patients. And the one, one of the worst aggravators for the deep sleep state is actually alcohol. Patients that consume alcohol, especially in the evening, are going to have lower deep state levels. And they have actually done research showing how consuming alcohol two hours closer to bedtime is going to impact your ability to go into the deep state of sleep and also impact rem. Both of these really important phases are going to get disrupted by alcohol consumption. And the other rest of the night, about 60 to 65% of the rest of the evening, we actually spend on what's called light sleep. And the light sleep, the body's healing is resting, regenerating, but it's not engaged. The brain doesn't engage the same way that it engages through deep sleep, through REM sleep, through light sleep. This is where the detox pathways become the most active, our lymphatic system. So let's talk about the lymphatic system. Our lymphatic system is one our main mechanisms to move waste out of the body.

Think of it as, in the fluid form, we have channels, we have organs that are part of the lymphatic system. So the tonsils, the thymus, the spleen are all our glands that help us clean out the immune system at night. And the lymphatics is this waste dumping mechanism that allows for this fluid to move. And our lymphatic system is the most active at night, is actually 60% more active than in the daytime. So as the body goes to sleep, the immune system goes to work. And patients that have chronic conditions, we see a lot of Epstein Barr virus now it's very common to see that. So chronic mono, we're seeing a lot of Lyme disease, a lot of patients with autoimmune disease. They're exposing throughout the whole day to viruses, parasites, any kind of infection, including toxins. We'll talk a little more about toxins. But toxins also are being flushed out in the lymphatic system. So the lymph, it's a fluid that carries a combination of immune cells, toxins, all the waste, metabolic waste, that the body's created through the whole. All day and during light sleep, the body is flushing. All this mechanism goes to work. So this pumping mechanism turns on. And this is really important that this also, to understand that this also happens in the brain. There's something called the glymphatic system. And it wasn't until four or five years ago that research showed that we have actually a lymphatic system in the brain. We all only thought that it was part of our body, but we, as we can see that we build toxic waste through just metabolic processes. The process of just speaking or digesting food or breathing creates a lot of metabolic waste in the body. That metabolic waste has to be removed at night mostly, but the brain also creates metabolic waste. It wasn't until recently that we realized that the conversation between neurons, the conversation between the cells in the brain, the creation of neurotransmitters, the processing of memories, all of that creates a lot of metabolic brain waste. And that also has to be removed at night. And the glymphatic system wakes up at night. It works the most, the most actively. So again, without proper sleep, you're not cleansing that there is something called beta amyloid that is a protein that is often associated with patients that have dementia and Alzheimer's. So patients that have dementia and Alzheimer's have the highest levels of beta amyloid. And the glymphatic system at night is removing beta amyloid is in charge of removing that. Again, this goes to show how lack of the proper sleep causes an accumulation of this waste material throughout the body.

The immune system, actually the cytokines, kind of the soldiers are made in of front produced when we sleep. So anyone who has an autoimmune disease or gets sick often or has anything to do with wanting to protect their immune system, Especially during the fall or the winter when, when it's flu season, you want to increase sleep. And isn't that amazing that that's a time where winter and fall, our nights are longer, it gets cooler out more. Why, it's so that you sleep more. So the brain, if you look at the four seasons and when we get sick more, and why Certain viruses grow in certain times. Sleep absolutely is more essential during the time where it's darker. And that's because it's been shown that when we have an infection, different things happen during sleep. We actually wake up more. And there's research showing it's to actually help you induce a fever to fight the infection. There's we're finding that things happen in the brain on the lymphatic level during an infection. That doesn't happen when we don't have an infection. So one of the things I always say is during the fall and the winter, I try to actually get more sleep to help your immune system. So it's not just about getting that flu shot. It's about taking your vitamin C and zinc and elderberries and really getting more sleep. Sleep is essential for the immune system, especially if you already have an immune disorder, an autoimmune disease, or you just want to protect and know that you might have a predisposition because of your family history.

So here are my main takeaways from today's Lesson number one we learned that one of the most toxic items in your house can be our mattress. If you're considering purchasing a new mattress, try one that is organic. I put some of my favorite brands in lesson materials. Now, if you have a mattress that's more than seven years old, it's probably off gassed all the toxins, so it's safe to keep. Number two, if possible, purchase an air filter for your bedroom or sleep with the windows open. This is going to help improve the air quality in your room. Now, as we heard, indoor air quality can be 10 times more polluted than outdoor air. There are some really excellent air filters out there. My favorite one is called Air Doctor, which is pretty affordable and removes nearly 100% of the particle pollution along with the vast majority of toxic ozone and volatile organic compounds. I also like IQ Air and there are a few other great ones on the market. Number three, minimize your exposure to food that contains toxins. The best way to do this is to stick to organic whenever you can. Now, I know it can get expensive, so I like to Follow the Dirty 30 Dozen and the Clean 15 list created by the Environmental Working Group at EWG.org this is a list of 12 foods that should always be purchased organic because they contain the most pesticides, and 15 foods that are usually safe to buy when they're conventionally grown because they don't contain that much pesticides. You can find the full list in the materials of this Lesson number four Support your natural detoxification systems by eating foods that boost your glutathione levels. That's the body's main detoxifier. Things like the cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage. If you suspect you have toxins in your home like mold, bring someone in to inspect your house. If you catch the problem early, it could be an easy fix. Now sometimes it might be as easy as fixing a leak under the sink. Sometimes it's as bad as having to gut your whole house, like I had to do. Also, make sure you're drinking clean, filtered water. Toxins like microbes, pesticides, plastic. Yes, prescription meds, heavy metals, chlorine, fluoride and other things are poisoning our water supply. So invest in a good water filter. Next, make your bedroom or the area near your bed a safe space. Avoid junk light from phones and TVs. I like to turn off all Wi Fi at night. You don't need wi fi when you're sleeping, just unplug it from the wall. Also, wear blue light blocking glasses and turn your phone to night shift mode in the evening. Now these are just a few simple rules for reducing your toxic exposure to improve your sleep. Sleep. Now when it comes to our immune health, it's important to incorporate all the principles that we've discussed in this course, such as avoiding refined sugars and processed carbohydrates and minimizing our exposure to toxins. We also need to boost our detoxification systems. We need to eat a diet rich in polyphenols, we need to get sunlight and time outdoors, and we need to figure out ways to reduce and manage our stress. And remember, sleep is how we boost our immune system and it's when our bodies do most of our detoxification. So just prioritizing sleep alone is a great step in the right direction. In our next lesson, we're going to dive into brain health. You know my favorite topic? How does sleep impact our brain, our mood, our stress level? You're going to find out. We're also going to talk about how we can exercise our way to optimal sleep. We all know what it feels like to miss out on a night of quality sleep and wake up the next day feeling cranky. Maybe we're short tempered or find it hard to tap into kindness or compassion. Maybe we feel stressed and unable to cope with our daily tasks. When I wasn't sleeping well, I had major brain fog and I couldn't even remember my patients names. When we miss out on quality sleep, our brain suffers the most. Today we, we're going to talk about the link between brain health and sleep. We're also going to talk about stress and exercise. First, our experts are going to guide you through an understanding of how sleep impacts the brain.

In my practice, I see a lot of adhd. I'm not really trained to detect it, but it's not difficult to see a kid, typically a young man that comes in and is bouncing around, bouncing off the chairs. I had one of my patients jump out the window in my dental operatory. He came back, he was just out by the car. I mean, it's not hard to see that there is a lot of hyperactivity going on and there's focus issues and all that. And then to see a sleep disorder alongside this should be of no surprise. The data is out now that at least 50% of the time there's probably a misdiagnosis of ADHD and it's actually a sleep disorder. And then on the other hand, the two usually go together. Is the sleep disorder the cause of the serotonin issues and synapsing issues in the brain that is causing or predisposing the child to an ADHD diagnosis? So I usually warn the parents that, you know, if there's any hint of adhd, if you have a diagnosis and there's a diagnosis or a sleep disorder, it's related and it's one in the same and both have to be dealt with at the same time.

We know that America is the number one prescriber of prescription stimulants in the entire world. Rates of ADHD are continually increasing for both adults and children. The reason behind this is it's the thought that we need more stimulation to the brain to actually focus and have energy levels. But I want to start to question this idea because is it really more stimulation that we need or are there other things that are going to help us focus more? You see, we're inundated with stimulation all day long. We've got billboards to look at, we have commercials to watch, we've got Instagram DMS to respond to, we have emails coming in constantly. So is it really more stimulation that we need or is there something else? And I'm questioning, I think that there's something else. I think that it's actually a lack of mindfulness and meditation that we're striving for that would help us get that focus. So I want to break and talk about a case and we'll talk about this guy named Ralph. And so Ralph is a 47 year old male and Ralph has had issues focusing, so he's on Adderall. Adderall is a prescription stimulant that can help with ADHD. He's on about 40 milligrams per day in divided doses, and he takes his last dose at 3pm Now, Adderall's half life is 19 to 14 hours. This means that almost half of it is still in your system after nine or 14 hours, which is incredible. And so if he's taking his last dose at 3pm, it's still going to be intact, his system past midnight, even towards 5am Ralph tries to go to bed at 10pm, but he can't fall asleep. So he uses Trazodone, which is a prescription sleep medication. Other things like Ambien are similar. So he uses Adderall in the morning to wake him up because he's groggy from using Trazodone at night to fall asleep. And then he needs Trazodone at night to fall asleep because he's stimulated from the Adderall that's still circulating his system at night. And you can see how this ping pong effect can continue years later. Ralph also has an elevated heart rate. His heart rate's like 110. We need a heart rate of 80 or less to be optimal for health. He's got elevated blood pressure, likely due to the stimulant use as well. Ralph is a perfect example of what we see in society. We're striving for stimulation, using uppers to get us up in the morning and downers to make us fall asleep at night. But this ping pong like effect is going to continue year and year after until we find the answer as to why we can't fall asleep in the first place. We need to start asking the question of why can't you fall asleep? What's keeping you up at night? Are you worried about finances? Are you stuck in a scarcity mindset where you never think that there's enough? Are your relationships not in line with your values and those are keeping you up at night? Or do you have a dysregulated circadian rhythm where cortisol is still too high at night? All of these things are questions that we need to ask. And on the flip side, why don't you want to get out of bed in the morning? Are you not excited about your job? Is your career not in line with your values? Are you just not passionate about what you're doing? Or are you not getting enough sunlight exposure during the day that's affecting your circadian Rhythm, whether it's physiological or emotional or mental. These are all the questions that we really need to dig into. We need to start asking the harder questions, get to the meat of the issue, so that we can solve these problems at their root and not put band aids on them.

It wasn't until recently that we realized that the conversation between neurons, the conversation between the cells in the brain, the creation of neurotransmitters, the process of processing of memories, all of that creates a lot of metabolic brain waste. And that also has to be removed at night. And the glymphatic system wakes up at night. It works the most actively. So again, without proper sleep, you're not cleansing that there is something called beta amyloid, that is a protein that is often associated with patients that have dementia and Alzheimer's. So patients that have dementia and Alzheimer's have the highest levels of beta amyloid and the glymphatic system at night is removing beta amyloid, is in charge of removing that. So again, this goes to show how lack of the proper sleep causes an accumulation of this waste material throughout the body.

I like to focus on the basics, the root cause stuff. There's no magic pill, there's no magic bullet, silver bullet for this. There's no supplement that we can supplement ourselves out of deep sleep. There's no shortcut sleep is that important. It's one third of our life. Get used to it. Don't think of it as a waste of time. I used to think of it as a waste of time. I used to be able to go to bed at 2:00am and wake up at 5:36 o' clock the next morning. And I felt great, or at least I thought I did. And then it caught up with me and I just increased my chance of getting Alzheimer's or heart disease, you know, by factors of 3 to 10. I mean, it's huge.

I want to touch briefly on neurotransmitters, which we also discussed in episode three. These are the messenger molecules of our brains and our nervous system. Just like our hormones, they're involved in nearly every function of our body, the brain. Chemicals or neurotransmitters send messages throughout the body to every cell, organ and tissue, helping you do everything from move your arm to feel happy or sad.

So the most important neurotransmitter for sleep, I would say, is actually gaba. And GABA helps you relax. So GABA is a neurotransmitter that most people can take in a supplement. It's not supposed to cross the Blood brain barrier. It's a large, large molecule, but I do find that it does. We have leaky guts, we have leaky brains, we have leaky sinuses. Unfortunately, our society is so leaky that it is safer to take in a supplement form if you need to. But obviously you need to ask yourself or have your doctor assess, why are my GABA levels low? But GABA is an important one. And that's how a lot of the benzodiazepines, the Valiums, the Klonopins, the Xanax, they work through gaba.

Other neurotransmitters that we have are GABA and glycine and L Theanine. So these neurotransmitters are called inhibitory versus excitatory. So we have two kinds. The ones that stimulate you, that wake you up, such as dopamine, taurine, and then we have the ones that calm you down to allow you to rest and sleep. Similar to what we talk about with the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. We have neurotransmitters that allow us to be sharp, alert, focused, and we have neurotransmitters that allow us to calm and relax at night. So GABA is probably one of the most important neurotransmitters. GABA is a natural, we call it as a natural. Xanax is the relaxer for the body and GABA is also produced in the evening. Gaba, the neurotransmitter GABA is also made by the bacteria, by your friendly bacteria in your gut. So if someone doesn't have a healthy gut or a healthy microbiome, they're not going to make enough GABA in their body. And lack of GABA leads to a lot of anxiety for patients. So neurotransmitters also L Theanine is another one that calms the brain and calms once cortisol level. So theanine is used to reduce cortisol and calm all that stress in the brain. So L Theanine, GABA are some very important neurotransmitters that if someone is low on, they're going to experience a lot of anxiety and not be able to cope with stress. So serotonin is very connected for depression support and L Theanine and GABA for anxiety. So those are the neurotransmitters that I always want to make sure my patients are have proper levels in order to support pathways of sleep. And again, when we don't sleep, we don't regenerate those neurotransmitters transmitters. So it's again, it's the cycle. The lack of them causes you not to be able to fall asleep. But not sleeping also depletes the body from it. So it's a lot of times when we have a broken cycle of sleep, we do have to supplement with GABA, with L theanine, with 5 HTP or melatonin to allow the brain to reset and calm at night until the body starts to make it on their own.

Now I want to take a moment to talk about stress. Chronic stress has become an epidemic in our society where faster is better and we attempt to pack more obligations into our ever expanding schedules. And when we're stressed, we often put sleep on the back burner. When you're stressed, your adrenal glands release hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which we already talked about, that flood your system, raising your heart rate, increasing your body blood pressure and making your blood more likely to clot. It also damages your brain's memory center, it increases belly fat, and it generally wreaks havoc on your body and your ability to get quality sleep. I'm here to tell you that late nights and burning the midnight oil at the cost of your health is not a badge of honor. In fact, in the long run, this lifestyle with can only slow you down and make you less sharp, less focused, less energized and less happy. In my practice, I often see patients who are so stressed that they can't sleep. And this is really unfortunate when it comes to this challenge. A personalized approach is always best. But there are things that you can do today to minimize your stress. Now, one of the best ways to enhance our sleep, to manage our stress, to optimize our brain health and our overall health is Drum roll please. Exercise. You know you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet and bad sleep habits. But exercise is an essential tool for getting and staying healthy. In fact, as our experts will discuss, people who are fit actually sleep better.

The American association of Sleep Disorders has actually come out and said that exercise is an effective way to treat sleep. Why does exercise actually affect sleep and how does it. Exercise has been shown to increase slow wave sleep. This is your deep restorative sleep phase. Exercise also decreases sleep onset, so it takes you less time to fall asleep. And lastly, exercise can just increase sleep duration so you can sleep longer. Now I want to ask you, why do you think exercise actually helps with these things? In order to answer that question, we have to understand why we fall asleep in the first place. So sleep Onset is thought to be triggered by a decrease in core body temperature. This is our ability to thermoregulate or change our body temperatures. And exercise has a key responsibility in thermoregulation. So when we exercise, say we're exercising at 70% of our maximum capacity capacity, or 70% of our VO2 max. If we do that for about 15 to 20 minutes, we're going to increase our body temperature by 2 degrees Celsius. So this increase in body temperature causes vasodilation, meaning that all of the arteries, veins, they dilate and they shunt blood flow to the surface of your skin. This is also why you just look flushed when you're exercising, is because all the blood is rushing to the surface in order to cool off our core body temperature, which is essential. You don't want to overheat this cool off though. And core body temperature may be what is helping us sleep at night, because it's that decrease in core body temperature that we need for sleep onset. So that's one factor why exercise might actually help us sleep. But there's a bunch of other ones too. So just increasing caloric expenditure, meaning that you're using energy up more so during the day when you're exercising, exercising, so you're just more tired at night. Makes sense. The other one is that exercise is going to increase your sleep drive. So again, that sleep drive is that buildup of adenosine, which is a byproduct of the glucose or the blood sugar metabolism. So it makes us sleepier at night. So increasing sleep drive is one of the mechanisms where exercise is really promoting that sleepiness towards the end of the day. Other things are going to be that exercise is anxiolytics, meaning that it decreases anxiety levels. And we know that anxiety is one of the key factors in insomnia. So that might be why it helps you feel more calm at night, making sleep onset a little bit easier. Now, it might not be the actual exercise that's improving your sleep, but the result of the exercise that's improving your sleep. So fitness level is now being tied to your ability to sleep and have really good sleep quality. I want to take for example, one second study that I looked at. So this study found athletes who were no longer exercising because they were injured, so they were out of commission for a little bit, but they were still really fit. Right? And what they found is that these fit subjects who are no longer exercising still had superior sleep quality compared to their non fit counterparts. And I find this fascinating because now we're realizing that it's not just the exercise, but the result of the exercise. So it starts to ask the question, when somebody can't sleep or they have poor sleep quality, should we be saying, are you fit enough to sleep? And this is something that we haven't talked about in medicine or in health in general. But it's one thing that I think we need to start changing the mindset around that you actually need to have a fitness level to have really good sleep quality at night. With exercise, consistency is king. So exercising one day will likely not have any effect on your sleep at that night. But exercise over a prolonged period of time is likely to really help improve sleep quality. When it comes to exercise though, consistency is king. So if you exercise just once and then you expect to have better sleep that night, unfortunately that usually doesn't happen. So this is over weeks or years where you get the effects of exercise on improve sleep quality. Now one study looked at how this can influence your sleep and they looked at an eight week study at first at putting people into a fitness regimen after eight weeks did not improve their sleep quality. But after 16 weeks of exercising, they found improvements in sleep duration, sleep quality and shortened time to actually fall asleep. So again, we need to make sure that we're giving it a good shot. Three days of exercise per week for several weeks before you're actually making any judgments on whether it's helping your sleep is really, really important. There's also too much of a good thing. So when it comes to exercise, I have a lot of athletes in my practice and I see this all the time, they think more is better. And that's not the case when it comes to sleep optimization. So too much exercise can actually be detrimental to your sleep. It's believed that over two hours of high intensity intensity exercise can decrease sleep quality. One study looked at female swimmers. These were athletes and what they found is during their highest training volume times, they had decreased sleep quality and increased sleep movements, meaning that they were moving more during their sleep and more disturbed during their sleep. Similarly, there's been a bunch of studies on marathon runners and they see decreases in the total volume of REM sleep after that marathon. So while exercise is super important for sleep and consistency is even more important, we need to make sure we're not overdoing it. Moderation is key. So the moral of the story with exercise is that consistency is super important. We need to give it a good shot over a prolonged period of time and we need to not overdo it. So more is not always better. But Moderation is really what we should be striving for. So we know that exercise is important for sleep, but what kind of exercise should we be doing? There's a few types of exercises and I want to focus on aerobic versus resistance training. So aerobic training is that endurance training. It's going out for a long run, it's going for a swim, a bike ride, all of these things that get your heart rate up for a prolonged period of time. Resistance training is more like strength training. You're lifting weights, you're increasing your heart rate quickly, but then you're taking a break between sets. And both of these have phenomenal effects on health overall. So it's not that one is better than the other, but it looks like most of the research is on aerobic training for sleep optimization. So if you're having trouble sleeping, then this is where you might want to focus your attention. Aerobic athletes have been shown to have increased duration of slow wave sleep. It also takes them less time to fall asleep and they have more sleep quality. So these are the patterns that we see with exercise in general. Right. One study looked at resistance training though, and what they found is that when they put elderly patients through a resistance training program over 10 weeks, they had them exercise and lift weights three times per week for one hour and they found that they had a self reported improvement in sleep quality. This just means that the participants said that they slept better, which is valid. That's actually what we're going for, is that people feel like they're sleeping better. Now. Does this mean that we should only be focusing on aerobic training and not resistance training? Absolutely, absolutely not. We need the benefits for both of them. But if sleep is really detrimental to your health and it's the one thing that you're working on, then I would really tell you to try to focus on aerobic training versus resistance training in the beginning. And then you can add the resistance training in once you feel comfortable with the aerobic training. The best way to start to focus on aerobic training, if you've never done it before, would be to start with a walk three times per week once you feel comfortable with a walk, then increase to a slow jog once you feel comfortable with a jog. Now you're running, so you really want to titrate up to your comfort level and to your training level. The last thing you want to do is jump into a high intensity workout where you get injured and then you can't work out for another 16 to 20 weeks because that's going to be more detrimental to your sleep and your overall health than anything. So start slow, start low and increase as your comfort level progresses.

We've been talking about when we eat and the importance of that and when we exercise is very important as well. And I'm of the belief that earlier in the day is, is best for exercise. Um, now I'll just provide a little context and caveat. Exercise when you can, but if you're doing very intense interval based exercise, Tabata high intensity interval training, where you're revving up your heart rate through the, the intensity, say CrossFit, for example, even orange, Orange theory. The earlier in the day that you do that, the better because, you know, look, I mean, if you look at the physiology of exercise, we're raising adrenaline, a stress hormone, we're raising noradrenaline, a stress hormone, and cortisol. Again, these are beneficial hormones in the context of exercise. They're counterproductive to fostering deep restorative sleep. So I'm not anti exercise at all. It's just being smart about when you exercise. And I've personally found with clients, if they exercise late in the evening, it does compromise their sleep. They tend to want to have some food after they exercise, maybe some protein. They're kind of wired. And so earlier in the day, just like with food, can be better. And there's another advantage from a circadian rhythm standpoint of when we exercise in and pushing it earlier in the day. Because from our circadian biological perspective, our mitochondria, which is where we oxidize and burn a lot of our fat for fuel, are amplified from a circadian rhythm standpoint earlier in the day. Uh, cortisol is elevated earlier in the day. And cortisol, actually, I know it has a kind of a, a mixed reputation amongst integrative doctors and practitioner, but practitioners. But cortisol really actually helps us pull fat from our adipose tissue and utilize that for fuel. And cortisol is going to be highest earlier in the morning. So you know, I advise people in, in and coach them and encourage them to just again, make exercise a routine. First thing in the morning, you're going to drive that stimulation of the adrenal glands, which is what you want. It's not all day long, it's just temporary. It's transient. Transient stress is adaptive, is beneficial. Chronic stress, chronic elevations of these wakefulness hormones and stress hormones is maladaptive. And so short term high intensity interval training in the morning can be beneficial again for digestion, for gut health, for creating an appetite, for Food so that you're eating earlier in the day. And another benefit of early time restricted feeding is by that time you've had one or two meals, you're not really hungry for dinner. You're like, I'm good, I've had enough food. And again, the importance of those early meals is they influence the peripheral clocks. Unlike light, which influences the central clock, meal timing and exercise can influence the peripheral clocks, which is great. So that's one of the benefits, I think, of early morning exercise. And the last benefit is most people are not having food right before they go to the gym because they just had what they've woken up, you know, they don't have time to make breakfast and so forth. And so you're exercising in a low state and that causes you to deplete glycogen, which is stored glucose. It causes your body to preferentially burn more fat for fuel. There's been some controlled feeding studies and controlled exercise studies by a gentleman, I can't remember his first name, Akiyama, in Japan. And what he found is people that exercise fasted in the morning oxidize more fat during the day compared to people that exercise fed in the afternoon. So again, exercise when you can make it a habit consistently. But if you're trying to really optimize things for longevity for health purposes, is there could be some added benefit to doing your exercise in a fasted state in the morning. And as we've been talking about, that creates this pattern, this system, and it also creates a little bit of pressure so that you can tell yourself, like, hey, I have to get off Netflix and Instagram at 10pm because I have a workout in the morning I need to prep for. So it helps to foster that sleep pressure and hold yourself accountable. And especially if we exercise, what with other people that I really recommend clients and everyone to do. This exercise shouldn't be this isolated event that we do by ourselves. The more people that we can get involved with when we train, whether that's a coach, an accountability partner, your spouse, your friend, like, hey, we're meeting at the gym at 6am like, let's go. That's going to hold you accountable. And so you'll be less tempted to have that third glass of wine before bed or less tempted to watch that next episode of the Netflix series that you're into and it'll force you to go to bed. So we got to take advantage of every little strategy that we can because there's a lot of things going against us in this world, right? There's amazing television shows, Netflix and YouTube videos that we could be watching audiobooks, we could be reading Kindles and all that. And so if we can piggyback off all these little tricks, I think it can help us get more deep sleep.

So let's put this all together. Here are some action steps from today's Lesson number one Move your body. You should be incorporating some form of movement every single day. Ideally you want to exercise in the morning or the afternoon and not before bed or after dinner. But for most people I recommend working out before dinner. Some people can't do it before two, which is optimal, but at least if it's before dinner, that's okay. Incorporate a mixture of resistance training, which is like strength training and cardio. And one of my favorite is hiit or High Intensity Interval training. High Intensity interval training involves working at the very top end of our capacity for 30 to 60 seconds and then recovering for three minutes by walking or a slow jog and then returning to very high intensity for another 45/60. And don't let the short, short time fool you. You can see significant fitness gains very quickly because you're pushing yourself to your limit. You can do it walking, running, biking, jumping, rope, dancing or even swimming. Just focus on getting your intensity up to a 9 on a 1 to 10 scale during these intense intervals and then allowing your system to recover as much as possible during the rest cycles and prepare to work up a sweat. The New York Times has is a great 7 minute workout app which incorporates HIIT training and I've linked to it in the course materials. Also, find something that you love to do every day and do it every day. I love to play outside. I like tennis, skiing, horseback riding, gardening. I have to spend time outside every day and as we learned, this is important not only for our well being mentally, but for our circadian rhythm. Spending time outside is also a great way to boost our immune system, which we also know is important for sleep. So what do you like to do outside? Can you move your indoor workout outdoors a few times a week? Sometimes spending more time outside is as simple as going for a 15 minute walk in the morning and then in the evening. Next, make relaxation a part of your daily routine. Unfortunately, we've come to see active relaxation as self indulgent, when in fact it's a necessary component of staying healthy. We know that your sleep is not just about how you end the day, but how you start the day. I like to do a 20 minute meditation in the morning and a quick breathing exercise at night. I often meditate in the afternoon as well. 20 minutes and it seems like it's a waste of time, but actually it helps me focus, sleep better and be better. Now, if you need some guidance, there are tons of apps out there like Calm or Headspace that you can use to guide you through different types of meditations. Here's two quick breathing exercises from our expert, Dr. Judy Hinojosa that you could do just before bed.

I'm going to teach you two breathing techniques that I like to have my patients do. And again, you can do this throughout the day. It's not just for sleep. If you do them throughout the day, you're prepping your body to go from the fight, flight, freeze to rest. So you're getting from the yin and yang, the yin being the calming space. So the first one is called and it's often both practices are practiced in yoga and meditation practices. So the first one is called four seven, eight breathing technique. And the four, seven, eight breathing technique is a form of breath that involves. I'm going to walk you through it involves a couple steps, so it's pretty easy. So what you're doing is you're going to breathe before you start taking the breath in, you're going to empty out what's already there. So the whole point of this breath is to activate the diaphragm. The diaphragm is the location right here. It's an organ that lives right on top of the intestinal tract. And when we're breathing, when we're doing deep belly breathing, we're moving the diaphragm, we're expanding the diaphragm. So doing belly breathing, when we say belly breathing, is an expansion of the diaphragm type of breath that doesn't just sit on the chest. If we just do chest breathing, we're not activating the diaphragm. And the diaphragm is important to activate because it stimulates the vagus nerve. So if we don't stimulate that vagus nerve, the adrenals are going to feel stress. So think of it as the vagus nerve massaging your adrenals. So every time you do this type of breath, you're massaging the adrenals so they can calm and relax. So you're having a little bit of an internal massage. So the vagus nerve wants to be stimulated. When we do belly breath, which is the diaphragm. But so the 4, 7, 8 breathing is what you start with is you're going to first take all the air out and you're going to breathe out through your mouth. And by breathing out through your mouth, you're going to force that air. You're activating the diaphragm. So I'll show you the first breath. So you're going to take all the breath out.

So you put the pressure and you're breathing out, all the air is out. Once all the air is out, you're going to breathe in. And as we do this, I ask my patients to close their eyes. Of course, be sitting somewhere comfortable. Don't be doing this when you're driving. Close your eyes. And then when you breathe, count to four. And as you're breathing, I want my patients to envision the breath coming right in between their eyes. So as you take the deep breath, you're going to count to four.

And the breath goes up right into here. You count to four and then you hold it for seven. So you're going to hold seven seconds. And as you're breathing in, try to put the tip of the tongue on top of the roof of your mouth. So as you take the breath in, count the four seconds and you hold it for seven. And by, by doing that pause, by holding for seven, you're bringing that oxygen to the brain, you're exaggerating the brain. And then you're going to breathe the air out and you're going to breathe down on eight, but you're going to breathe it off through your mouth. So then we're going to activate the diaphragm. So you're bringing the air and by doing the longer breath out, so you're going to actually slow down your nerves, nervous system. So the, the quick breath in, holding of the breath and breath out allows your diaphragm to be expanded. But the slow breath out when we have longer exhales calms down our central nervous system. That's really important. If patients don't do the 4, 7, 8. Just the simple act of breathing out slowly and steady and control calms down our nervous system. But through this bread, we. I'll run you through it now. So it's four seconds.

And then you hold it for seven.

And then you breathe it out through your mouth.

And you count to eight. But you want to breathe it out and get all that air out. And when you're breathing in, expand your abdomen at the same time. So you want to breathe in, expand with expansion of the abdomen and breathing out through your mouth. And all you do, all you need to do is four cycles of that. So getting a very comfortable space, no tight clothing, Whether you can really expand that abdomen and the diaphragm. But by doing this breath you can do this twice a day for, for four cycles. If you're under a lot of stress you can do it, but before bedtime, definitely do an hour before bedtime, 30 minutes before bedtime. But do it somewhere in the day as well so your body gets that resetting and that messenger of clean air, fresh breath to activate the vagus nerve and slow down the central nervous system. If patients can't, if they wake up in the middle of the night, instead of doing the four seven, eight I have them just breathe in and breathe out. By always the breath out, count it twice. So you can do a 4, 8. So breathing 4 seconds and slowly let it out on 8 seconds. In the middle of the night the body just is awake, the brain is awake. Just reminding ourselves, I like to tell my patients, remind your this is a perfect opportunity to breathe. This is a perfect day to meditate. This is when your body, your body's awake at night. Just bring the breath and bring the breath and as you do the breath, four in, eight out, it will calm your central nervous system and you can count. As you're counting and counting out, your mind will disengage on the thinking is going to focus solely, your attention is going to go. All the awareness is on the breath. You're watching the breath, you're watching the breath out and you're counting and the mind is no longer engaged. Because when we wake up in the middle of the night we're anxious, we're thinking, the mind can't stop. And this is a very simple technique. If I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't fall back to sleep, I'll just remind myself this is a perfect opportunity for me to breathe. I'm just going to do this breath and with no expectation or attachment tell yourself I'll just breathe for as long as I need to. It's great for my nervous system, it's great for my vagus nerves, great for my brain. I'm just going to breathe right now and within a minute or two you'll probably be falling asleep already. It's taking the expectation and the stress of I can't sleep, sleep. So the 478 is a great breath technique. The other one is the alternating of the nostrils. Breath. The alternating of the nostrils is also a very simple technique where again you do it for, you can do it for two minutes but you're bringing air in through one nostril. So you cover one nostril as you bring out and then you let the air out. So you can use the right. What is easier to just use the right thumb to cover the right nostril layer air comes in and you can count to six seconds and then layer goes out through the other nostril. So you're just literally covering back and forth the nostrils. And if you do maybe a round of 10, you're bringing air up in the brain is really good to activate the oxygen into the brain which allow what it does by doing the taking turns on the right and left. It allows for both hemispheres of the brain to become imbalanced. And when the hemispheres are imbalanced, the brain is easier to go into rest at night. So it's a great breath that you can do throughout the day. This is something you don't have to close your eyes. I will do it maybe in between patients. I try to practice doing that type of breath to calm my central nervous system system. And that's the importance of doing something throughout the day. So it's easier to fall asleep at night. So the alternating breath is very easy to do. Just bring the breath in, bringing one in, one nostril out, both parts of the brain will be activated.

Another way to relax before bed is to take time to connect with people in your home. My wife and I like to play backgammon. We like to chat and catch up, just hang out and chill together, read a book. Sometimes when it's nice out we go for a long walk around the city or around our house in the country. And one of my favorite ways to relax is with an Epsom salt bath before bed. That really helps you sleep. And if you put some lavender drops in it, it lowers your cortisol and helps you sleep even more. So you can learn more about all this in the lesson materials. Remember, Yang energy in Chinese medicine is all about doing, doing, doing. It's all about productivity and focus. Most of us spend too much time in the Yang energy, and we need more time in yin energy, which is soft and relaxed. If you're in go mode all day long, no wonder it's hard to calm down at night. I promise you that if you prioritize relaxation and you tap into yin energy for at least a few hours each day, your body and your mind and your sleep will thank you.

For me, I'm always trying to understand. I take so much time to not just ask about sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep. I want to know you. I want to know who is this person that cannot Fall asleep. Because falling asleep has a lot to do with letting go of control. You literally have to become unconscious. You literally have to let go of everything in your life. Your kids, your plans, your job, your money issues, whatever is on, going, going on in your life for seven hours, five hours, 10 hours, you have to completely let go. So control might be an issue that I might address with some patients. You know, how. How good are they at letting go of the past or literally letting go of things and wanting to be in control. But looking at myself, I remember when I had this incident when I was. I. Someone broke up with me. My heart was broken. I was shattered into pieces. I literally remember feeling like I was all over the room. I was in bed, but couldn't fall asleep. I couldn't get out of my bed. Low motivation. I actually lost all my appetite, lost weight. And when I went later back into India for a yoga training retreat, one of the mentors there, you know, I remember having. Asking them if they had something to help me sleep. And he was a beautiful spiritual guru. I think he was almost 100 years old, doing headstands every day. And he said, don't suppress the pain. There's a reason why you're not sleeping. You have to stay up and actually feel what your mind is going through. And I thought, oh, my God, what's this guy saying? He obviously hasn't had insomnia and doesn't know how hard it is and how bad it is. But honestly, it's probably the best advice I got with sleep because it was still at my beginning stages of the grief, you know, and I was unable to. To sleep. And I knew why, because before then, I slept okay. It wasn't like, as a kid I had a sleeping disorder. And so often I encourage this in individuals. I say sometimes people wake up at 2 or 3. And I remember Wayne Dyer saying that's when he wrote all his books. You know, sometimes it's not what we think it is, you know, and there's even research showing people who had a negative outlook on insomnia, thinking that if they don't follow some sleep or they wake up, that they're more predisposed to disease. They actually got more sick than the people who were okay with themselves waking up at three, going into another room, reading something, getting sleepy, coming back into bed. And so I think that's important to remember that don't objectify and attach to this disorder. If. If you've been diagnosed with insomnia or. Everything I said right now kind of freaked you out and go. And you're like. Like, oh, my God, I have all those things. Okay, great. Put that aside. Go back to you. You know, you. You know what you feel. And it's often from a mental, emotional, spiritual disharmony that is making you not able to do something that's so natural. It is the most natural. It's just like breathing, right? So if you can't do it, there's a reason for it. So address that, you know, and you can start with cognitive behavioral therapy. You can start with even finding a counselor or meditation or spiritual or someone who can help you understand you better and not band aiding it, because we already know in medicine that those don't even work, you know, and they have so many other side effects. So I highly encourage people to care enough about themselves to not start themselves on that bandwagon of the Zolpidems and the ambient Ambiens and the Xanax and all these medications, because I see 20 years later, some of these people, I cannot help them. They cannot come off some of these things because it has messed up their brain. And now I have five other things that I have to fix. And so I always encourage. See this in your kids. If you're starting to see they have anxiety, they have depression, or, you know, I asked my. My daughter, who can't find fall asleep, what it feels like, because she's learning about the word anxious. And I always say, I'm six years old. I don't understand what that words. What do you feel? And she'll say, I feel this inside, you know, And I feel like it's. We forget to use sensations. And so I've helped her with magnesium, you know, but just getting this to come out through art and music and getting her climbing, getting her to use this energy and will see, say it like, how much of this is happening right now, you know, But I'm teaching her to be in tune with what she truly feels on an energetic sensation level instead of, I have anxiety, I have a mood disorder, I have depression. What does that mean? What do you actually have? You might have sadness, you might have anger, you might have rage inside. You might feel betrayed, you might feel something, and you can't let go of that. You're upset about it. And that's making your question. Cortisol and melatonin, serotonin and all these fancy things that we say as doctors go up and down, but if no one's helping you address that, and we are even just looking at, you know, all these root causes, but that is the root cause and it often is, then we're missing the whole picture and we're just using, you know, these supplements and herbs to help you. But I encourage you to look at that and say, you know what, there is pain here and I want to address it. I want to see me not being able to see sleep, if it is coming from that, that I want to go through it so that I can come out of it. And I can't tell you, yes, I didn't sleep for those nights and it was painful. But I, I have now experienced insomnia on a whole other level. And I'm glad and I can, I can help other people from it. But I also understood on a spiritual level when, when I am not able to express an emotion and I hold it in, it goes somewhere, it affects something, it comes up as a symptom. And as a doctor, I encourage patients to feel free and give themselves permission to feel their pain, to feel what they're feeling. And the cause of not being able to let go at night, because nighttime is the most vulnerable time. So you will feel whatever you've been holding in and trying to not show to the rest of the world. That is a time where your body is like, okay, we can't hide it anymore because now we gotta let go and we are not letting go. So yeah, looking at perfectionism tendencies for ocd, I mean all these words I don't like to use, but a lot of my patients will resonate, you know, that they like things a certain way, that they worry about their kids health, they worry about certain things, they worry about their lab numbers, they want to get their microbiome tested, they want to get everything tested. So sometimes I'll come in with a binder of lab tests done with previous doctors. I already know this patient doesn't get good sleep just from that alone. Right. Because it has to do with control. Like what is health to you and what does it mean if you do find something wrong? Well, it's because you want to fix it. And in life, probably something happened to them that they couldn't fix. They, they were out of control and, and now they're compensating in the daytime. And guess what? In the nighttime will remind them. The yin in them will remind them the time where they get their period, which is your most yin time will remind them of their true emotions. And I hate when we keep labeling people with PMS and moody mood disorder. It's hormonal. No, sometimes you are supposed to be fatigued during the first Day when you're bleeding, you're supposed to feel something. During ovulation, you're supposed to have a shift. Being female is amazing because we have this report card every month that reminds us of how we did last month and these emotions. You know, back in Iran, there are homes, like my grandparents, that is made out of clay. And it's true. It was tradition that women would go into these areas only when they had their period so that they could be around that energy and really go in, go inward, go yin at nighttime, and they would just sleep, they would oversleep to restore their body so that then they can get ready for ovulation to conceive. And so it's amazing how sleep was used very differently than like, the sort of mechanical way that we use it. They slept more during their periods, and that is normal and that's healthy. Whereas now people come to me and they're like, I'm so tired. You know, I have my period and I'm going to the gym and. And I'm like, but you're not listening to your body. There's a reason you're tired. You know, your. Your uterus is like working so much right now, getting rid of all this blood, and you're pumping that blood to the periphery and trying to exercise, and then you're exhausted, you know, so you might need more sleep during the first couple of days of your period of the day before. It should never be to the point where you're a whole other person, you know, so sometimes there is true pmdd, which is the PMS is very severe, and sometimes it's from progesterone deficiency. And they'll say, I have insomnia the week before my period. It's. I don't sleep well, I'm restless, I'm tired, so that's different. But being more emotional around your cycle, there's nothing wrong with that. That's actually great time for you to go in. And same at nighttime. It's a great time to journal. It's a great time to be still with your mind. So I encourage that sort of five minute in the morning to, you know, make yourself the ritual of having a tea or a coffee or whatever it is. It's not about the thing you're drinking. It's the ritual being aware of your breath, your diaphragm. So remember, I said during sleep, the only muscle that is awake and working is your diaphragm and your eyes during that rapid eye movement. And how many of us don't even know how to Breathe. Our diaphragm is stuck, literally. I'll palpate here. And it's like, everyone's like, ow, ow. And it's because it's got the fascia there is so tight. We are not using that diaphragm to breathe like a baby. Like in and out, in and out. So at nighttime, during the daytime, in the middle of the day, those are times you want to prep for sleep. If you've got sleep issues, start with your morning. Get a puppy, get a dog so it forces you to take them for a walk and get that sunlight in your eye. If you don't have sunlight and it's gray, you might get an artificial light that actually stimulates light. So your sleep is all to do with the light that you get throughout the day. Try to take a break throughout the day to check in with your diaphragm and your body and your breathing. Check in at nighttime with your breathing. Have an unwind hour before bedtime where you know you are using something to relax you and help you fall asleep, but that will also help you stay asleep.

Thanks for joining us in this lesson. In our next lesson, I'm going to share my favorite supplements, tools and gadgets to enhance your sleep. Once you've taken care of the root cause of your your sleep challenges, there are a few additional things that you can do to support your sleep. Over the past few years, I've discovered some useful tools and gadgets that help me get my best rest. I've also dialed in on what supplements can be the most useful for supporting our sleep. In this episode, I'll share all of these tools with you and all the tips that I use personally. First, I want to talk about tracking your sleep. Now. When I started tracking my sleep using the Oura Ring, that's this thing right here, I was given some powerful insight about my health. In fact, all the experts in this lesson recommend tracking your sleep as the first line of defense. Understanding how well we sleep is an important part of fixing our sleep.

Tracking someone's sleep is interesting because when you track sleep, you're able to see how much time someone spent on REM versus deep and light states of sleep. And I do think it's a good idea for, for a lot of patients when they're starting to understand their sleep, to track their sleep. There's many devices out there and my recommendation for my patients, one of the most accurate ones is called Oura Ring. And it's a ring that they can wear at night that will track their sleep. And it'll be very accurately track their deep REM and their light sleep. And.

There'Ll be an app that they can tell the information to to understand their patterns. My advice around this for my patient is if you wear the ring, make sure that your phone is on airplane mode and then your WI fi is turned off, the Bluetooth is off. So at night you're not getting constant connection into your ring because that defeats the purpose, which we'll talk about. Emfs. If you keep the phone on next to you as you're wearing your ring, you're going to have a lot of EMFs running through your body which are going to disrupt your sleep. And I recommend my patients just to wear it at night. I don't think they should be wearing in during the daytime. In the daytime you're walking around.

EMFs and Wi Fi, they're constantly trying to connect to your ring. So when you charge it to, to when you put it in in the morning to analyze the data, don't analyze and run it when it's in your body. Otherwise you're getting a lot of EMFs into your body. I'm not a fan of a lot of bands to wear through the whole day because it meets a lot of EMFs. And EMFs have been shown to really disrupt sleep as well. So I think it's a good idea to understand patterns. But I'm also very cautious in telling my patients that whatever shows in their report of their sleep cycle, to not panic about it, to not become obsessed of it. I can see sometimes certain patients, I might not have them track their sleep at all because if they have too much anxiety and concern about sleep, actually monitoring and tracking their sleep creates more anxiety for them. So I don't think it's a long term solution for patients to constantly monitor and track, but just to have an idea of what, what their body's doing or how certain therapies or certain lifestyles or food or alcohol can impact their sleep. Is it's a bit of an experiment for them, but without attachment. And it's really important to have the conversation of don't attach yourself to what the ring says, get the information, but eventually sleep without a tracking device in your body. I think that's something that's necessary.

The best device that I can think of is the device that changes your behavior. The one that changes your behavior, makes you a better sleeper and gets you to bed on time. That's what I love about the OURA ring. It's making suggestions as to when I should go to bed. I Don't really need those anymore, but it's there, it does reinforce my behavior and it also rewards your behavior, your good behavior. So that's where a device is helpful. It is not going to be the solution. It is an additive thing that can help you become a better sleeper. And again, sleep is innate, but it's not guaranteed. We do have a lot to learn about, about sleep and we are bad sleepers, self imposed and I'm speaking for myself, we have abused that privilege of being able to sleep. And so devices are helpful in that regard, is rewarding for good behavior and also letting you know, you know, giving you tips on what you can do to be a better sleeper.

Next, let's talk about temperature. Remember a night we're meant to feel slightly cool. Now this might mean something different for everyone, but you need to find the best temperature for you and your partner.

This tip is one of my favorites. I've been doing it lately. Take a warm or cold shower. That temperature change will reduce your body temperature. Body temperature is extremely important when it comes to sleep. In fact, there are some devices out there that measure body temperature. A drop of half a degree is a good thing because your core body temperature, when it drops sleep is more likely to happen. The cold shower, the hot shower will in fact accelerate that. It will create that body change where you may fall asleep quicker.

So cool is usually. I used to be a very cold person. When I heard that, I was like, absolutely not. If I'm cold, I'm not going to sleep good. But the research does show and that's what happens in nature. Like when we were in caveman, we didn't have heaters, we didn't have a ton of blankets. You're supposed to be cooler. Your core temperature actually drops at night and it comes up around four in the morning, five in the morning to warm you up as the sun comes up. So that's, that's another thing is looking at temperature and maybe getting some more breathable mattresses or blankets, pillows. What happens to babies if you're, you know, putting blankets all around them? Their head sweats. So we release heat through our head. And that's why you see a lot of babies, they leave that little mark at the back of their head because that's where they sweat. Well, with adults, we've forgotten that. And I think a lot of men especially, they heat up at night. As soon as they lie down, their body temperature goes up. And so I want to look at that when I'm talking to my patients. I ask that and People just think, oh, that's my dyspr physician. I'm, I'm just a hot person. But when you study Chinese medicine, when you study other, you know, non conventional therapies, you realize there is a normal and healthy way of being. And when you're not moving, you shouldn't get hotter. You should actually either remain the same or actually get cooler. Especially when the, the temperature actually naturally comes down. As the sun goes down, it's supposed to get cooler. But with our climate control and being able to, you know, keep your temperature at 70 or 72 all day, you don't get that cue that's natural that we would if, you know, we lived more in tune with nature and we would get cooler. And that often is assigned to the body to release the hormones to get you sleepy. Right? And so that I look at temperature a lot with my patients and what happens throughout the day? Do their feet only get, do they get hot all over? Do they get really cold? Does the tip of their nose get cold? That can often be a sign that they're actually tired. Do they start yawning, you know, at 8:00pm? And then, you know, a lot of my women, I'll say, touch the tip of your nose if it's cold. It's a sign that your periphery isn't getting that blood and your body is trying to get ready for sleep. So using these cues to help you.

Ideally, your room will be between 65 and 72 degrees, depending on the person. In order to cool down your body temperature before bed, a bath or shower is great. Also, I love using bedjet, which blows cool air into your sheets all night long. Or a chili pad, which I love, which keeps the whole bed cool and even. You can have one for you and one for your partner. So you have different temperatures. You can set it to different temperatures using your smartphone. It's pretty cool. Not only should your room be cool, but it should also be dark. Remember what Dr. Afou said about melatonin receptors? If our room isn't dark enough, we might have a tough time falling asleep. And I use blackout curtains. I use black tape to cover all the lights in my room, like smoke detector, all kinds of stuff. And I also keep technology out of the bedroom. I keep the bed for sex and sleep. That's it. I also use eye shades, which are goofy, but they work. Next, I want to talk about one inexpensive tool that has helped thousands of people get better sleep. And it's related to mouth breathing. Remember our conversation about mouth breathing? Well, recently, more and more folks have been experimenting with something called mouth taping to help them breathe through their nose. Breathing through our mouth versus our nose can contribute to poor sleep. It can cause dry mouth, high blood pressure, migraines, and lots more. More. When we breathe through our nose, we're able to activate our parasympathetic nervous system. This means we're more calm, relaxed, and ready for bed and get deeper sleep all night long.

When it comes to sleep, I mean, you would think that someone who's very interested in this, I'm naturally a good sleeper, but that's not at all the case. I mean, I'm, you know, my brothers can fall asleep on an airplane really loud, but I struggle very light sleeper. And I would wake up oftentimes, especially in my appetite, adolescence. I noticed, like I would be really sleepy in school time and things like that. And lo and behold, it wasn't until, gosh, 2015 that I met Dr. Mark Behenna. I realized that I was a mouth breather. And that's why I was getting really unrefreshed sleep. And so the practice of mouth taping literally transformed my brain, my life, my energy. And ever since then, I mean, I've prioritized sleep and considered sleep to be very important. But I didn't really. I wasn't able to really differentiate what was good night's sleep versus a bad night's sleep until I started mouth taping. I remember the first night when he taught me this. In 2015, I was staying at my mom's house in San Francisco. I did an interview with him that day when he was telling me that you can enhance your sleep by taping your mouth. I thought he was kidding. I thought it was like a bad joke that I wasn't getting. I'm like, what is he talking about? And he said, no, no, there's really science about this. And he's a dentist. And I went home and on my way home, I bought some 3M micro tape that he recommended. And I remember waking up, I remember putting it on the first night that I did this and putting on mouth tape. And I thought it's, it's kind of claustrophobic, feeling like you feel like you're kind of trapped. Like all these things run through your mind. What if I have to vomit? What if I cough? What if this, what if that, right? Anyway, thankfully I just fell right asleep. I had one of the best night's sleep that I've ever had up to that point in my life. I remembered every dream in vivid detail and color. And I Was blown away. And ever since then, I've been trying to encourage more people to do this and have even. You know, at that time, my daughter was three years old. It took some, you know, convincing with my wife to convince her because I had seen my, my daughter, you know, she was a mouth breather just like me, okay? And at that point, she was sleeping with us in the bed, and she would end up upside down. I would get a foot in my mouth. You know, she. And part of that was because. Because she was struggling, as I understand it from a neurologic perspective. While she was sleeping, she wasn't getting oxygen because she was breathing through her mouth and her tongue was collapsing the airway during her REM stages. So when I started mouth taping with her, and we had to make it as a parent, this is a tip for helping your kids to mouth tape. We had to have mom and dad do it, and it was cool. Mom and dad are mouth taping. This is really cool. It's part of our pre bed routine. And then so eventually she would do it on her own volition. At first I had to put it on her and just say, just, just please do this, honey. You know, this is going to help you with sleep. And she would lie still and sleep really good. And she used to have these really deep bags under her eyes. Even at age 3, those totally went away. And so it's been amazing. And her face structure, her jaw, you know, has totally changed. Her teeth, you know, we're starting to come in kind of crooked. There was a lot of crowding. The dentist was saying, you know what, we're probably going to have to refer you out to an orthodontist. There's a lot of crowding in here. And so the mouth taping has been very helpful with that. And we also, with her, got the myobrace, which I have no financial affiliation with, but it helps kids learn how to breathe through their nose while they're sleeping. It's just a. It's not invasive at all. It's like a night guard, essentially for kids. And that she's had no dental work at all. And again, her teeth were coming in kind of crooked on the bottom. A lot of crowding. Now her jaw is expanding. And so it's just, it was amazing to me to see like in real life, in a few years time, how just changing how we breathe while we're sleeping could have an impact on facial development and teeth structure. And, you know, various experts have talked about this, you know, going back to Weston A. Price you know, about the, the mouth and, and the connection between, you know, the airway and all this, but to actually see it, you know, and not, you know, see these pictures of people in Africa, but to see that, you know, nutrition and breath, it was such a, such a game changer for us.

Nose breathing is huge. Mouth taping is a simple fix, or at least a diagnosis, differential diagnosis for knowing whether you can properly nose breathe during the day and also at night. I first discovered mouth taping.

Via research for my book. My daughter and I came across it and again, four or five years ago, it was not such a big deal. Maybe in the outer circles of healthcare, mouth taping was mentioned. We were aware of it. These patients that couldn't breathe properly were mostly obligate mouth breathers. I mean, they weren't able to breathe through their nose. And so after a lot of research, research and then seeing that being verified, but what I was seeing in my practice, and it being linked to poor sleep, interrupted sleep, poor quality of life, high blood pressure, and certainly the dental grouping of decay and gum disease and bad breath, it became a very big part of my practice. And unfortunately, now I can't go without noticing that with anyone in any daily conversation. Our patients that are phobic, that don't like dentistry, that avoid the dentist, most of them are mouth breathing. Think about it. If you're at the dentist and you're on your back, which is, I've been told by some of my patients, is a form of waterboarding, and you can't breathe through your nose, and your only airway, only source of air is through the mouth, and I've got my fingers in there, and the dental system has their fingers in there, and there are instruments in there, there's a rubber dam on there, there's water in the back of your throat, you're going to be in panic mode during the whole visit and that's not what we want, of course, that's because they can't breathe through their nose. There are, as I mentioned, so many things about nose breathing that are just so important to know. For example, when you breathe air in through your nose, it gets warmed, the temperature is slightly elevated and it also is humidified. That air gets to the lungs and that is actually better for your lungs. It's less likely to dry out the lungs. Breathing through your mouth, of course, counteracts that. There is a nasal biome. There is.

A layer inside of your nose that is living and helps you filter out viruses and even spores breathing in through your mouth. It's an open passageway to your lungs and to the rest of your body. Breathing through your nose can actually allow you to sound different. It changes the tone of your voice. Typically, if the patient doesn't have a cold, I can hear the mouth breathers. It's a nasal kind of tone. And that's not right. I mean, we should be able to be able to breathe while we speak, right? I mean, that's important. So again, that whole idea of using the nose to breathe is very, very important. Nitric oxide is produced with this biome in the nose. If you have a very dry nose because you're not breathing through it and all the air is going in and out of your mouth, you're going to have a lot of allergies. The histaminic response to allergens and pollens is that much more exaggerated because your system is not in place to counteract that and to work properly. So use your nose. If you don't use it, you're going to lose it. It's that simple. So how, how does one figure all this out? It's so simple. It's as simple as just putting tape over your mouth. So my wife and I tape every night because even though we have our oral appliances and we have very good readings on ahi and all that, this does help. We don't want to get cavities, we don't want go to get gum disease, of course, but we also want to make sure that we are nose breathing. And I'm not sure why, but even though we are good nose breathers and able to nose breathe, every once in a while, we sleep in such a way where our mouth falls open and that's when the heart rate goes up, that's when the respiratory rate goes up. Why even deal with that if we can fix it by. And I literally do this in the middle, in the dark, before I go to bed, lights out, I reach over, grab some tape and I seal up my lips and they stay on till the morning time. I'm going to give you a demonstration right now. Just take some the right tape. I like 3M Nexcare and you rub it in to rub it onto your lips. Place it onto your lips with a normal lip posture. Don't pucker up, don't pull in, whatever your rest position is, even if you're slightly open and some people can't close their lips properly. That's lip posture. That's fine, whatever is relaxed for you. And this is what, what you do.

It comes off, it comes off very easily. No One's going to suffocate. So a lot of my patients will mouth tape, and some will do it fine. The tape's on in the morning, and I encourage them to keep doing that because most of them right away notice that something's different. They remember less at night. Their partner, sleep partner may say, oh, you didn't snore last night. Those are patients that can do it well. And they're kind of borderline in terms of obstruction of the airway. The more borderline patients, the tape will stay on for a few hours and then they just remember ripping it off and having a headache.

They're having hypoxia. They're suffering from hypoxia. They were able to do it for a certain amount of time, but there wasn't enough air coming in through the nose. And they started getting this headache from not getting any enough oxygen. And that's very telling as well. So. And then there are the people that won't even mouth tape. And those are the patients that, you know. Those are the same patients that are phobic. When they come see the dentist, they can't breathe through their nose. And anything that comes in front of their mouth, they won't wear masks. They won't. They're phobic about anything close to their mouth. Those are the patients that they instinctually know or know overtly that they cannot, they cannot nose proceed. And they are very protective of their airway. And those patients get an ENT referral. I wouldn't force tape on them. Some patients have allergies. There is discussion on the Web about techniques of bringing your breathing rate down. And I don't run around, have a high heart rate, high respiratory rate, and tape and jump into bed. That's almost impossible for anyone. You have to be relaxed, then tape up and then go to sleep. For patients that, that have allergies, forcing the issue with tape, let's assume they're good nose breathers, but they have an allergy. They're a little stuffed up. And I've had this issue as well sometimes, and there's some nights that I cannot tape, but sometimes it's good to try. Bring down your breathing rate, bring down your meditate, bring down your resting heart rate, and then try and tape. And even though you're slightly obstructed in terms because of, of the allergy, all of a sudden, by forcing the air through your nose, you're able to kind of reverse that stuffiness because you're allergic to something. And that has worked for a lot of People. So anyway, mouth taping is a very interesting technique for a variety of reasons and I highly recommend it.

If you're considering mouth taping, please consult your doctor again. This is not suitable for everybody. If you're a beginner with mouth taping, I recommend Somnifix Mouth Tape. They offer a gentle mouth tape that has a little slit between the lips for anyone who feels uncomfortable. The tape also comes off super easy. Now let's turn to a discussion on supplements. It'll be great if we can get all our nutrients and everything we need from food. But even with a perfect diet, the combination of lots of things, including our depleted soils, the, the storage and transportation of our food, genetic alterations of traditional heirloom species, the increased stress and nutritional demands resulting from a toxic environment, all these things make it really hard for us to get the vitamins and minerals we need solely from the food we eat. Also, our late nights and stressful lives mean that sometimes we need support when it comes to our sleep. So let's hear from our experts when.

It comes in to therapy. So what can one do to support support the sleep? So in terms of supplementation, there's some great things you can do for supplements. I like a combination of nutrients or bottles, supplements that have a combination of herbs and amino acids. Some of my favorite herbs are lavender. There's great lavender oil capsules that's a great gentle therapy even for children that have overstimulated mind or they can't sleep. So lavender oil capsules, capsules are great. You can also get a combination of a herbal formula that has some chamomile, some passion flower, some valerian root, some asha wanda, some rhodiola, some regular, some of the adaptogenic herbs that help manage adrenal function and help relax the brain and the mind for sleep. So an herbal formula. There's many companies that make great products. Gaia makes a great formula called Sleep Aid is herbal. So if you're, you're just going gentle, the herbs are a great way to help. If you're going into the amino acid realm. I love to use Gaba L theanine around 100 milligrams to 200 of L theanine, the same with GABA, 5 HTP, around 100 milligrams to 200 as well. And again, if you use melatonin or 5 HTP, I like to use the control release version of of it, meaning it stays in your body through the whole night. And it's good if it has a lot of B6, B6 around between 5 to 50 milligrams helps you metabolize and activate the serotonin pathway so the conversion of melatonin happens easier. Many patients that pick up melatonin need a little bit of the B6 built into it to metabolize it better. And again, the control release formula tends to work better. But you want to build up some slowly on melatonin. Start with a half a milligram. The highest dose a patient can take is 10. But build up slowly if you need to. But again, the amino acid blends that have a combination of gaba, glycine, L thinning, even taurine. So another great support for sleep. I also like magnesium. Magnesium is very relaxing for the brain. Women actually have much lower levels of magnesium than men. And this is one of the reasons why females tend to struggle more with insomnia. We need magnesium for balancing our hormones and balancing our adrenals and nervous system. There's more stress naturally in the body because of the hormonal changes, being a mother, having children. So magnesium supplementing with around I like between 200 to 400 milligrams of magnesium. I personally like magnesium citrate the best. I think patients sleep the best with the citrate. You can get in a powder form or in a capsule form. But my routine is I take magnesium every night. Calms my central nervous system, allows me to fall asleep easier. There's also great formulas. Again, I use a powder called Relax for helping patients sleep and to balance cortisol. So really it's all so much of sleep is, is the cortisol breaking down that cortisol. At night, I use something called Cortisol Balancer and Cortisol Manager that has amino acids, phosphatidylserine to break down the high cortisol in the body. So metabolizing that cortisol is very important for patients. Doing a fiber also bind some of this excess hormones. So maybe doing some flaxseeds in the morning or in the evening, a tablespoon of that can settle and bind some of those toxic hormones that are surfacing in higher levels.

Some of my favorite supplements for sleep include Cortisol Manager, which has ashwagandha, magnolia and phosphatidylserine, all which help lower cortisol levels. Melatonin is also fabulous, help reset your sleep cycle and help you stay asleep. Gaba, which is sort of a natural valium. It's an amino acid. Magnesium is very good. L theanine comes from green tea, also powerful. And there's lots more now it's important to talk to your doctor before taking anything. Some people are really sensitive to melatonin, so you might want to start with a small dose. Some people use half a milligram, some people might need one or three or five. Depends on the person. Start with a small dose and see how it affects your sleep. For a list of my favorite brands and specific products, please visit the written lesson that accompanies this episode. In the next lesson, we're going to put all this information together and create a full 10 day plan that you can start. Today, we're going to talk about setting up a morning routine, an evening routine, and we'll recap the most important takeaways from the sleep masterclass. Welcome to the final day of the Sleep Masterclass. Now, don't worry, the journey doesn't end here. It starts here. Today we're going to put all the information together from our lessons so you can customize your own 10 day sleep reset. Now, I know we shared a bit of information and it might feel overwhelming, but the key here is not to stress yourself about sleep sleep. The key is to choose which tools resonate with you. And as our experts mentioned, stressing out about not getting sleep and stressing out about not setting up everything perfectly only makes the problem worse. In this video, I'm going to offer you all options for your 10 day sleep reset. I'll talk about food, exercise, a morning and evening routine, setting up a sleep environment, and lots more. However, I also recognize that not all of this is possible for everyone. I want you to focus on what works for you. If it all works for you, then great. If you only get a chance to change a few things such as focusing on balancing your blood sugar, that's still a step in the right direction. I want you to wake up every day feeling happy, focused and healthy. And I know that means getting great sleep. I hope the tools that we offer you today will plant the seeds for healthy sleep habits that will carry you beyond these next 10 days on into the rest of your life. So let's get started.

Your evening time is that wind down time. You have to like prepare the body. You know, even like a loving touch, even like a facial, just touch itself can release oxytocin, which is relaxing. You know, touch with intercourse or sex can absolutely calm your nervous system down. That's that parasympathetic mode, you know, an herbal tea, not drinking too much fluids, but an herbal tea, a chamomile tea, valerian root, a lot of these things you can get that calm the nervous system down. These herbs we call nervines like skull cap, oat, strawberries, passion flower, chamomile. These are great ways to actually wind you down if you're too wound up from the day.

So your bedroom should be one of the most sacred places where you go into to rest. That's where you rest. Your bed is associated with resting, relaxation. It shouldn't be where you're working, doing emails or watching TV or eating. It shouldn't be the place where you're overly the mind is overly engaged. So watch your home. Make sure that your home has your bedroom has proper coverage for light. So we sleep better when we're fully in the dark. When we are in the dark, we release more melatonin. And if you have any electronics that are on or lights, that's going to disrupt your brain. So make sure everything is unplugged. Have a total dark room, even if you have to put blackout curtains, which I have in my house. And also noise. You want to minimize noise. So if you sleep with a partner that snores or if you're sensitive to noise, just wear earplugs. I sleep every night with earplugs. And the body, when it's quiet in darkness, knows how to go to rest.

Outside of the darkness is also temperature control. So we sleep better when we are in a cooler space. The body naturally drops the its temperature at nighttime in preparation for sleep. The body does better when it's in a cooler temperature. So getting the room cooler helps. So anywhere around 65 to 72 degrees depends on each person. But ideally around a 68 to 70 is the ideal for most people to have a cooler room when they go to bed. And one of the techniques for patients to actually get their body to fall is sleep is take a hot shower or take a hot bath is not only relaxing, but when you come out of the shower, the contrast of the hot and the cooler temperature naturally bring is causing your body to circulate more blood. And it's cooling your body down from all the heat. Your body starts to cool down. So it's a quicker way to drop someone's temperature as well to go to bed if you're too warm at night. My patients that have hot flashes at night, they're hot at night. They actually say that when they take after a hot shower, often they feel cooler so their body's able to rest more at night. So getting your temperature down and making sure that your bed is not too warm as well and what kind of clothing you wear it Is advisable that most people don't wear clothing when they go to sleep. Your body, you don't want to restrict again the lymphatic movement that happens. Otherwise you're not detoxing as well. You want to sleep just on your skin at nighttime. So watching the temperature, the light, sound. And again, if you're wearing a device to track your sleep, make sure that it's not connected or on. On airplane mode. So you don't want to be radiating yourself all the time. Other practices for sleep, I always guide my patients to either adopt a practice where they focus on their spirituality, their focus on their energy body, where they have sacred space. And this is what I do every night right before the last thing I do before I go to bed for 10 minutes, I either pray or meditate. And I do it either when I'm laying in bed or right next to my bed. And I will set up an environment where I actually love aromatherapy. So I may have some lavender oil or gentle rose being infused in the bedroom just reminds my body to rest, relax. And I'll probably do a breath work or meditation or a prayer to just slow my system down and connect with a deeper self. The body has been active all day, so I go to a deeper place of transition where I can also run through my day in a form. Prayer is a form of unloading the brain. So I'm spending in gratitude. I'm kind of going through my day and being grateful for what has happened and also releasing what I need to release. Whether sometimes there's too much in my mind, I'll write it down, I'll journal what's in my mind, my to do's for the day or for tomorrow. I'll write it down and put it on a journal that the next day I dump my brain in essence in the paper. So it's there, I haven't forgotten it. But once I clear the mind that I go into breath to calm my central nervous system down. But I always spend time in prayer and gratitude. Gratitude to the day and just setting, relaxing the brain and the mind so the body can rest at night. And when we sleep at night, it's not just physiology, but it's our energetic body that needs rest. And the energetic body does well when we nourish it with kindness, with appreciation, with gentleness. So a lot of gentle energy you want to do around sleep time.

One of the best ways to prepare yourself for sleep is to keep your environment environment dark. And this means orange lights or dim lighting or even candlelight. If it's safe. Also, for two hours before bed for the next 10 days, can you commit to avoiding screens? Here's an example of what I do before bed. Around 8 o', clock, we'll turn off the lights in the house and either switch to candlelight or we'll use orange lights. Now, if I'm on a really tight deadline and I have to be on my laptop or if we're watching a movie with friends and family, I also wear my blue blocking glasses. My favorites are true dark blue blockers. Most nights I'll try to do something really relaxing and here's some options you can use that time to catch up with people in your house, your family, Write letters to someone you love, play a board game with your family or friends, or do some light yoga or stretching. Take a bath, listen to calming music, meditate. Try some deep breathing, make some chamomile tea and just sit outside and watch the stars. Next, it's time for bed. Make sure the room is cool and dark. Your body can sense if there's light in the room, so try to use blackout curtains if you have a lot of light pollution coming in from the street. If not, just cover up any source of light in the room with pillows or or black tape. I use an eye mask, which is awesome. Now, if you're having trouble falling asleep, try one of the breathing exercises recommended by Dr. Judy. I also added these exercises to your course materials. Also consider mouth taping if your physician approves. This is another way to make sure you're breathing through your nose instead of your mouth, which we learned can lead to many issues including sleep apnea. Apnea. Next, if your challenge is staying asleep, try one of Dr. Judy's breathing exercises. Or use this as an opportunity to meditate. So if you have to get up and go to another room for a little while, don't beat yourself up. Stressing about being awake is going to keep you awake. Remember, waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep could also be a blood sugar issue. So try having a spoonful of almond butter or a little bit of salt sweet potato before bed and see if that helps. Finally, keep your phone and your gadgets away from your body when you sleep. If you need your phone and your phone alarm, turn your phone on airplane mode and leave it charging in another part of the room. If you can also turn off the WI fi in your house, the key here is routine.

It sounds really simple and silly, but just brushing your teeth and going through your pre bed Routines kind of tell your psychology and your nervous system that it's time to go to bed. And it can help mitigate again that anticipatory anxiety of am I going to have another restless night?

Right.

So you know, we've all brushed our teeth thousands of times. You know, anyone watching this video probably has at this point, you know, and think about all the good night's sleep that you had when you brush your teeth. And so another kind of small tip that I would share with people, if they do wake up at say 2 in the morning and they're like, I just need to go back to bed. How am I going to get back to bed? I have to get up at 6, work and take the kids and do all these things. What you can do is just go through your pre bed routine again, floss your teeth, brush your teeth. And it sounds really simple and like, wow, how could this even work? But it can actually help you fall back asleep because you're doing that same pattern. And after that pattern, your body knows, oh yeah, it's time to go to bed again.

Okay, now let's talk about your morning routine. Remember, what you do during the day is as important as what you do at night. When it comes to sleep for the next 10 days, I want you to commit to getting outside first thing in the morning. Can you spend 10 or 15 minutes outside when you wake up?

So we know in the research light is more important than melatonin and more important than exercise. We need light exposure during the day to help us sleep at night. So that light exposure is going to reset your circadian rhythm, help you produce the right amounts of cortisol and melatonin, and get you the exposure you need for vitamin D, which is essential for the sleep process as well.

When you wake up, don't check your email, don't look at your social media feed for at least 30 minutes. Remember, what you do within those first 30 minutes is vital. It's vital for your health and it's vital for your life. If you're stressed out looking at your phone, this is going to automatically set your day app to be a stressful one. For me. I like to wake up, meditate for 20 minutes, step outside in the morning with my wife, sit on the porch and have some coffee or go for a walk to the local coffee shop. And then I check my food before my workout. Next, eat a blood sugar balancing breakfast. For me, this is usually an omelet with tomatoes and olive oil and avocado or I'll make a big green smoothie and I'll throw avocado and good fats in there. Remember you want healthy fats plus protein plus fiber in the morning and continue to eat blood sugar balancing meals throughout the day. For lunch I like a big salad with loads of of veggies and canned salmon, olive oil, nuts sometimes I put in there for dinner. I like to have different types of veggies with some protein. Maybe I'll do a little grass fed beef with roasted veggies. For snacks I like nuts and seeds and sometimes I'll have grain free or gluten free crackers with guacamole or hummus for the next 10 days, can you commit to this way of eating? I call it Pegan because it takes the best of paleo and vegan and sensible eating and science and common sense and it combines it for an inclusive way of eating that can fit anyone's dietary needs. In the course materials, you're going to find a full list of approved vegan foods and the foods to avoid. Next, let's talk about your afternoon break for the next 10 days. I want you to commit to taking an afternoon break and that means at lunch or after lunch, take a walk. Spend some time outside. So many of us are hunched over our desks working all day. We rarely schedule time to be outside or take five minutes away from our computers. Here's some options for your afternoon break. Eat lunch outside. Go for a walk after lunch, do a quick meditation outdoors, or walk to your local coffee shop and grab a cup of tea. Just commit to spending about 20 minutes outside in the afternoon for the next 10 days.

A lot of us stay indoors for two or three hours and then maybe we see some sunlight or we go into a garage, get into our car. We're behind glass, the windshield of an automobile. And then we get to work. We park underground. We go into our workplace. The windows are filtering all that wonderful vitamin D and sunlight producing good stuff. But we're not resetting our circadian clock. And then we expect ourselves to go to sleep at the right time. And it's because we haven't seen enough daylight. Trunk exposure would be wonderful. That means taking off your shirts and pants and getting as much of your skin exposed to sunlight. That trick has helped me, especially in situations where I'm suffering from jet lag. Whether traveling to or traveling back from something, get out there in the sunlight and soak it up. Don't get a sunburn, but don't use sunblock because that could negate the effect. Your exposure to sunlight is key and that's, I think, one of the most important tips, especially for children. Getting out and playing is an important thing for many, many reasons.

Next, and I know this might be hard for some, I want you to do your best to take an information detox. And this means that you limit, especially before bed, the news, upsetting movies, TV shows, or aimlessly scrolling through your social media feed. You might not feel like these things are affecting your sleep, but they are. I can't tell you how many times I read a stressful news article before going to bed and then I have chaotic dreams or I couldn't fall asleep thinking about what I just read. Instead, I focus on uplifting content, on spiritual books, on whatever makes me happy. Now there are so many podcasts and books and positive shows and movies to watch. I've listened to some of my favorites in the course materials. Next, exercise as we learn from our experts, exercise is an effective way to treat sleep disorders.

Exercising during the day is going to help you boost your cortisol levels appropriately. It's also going to help you increase your energy expenditure and improve sleep drive so you can fall asleep at night.

Other techniques for patients is exercise. What kind of exercise to do, what kind of movement? Studies are showing showing that exercise is very essential to help you sleep. The type of exercise matters if you're walking every day, you're moving your body, pumping your lymphatics. I would say most exercise will help your sleep. But if you're having a lot of insomnia problems, probably resistance training would be your best form of exercise. And you can do that just twice a week and then walk every day. Yoga again, stretching, breath work. Patients always sleep better with movement, but make sure you're not doing intense exercise two hours before bedtime, two to three hours before bedtime. Otherwise you're waking your body up too much and patients sometimes exercise too late at night or up all night. So choose the timing of your exercise. Don't over exercise. Don't burn your system out as well. Be gentle.

Next, focus on sleep support. My favorites include melatonin and Gaba and theanine, vitamin D, magnesium and others and I've linked to my favorite brands in the course materials. Remember, before you take supplements you want to check in with your doctor. Now. Some individuals are very sensitive to melatonin, so be careful. Next, reduce your exposure to environmental toxins. Keep dry cleaning and shoes out of the bedroom. Your bedroom should feel clean, not cluttered. Also, limit the use of plastics, toxic skin care products and home care products. Use environmental working group's website to find the cleanest and the safest products, and I'm going to share some of mine in the course materials. Also, keep tech out of your bedroom or away from the bed. No watching TV in bed. Just like you put yourself to sleep, try putting your phone to sleep for the next 10 days. Pick a time where you turn your phone on airplane mode and keep it far away from your bed, or not even in your bedroom. You might also want to consider some supportive gadgets. Gadgets cannot solve all your sleep troubles, but they can certainly help you get better sleep while you also address the root causes of sleep disturbances. My favorite gadgets include the Oura ring Chilipad, the TrueDark glasses, an eye mask, and an air filter for your bedroom. I've included more information about these in the course materials.

As I mentioned, I'm wearing the Oura Ring. I talked about this chili pad which can change your temperature and keep you cool at night, for example. And all these gadgets, you know, with our iPhones and iPads and I watches that track sleep. All these are amazing tools and technology is amazing and it's evolved so much since I was a kid, but we sometimes are missing the foundation. So if I find out that I am hot and let's say this mattress that's now cooling me is helping me. We didn't address why I had the temperature dysregulation to begin with, or if I have sleep apnea and now I'm using a CPAP machine and that's getting rid of the sleep ap and it's helping me. I didn't address what was the cause of the apnea to begin with, you know, and so I often tell patients to start at the foundations and foundations of health. Sleep is often the foundation as a root cause in our functional medicine tree or in naturopathic medicine. If someone's not sleeping well, then nothing is going to work well. Same thing as if they're not eating well and they're not digesting well. But to go underneath that, if someone's not not sleeping well, we have to understand the mind, the body, the spirit of that human being, the cellular function of that human being, the toxins in that being. So it's kind of like a holographic look at that individual, right? But when someone tells me they have to take these drugs to sleep, you know, and they've been having sleep issues their whole life, or this is a new onset, like there is always a reason why someone's not sleeping, and if they're not as interested to Find out. And hopefully, you know, people watching this are. And that's why they want to fix this. They know how important it is to be in tune with yourself enough to know this is why I'm not sleeping well.

Finally, I want you to focus on active relaxation for the next 10 days. Remember our conversation about Yin Yang energy. I want you to challenge the idea that being busy makes us worthy. And then we need to pile more and more onto our plates. This is depleting our health and causing restless nights.

Burnout is when your Yin is gone and then you don't sleep as well. I had massive insomnia despite being able to take. I was taking my progesterone. I was doing everything right and I couldn't fall asleep. My body was too depleted and I had gone through a lot of deep detox for my heavy metals. So my. My Yang energy, my Yin energy just burned. So at that point, I had to really see how. And even in the process of healing, one can burn one's Yin energy. So how you go even into healing has to be more gentle. We have to slow it down a bit and then nourish ourselves. Find activities that nourish your Yin. Having a soothing conversation with a friend is yin nourishing. Doing something nice for yourself that you love or getting a massage or going on a walk with nature. Just sitting and observing life. Going to the beach. You don't have to go away that far to practice Yin energies. How you see life around you and how you pro.

How.

What. What do you do around the nighttime when the Yin energy should be the highest, is at night. So Yin loves a little cooler weather. It likes it once warm, but it also wants cool at the same time. So sleeping again in the colder room and also feeling safe, nourished. The foods that you give your body, Yin foods tend to be things that bring a little bit more of that, the cooling down into the body without creating too much heat. So again, the choices of foods can really make an impact here in the Yin and the practices of life. I love recommending my patients to get acupuncture to build their Yin. I love floating. Floating is sensory deprivation in a floating tank. In a soul tank. I do that twice a week. And that's how I actually got my. My Yin energy back.

When you go to a floating session, you spend one hour just resting and complete darkness. There's darkness. There's no sensory stimulation. There's no lights. There's. It's just in complete darkness in warm water, salt water. So you get huge benefits of resetting the parasympathetic nervous system and building that Yin energy. So breath work, meditation, floating are some of the great ways. When my patients have burned up their Yin, I send them to get acupuncture or get I do acupuncture myself. I have them do acupuncture or do floating tanks as well. Or I send them for five days to the mountains to nature to spend time. So restore setting that energy is important but also nourishing all the time. So let's be really aware that the Yin energy needs to be nourished in our lives if we want to have continuous healthful sleep.

Remember, we're meant to sleep well. If you don't get quality sleep, don't give up. There's always a solution. I hope that the takeaways from this course provided you with the inspiration and the motivation to reclaim your sleep. In the course materials, you'll find the full 10 day sleep reset protocol. So thanks for tuning in to the Sleep Masterclass. I wish you health and happiness and great sleep.

If you loved that last video, you should check out the next one for sure. On getting to the root cause of all disease, neuroinflammation inflammation.

Specifically regarding the function of your hypothalamus can damage what's happening with your metabolism. But nobody's talking about that in these cookie cutter diet.