DO THIS To Improve Your Sleep & LIVE LONGER! | Mark Hyman & Dr. Cindy Geyer

We used to think, well, you get the sleep apnea because you have insulin resistance and gain weight. But if you have disrupted sleep, your insulins are higher, your cortisols are higher, your glucose is higher, you're looking for highly processed, quick energy dense foods and less able to resist them.

Why is not sleeping so bad for you and why is sleeping so good for you?

Probably should do that, yes. So sleep is when we're repairing the powers of both the mind and the body. Sleep is when we reduce inflammation, repair tissues. The discovery of the glymphatic system in 2012-2013 is this passive channel that runs alongside our arteries and veins in the brain that fills with fluid when we're in deep sleep and allows a washing out of debris we may have accumulated during the day.

So all those bad thoughts get washed out.

Well, not the bad thoughts.

No, but the amyloid plaque, that sticky plaque that we secrete in response to inflammation or injury, if it accumulates, of course, it can damage surrounding neurons and.

Is associated with neurodegenerative disease and Alzheimer's disease.

So in English, that means if you don't sleep, you're likely to get demented. It's definitely playing a role. And this concept of bidirectionality, we know that sleep disruption, circadian rhythm disruption, sleep apnea is present in two-thirds of people with insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, diabetes. And it is a chicken and the egg thing. It is driving the bus. We used to think, well, you get the sleep apnea because you have insulin resistance and gain weight. But if you have disrupted sleep, your insulins are higher, your cortisols are higher, your glucose is higher, you're looking for.

Highly processed, quick energy dense foods and less able to resist them. Wow, so not sleeping is a risk factor for obesity. Absolutely. And heart disease.

Yes.

And cancer.

And dementia. And flares of autoimmune conditions.

Yeah.

And chronic pain. And fibromyalgia. So, and anxiety and depression.

I mean, it really affects- oh my.

God, if I don't sleep, I'm depressed and anxious.

But the more you worry about it, the harder it gets to sleep. Yeah, it's true. So, okay, so we have that chronic stress. What else is driving this insomnia pandemic.

Which is huge, right? How many 70, 90 million people are- struggling with insomnia?

Right.

So I do think that there's a need to address underlying contributors to anxiety and depression independent of their impact on sleep. So talking about what's going on, bringing in some kind of breath-based practice, whether that's yoga or tai chi or meditation, just to ratchet everything down. That's another important component of it. And thirdly, you've already touched on a little bit about the dopamine with the foam, but it's also the dysregulation in our circadian rhythms. You know, we think about how, there's been a lot of, research about how important it is to avoid light exposure at night, for example. But everything we do during the day and when we do it is ultimately going to influence our ability to go to sleep when we want to and get the rest that we want to. So in other words, when we're eating all day long and snacking late at night and watching TV at night, that's signaling our computers. Yes, and on our computers, that's telling our bodies and brain that it's day, it's day, it's day. So we want to actually reestablish a consistent circadian rhythm, meal timing, so we're having eating earlier in the day and then building in a fasting interval before we go to bed.

So don't eat three hours before bed.

No. Interestingly enough, as you know, there's a connection as well with digestive function that eating late at night not only disrupts your sleep, but it's contributing to higher reflux, which can also interrupt sleep. So everything's interconnected.

That happened to me last night actually, because I went hiking and it's summer and it's so beautiful and it says late light. So we were like, didn't get down from the mountain till eight o'clock at night. And I'm like, oh, let's go eat. I'm hungry. But then by the time we ate, it was like nine o'clock. And I like last night, I tossed and turned for a couple hours before I went to bed, which I usually don't do. It was a sleeping late at night. So there's eating late at night. There's circadian rhythm disruption. And this morning I went out and sat on my deck and the sunshine was out. So getting light in the morning is so important. Absolutely. So we don't do that. We're all like on our phones or computers right away. We need the natural light to reset our brain.

It makes a big difference.

Light is medicine, right? It is. Light is medicine. It is. And also it could be bad medicine if it's the wrong light at the wrong time, right? Exactly. So we have all this like, there's this great book called Lights Out that I read years ago, Cindy, that was really talking about the advent of the.

Light bulb driving chronic disease because of the disruption in our rhythms and so on. It's interesting, they even looked at LED.

Street lights disrupting the circadian rhythm of animals and insects too. So it's not just humans that are.

Being impacted by this. And there's some other weird stuff that affects sleep that we don't think about.

Like what else?

Well, one of the conditions is restless leg syndrome. And that's, it's hard to diagnose. It's more of what we call a clinical diagnosis. People describe this creepy crawly sensation in their legs or this irresistible urge to rub their feet together. And typically it's treated with dopamine medications. It's connected to relatively low dopamine levels in the brain. You know, dopamine, yes, revs you up, but dopamine also seems to play a role with movement. So it's treated with some of the same medications they use to treat Parkinson's disease. But it turns out that that can be more prevalent in people who have autoimmune conditions, in which case we wanna address the underlying autoimmune conditions. There are some nutrient deficiencies that are gonna make this symptom of restless legs more significant. Low iron, low vitamin D, low folic acid, low magnesium. So we really want to look at somebody's nutritional status.

Yeah.

And by the way, 80% of the population is deficient in vitamin D, 50% in magnesium, you know, like 20% iron. I mean, it's like a lot of people are deficient in the B vitamins and they don't even know it.

Right.

You know, and you go to your doctor and you have insomnia, they're not checking those things. Exactly.

And there's even weirder things than nutritional stuff, right? So if we identify a nutrient deficiency, for example, the next step is why? What's the why that somebody's nutrients might be low? And there we come back like so many other things to the function of the gut. And interestingly enough, there is a higher correlation in people who have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth also having restless leg syndrome. Maybe because it's contributing to ongoing inflammation, maybe because it's also contributing to difficulty absorbing those nutrients from your food. So we're even gonna go a step further and say, is there an underlying issue with digestive function absorption and assimilation of nutrients so if your gut's a.

Mess, it can also cause insomnia.

Absolutely.

And then heavy metals are another big one that we don't really hear about.

Right. Lead, mercury, things that are under the radar for many, many people and unfortunately can be a problem.

Yeah.

I had that. We talked about it on the show, but I've had mercury poisoning 30 years ago almost, and it really totally screwed up my sleep.

What happened with your sleep?

I just couldn't sleep. Like, I just, I was just really couldn't fall asleep, couldn't stay asleep, never felt rested, had chronic fatigue syndrome. Until I got the mercury out, got my fillings out, chelation, everything, I couldn't sleep. And it really took a long time to reset that. Okay, so we've got all these different things that traditional medicine ignoring, the hormonal fluctuations, the gut issues, heavy metals, nutrient deficiencies. I mean, doctors know about sleep apnea, but they often miss it in thin women because that's not the archetype of someone who actually like the Pickwickian figure with, you know, a huge belly and a thick throat and size 17 neck. I mean, you know, so there's all these issues. And, and yet, you know, this continues to be such a struggle for so many people. And the, and the traditional treatments really are just stop Gap. They don't really address the cause. So in functional medicine, the way we think about things is to look at some of these other factors. So in your practice, Cindy, how do you start to dig down? What are the kinds of diagnostic things you look at differently? We talked about all these different factors, but how do you identify what's the problem in this or that particular person?

Well, I think it's the time to take a history and really understand all of the other interconnectedness that could be going on. For example, somebody with sleep concerns might also have digestive concerns, and then we might be thinking about assessing their digestive function. looking at a nutritional assessment. But I think there's a time and a place and there's tremendous value in screening somebody with a portable sleep study because that gives you a tremendous amount of information. And we're using it, yes, to diagnose sleep apnea, but also to say, how often do you wake up during the night? How much percentage of time are you spending in REM sleep and deep sleep? Are you tossing and turning all night long? So it can give us a tremendous overview in terms of somebody's sleep throughout the night. And from that, we can also decide, okay, what else do we need to explore?

And then let me do some testing, right? You can look at nutritional levels. You can look at these vitamin D and magnesium and folate and iron studies. You can look at obviously the sleep apnea test and there's home test now you can do really great. We look at heavy metals, right? And the hormones, we can really get a sense of what's going on with hormones for people. If their estrogens and progesterone is all out of balance, it just happens in menopause, you see. a lot of sleep issues, heavy metals, like I said, we can test. So there's a lot of ways we can diagnose using functional medicine testing that you don't really get with traditional doctors that can help get underneath things. So tell me about this patient you had because it sort of speaks to a lot of the issues that we're talking about and it gives you a little unusual approach to insomnia, something you wouldn't really get from a traditional doctor.

Right, so this is somebody that, and one of the things I want to plant the seed for is sometimes we start with what we think is the most likely issue and we gradually uncover more potential contributing issues and peel the layers of the onion. And this was a woman that I had known for years. She was pretty healthy in terms of her lifestyle. She exercised, she wasn't overweight, she ate a healthy diet, she didn't drink any alcohol, she was treated with antidepressants, she was on a serotonin reuptake inhibitor and wellbutrin for her depression. And she started, she was also on hormone replacement therapy. She was postmenopausal in her 60s. And she started complaining of fatigue and difficulty concentrating and just felt scattered. And by Sundays, she would have the need to take a three-hour nap. So, well, that's unusual. So we did some of the usual testing for causes of fatigue. We tested her thyroid. It was okay. We looked at her iron levels or sugar levels. They were okay. So I decided to do screened her with a sleep study. And it turned out you would not have looked at her and said, oh, yes, she is the poster child for sleep apnea. She turned out to have one of the most striking positional components to sleep apnea I've ever seen. When she was on her side, her sleep was normal. But when she was on her back, she had respiratory events that count as either a slowing of airflow or a stopping of airflow more than 60 times an hour.

Wow.

And then stop breathing 60 times a minute. Yes, yes.

Like once a minute. That's a lot. No wonder she was exhausted, right? So when you see a positional component like that, I have people who don't want to do a sleep study because they don't want to, I'd never wear that stupid mask. But for her, we said, okay, well let's start with retraining you to learn to sleep on your side. And she tried that. There's some commercially available positional devices. There are all kinds of strategies you can use.

There's a very, very sophisticated technology called the tennis ball.

Yes.

Strategy, where you sew a tennis ball into a t-shirt on the back. So if you roll over on your back, it makes you flip over to your side.

Or the fanny pack with the pillow stuffed in it. Yes. There's all kinds of strategies you could do. And of course, it's big business, right?

You can buy a slumber bump or a bumper belt.

Oh, I didn't know they had those. I was on the tennis ball track. Even more sophisticated, there's now a biofeedback device that's a strap around that vibrates when you roll on your back. So it's sort of autogenic nighttime training to get you So that's what she used, interestingly enough. And it helped a little, but she was still tired. So as we're peeling the layers of the onion, she had some digestive symptoms, a lot of bloating, a lot of discomfort, and we had done a full sleep study. She had restless legs and periodic limb movements. She turned out to have a very abnormal breath test for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

That means bugs growing in your small intestine where they usually should be- Where they don't belong, right.

Right.

Which can cause inflammation.

Absolutely. And low iron. Her iron wasn't terribly low, but one of the sidebars here, I think the other thing we do in functional and integrative medicine is understand the difference between a normal blood test, I should put, quote, normal blood test, and an optimal blood test. Ferritin is a classic example of that.

Ferritin looks at your total tissue iron.

How much iron is in your iron bank in your body? In your iron bank, your iron stores, right. And normal can be anywhere from 15 to 250.

Yeah.

So- It's a big range. It's a big range.

And what we know the threshold is for somebody who's got restless leg symptoms is you actually don't wanna be normal. You wanna be over 100 because there's some evidence even comparing it head to head with those dopamine drugs we mentioned earlier, getting somebody's ferritin over 100 was as effective as the dopamine medications. That's amazing. That's amazing, right? As simple as correcting a nutrient deficiency.

Not to the normal range but the optimal range.

For that condition.

You know, it's interesting is, you know, if, if, you know, heme iron is the, the best absorbed kind of iron, but that usually comes from meat.

Right.

And if people are vegan, then the plant forms of iron aren't as well absorbed. Right. And you often see very significant iron deficiency in these patients, especially women who are menstruating. And I think that, you know, I learned actually in traditional medicine that ferritin was connected to sleep, actually. Interesting.

I learned that in a lecture on.

Insomnia that I went to by some drug company. That's great. I was like, well, that's interesting. But, but, yeah, I think it's, it It's something that's often overlooked and it's an easy blood test to check your.

Ferritin, which most doctors won't look at. And Mark, I think from the internal medicine standpoint too, it's equally important to say don't just correct the iron, figure out the why.

You don't wanna miss- yeah, she got blood cancer. A stomach ulcer, she's just menstruating heavily, does she have a bladder cancer or something, right? So I think that's really important, you're right. Just don't look at the symptom, look at the cause. 'Cause low iron's a symptom. It's not a cause, right? caused insomnia, but what causes low iron. So that's what functional medicine does, it keeps going upstream. And you said something a couple of times that I just want to come back to, which is peeling the onion. So one of the principles of functional medicine from our mentor, Sid Baker, who is a cool old guy, Yale professor, erudite, super smart, one of the most thoughtful men in medicine, people in medicine, period. he said, you know, we have the TAC rules that help us sort of determine how to figure things out. One is, if you're standing on a TAC, it takes a lot of aspirin to make you feel better, right? Take out the TAC. So if, you know, the bacterial overgrowth is causing the restless leg syndrome, you can take a lot of these traditional medications, but it's gonna take a lot of medication to make it away. Or if you fix the bacterial overgrowth and the, you know, that'll help. But then also, if you're standing on to tax, taking one of them out doesn't make you 50% better. So she had bacterial overgrowth and she had iron and she had the positional thing. So it's like usually three or four or five things. And the problem with medicine is we are so focused on the one thing, you know?

You know, there was one other piece related to her story that I think is also important to call out. Addressing all of those things, her sleep quality was still not what she wanted to be. So we had a conversation and she relayed the fact that when she was growing up, things were pretty unsettled in her home of origin. There were a lot of late night parties, a lot of noise, and bedtime became a time where she didn't really feel safe and quiet and comfortable. So we also talked about referring her to a life management behavioral therapist to really talk about what it meant to be safe and regaining that sense of being okay being in bed. And I think that goes hidden as well that a previous history of trauma or not feeling safe can also show up with insomnia and difficulty sleeping.

Yeah.

And I think that's a big thing for a lot of people. You know, there's a questionnaire you can do online called the Ace questionnaire. It's adverse childhood events, and you get a score. And if you have a high score, it means you've had a crappy childhood, and you probably have some level of trauma. And different people respond differently to the trauma, of course. But, you know, PTSD is so prevalent and, and our nervous systems are so jacked up in general, so it's sort of like acute on chronic. Absolutely. We've got our acute stresses on this chronic level of PTSD. And it leads to so many physical, psychological, emotional stresses for people. And there's a lot of ways to sort of access that. You know, I mean, there's you shared about how you use cognitive behavioral therapy or yoga or meditation or breath work or, you know, emotional freedom techniques. There's all kinds of techniques out there. But now people are exploring, you know, psychedelic assisted therapy, MDMA, psilocybin therapy. It's legal in Oregon now. and there, you know, there's some interesting research going on, Johns Hopkins and New York NYU and others are really looking at how do we help people with some of these chronic long-term traumatic events and experiences. And, and I think, you know, sort of listening to, it's just interesting to hear that you're dealing with, you know, something as simple as insomnia can be quite complicated. You have to look at inflammation in the body. It's like, where's it coming from? Is it the gut? Is it heavy metals? Is it hormonal changes? Is it nutrient deficiencies? Is it maybe it's food sensitivities or allergies, maybe it's low thyroid, there's things that we, you know, we just don't often think about. And so, what's so satisfying with functional medicine is we're able to actually dig into these things and look and see the why, you know, we say functional medicine is the medicine of why, not what, not what disease you have, which is helpful, but it's not the end of the story. We go, why do you have that disease? Like, you know, and that's the challenge with traditional medicine. It's like you make the diagnosis and you stop thinking. okay, you've got depression. Here's antidepressant. You've got insomnia, take the C pill. Oh, you've got rheumatoid arthritis, take the rheumatoid pill. Like, not why do you have insomnia or depression or rheumatoid arthritis or migraines, but, like, why? And, and that's what's so powerful. So then you sort of, there's some basic sleep practices that are really good. We've covered some of this, but I think it'd be good to go over it. And I think, you know, and I think it's, it's important to emphasize that. everything matters, sleep, exercise, stress, obviously your diet plays a huge role, nutrient status, and that's what we do in functional medicine, so we dig down into it. So talk about some of the other factors around sleep hygiene that we sort of haven't touched on in terms of diet and lifestyle and food and exercise.

Sure, I think first and foremost we have to recognize that sleep, you and I trained in an era where sleep deprivation or how little sleep you could buy on was a badge of honor.

Yeah.

We need to shift that internal dialogue that we all have that, oh, if I'm sleeping, I'm wasting my time and I'm not getting my stuff done. So first, honor the importance of sleep for your overall health and well-being, and even your ability to stick to your intentions around choosing healthy foods and sticking to your exercise plan. Then create a sanctuary that's really conducive for rest and relaxation. Dark, quiet, cool, ideally electronics out of the bedroom or turned off if you can, getting rid of all of the light exposures, even your chargers, you know, that had that.

Yeah, like those like lights, like this red green lights on different devices. I'm like, that drives me crazy. I used to, I had a patient.

Who told me she traveled around with black electrical tape whenever she went to a hotel and she would put it over all the little light sources.

That's a great idea. I travel with eye shades because you never know where you're going to be.

So those two quiet, calming. And I think this idea that you go, go, go, go, go, go, hop in bed and turn it off like a switch, that doesn't work either. So building in a transition to rest and relaxation. If you can do an hour, that's great. And getting off the devices, not watching TV, maybe reading a book or journaling or doing something, taking a bath, stretching in the tub. I mean, there's all kinds of wonderful ways to ease into to rest of your life.

I like the hot Epsom salt bath and lavender drops because the lavender lowers your cortisol. The magnesium relaxes you and the sulfur.

And the Epsom salt helps you detox. That's my favorite as well. And then you go to your cool bedroom and you do your legs up the wall yoga restorative yoga position and.

Bingo, you've got your transition to rest and relaxation.

So powerful.

And alcohol obviously is a big practice for people. Yeah, that's a tough one. That's a tough one. So the rough analogy is this. It's funny. when they asked partners of people with insomnia how many of them were suggesting that they have a drink to go to sleep, it was about a third of them. So people think alcohol is going to help you sleep and it might make you fall asleep, but then as it clears out of your system, there's an arousal that can exacerbate hypoglycemia. It makes you wake up. It's going to make sleep apnea worse. If you're a woman in midlife, oh boy, it's a bladder irritant. It's a hot flash trigger. So it's really Affecting sleep in a lot of ways. The rough equivalent is there's about an hour of sedation followed by an hour of arousal.

Yeah.

So if you had a glass of wine at 6:00 and you go to bed at 10:00, it's probably not going to impact your sleep as much as if you have two glasses at 8:00.

Or like your late dinner last night.

If you had a glass or two of wine. You had a beer.

Yes. That has another impact on your sleep. I just noticed it actually. I had an aura ring for a while. I was tracking my sleep. and I noticed whenever I drank, my sleep's pattern was so disrupted. Quality of sleep, the depth of sleep, the amount of REM sleep, deep sleep, snoring, you know, all that.

It's really interesting. And then caffeine also is another big one, right? Yeah, absolutely. And we're all different in terms of our caffeine metabolism ability. Some people are really fast metabolizers. Sorry, fast metabolizers. I happen to be one of those. But if you're a slow metabolizer, half of your cup of coffee from noon could still be in your system at nine o'clock at night. And most of the time we're not thinking back to that noon cup of coffee. With food, it's really about quality, quantity, and timing of food. It's all three. Yet another area that's impacted with the health of the gut microbiome is sleep. And data is suggesting that people who eat a wide variety of colorful fruits and vegetables tend to have better sleep quality, whereas a highly processed standard American diet is associated with more sleep disruptions and less deep sleep. So quality matters. We already touched a little bit on the timing of eating. So eating your calories earlier in the day also helps re-regulate those circadian rhythms. So the clocks in the brain and the clocks in the body that are ideally going to be working in sync with each other, they're influenced by light, by movement, and by food. So when we line all those things up during the day, it's going to help us get the rest that we need at night.

So important. This is such good information. Let's talk about what are the challenges that you see in your clinical practice around women and sleep and what are the main reasons that you're finding and some of them are expected. And then let's go into how there would be traditionally approached by conventional medicine, and then we'll dive into functional medicine.

Sure. So I think the first thing is that some common sleep conditions like insomnia and restless legs, they disproportionately affect women and they can have a connection to lifestyle. Sleep apnea, interestingly enough, gets underdiagnosed for women. And there's a lot of reasons which you can dive into it, but some of it has to do with stereotypes on the part of clinicians of thinking about sleep apnea being a man's condition.

Especially if they're overweight.

Especially putting weight on around the middle. but lean women can get sleep apnea too, and it may show up very differently. There's also the idea that when we look at times of hormonal fluctuation for women, whether that's before their periods or during pregnancy or the postpartum or the menopause transition, that can also cause an uptick in disrupted sleep. So hormone balance and regulating hormones can play a huge role in improving sleep quality. And finally, you know, disproportionately in the past, caregiving demands have fallen on the shoulders of women, and I think that that really became manifest or evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when you saw a bigger proportion of women than men experiencing an uptick in insomnia, anxiety and depression. So they're all interconnected.

Yeah.

So women take on the burden of the families. They often, especially during the perimenopausal years, become the sandwich generation between raising their kids and taking care of their older parents. And you're kind of in the middle of that, a little bit toward the tail end of it, but you kind of went through that. And it puts a lot of stress on women. and also I think there's some unusual causes of sleep that get missed by traditional medicine. And so if you were a woman and you went to the doctor, like, I'm having insomnia, what are they going to tell you?

They'll probably tell you to take a sleeping pill.

A little Ambien. Little Ambien, right? Or maybe they'll give you an antidepressant, right?

Right, right.

And of course, those come with side effects. They're addictive, they impair cognition, they have all kinds of long-term effects. I mean, the benzos or things like Valium, lorazepam, or Ativan, they may lead to increased cognitive problems like dementia when you get older. Ambien, you know, we heard all the stories about people wandering around doing stuff they shouldn't do in the middle of the night. It's unfortunate that there are other things too that traditional medicine misses that affect sleep. You talked about the big ones, which are the stress and the sleep apnea and the hormonal issues. But there's really more that we know about sleep disruption. And the difference with functional medicine is that we tend to take a detective approach. We don't just stop at the diagnosis. Insomnia is a symptom. It's not a disease.

Right. Right.

And so we go, oh, I know it's why you can't sleep. You have insomnia. No, that's just the name of it, silly. That's not the cause. And so we kind of have a different approach. And there, Over the years, there are things we've really uncovered in functional medicine that play a role in sleep that are mostly ignored. You shared a little bit about it earlier when we were chatting, but what are the kinds of other things that.

We see underlying the root causes of insomnia? If we think about insomnia, about 80% of people who develop chronic insomnia, there's an initial inciting event, but it leads to a stressful event, for example, and there's sleep. Like a death or divorce.

Right.

Or a transition with the job. the pandemic has contributed to it as well. But then what happens is there's this upregulation of the HPA axis and this chronic overproduction of cortisol is hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis.

So it's the brain's command center that tells the body what to do.

Absolutely. So it's that connection between what our brain is registering as a threat and how that impacts our need to respond to that threat by pumping out these hormones that then in turn keep us ready to deal with a threat that may not be there anymore.

So basically, if you're in fight or flight, your job isn't to go take a nap.

It is not. Stay on alert.

It's a rush.

And wait for the next thing that's gonna threaten you.

So that activated sympathetic nervous system is huge. And our culture just does that. The phone is like a dopamine pump. It's like a dopamine pump that keeps your blood pressure up. I mean, you know, when people are dying in the intensive care unit, the drug we give them to keep their heart going is dopamine. Right? And that's what great analysis, you know? And so, like, it's like at the very end of life, like, if you can't, if everything else, epinephrine fail, everything, you give dopamine because it's so powerful at keeping you awake and alive. And so everything in our life is the sugar. the phones, all the new, I guess just we're constantly in a dopamine barrage.

You know, it's funny you said that because I've had people tell me, you know, I wake up at 1:30 every night. And I said, well, how do you know it's 1:30? Because I look at my phone and it says 1:30. And that, again, perpetuates the cycle because then you're thinking, oh, it's 1:30. Oh, crap.

I'm awake. I should be asleep. And then it just becomes.

Yeah.

You know, the best thing I ever did for my sleep issues, because I struggle with them as well, is putting my phone and my watch off, like just taking everything out and not knowing what time it is. And just letting my body do its thing.

I think that's brilliant, Mark. And even sleep trackers, for some people, it can be a double-edged sword because you're thinking, okay, what's my tracker showing me? How well did I sleep last night? So it's that learned pattern.

You want to know my secret for living a long and happy and healthy life? Well, all I have to do is check out my weekly newsletter, Mark's Picks, where I share my favorite tips for health, longevity, well-being, and lots more. Check it out and link below. When you get a good night's sleep, it's like the world just looks rosy.

And when you don't, it looks depressing. Great. And you know, that's an important thing too, if you pay attention to how you feel. So you mentioned the aura ring. People ask me, how good are these trackers for telling you about your sleep? They don't. diagnose a sleep condition. But sometimes you can gain some insights. for you, you gave a great example of this. You found, Oh, look at this when I've had alcohol, my sleep is noting.

M sleep is nots myability, everything.

And then you pay attention? Well, how did I feel the day after? Yeah, I was more tired. Yeah, I was more irtable. I was looking for different foods. So I think the more you build that internal awareness of that connection between your sleep and how you feel the next day. that's a win. That's really how you learn to prioritize it.

Yeah, just take home here is that sleep is the most underappreciated fourth pillar of lifestyle medicine.

I agree.

It's diet, exercise, stress reduction, and sleep. And it really is important. And I think I feel like a lot of my health issues in part were driven by lack of sleep. And I think as doctors, we were just so trained overcome our natural instinct to sleep when you have to stay up all night alert seeing patients, either pound the coffee or you just will your way through. And I remember working the ER in weird shifts, like 11 to 2 in the morning, and I'd be like driving home with my eyes open like this, forcing myself to not fall asleep. And that just messes with you in a big way.

I remember the box of donuts at the nurse's station because you needed the quick energy to stay awake. And then the bottle of NyQuil Locks right next to it because your stomach just felt awful and you'd wolf the donut, swing the mail locks and go do your work.

Nobody's waking up in the morning like, you know what? I want to look terrible today. You know, everybody wants to look good. And if we understood just how much our sleep quality affected our body composition, I think it would start to push that conversation forward. So there was a really cool study that was done at the University of.

Sleep and weight are oh, my goodness.

University of Chicago did a really fascinating study. So they took folks and they put them on a calorie restricted diet, which is what I was taught to do in a university setting, which doesn't necessarily work, by the way. Exactly. But they put them on this calorie restricted diet, and during one phase of the study, they allowed them to get eight and a half hours of sleep. So sufficient sleep. Another study, another phase of the study. Same people, same exact diet. They're not cutting any more calories, they're not exercising more. or less, and now they sleep deprive them. So now they're getting five and a half hours of sleep. They take three hours away. At the end of the study, they compiled all the data, and they found that when folks were getting a sufficient amount of sleep, they lost 55% more body fat just from sleeping.

Yeah.

All right.

And I didn't say weight.

They lost actual fat mass, not muscle, which is crazy. Like how it. I'm not saying you're doing, like, eight days a week, CrossFit, right? you're just sleeping better. And the question for me is immediate, like, oh my goodness, how? How is that happening? And so it's during sleep that we are releasing, this is crazy, melatonin, this super glorified sleep hormone, which it really isn't that. It's kind of a regulator of your circadian rhythms, period. But it actually is a really profound fat burning hormone as well. So the Journal of Pineal Research found.

That melatonin is a gland in your head releases melatonin.

It's like pineal gland. Correct. Which, that's not the only place.

So we'll get back to that in a moment.

It's like your third eye gland, basically.

So the pineal gland and it responds to light and, you know, all the.

Artificial light and the fact it suppresses it. It has to have darkness.

Right.

So the Journal of pineal research found that melatonin increases your mobilization of something called brown adipose tissue or brown fat. And this is a type of fat that actually burns fat.

That increases your metabolism. Yes.

And the reason is brown versus the white adipose tissue is kind of the stuff we think about when we're trying to get rid of fat. Brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria, right? These kind of energy power plants. I know you've talked about many times on the show, but it's such a metabolically active tissue. And so if you're not getting adequate sleep, you're not producing that hormone, nor you get your greatest secretion of human growth hormone during sleep. This is the most, it's also known as the youth hormone in a way. It's the repair hormone. Kids have so much HGH. This is why they have so much energy. It's muscle sparing and also it's a big component of you healing and recovering. And so you're missing out on that. And cortisol, that's another one. So if you're sleep deprived, one of.

The very first things we see is.

An increase in your cortisol levels. That's the stress hormone. Exactly, exactly. And cortisol has this interesting ability to literally break down the muscle that you're working so hard to build.

Oh, it's terrible.

Gluconeogenesis, a process called gluconeogenesis, break down your valuable muscle tissue and turn it into fuel because it's this stressed, hyper, alert, cautious, dangerous state your body thinks you're in because you're sleep deprived.

And I can go on and on. I'll share one more. I always say stress is bad because when you have high cortisol, it does everything you don't want, right? It shrinks your memory center in your brain, causes Alzheimer's. It causes you to lose muscle and gain fat. It causes your sex hormones to get screwy. It has so many horrible effects and it's not worth getting stressed about stuff.

It doesn't matter.

You know, like stuff, there's stuff that does matter that you have to worry about. But the truth is most of the things we react to and stress about are just our beliefs or thoughts. They're not really real, right?

Yeah, that's a, and I even focused on that as well because A lot of folks have what we call clinically just a lot of inner chatter. You know, the brain is a very vocal and kind of noisy organ.

Yeah.

You know, and so the great thing is a lot of our needs are met, especially if people are listening to this right now.

It's like the crazy aunt that lives in your head, you know?

Right. Right.

But we have so many things covered in our lives that our ancestors didn't have to worry about. But the human mind is so expansive so we can manufacture things to worry about. and that worry can push us. And I often tell people, you know, when people are coming into my clinic, that you can overeat your way fat, you can under exercise your way fat or under move your way fat, you can under sleep your way fat, and you can also over stress your way fat for sure. It has a huge component for our overall health and our body composition too. So, but I was going to share Stanford University. They found that just one night of sleep deprivation has a dramatic effect on suppressing leptin.

Yeah.

Right.

And that's that kind of glorified to make hunger full. I mean, I'm sorry. Satiation hormone. And ghrelin on the other side has this uptick, and that's that hunger hormone.

Yeah. Right.

So just one night. And it makes you crave a ton of carbs. I want to ask you this. I was gonna say, I know you've been up late before. Oh, yeah. But I don't know if it's me or if anybody else listening, have you ever been up and, like, two o'clock in the evening, maybe at a party, maybe just kicking back watching TV, and you're like, you know what? I really want a salad right now. Nope. No.

No.

If that's ever happened, please inform me. I don't get a craving for broccoli. I want salty, sweet, crunchy, like I want. Yes. Yes. Because your brain is literally starving for glucose. Just one night of sleep deprivation, we're.

Seeing about a 14% reduction in glucose reach in your brain. Yeah, I know. It's true. I remember working many nights in the emergency room, delivering babies, being up all night. and the next day, all you want to do is eat carbs and sugar. You know, I'd go to McDonald's and get the apple turnovers and the french fries in the middle of the night. Apple turnovers. It was the only thing that was open in the hospital. It was only closed between two in the morning and six in the morning, otherwise it was open 20 hours a day. It was the only thing open in the hospital, can you leave it?

And I would go, you know, be sleep deprived and stay up all night. And I totally craved carbs. Wow. And you did that work on that food, and now what you're made of now and the work that you're doing is just like exponential. Like you see that. I thought about this the other day. We're putting folks in space on vending machine consciousness, right? Astronauts, yeah. Just imagine if we can get people on really healthy, real food and what we can create as humanity. It's exciting.

So what's exciting about your book about sleep is that you break it down. You talk about 21 strategies that are very specific to actually fix your sleep.

Yeah.

'Cause I'm sure many people listening, maybe even half or more, have sleep issues, whether it's not enough sleep, whether it's disrupted sleep, whether it's poor quality sleep, more serious things like sleep apnea and people often don't know they have it. So can you walk us through some of the key strategies and what really matters?

Sure. So I've been really working to press this into public awareness for about five years now. And this was because seeing people in my office coming in and, you know, they're struggling with their blood sugar, for example. And we had about right around 75% success rate with, you know, getting folks off, you know, lisdexamfetamine and metformin and all this and working along with their doctors. Those are blood sugar and blood pressure pills.

Yeah.

And here's the thing, that 25% of folks who weren't getting those results, ironically, that would really bother me.

And I know you've probably felt the same thing.

Yeah.

Ironically, kind of 20%. What are you missing?

Right.

And so it took about five years in practice, maybe a little longer before I had the audacity to ask, how was your sleep? and what people would tell me blew my mind. I couldn't believe they're even sitting there. And so, and this is another thing that we know is that folks don't really want to change too much to get the result they want. And I knew that. And so I just dug into the research and I wanted to find clinically proven strategies that people don't have to turn their world upside down. And once I implemented those with the patients I was working with, it's like the floodgates would come off, the weight would finally come off, their blood pressure would finally come down, their symptoms of depression would start to dissolve. And I was just like, this is really something special. I need to tell more people about this. And so eventually it's compiled into these 21 strategies. And for me, again, some of these things are going to be a reminder for folks today, but I want to talk about something that a lot of folks still don't have a big awareness of. And this is the fact that your gut and the health of your microbiome has a huge impact. Whoa. On your sleep quality.

So your poop and sleep are connected? What a concept.

In a way.

Okay, let's dig into that one. Don't do the two together.

Leather. No, that's not. You know, that's going to blow people's mind and even my mind. Tell us how the microbiome and your gut affects your sleep and what you.

Can do about it. Absolutely. So let's start with the basic component. And I know, again, these are going to be things people have heard about before, probably on your show. Yeah.

But let's start with serotonin. Okay. So it's pretty well known.

By the way, there's more serotonin in your gut than there is in your brain. Exactly. Upwards of 80 to 90 of your.

Body serotonin is actually located in your gut, produced by your enterochromaffin cells, by the way. All right, so those are special cells.

In your intestinal lining.

Yes. I'm just translating all the big words.

See? I like that. We're like flipping places because I would do this for you. So here's what's so interesting is that serotonin, we talked about melatonin being important for our sleep and our circadian rhythm. Serotonin is a precursor or a seed to make melatonin. So already right off the bat, your gut environment, these cells in your gut are helping to make this compound that's related to your sleep quality. And with melatonin is what I want to liken it to. It's like that manual gear shifter for you to go through your sleep cycles properly and to actually get recovered. You need melatonin to be produced, and we'll come back to that. So that's number one, serotonin.

You can't just take melatonin.

I'll answer that in a moment.

Okay.

Okay. That's tricky.

Okay.

So, well, I'll just tell you. So, I looked around because some of our colleagues would feel that, and this was just a theory, that if you take supplemental melatonin, it's going to reduce your body's ability to produce it itself. And that's actually, I couldn't find that anywhere. There was no evidence of that. What I did find was taking supplemental melatonin, taking too much or too frequently, can downregulate receptor sites for melatonin. so your body can still produce it, but the receptor sites that actually do something with the melatonin can get down regulated.

The key is there, but the lock isn't.

Yeah.

So we do need to be mindful of that, and we can come back and talk about that. But here's the biggest, probably aha moment, hopefully, of this episode, is that it's not just serotonin that's producing the gut. And so check this out. And I just came across this. I'm gonna share this with you today. This was in. The World Journal of Gastroenterology. Listen to this. They found that there's upwards of 400 times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain. Because you talked earlier about the pineal gland. That's what I was taught in school. It's produced by pineal gland in the story. This study found that you can actually have a pinealectomy, which is a removal of your pineal gland, which I don't.

Recommend, by the way, don't do that.

It's like a frontal lobe, you know, go there. And you don't actually lose those levels of melatonin that's located in your gut.

Right.

So you're a gut brain and a brain brain.

Exactly. And that, that's, that's something really important to understand, too. Your gut is really, it's often referred to as a second brain. You know, it's, we can call it the enteric nervous system. There's like 30 neurotransmitters just like your brain.

It's like a mass of nerve tissue.

50 of your immune system and.

Yeah.

Most of the genes in your body as well.

Yeah.

That vagus nerve. So UCLA research has found that the vagus nerve, which we thought was just kind of like the brain communicating more, telling the gut what to do. 90% of those, the communication from those nerve fibers from the vagus nerve to the brain is your belly, your gut telling your brain what to do in many ways. Totally nuts.

And the other thing people should know is that when you're stressed, not only is your cortisol high and you lead to more fat accumulation, it's towards belly fat, but it actually blocks your cells ability to burn calories because the nerves from the vagus nerve help you metabolize your food, which is a relaxation nerve. It also has the effect of decreasing absorption of nutrients. So not only are you not absorbing, but your metabolism just slows down, which is amazing. It's just because of the nervous connection between your stress nerves and your relaxation nerves and all your gut function.

So profound. But this is just getting out of that isolation thinking, you know, this is what I was taught in school as well. It's like, well that's functional medicine, the body's a system. Yes, everything is interconnected and it's a beautiful symphony if everything's working well. So Caltech researchers to kind of get to how does this all connect, they discovered that, and this was just, I mean it's been around for years, but this is more of a recent like, okay, meta-analysis. Now we know that certain bacteria in the gut communicate with cells that produce these sleep related hormones and neurotransmitters. So your gut cascade, your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. And so now the question is, what do we do about it? How do we protect or support our microbiome? And that's one of the things that's going to help to improve your sleep quality. So let's just go through a couple. The biggest thing in my opinion is avoiding things that mess it up. All right. So one of those would be eating processed foods. So that crazy amount of sugar has a tendency to feed pathogenic opportunistic bacteria.

Right?

So that's one thing, avoiding haphazard use of antibiotics. They have a place, but we shouldn't be using antibiotics every time you get the sniffles. Right? And that's literally what, when I was a kid, just give them some antibiotics.

Right?

We would even, like, if my mom had some antibiotics, you know, just totally negligent.

Yeah.

Give them whatever's in the cupboard also. pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides, heavy metals. Yeah, these things, side literally means to kill, by the way. But these have a pretty, because they're meant to kill small things, guess what your microbiome is made of, you know? And so.

And how many millions and millions of people are taking acid blockers, which also terribly disrupt your gut microbiome.

Yeah, we're looking at that the wrong way as well. And so just avoiding those things. But also what I want people to do is support their microbiome by you know, and this should be just captain obvious at this point. And me working at a university for so long as a strength and conditioning coach before I did my clinical work, I work with people from all over the world and I would ask them about their fermented foods and every culture had something.

Yeah.

Right. So whether it was like some kind of kefir or like pickled whatever.

Right.

And so making sure that we're getting us at least, you know, every couple of days get a serving in of some fermented food or beverage.

Got to eat the kimchi. yeah, I got a jar in my fridge.

I love kimchi and my my mother-in-law makes it for me and she's from Kenya. So they had like fermented, a fermented like kind of similar to kombucha. Like she knew about this like 20 years ago and I'm like, what is this weird stuff she's growing?

Yeah, yeah.

And the kitchen is freaking me out. She had grass like first time I came to visit and they were growing grass, you know, like it was wheat grass. But I was like, hey, why has your mom got grass in here? Is she getting high? I didn't know. So anyways, different kind of grass. I didn't know. But that is a big component here is like shifting gears and having a more targeted perspective about supporting that gut microbiome. But also, and this is a really cool takeaway for everybody today is making sure we're getting in servings of what I call good sleep nutrients every day.

Yeah. What is that? Because eating for sleep, nobody really talks about that. so what does it look like?

The first one I'd share, and this one is from the Public Library of Science, and so they found that vitamin C, which we know about vitamin C, we tend to associate it with the immune system, right? That's powerful antioxidant. But they found that folks in this particular study that were deficient in vitamin C had a tendency towards waking up more frequently. And getting vitamin C levels elevated reversed their symptoms. All right, so that's just one example.

Iron is the other one. If you have a little fairy.

Iron is another one. Yeah, that's, oh my goodness, that's huge. And especially more so for women. It tends to be. And another one, this was published in the journal Sleep. This is the big journal. And what they found was calcium. So this goes back to that story that I was told about calcium. It is important for sure, but folks who are deficient in calcium, had more interrupted sleep patterns as well. And so by getting those calcium levels up, but how do we go about that? I'll just pass it over to you.

Yeah.

Rather than drinking like homogenized, glowing dark, you know, like from a mutant cow. Like, what other sources of calcium do we have? Oh, my God.

You know, it's, it's, when you look at the data on calcium, it actually isn't as great as we thought for bones, but the best absorbability and use is actually from grains like arugula and greens that we can have dark green leafy vegetables. Also, there's some great sources like tahini which is basically ground sesame seeds. Also, different things people might like. I like which is sardines with the bones in them and salmon with the bones in them like canned salmon. Those are really great to eat because.

They have a lot of great absorbable calcium. Exactly. Calcium is kind of like an end product from this biological transmutation. So, bones have great Source of it.

But you know people say oh, you don't you need you need milk I'm like well, where do you think a cow gets their calcium from and has strong bones? They eat a cow bone They eat.

Grass and so you should eat grass anyway. It's this really fascinating process It's kind of like like a biological Transmutation of sorts where certain things come together to create bone, right? So like you need silica youa need.

Boron boron by k2 yeah, all of.

These things come together to make this magic happen so by the way, I want to give some sources with vitamin c Obviously, we know about citrus, fruits like strawberries, sweet peppers, but there are these, quote, superfoods as well, like camu camu berry. This might be the highest botanical source of vitamin C. Super tart, tangy fruit. It's like an Amazonian thing. Amla berry, Acerola cherry, those are super, super high sources of vitamin C. Another one, and this was, this is the last one I'll share. There's a whole list. in Sleep Smarter. So this was a study conducted by University of Oxford found that Omega-3s can help folks to get deeper, more restful sleep. All right? So it helps with those modulating those rhythms, which it makes sense because it has to do with your brain.

Yeah. Right.

Your brain has these Gates. You know, we have the blood-brain barrier, but the gate allows in certain VIPs.

Yeah.

And it's only like 30 things.

Right.

And one of those is a mega. Well, you can have a leaky brain.

And then you get more trouble. oh, my goodness.

You know about the leaky brain?

This is like, you're already. You're getting into some territory here. This is super fascinating stuff, right? Leaky gut, leaky brain. Who knew?

Yeah, right.

Who knew? So exciting. And also, there's some research just came across that the brain kind of has its own nerve immune system in a way.

Yeah, it does. It has its own lymphatic system, which is like to clean the brain every night. And guess how you do that?

Sleeping.

Yep.

That's 10 times more active.

Yeah.

I mean, we know if you, if you don't sleep, you're much higher risk.

Of Alzheimer's because you can't clear out the garbage and your brain gets toxic. It's fascinating. It's run by the glymphatic system.

Yeah.

So that's like little shout out to the glial cells that help to run it. The body is just incredible.

So eat plenty of good, good sleep nutrients every day.

Magnesium, though. Oh, that was the last one, actually. Okay. I was like, that's the one. First one I go to, no patients. This is the big one. I was saving the best for last.

Yes.

I first learned about the benefits of magnesium probably from you.

Okay.

And this was again, like you've been talking about this for like 15 years.

Yeah, I'm getting old.

And I was like, holy crap, because it's responsible for so many biochemical processes.

Oh, I got 300 enzymes and yeah.

Yeah.

And so what that means for people is just like, so magnesium is responsible for these, well now we know like over 325 processes. What that means is there are 325 things your body can't do. or can't do properly when you're deficient on it.

And by the way, magnesium deficiency affects 48% of Americans and it's caused by stress. Chronic magnesium deficiency. It's caused by stress, it's caused by coffee, alcohol and not having enough in our diet which comes from mostly plant foods, beans and greens, nuts and seeds.

Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the things that we can do something about but like you said, it's a it's kind of like an anti-stress mineral.

Yeah.

And so just the amount of stress that we're exposed, even. Even today, even our environment is stressful. It's different. You know, we're indoors a lot more processed air, and we're not getting access to sunlight. Like, just our reality is more stressful. But then put on top of that.

Our work demands, relationship demands, you know.

How would you know if you're magnesium deficient?

You can get a test done, you know, but I really always most of the tests. are very inaccurate. Red cell magnesium is better, but it's mostly symptomatic. And actually the way we really have to diagnose it is called a magnesium load test where you give people a high dose of IV magnesium and then you collect the urine for 24 hours. And if nothing comes out, it means their body sucked it all up and if it all comes out, it means they have enough.

So, I think magnesium testing is tricky so you gotta go by the symptoms. Exactly, exactly. That's the thing. And what I was gonna say is I always err on the side of how do you look, feel and perform? You know, and in my practice, there were only a couple supplements I would recommend. Magnesium was generally, and maybe for 80% of the people that came in because it, there's such a tendency for people to be in deficient in it. And so, but here's the issue. So food first, obviously, anything green is going to be a good source of magnesium. So just keep that in mind. Kale, collard, mustard greens, but outside of that, supplementation can be tricky because we have this bowel tolerance. Yeah.

Right.

So even if you take a little bit more than your gut can handle at that moment, and you might need to really get your magnesium levels up, you're gonna activate what we call clinically disaster pants, which means the poop, potentially pooping in your sleep.

Yeah.

Like the whole thing. This goes full lactate.

Milk of Magnesia.

Right.

Magnesium Citrate, what they give people before. There you go. They have Oscopies to clean out their bowels, right?

It works. So, and there's different forms and some are going to be better for different people. But what I, I don't know if you've done this or looked into this, but like topical magnesium. Yeah, you can use topical magnesium.

Yeah.

That's what I do. Even brought some with me when I travel. You know, keep it in my, in my bag. And I love it.

I think it's fantastic. It's important. And people can, you know, overlook symptoms that are all caused by magnesium deficiency, right? sleeplessness, insomnia, anxiety, palpitations, muscle cramps, menstrual cramps, seizures, arrhythmias, palpitations, all those things are caused by magnesium deficiency. It's interesting in medicine, we don't really think about it, but it's used as a drug in the worst cases because drugs don't work. For example, preterm labor, someone comes in having a baby too early, you give them intravenous magnesium. Someone comes in and they're having high blood pressure, and seizures in pregnancy, they give them intravenous magnesium. People have cardiac arrhythmias where their heart is beating crazy beats in the emergency room and none of the drugs work, you give magnesium. It's pretty interesting and it's something we use all the time in medicine. We don't think about it in this.

Way but it is probably one of the most powerful things for sleep for people. Absolutely. And Oz told me that he would use it for open heart surgeries.

Yeah.

To keep that heart going. It's profound.

It's really profound. So, and it's sort of the relaxation mineral, sort of an antidote to stress. So, besides the nutrients, the processed food, all the stuff we're eating, what are the other key tips that people need to know if they're not sleeping? And what are the other causes of sleep issues? Because you mentioned the gut microbiome being a cause, right? So, you can take all this stuff and eat the right diet, but if you don't know what the cause is, like, so tell us about what the.

Causes are that are common. And then what are the other key strategies to actually help people sleep? That's such a good question. one of the biggest causes that I would see is having a upside down cortisol level or abnormal cortisol rhythm.

Yeah.

So folks are having their cortisol too low in the morning, making it very difficult to get out of bed, and then it's too high at night. And so they're just, like, up. And so this cortisol rhythm. And by the way, so cortisol has definitely gotten a pretty bad name, and rightfully so, but it's not all bad. You actually need cortisol to, like, make thyroid hormones. it's just if it's produced at the wrong time in the wrong amounts, then it could be a problem. And so to help folks to reset that cortisol rhythm, what we call a cortisol reset, this is super low hanging fruit and anybody can do this. This is so cool and I've seen.

So much good success with this.

Hanging on the edge of my seat here. So, Appalachian State University did a study and they went to find out would the timing of your exercise affect your sleep quality. and so they took test subjects and they had them train exclusively at 7 a.m. for one phase, train exclusively at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, and then train exclusively at 7 p.m. for the final phase of the study. They compiled all the data and they found that morning exercisers, first of all, they tend to spend more time in the deepest, most anabolic Delta stage of sleep by exercising in the morning. They found that they had a tendency to sleep longer. They had more efficient sleep Cycles overall. And here's something cool. they also found that the morning exercisers on average had about a 25% greater drop in their blood pressure at night, which is kind of correlated with that deactivation of that sympathetic fight or flight. And 1 o'clock wasn't good? 1 p.m. it was negligible in the change and they did see some benefit with the 7 p.m. ironically, which you've got to be careful with that because that might get your body temperature too high, your cortisol can get elevated.

Yeah.

But I even have a children's book that I read to my son when he was little, and they like take the kid through a bedtime ritual with the characters. One of their rituals, like old timer type things, is doing exercise before bed, right? Like tire yourself out, I guess, is the approach that you might think. And there's a difference between getting great high quality sleep and passing out for exhaustion.

Right. Because then people are tired and wired and they fall asleep and they wake up because their cortisol is so high.

Exactly. Exactly. And so what we want to do and how to work out in the morning. It gets that cortisol rhythm. It gets that cortisol elevated in the morning to kind of put it back on track because it should be elevated if it's a normal rhythm somewhere around at its peak, maybe 8 to 10 a.m. and gradually drop as the day goes on. And so, but the question is, well, you know, maybe I can't. I have whatever in the morning, you know, kids, work, whatever. I work on the afternoon, just five minutes, four minutes. You can do Tabata, right? 20 seconds of exercise, 10 seconds of rest, set your phone timer. incredible. First of all, you're going to get some fat burning benefits, right? And that post-exercise oxygen consumption, right? You're going to be burning more calories, but also it's going to help with your sleep quality at night. And so that's one of the big.

Low-Hanging fruits is just to get in at least five minutes of exercise in the morning. Amazing. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

So fix your gut, exercise in the morning.

Yeah.

Take the right supplements. What are the big things people can do now? This one is a little bit more common knowledge now, but the question really is, what are we doing about it? And this is our issue with our tech, right? This is like the most pervasive thing we're dealing with right now. And Harvard researchers have confirmed that the blue light spectrum coming from your iPhone, from your desktop, from your, they found that at night, this does in fact suppress melatonin production and elevate your cortisol, not during the day. During the day, there's no impact. That's fine. But at night, and here's what they found, and this is just an approximation, every hour you're on your device at night, you suppress melatonin for about 30 minutes.

Wow.

So you might be up on your device or watching TV for three hours and you go to bed because you're just physiologically exhausted or just like, I really should get to bed. You're not even producing adequate melatonin to take you through your sleep cycle for almost two hours into sleep. And so again, this is why we're waking up tired and we're not really getting high quality sleep is because we're destroying this process of producing melatonin.

So our friend Dave Asprey has these blue blocker glasses. What do you think of those? Is that the real deal? And all the things on your phone where it says night shift and Lux.

On your computer, those really work or? So I'm very big into like I need some proof, you know, anecdotally, I love them. When I put them on, I get sleepy. You know, I have my, and I went through the spectrum because I don't do this. Yeah, I mean literally I was doing this like six years ago. I ordered some like wood shop like.

They were sexy ones they have now.

I don't know how my wife even liked me. Like somebody came to my house in the middle of the night like are you building this stool? Like this wood shop. So I went from that and I just gradually got some cooler ones. But we are starting to see data trickle in now that it does help with that kind of sleep onset. and that feeling of being tired and also potentially we're seeing a little bit evidence that it can help to make your sleep cycles more efficient. That's with the blue light blocking glasses. With the apps on the phone, we don't have anything yet. So, but that doesn't mean that they don't work, we just don't know yet.

So, does it take out the blue light on the phone?

Or not really. Yeah, that's the question. Like, is it actually doing the job that it's saying it's doing? It's like, so anybody has an iPhone, for example. It's a tool that's built in night shift. You could set it and forget it. I do it for the desktop laptops flux. I've been using that for about seven years, probably. F.lux.

You can download it.

It's free online. And it just takes out, supposedly, kind of cools your screen off. Yeah. You know, in essence warms it up.

If we're looking at the Kelvin scale.

Right, right. A little more orangey, but yeah. And you can easily, like if you're a designer, like you can just click a click a button and then you can turn it off and turn it back on. But I've again, just in my practice, so many people would say just by doing that, they would sleep better, they'd have less eye strain or headaches. And so these are things to keep in our back pocket.

Hey YouTube, if you like this video, you're gonna love the next one. Click on it to check it out today.

Getting quality, sufficient sleep on a regular.

Basis is without question the foundation of mental and and probably physical health as well.

No, I already knew.

I mean, this is so huge. This is such a huge idea.

So sleep is different.