Hack Your Sleep with Shawn Stevenson

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And we have a great conversation today with Shawn Stevenson that really matters about a number of things, including sleep. We're going to get into that. Shawn is the author of the international best-selling book Sleep Smarter, which is important for all of us because sleep is underrated and very important. He's the creator of the Model Health Show, featured as the number one health podcast on iTunes with millions of listener downloads each year. He's a graduate of the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He studied business, biology, kinesiology, and went on to be the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. And he has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, Forbes, Men's Health Magazine, the Dr. Oz Show, ESPN, CNN, many other N's, and many other media outlets.

So you can go find more about.

Sean at themodelhealthshow.com so Sean, welcome.

To the doctor's pharmacy.

Such a pleasure to be here. Well, you're quite an amazing guy. I've done your podcast a bunch of times and you always know way more than I think most physicians and experts than someone who's actually come from a background is really around sports and fitness and it's just kind of amazing your expertise goes so deep and I wish most doctors knew what you knew. Now, you got into this, you grew up in kind of a rough neighborhood. I did, yeah. And you were trying to get out of it through athletics and you were in track and, you know, killing it. You were probably going to the Olympics, who knows? And then one day you had this horrible accident. So tell us about that and how that led to sort of a disruption in your health and how that led to the discovery of a whole new focus on health and well-being.

Yeah, it was definitely a life-changing event for me. And for me, at that point, I didn't realize that food mattered at all. I didn't know the difference between gummy bears and wild caught salmon, you know?

Right.

And so it's just for me, it was just food is just food. I didn't realize that it was literally making up what I was made of.

Yeah.

And so for me, everything was looking great. Like you said, I ran a 4-5-40 when I was 15 years old. And so this is like NFL combine numbers. So things were looking good.

4.5-40 yards or 40-40 yard dash.

Yeah. Like what they do with the NFL combine, which is kind of, you know, people are just literally watching TV just to see that stuff now, you know? But everything changed. I was doing a 200 meter time trial, and as I was coming off the curve onto the straightaway, I broke my hip. And it wasn't from trauma. Nobody hit me. I didn't fall. My iliac crest just cracked and just broke. And I went in to see my physician. He eventually sent me to physical therapy as well. And they put a scan up and they're like, oh, there's the problem. And I went through the normal kind of standard of care, which is take some NSAIDs, stay off the leg, If you're that age, you're gonna get better. You've got the hormones like a Greek god at that point. But nobody stopped to ask, how did.

This kid, this child, break his hip from running?

That's the first question I was thinking. That's the thing. And it wasn't until four years later. And so I had about a dozen more injuries, and my hopes of playing at the next level were just diminished. And so I kind of even had a loss of identity. But I was in college at the time, 20 years old, and now I get this diagnosis of degenerative spinal disease. degenerative disc disease. And so my physician at the time told me that I had the spine of an 80 year old man. I was just 20.

Bulging discs at 20.

Yeah. Two ruptured discs and a lot of pain. And so for me, the big issue was, and you know about this, it was a nocebo effect took place, which people know about placebos, which I want to put this out there is super important because the gold standard of study is a double-blind placebo-controlled study because placebos actually do something.

Yeah, 30% benefit on average.

About 30% effectiveness because of your belief in a treatment.

I would say the most powerful pharmacy in the world is between your ears. Absolutely, totally agree.

But the nocebo effect is kind of giving a negative injunction that something bad is gonna happen. You're not going to survive this, this is something you can't change, you have two weeks to live, that kind of thing. And so he told me that there was nothing I can do about it. Oh, that's encouraging. And for a 20-year-old kid, it's just like, how negligent. But I believed him and he's an authority figure. And so the next two years was just a really a downward spiral for me. And the Doritos. I was in college at the time, so I was on what I lovingly call the tough diet, right? Typical university food. So yeah, pizza, we had Papa John's special and breakfast if I had some leftover. But, and I didn't realize that I had any power in the situation. And so to make a long story short, two years go by and at this point, I was very docile because, you know, they tell me bed rest, stay off, you know, stay off your legs because I was having this chronic sciatic pain. And it wasn't until, and I'd gained like 40 pounds. Yeah. So I was a much fluffier version of me. Yeah, being a you can take a look at Sean.

He's a ripped dude. Thank you.

Thank you. But at the time, I really lost my identity and I lost my sense of self. My residual self image was, wasn't what I saw in the mirror. And it just, it took two years to see it. and I realized at that point that for those two years, I'd been giving my power away. And I realized that even though my physician meant well, he, he wasn't walking in my shoes. And I didn't even give myself the opportunity to try to get better. And so I made a decision to get well. And Martin, most people never actually do that. Yeah. It's more wishful thinking, like, so what.

Triggered you to go, ah, like, this is it. I need to.

Oh, man, for me, it was. sitting on the edge of my bed. And for me, the biggest struggle, ironically, was my sleep. And if you're not sleeping well, you're not healing. -'Cause your back was hurting. -Yes. If I even changed position, I get this sciatic nerve shot down my leg. It would jar me out of sleep. I was terrified. And so I was taking over-the-counter and pharmaceutical, you know, prescription pills. -Sleeping pills. -Yeah. And I realized that after these two years, nobody was helping me. I was pointing the finger. I just realized I'd been like, why isn't this person helping me? Why doesn't this person care? And I never pointed it back to myself. And my grandmother kept calling me, you know, grandmas can be just harassing you. Are you okay? It's like, yes, grandma. But I wasn't okay. And it finally hit me that she had so much invested in me.

Yeah.

And I hadn't been living up to that potential. And so I wanted to do something about it. Yeah. And so, like I said, most everybody needs a grandmother like that. Absolutely. Most people never decide to get well. It's more like, I'll give this a try. We'll see what happens, wishful thinking. And the word decision is from the Latin, de meaning from and caiere, which means to cut. So when you make a real decision, you cut away the possibility of anything else but that thing. And so I decided to get well no matter what. And from there I put together, and I'm very analytical as we'll go through today, but I put a plan together because it's not like you decide and then like the clouds part and like a leprechaun comes out or whatever. Or Aladdin's coming out soon whenever this comes out. But I put a plan together and that plan entailed three specific things. I changed the way that I was eating, which for you, it was maybe two years later I came across your work and this was 15 years ago. And you said this statement, food isn't just food, it's information. It baked my noodle. Like it changed everything. And so I asked the fundamental question, okay, my bones are breaking down, my spine is breaking down, what are they made of? Right.

What a concept.

And the big marketing tool is calcium, right? It's just marketing. There was like 200 other things and many of them more important than calcium, vitamin K2, vitamin D, magnesium, sulfur-bearing amino acids, all this stuff I'd never heard of. And so the first step I did was natural pill popping, which is not the way to go. Eventually I got to food. I'm like, what's the point?

You put it on your Papa John's, the pills.

Sprinkle a little on top, you know, and For me, it was I finally got the realization, food first. You know, it has this intelligence.

Food first. That's quite an interesting statement from a guy whose life has been focused on exercise.

Exactly. And that was the second component was movement. I'd stopped everything. And the worst thing you can do is to do nothing. And so it wasn't just my bones atrophying. Everything else was going to atrophy if I wasn't moving. And here's a crazy thing. So I came across this study on race horses of all things.

Yeah.

And so this is a like a billion dollar business. And so if a thoroughbred like goes down with a broken bone, it's like grounds to lose that animal. And so they did a study where they took the race horses and they gave them supplements to see if they can increase their bone density. And they did. It was a significant increase. But there was another study group where they gave them supplements and walk the horses. And they found that there was an even greater increase in their bone density by having the nutrients and the movement. And so I started to move again. I went from just doing a stationary bike to the elliptical to started jogging a little bit, picking up the weights again. And over the course of the next six weeks, I lost right around 25 pounds, which is not typical. But for me, my fat gene, like I was kind of the skinny kid in my family, but my fat gene got turned on. And that weight just kind of came off my frame when I started to eat real food. and to move again. And the biggest key for me was my sleep. Sleep, yeah.

So what was wrong with your sleep? Was it because of the pain and then the pills?

Yeah, absolutely. It was kind of a pseudo sleep. You know, it's not really getting-- what we're going to talk about today, sleep is a very strange phenomenon. Like we don't even have a definition for what it really is. But with science, we can see-- we know when we're sleeping because there's a.

Change in your brain waves.

So what-- Deep sleep and light sleep and REM sleep and Exactly. So we go from this a normal waking state right now, we're kind of in beta, we can get into some gamma as well. And then we transition to alpha, theta, and the deep delta sleep. And so all of those sleep cycles are correlated with different processes, hormones release, neurotransmitters in the body. And our key, it's not necessarily how many hours of sleep you get. It's really the quality of those hours because you can sleep for eight or nine hours and wake up feeling like, trash, like a dumpster juice or whatever. I don't know where that even came from. But you can feel terrible because you're not actually getting efficient sleep cycles. And so that's what I focus on is how can we ensure that we're getting quality sleep? And for a lot of people, they can potentially sleep six hours and sleep better than folks that are getting nine. Yeah.

And the truth is we've sleeping two hours less than we did 100 years ago per night. And that is interesting stat. And also the quality of sleep is terrible. Tens of millions of Americans have sleep problems and it's something that we don't really deal with very well in medicine. We say, oh, take Ambien or take Ativan or take Xanax or whatever. And those have serious consequences and they reduce the quality of your life. They increase mortality. They increase the likelihood of cognitive impairment and cognitive dysfunction, dementia. I mean, these are real issues where people are dependent on these pills. So how do we get from our.

Sleep deprived and disrupted sleep culture, what's causing it to fixing it? that's such a great question. You know, today more than ever, there is, there's a epidemic for sure with sleep deprivation. And we're seeing this show its face in so many different areas. I think the first step is actually understanding the value of sleep. And so, for example, you know, real talk, 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 and affected our body composition. I think it would start to push that conversation forward. So there was a really cool study.

I was done at the University.

Sleep and weight are connected. 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 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. And I didn't say wait. lost actual fat mass, not muscle, which is crazy. Like how, 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 that gland in your.

Head that 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 all the artificial light.

And the fact around it suppresses it. It has to have darkness. 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 it's 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. But I was gonna share Stanford University, they found that just one night of sleep deprivation has a dramatic effect on suppressing leptin. And that's that kind of glorifies hunger hormone. I mean, I'm sorry, satiety hormone. and Garelin 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 at 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.

If that's ever happened, please inform me. I don't get a craving for broccoli. I want salty, sweet, crunchy, carbs. 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 reaching 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. I'd go to McDonald's and get the apple turnovers and the french fries in the middle of the night. That 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. 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. Because 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, whether it's more serious things like sleep apnea, 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, lisinopril 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 keep moving. Yeah, 20% what are you missing? And so it took about five years in practice maybe a little longer before I had the audacity to ask how was your sleep? Yeah, and what people would tell me blew my mind. I couldn't believe they're even sitting there. Yeah, 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 the, 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 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 gonna be a reminder for folks today. But I wanna 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 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.

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.

And by the way, there's more serotonin in your gut than there is in your brain. Exactly. So upwards of 80 to 90 of.

Your body serotonin is actually located in.

Your gut, produced by your entrochromaffin 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 minute. 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 down regulate 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. you don't actually lose those levels of melatonin that's located in your gut. Right?

So you have a gut brain and a brain brain.

Exactly. And that's something really important to understand too. Your gut is really, it's often referred to as a second brain. You know, 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. 60% of your immune system and most of the genes in your body.

Vagus nerve as well. 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 stores 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 gonna 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 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 worked with people from all over the world and I would ask them about their fermented foods and every culture had something. So whether it was like some kind of kefir or like pickled whatever, right? And so making sure that we're getting at least, you know, every couple of days get a serving in of some fermented food or beverage.

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

I love kimchi and 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's your mom got grass in here? She's like, did she get it? 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 that 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 their, in this particular study that were deficient 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.

So Iron's 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. Yeah, it tends to be. And another one, this was published in the journal Sleep. All right, this is the big journal. And what they found was calcium. Right, 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 rather than drinking like homogenized, glow in the dark, you know, like from a mutant cow. What other sources of calcium do we have?

Oh my God, you know, when you look at the data on calcium, it actually isn't as great as we thought for bones, but the best absorbability in use is actually from greens, like a 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? It has strong bones.

They eat a cow bone. They eat grass. And so they 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, you need Boron.

Boron. Boron. 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. So it helps with those modulating those rhythms, which it makes sense because it has to do with your brain. Your brain has these gates, you know, you have the blood-brain barrier, but the gate allows in certain VIPs. And it's only like 30 things.

And one of those is a megaphone. Although you can have a leaky brain.

And then you get more trouble. Oh my goodness.

You know about the leaky brain issue?

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?

Right, who knew? So exciting. And also, there's some research that 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.

I mean, we know if you don't sleep, you're at 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. 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 sleep nutrients every day.

Magnesium, though? Oh, that was the last one, actually.

Okay. I was like, that's the first one I go to about patients. This is the big one. I was saving the best for last. I first learned about the benefits of magnesium Probably from you.

Okay.

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.

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. Yeah.

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

So how would you know if you're magnesium deficient?

You can get a test done, 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.

We just goes full. It's laxative. Milk of Magnesia.

Right.

Magnesium Citrate is what they give people before. There you go.

They have colonoscopies to clean out their bowels.

Right.

It 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. 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 to keep that heart going. It's profound.

It's really profound. so it's sort of the relaxation mineral, sort of antidote to stress. So besides the nutrients, the processed food, all this stuff we're eating, what are the other key tips that people need to know if they're not sleeping in? And what are the other causes of, 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 causes are, like, so tell us about what the.

Causes are that are common, and then what are the, what are the other key strategies to actually help you? 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 hormone. It's just if it's produced at the wrong time and 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 7:00 a.m. for one phase, train exclusively at 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon, and then train exclusively at 7:00 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. But I even have a children's book that I read to my son when he was 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 still high. Exactly, exactly. And so what we want to do and how do you 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 8:00 to 10:00 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 out in 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, 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 issue. 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 love doing this. -I'm wearing these glasses. 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. But you know, like, if somebody came to my house in the middle of the night, like, Are you building a stool? Like, is 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 of 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 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, well, 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 button and then you can turn it off and turn it back on. But 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.

So it also speaks to the question of creating a great sleep environment and light and sound, but also people are talking about EMFs and Wi-Fi and electromagnetic frequencies and effective that and cell service. And there are people even going so far as to create faraday cages around their beds or in their bedroom, which essentially means putting a special cage over your bed or in your room that blocks out all like lead lining your room in a sense to block out all electromagnetic frequencies.

You're making yourself your own zoo animal. It's really interesting, you know?

But, for example, I notice when there's like a hurricane or a storm and the electricity goes out and the Wi-Fi is off and the the phone's out and the electric's out.

It's like, I know I sleep way better. Yeah. So truth be told, this is. I have my Wi-Fi I'm kind of out in the woods a little bit where I live. I live in the Midwest, and I have a timer on my Wi-Fi it shuts off in the evening because we do have some evidence that this stuff is affecting us. We just don't know to what degree. And it's so new, you know, humans, these. These waves exist, but we're just now starting to really play with them. in a major way. And so, you know, even on flights, you know, it's just like that used to be the time I just kind of disconnect. Now I'm doing emails, you know, because we've got Wi-Fi exposure everywhere we go and just these electromagnetic fields. So we don't have enough evidence, like long-term data, to know the impact. But so for people, and this is one of the biggest things as well, is when you mentioned earlier and we talked about, you know, having that kind of eye protection, what I would really encourage people to do is to create an evening routine. I think this is a huge key because we used to get ready for bed when we were kids, right? But then we get grown up, it's just like, forget it, like I could do what I want. And it's literally, it's creating these neural associations in your brain. And so for you, if your bedroom, the sleep sanctuary you wanna create is the entertainment hub of your house where you're working in your bedroom or you're watching TV in your bed, Even if you have the intention of going to sleep, you're gonna have neurons that are firing, expecting you to watch TV, right? And plus, here's something, this is just.

A little... Not people watch stuff on.

Their phones, on their computer, or... Right. Anywhere. I'm gonna put this in parentheses. I know some people are gonna take action immediately when I say this. There was a study done on, and this was Italian couples, and they were like, you know, in their 40s and 50s, and they found that these couples.

That have a television in their bedroom have 50% less sex. Ooh, all right. Watching more on TV but less in real life.

So, yeah, exactly. You know, and so I know some people have paused this to go get the television out of their room. Welcome back. You know, they just went and did it. But it's a distraction. Also, it just because of the diminished sleep quality, there's a huge impact on your sleep quality and your libido, your hormones. Yeah. And your ability to even produce sex hormones and the reverse as well. So your sex life also influences your sleep quality. And so when you have an orgasm.

You- talk about the big O.

The big O, yeah. When you have an orgasm, we produce a cocktail of chemicals. So like prolactin. Oxytocin. Oxytocin, yeah. And some hormone. We see this significant uptick. And by the way, so with male test subjects, they saw prolactin increased about four times more and this is also a big pathway to relaxation, four to ten times more prolactin produced when the male would have an orgasm with their partner versus having an orgasm by himself.

Yeah.

All right. And so this is what we see instead of like, you know, somebody has an orgasm, then they go get a bowl of cereal or whatever versus if they're with their partner and they fall asleep. And we actually have this term in culture called sleeping together, right? And so there's this intimate connection there.

But oh, yeah, it's true. Sleep together, right?

That might be a part of your evening routine, but don't be so, like, robotic about it. Like, you know, it is time for missionary. Like, I'm not saying to do that, but understanding that, and what I would recommend people to do is to have a screen curfew, ideally, and just 30 minutes. I'm not asking for everything. 30 minutes.

Well, people don't realize how much on their screen I Got this new app that's on the new iOS operating system, which is screen time. And it tells you what you're doing, how long you're on it, how many times you pick up your phone. I think it's a shock for most people. My nephew was on his phone a lot and he didn't realize it. He would write screen time to send me a report every day, screen time two hours. I'm like, all right, send me the screenshot of your screen time. He proved seven hours a day.

Oh man, that's crazy.

A thousand pickups a day, you know, where you pick up your phone to look at.

That is insane, right?

It's insane.

And I don't think it's abnormal, you know? Right. Yeah.

And he's not at the highest end of the spectrum. He might, I don't know. I mean, I think it's, it would be interesting to get data from Apple and what this, I mean, if they.

Actually would produce a study on the data, it would be fascinating. But this is the big barrier of entry for when I say having a screen curfew is like, what do I do with my hands, Sean? what do I do in that 30 minutes before bed? Read a book. Here's the thing. You have to do something, just like with any habit, you have to replace it with something of greater or equal value. You can't just like screen curfew and just sit there and twiddle your thumbs or do something that you hate. And so this could be getting lost in a great book. This could be audiobooks are fantastic.

You don't have to stare at your screen.

Listen to my podcast or your podcast.

Perfect, right?

Go to sleep. go to bed with that kind of knowledge, you know, just processing in your mind or hanging out with your loved ones, your significant other. Maybe you can actually talk to your partner. I know this is revolutionary what I'm talking about, but maybe you can actually have that intimate connection and possibly that can lead to an intimate connection, you know, or for me, I have a practice where it varies from time to time, but right now I'm doing a little bit like some foam rolling.

Right?

Kind of trying to encourage that sympathetic system activation, right? Hot bath.

Hot bath.

Magnesium bath. Yes.

Epsom salt, which is magnesium.

Help set yourself up for victory, you know, these simple practices. And you're gonna find, number one, you're gonna sleep better, but then your mornings are gonna get better. A great morning really starts the night before, you know? And that's kind of one of the last points I wanna share is that a great night of sleep starts the moment you wake up in the morning. So I already shared about the exercise, but also just getting some access to sunlight, the light exposure. So we want to avoid artificial light at night and get more natural light during the day.

Yeah. Right.

And it can be especially, you know, we're in New York City right now. It can be a little bit of a challenge, you know, so there are hacks to it, but especially during the times of year that we can definitely...

Sad lights. you know, the full spectrum lights you can watch your face in for 20 minutes if you can't get a little thing you can buy.

Yep, there's so many different things, even just basic light boxes that are prescribed for like seasonal affective disorder. This is like clinically proven to work, right? I thought you were talking about the new infrared stuff. No, no, the light boxes. Oh yeah, the new infrared stuff is really cool as well. So there are many different options. They've got visors, they've got earbuds, you know, there's so many different things.

Mm-.

But the very best thing is just getting connected to nature, getting some natural light. And here's why. Innovations in clinical neuroscience found that getting sun exposure in the morning helped people to sleep better at night because folks that were getting adequate sunlight had a greater drop in cortisol levels in the evening.

Mm-.

Right? So getting that sunlight helps to reset that cortisol rhythm. Yeah. And the question is-- It's on the pineal gland too. Yes. Are you taking advantage of it? And sunlight, triggers your body to produce more serotonin. And the list goes on and on. These really basic things. Are we doing it? Because if we're not, and then wondering why we're struggling with our sleep, these are the things we need to address.

First before we jump to something dramatic. So, does your experience with people follow these 21 strategies for optimizing your sleep.

That they can overcome their sleep issues? Man, I've received the most. Now it's published in about 20 different countries. Sleep Smarter, great book. Yeah, and I received most incredible messages, like literally, oh man, it just, it's, it kind of gets me choked up sometimes because I, I was passionate about this, but I didn't know the impact that was going to have, you know? Yeah. And people, I mean, just message people who are struggling with their sleep, you know, 10, 20 years and, you know, just applying some of these things because the thing is just, we don't know what we don't know oftentimes. And also giving people, making it fun as well to learn about this because Let's be real, sleep isn't a sexy topic. The Dune Diet or exercise program, the Brazilian butt workout, whatever, that's sexy.

You can get a better butt by sleeping better.

Exactly. Sleeping smarter. Exactly. And so making this attractive, making it something that people really look forward to and they're excited about is really what I set out to do and I think I've done it. So I'm really, really happy about that.

Oh, that's amazing. So if, you know, people are going to start today, what are the the top five things that they should focus on in sleep.

Yeah. We can just go in order. So number one, low hanging fruit, get that five minutes of exercise in the morning at least. To help to reset that cortisol.

I like that seven minute workout in New York Times. Great.

Yeah. Even that, you know, it's just like.

Literally on the Michael Jackson. Turn the thing on, a timer, 30 seconds, 12 exercises, 10 second break in between.

Or you could just put on the Michael Jackson and like moonwalk and try to, well, try to. It's more like a sunwalk, as a lot of people do. So that's number one, is yes, waking up and getting some movement in within that first 30 minutes of rising. The second thing would be to, if at all possible, get some exposure to natural light, natural sunlight. If not, then some artificial lights that we have access to that do the best job possible, do that. Just to keep that rhythm on pace. the third thing would be, this goes back to kind of creating that sleep sanctuary. We want to create a strong neuro association with your sleep. And so make your bedroom a place where relaxation takes place. And it's not like the place you're hanging out watching TV and doing your work. Keep that stuff outside your bedroom. Yes, the double S happens to be my initials as well. I'm just throwing it out there.

Sleep Smarter, Sean Stevenson, the sex who knew?

So those three, so create a sleep sanctuary. The fourth thing would be to make sure that we're taking care of our gut microbiome and eating plenty of good sleep nutrients. It's of the utmost importance because as we've talked about, a lot of your sleep quality is resulting from what's happening in your belly. All right? And the final thing would be, and I think we've been kind of teetering on this throughout this conversation, we need to have a practice to kind of calm that inner chatter. And so a study that was published in the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, published by them, found that meditation in the morning actually helps to improve sleep quality at night and improve sleep latency. So folks fell asleep faster. That's right. They had more efficient sleep cycles and they tended to sleep longer. And many of the people in the study had chronic sleep issues, you know, so effectively having a solution for insomnia, what we label as insomnia, without drugs, right? And we have access to this, like this is something we can all do. And so, but I want to also point folks to this doesn't mean you have to just sit in a closet with the lights off and like, you know, om, which is cool. Like, the humming and it just depends on you and what kind of flavor of meditation you're doing. Meditation in a car or in a subway.

Yes.

Mindfulness practices. There's also research indicating the mindfulness practices help Qigong. I find that folks that have a really busy mind, really active, kind of hyperactive folks just by nature do really well with Tai Chi and Qigong. And there's great research indicating how those are effective. With Qigong, there was a study done that found that folks who did the Qigong practice had more melatonin metabolites. Like basically their body was either processing it or using it better. And that's really fascinating in itself. And these things have been done thousands of years. Ambien was made like yesterday, right? And so having a practice to kind of calm down, calm this inner chatter, because what we want at the end of the day is for all of us, even to be successful today, we're gonna have a lot of tabs open on the computer screen of our mind, which is great because we're able to communicate and have solutions and interact. But when we go to sleep, we would just want one window open and that's a sleep window. Yeah. So to be able to minimize those windows, I think it takes a practice, and it's called a practice of brain training, and we call it meditation today. But so finding a practice that really vibes with you and incorporating that on a regular basis is going to help your sleep quality.

So powerful. I know a friend of mine, Emily Fletcher, who's going to be on this podcast, created a company called Ziva Meditation, where she teaches meditation online and in person, but she was a Broadway star and had anxiety and insomnia and got turned on to meditation meditation. It changed her life, and she changed her career to share it with everybody. And it's powerful. I've been doing meditation for, you know, 40 years and took a bunch of breaks when I had kids and was stressed and, you know, didn't think it was as important. I was doing yoga. I figured that was okay. But I. A number of years ago, I started back again twice a day for 20 minutes. And I do it, you know, I can do it in a car, I can do it in the train, a plane. I do it in my house, bedroom in the morning. And it is profoundly impacted the quality of my life, not just sleep, but. my happiness, my ability to not be reactive in my life, to enjoy my life, to be more present with the people I love, to do more focused work. And, you know, there's a really powerful tool. And people don't realize how easy it is, how simple it is, not mysterious. You don't have, you know, beads on and sit on a cushion and burn incense.

And it's like, none of that nonsense.

Unless you're into that. Well, if you want to do it, fine. You know, I used to meditate in a zendo, you know, in cold mornings in the middle of the woods with no, with with no plumbing and that was fun, but you can't-- Was it? Yeah, I actually liked it other than my knees hurting. But it was really powerful to do 12 hours a day of meditation and be in silence.

These are the things that people want to hear, Mark, because for somebody who's in the position that you're in to have helped so many people to say that this is such a huge part of your life, we cannot really overstate that.

I'm too busy, I'm too busy. I hate to say I'm probably busier than anybody can imagine. Ask my assistant who makes my schedule, but it's crazy. But if I do that, I just feel more grounded, happy, and more able to be more productive and be more successful. So it's like 40 minutes a day, but it gives me so much more quality of the rest of my time. It allows me to do the things I do easier, better, faster, more effective.

It's competitive advantage today.

Totally. I mean, you think of like the Seattle Seahawks, the Chicago Bulls. I mean, these were, you know, title winning teams, and they were all meditating. You know, you got Phil Jackson wrote a book called Sacred Hoops about, you know, teaching his players in the Chicago Bulls to meditate in the Lakers to actually be more focused and incredible, you.

Know, and he's all speak for themselves. Exactly. Yeah.

People gonna be like, well, he did.

Have Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and Shaq. Yeah. And a few other. But you still have to put the pieces together. Yeah. And you gotta execute. And, you know, that's a big part of it, is helping you to show up better, you know, to be your best self, your best version of yourself. And for me, I've been, I've had a meditation practice for about 12 years. My mother-in-law taught me. And again, I was very resistant because it's just like, what is this? Weird, you know, and. But I, I had the opportunity to just, just. put my disbelief to the side for a moment and engage with it. And the very first meditation that she taught me and she, you know, she was a TM teacher. She was a teacher for various, you know, chakra meditations, all this stuff. And again, she's from Kenya. And so even her story and getting to where she is was your mother-in-law. Yeah, she's crazy. She is my biggest inspiration for sure. But, and so I realized I did the first meditation and I woke up like I really realized that I hadn't really had a conscious thought, really, my entire life, just reactive. Yes, just living, I was kind of in the moment in a sense, but I wasn't aware that I was aware. And it changed everything for me. And so now, like you said, that patience, the kindness, if people would know from my past and me growing up versus the person I am today, I'm so much more patient, I'm so much more understanding. There's a space there. It really makes me think of thought and reaction. And it also is a gift for other people because I can show up and bring a different energy when there's chaos. I can bring a different energy when there is frustration or there's, you know, upsetness and anger. And I'm so grateful that she taught me this practice. And it's just definitely, it's a big part of my life too.

This is amazing conversation because it connects all the dots, right? So all the things you do to create health, also help you have better sleep, also help you fix everything, right? Whether it's the food you eat, taking care of your microbiome, optimizing your nutrients, exercising, meditation, protecting your space and creating a safe space to sleep in. All these things have multiple spillover effects on everything that matters, right? Not just your health, but your well-being, which includes your relationships, your work, your life force, your vitality. I mean, you know, if you live a life that's depleted and empty because you're exhausted or you're not sleeping or you're stressed or your body's not working. I mean, we don't realize the power when we access these very simple physical doorways to our health that has a spillover effect on our emotions and our cognitive function and our just our spiritual life. All those things are impacted by these simple things that we easily can access that don't cost any money. You know, it's pretty amazing.

It is.

It definitely is. Well, Sean, it's great to have you on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

This has been a great conversation.

I really appreciate being here. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. So you've been listening to Doctor's Pharmacy. It's Dr. Mark Hyman. And you've been listening to the Doctor's Pharmacy with Sean Stevenson. I would encourage you to check out his podcast at themodelhealthshow.com, and please get his book Sleep Smarter, because it is going to change your life. It certainly has helped me. And I I feel like, you know, sleep is those conversations that aren't so sexy, but are pretty damn important. So thanks for joining us. And if you've liked this podcast, please leave a review. If you really like to share with your friends and family, and if you haven't signed up yet, sign up wherever you get your podcast. You've been listening to the doctor's pharmacy with Mark Hyman. Stay tuned for the next show. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free with Hyman plus on Apple podcasts. You can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your 7-day free trial.