How to SLEEP Smarter | Jim Kwik Podcast

The vast majority of your melatonin is located in your gut. All right, we're talking like 400 times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain.

This device actually looks like Iron Man.

That's right. That was the inspiration, was Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man.

What are 3 quick tips our listeners can use to sleep smarter?

So first one was go with the super low-hanging fruit. And I love these, and this is something you can implement immediately. And so this was a study, it was done by Appalachian State University, and this was a study on exercisers. They were looking at the timing of your exercise. How would that possibly potentially influence your sleep quality? And what they found was absolutely shocking. So at one phase of the study, they had the individuals to exercise exclusively at 7:00 AM over the course of that study period. Then they take the same exercisers in another study period and have them work out exclusively at 1:00 PM in the afternoon. A final stage, they had them to train exclusively at 7:00 PM in the evening. And so here's what's crazy. At the end of the study, they found that the morning exercisers on average spent more time in the deepest, most anabolic stages of sleep, which is what we talked about earlier and how important that is. They found that the morning exercisers tended to sleep longer. They tended to have more efficient sleep cycles, which again, that's what we were talking about here, efficient sleep cycles, not necessarily sleeping more. And they also found that the morning exercisers had a 25% greater Yeah. And they found that there was a larger drop in blood pressure in the evening compared to working at the other times. And why that matters, that's correlated with the activation of your parasympathetic or rest and digest system and a deactivation of the sympathetic fight or flight. And so, all of that simply by getting some exercise in in the morning. And immediately, some people are like, well, I don't have time. I work out after work, or maybe I'm not working out right now at all, which is you don't have to stop doing what you're doing if you're working out after you get off of work, if that fits better with your schedule. The great thing is that you can still take advantage of the benefit by getting even 4 minutes of exercise in, in the morning.

Wow.

And so, clinically, what we call this and why it works is it's something called a cortisol reset. And sometimes, we'd see people coming into the clinic where we'd see their— do a hormone panel or just look at their sleep patterns, and we'd call them tired and wired. And basically, at night, when they should be tired and ready to go to sleep, they're wired and up. And in the morning, they're just so tired. difficult to peel themselves off of their mattress because their cortisol's too low. And cortisol is not a bad guy. That has to be said really quickly here. It's if it's producing the wrong amounts or at the wrong time. And so by exercising in the morning, you get this cortisol boost, and that sets the template because your cortisol should be elevated in the morning and gradually drop as the day goes on. So it really works as simply as that, getting that cortisol reset. You can do Tabata, which is 4 minutes of exercise, it's 10 seconds of rest. So 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off for 4 minutes. You'll probably kick your butt. It's really difficult. Maybe you just do bodyweight squats for that time period. You're going to get a great workout in, you're going to upregulate your metabolism, and you're going to be able to help your sleep at night. So, that's tip number 1, low-hanging fruit, is to get in some morning exercise. All right. So, for number 2, and this one is a little bit more in my field, I'm a clinical nutritionist and I've had the opportunity to work with a couple thousand people in a one-on-one context and many hundreds of thousands of people now, probably into the millions via my show, the Model Health Show, live events and speaking and traveling and all these different things, programs. And, what I saw was there definitely was a correlation with what we're eating in our sleep. And so, I dug into the research and it was so fascinating. It really blew me away what I found out because when you hear the word melatonin, which is this glorified sleep hormone, we don't tend to really think— and this is what I was taught in traditional university, melatonin is secreted by your pineal gland, end of story. That's just how it is. Well, come to find out that the vast majority of your melatonin is located in your gut. We're talking like 400 times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain. And so, when you can actually have a pinealectomy, which is a removal of your pineal gland, which I don't recommend, I'm not saying to go do that after the show is over, but here's the thing is that they still had the same levels of melatonin in their body after the pineal gland was removed. Crazy, crazy stuff. And so, the environment in your gut, and researchers at Caltech and some other organizations that I looked into for compiling this data and making it all make sense for people, found that certain bacteria in your gut communicate with cells that are responsible for creating sleep-related hormones and neurotransmitters. So, the environment in your gut matters a lot, and the food that you put in there determines in a huge way what's happening in that environment, your microbiome. microbiome. And so I'm going to leave that piece with one tip, which is help to support the microbiome. Don't put things in your body that destroy your microbiome, if at all possible. So avoiding unnecessary antibiotics, chlorinated water, processed foods that help to keep opportunistic bacteria in control of your ship. So that's part 1. And this is much more in-depth in Sleep Smarter. And it's chapter 7. I'll never forget this chapter because it blew my mind writing this way. But also, we want to add in more what I call good sleep Nutrients. All right, so there's certain nutrients that are kind of building blocks or seeds for creating sleep-related hormones and neurotransmitters. I'll just share two really quickly. One of them, funny enough, is vitamin C. So we hear about vitamin C for your immune system and things like that, but it's actually important for regenerating tissues. It's also important for your sleep. It helps to regulate this process. So, and this was a public library of science did a study and found that individuals who were deficient in vitamin C were much more likely to have interrupted sleep. So this are people who tend to wake up more frequently during the night. And so, by optimizing your vitamin C, you can help to eliminate that. And again, it depends on you. This might not be the thing that's going to fix that, but it might be something to look at. And I'm a big fan of botanical or food first. So, not going and buying a vitamin C supplement, some synthetic thing, but get it from food first and/or a natural food source supplement. And I'll share one other one. There's so many that I want to tell you about right now, but one other one would be magnesium. Magnesium is responsible for over 300 biochemical— I'm sorry, 325 biochemical processes we're aware of. Many of them involve sleep and recovery. And this is also the number one mineral deficiency in our world today. So, that's why this is a big, big problem. It's a kind of a stress-modulating mineral. It really deals with your body's kind of sympathetic nervous system a lot. And so, this gets zapped from your system very quickly. So, you want to be adamant about getting magnesium, optimal magnesium in your diet. Food first, and then supplements. There's oral supplements. I would recommend people go supplement with this one too, in addition to food. However, here's the issue. If you take too much of an oral supplement of magnesium, it can cause what we call clinically disaster pants, which is diarrhea. That's another way to say diarrhea, but in a more elegant way, I guess. So, be careful with the amount of magnesium that you're taking in. And I love topical magnesium from our friend Ian Clark and his amazing company Activation Products. So, topical rubbing it into your skin is a great way to go about that. So get more good sleep nutrients. And final tip here. So we covered exercise, we covered good sleep nutrients. This is something that I don't know if you've talked about on your show yet, but I know you've probably weaved it in. And this is having a session, a practice of brain training, AKA meditation. And so what was so fascinating, the American Sleep Foundation and the American Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. They both correlated and put together studies and looked at the research. And, it was so fascinating to see this because you hear about meditation and we tend to think about, oh, that sounds good for relaxation, and it can be a little bit airy-fairy. But, you and I are very much the same in our thinking. We're very analytical. We want to know that something actually does work. And so, for them to come out and say that And, I cited the study in my book Sleep Smarter as well that meditation is equally as effective as some of the best sleep medications that are out there is really fascinating.

And, your question for today is, how do you improve your sleep? Now, we are actually shooting this at the biohacking conference where my guest and I are speaking. And, I'd like to introduce everybody to the founder of Happi, which is a wearable device that helps you everything with Everything from focus to the topic of sleep. Scott Donnell, thanks for being here, buddy. I'm looking forward to going into those tips and also talk about the technology. Some people are watching us on video, and I recommend also people tune into YouTube because we put the full extended version there. Underneath your shirt, this device actually looks like Iron Man. That's right.

That was the inspiration, was Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man. You can turn the light off, but But you want to make sure you have a cool glowing light.

Yeah. Well, I want to talk about the incredible technology and then the 40 or so patents that you have around it to help people to choose the way that they feel, that they actually could choose focus, they could choose calm, they could even choose to be able to relax and have deeper sleep. And so what are some of the things— before we go into the technology part, what are some of the things that you found worked for you? Because sleep for our community is very important because without sleep, you don't have long-term memory. Without sleep, you're not getting, you know, cleaning out the beta amyloid plaque that leads to brain aging challenges. Without sleep, you're not getting into those dream states where, you know, we can be creative and coming up with inspiration and inventions and things like that.

Yeah, I think people talk about education and the best way people can learn well and learn quick is good sleep. Yeah, there, there is, there is no better drug you can take. There's no better system or strategy you could— you can deploy other than having really good sleep habits.

And when you and I were talking, like, your habits are pretty— they're pretty, pretty simple. Yeah, you know, certain things. So where, where would you recommend our listeners— where would you start?

Okay, so there's different— there's different levels, right? Like, there's sort of the setting, your environment. There's things you're gonna ingest or not ingest, be very careful of. And then there's the mental side too, right? Like you have to have a rhythm and a routine that puts you in sleep mode. Like it's time to sleep, Scott, right? Like, so when it comes to the simple setting, light is a big one.

Mm-hmm.

Trying to block out everything. I mean, we've blocked out any green light, like, you know, the old-fashioned red alarm clock on the side of your bed or the blue alarm clock or green lights. I always, I do this right in the hotel room. I literally just, whenever I get to a hotel room, I put the clock on its face. Or unplug it so there's no light coming in. Get as dark as you can possibly get it. Black shades are fantastic. Sleep masks work for a lot of people. So light is a big one. Sound is also huge. There's a little bit of controversy around like white noise or pink noise, but something that can help trigger a parasympathetic safe response for noise is very, very important. So, you know, like we live in Phoenix, there's a lot of people around. We are, you know, like 5 houses down from like Camelback Road, so there is traffic and sometimes there's, you know, lights and alarms and sirens. But our, you know, we've found that having a little bit of noise, like a little bit of white noise, helps a lot, especially if there's like a kid that cries, you know, on the other side of the house, but it's only a minute cry and then they're fine, right? Sleep training, we can talk about that for babies. But, um, the sound and light are 2 of the biggest ones.

And even when you travel, you can control what You control the controllables. I actually travel with these little black clips, and then it helps to close some of the curtains.

Yeah, that one little light that's in the middle of the curtain that always hits me if I don't do it right. You're right. So light and sound are 2 of the biggest ones. When it comes to, well, I'll talk about the ingesting of what not to ingest and what's good.

How about, you mentioned temperature also.

Yeah, temperature. The temperature of the bed. We just got delivered these chili sleep pads from our friend Todd Youngblood.

We like them, we love them. I love them. We have a number of units in our home.

Yeah, temperature regulation is so important to be comfortable when you're going to bed and throughout the night. Sometimes your body can heat up. Sometimes dreaming changes your temperature of your body, right? You ever woken up in a cold sweat? Like, that's because that changes throughout the night. And so Chili's an amazing one, especially for couples or partners where, you know, my wife loves all the covers on and like, and I'm like, I just wanna sleep like in my boxers with nothing on. And so the pad and the temperature really helps us both regulate. Like I'm a cold, you know, in the 60s on the ChiliPad. So having a cooler temperature does help get better sleep. And so that's a big one.

'Cause it allows you also to create melatonin. It's interesting because the 2 triggers for that, you think about, you know, even as hunter-gatherers, you know it's time to sleep when there's a drop in light. and a drop in temperature. But today in modern society, we have temperature control and light control, and our devices that create light. Yeah, you know, and so we have to make conscious choices.

Yeah, I— in fact, I— this week, this brings up another topic of travel, right? Have you ever done a red-eye or like an over-the-Pacific or Atlantic flight? Um, that happy helps a ton, but getting yourself a great sleep, a mask, Get your temperature right with the air, do whatever you can to sleep well because on average they say it takes a day per hour change to get yourself right if you're taking a long trip. And so there's a lot of little hacks that we use with Happy and the sleep mask. There's even some cooling things that we use on flight just to get ourselves comfortable to get really good sleep. We just took our 10-year anniversary trip to Bora Bora. We just went for it. It was amazing. And on the flight there, I stopped all the caffeine. I stopped— no nicotine or no nothing. And we got on the flight, we did all the 5 little tricks with the happy and the thing, and we both slept perfectly. It was awesome. We got 8 hours. It was also because we were relaxing going on this trip, but we both wrote down what we were so thankful for right before the flight. And we just were talking about all the things we were grateful for. And that kind of goes into the mind frame, right?

Yeah.

Every night, I want to say 3 things I'm thankful for, not just for the day that were accomplished, but in life, what I'm grateful for.

So, Shawn, what do people do? We had a question from someone in our Facebook group asking, what do I do when I wake up in the middle of the night? Should I just lie there and I can't fall back to sleep? What do you recommend?

Yeah, so this is person-dependent. This is going to depend on you. I could tell you what not to do. We do not want to get on your devices. All right, because we've already— this is well established in our culture that the light spectrum coming from our device and also the activation of dopamine and all these things that can kind of stimulate us. So that's not a good idea. What we can do is this is a great place to have a little bit of a meditation practice because crazy enough, through meditation, you can get into some of these different stages, brainwaves, frequencies that correlate with sleep, right? It's not necessarily the same thing, but it's very close. It's like a girl gets a really fancy Coach bag, and then you got one that's a little bit of a knockoff, but you'd never know, right? So, that's one way to go about it is doing a meditation practice where you're allowing your body to get into the alpha and theta and potentially delta sleep if you're an advanced meditator. So, that's what I would recommend people doing. And also, we want to look at if this is happening, there's 2 potential issues that I generally looked at clinically. Number one was deficiency, deficient in certain key nutrients that we've already are covering here in this episode. So making sure that they're not deficient and making sure that their hormones are operating in the right way. So for people, it's generally going to be cortisol doing the wrong thing, cortisol and melatonin not being optimized. So we do things to help those things to get sorted out. Another potential issue, which is kind of weird, could be some kind of an infection, parasite infection, bacterial infection, viral infection, can be kind of messing with somebody's sympathetic nervous system. So, that's another thing to look at. So, I look at removing the cause rather than trying to figure out what to do when you get up, if that makes sense.

I like that a lot. What about—

so, if someone be tested for Lyme or mold and all those things that could be contributing to people waking up?

And, I'd recommend working with an integrative physician So somebody who can look at the bigger picture and not just look at your blood work as just like it's so cut and dry, but to be able to look at your blood work and hormone panels and see that it tells a story and have some better investigation on where to look for change. Hi, Kwik Brain.

It's your brain coach. I want to thank you so much for watching this video. 3 things to do. Number 1, make sure you share this because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well. Number 2, make sure you subscribe. To this channel, so you don't miss a thing. Because if you miss a video, you miss a lot. And finally, make sure you hit that bell so you're notified and you find out when we put out the latest and the greatest. One extra thing: if you want really close attention, then text me. Here is my phone number: 310-299-9362. Did you remember that number? 310 299-9362. Shoot me a text and we'll stay in touch. Ask me your burning question. And I wish your days be full of lots of life, lots of love, lots of laughter, and always lots of learning. I'll see you in our next video. Bye.