Kwik Brain Episode 27: How To Sleep (Even) Smarter - Q & A with Shawn Stevenson

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How do you sleep even smarter? In a recent episode, we talked about how to unlock your Kwik Brain by hacking your sleep, because when you don't get the sleep you need, it impairs your attention, alertness, concentration, reasoning, problem-solving, and especially your memory. If you haven't listened to it yet, I highly recommend you do that first. Now, the episode was so popular that I wanted to bring back to you our expert Shawn Stevenson to answer your burning questions that you posted in our private Kwik Brain podcast community on Facebook. If you're not a member of our private Facebook group, make sure you search and request to join, or go to kwikbrain.com for a direct link. It's where you get links to show notes, live trainings, post questions for future episodes, and much more. So let's jump right into it with bestselling author of Sleep Smarter, creator of Model Health Show, and the recent speaker at our Kwik Brain Conference, Shawn Stevenson.

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 gonna 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. 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?

Yeah. And, I'd recommend working with an integrative physician on this. 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.

Okay, so let's go into this because we had another question when we're talking about the environment and obviously getting rid of pollutants and such, EMFs or mold and all that. Somebody was asking about the ideal sleep environment. Shawn, what does your bedroom look like? Is it optimized for sleep? Is it different than other people's bedrooms, you think?

Yeah. I recommend people to create their own personal sleep sanctuary. You know, somebody, some, somewhere that you can go that, that you're creating this neural association. Number one, wherever you're going in your house or in your life, there's a pattern that's taking place. Your brain is always creating connections and looking to optimize behaviors. And so if you're going into your bedroom and it's the entertainment hub of your house where you've got your TV, or maybe you're doing your work and that kind of thing, even if your intention is to go to sleep, your brain is gonna be lighting up in certain areas for you to turn the TV on. So, an ideal situation, we want to take the entertainment stuff out of our bedroom and just reserve it for the things that a bedroom should be used for, sleep and sex primarily, and keeping all that other stuff in a different place in your apartment or your home or whatever the case might be. And also, an ideal situation depends on where you live, but if there is what we're now dubbing light pollution coming in through external sources, so street lamps, porch lights, cars that are going up and down your street with the LEDs that are coming into your bedroom, that can actually disrupt your sleep quality. And it might sound like, well, it's not a big deal. And I used to think that until I saw the study from Cornell University, and they had the individual just sleep in an otherwise dark room, and they put a fiber optic cable and a light the size of just a quarter behind their knee. And that was enough to disrupt their sleep cycles, that their body actually picked that data up and started to change what's happening with their brainwaves. So our skin picks up light too. So getting an eye mask is cool, but you want to really get your room as dark as possible. So getting rid of that external light pollution is going to be something that's really helpful. And we could do a whole episode just talking about creating a sleep sanctuary, but there are some real basic things people can consider for this.

Do you recommend blackout curtains?

If they live in an urban or suburban environment where they are exposed to that. But if somebody lives in an area where it's just some moonlight, stars, that kind of thing, we've evolved with that. So the lux, the luminance, the power of that lighting is very different from what we would get from even a weak LED that's shining in through your bedroom. So, if you're in those kinds of environments, blackout curtains for sure. If not, you could even keep the curtains open. It's not about natural light. It's the unnatural light that we have not evolved to be able to handle right now.

And then, the last question that we have is about travel. A lot of our listeners, they're all over the world like yours, and they're always on planes and they're sleeping in unfamiliar hotel rooms or something to that nature. A couple of travel hacks to reduce, whether it's jet lag or it's just helping optimize their sleep when they're in a new environment, those are things that you recommend they travel with?

Oh my goodness. This is another huge topic, but just some key points here. It's all about being proactive and not reactive. And, you know this, you talk about this. So, when I'm coming, I'm coming prepared to create my sleep sanctuary. I'm ideally looking for— I'm bringing along this little blue tape that I bring along with me if there's— because Because even the light that's shining from when you plug your computer in, that little Mac light, the little green light, you could read a book by that light. And so, I'll stick little tape on those things and it's one of those weird things that I do, but it just— also, there's a part of this that is mental as well, for sure. But sometimes when I'm traveling, some of those lights are really pretty strong. And green light does actually have an influence, by the way. Red light, not so much. It's kind of negligible. And this was Harvard research, by the way. the way that I'm talking about, and which I think you're there right now. But the bottom line is these small lights can affect you. So I'll put a little tape on those kind of things. But also, ideally, most nicer hotels, they have blackout curtains, that kind of thing. But also, I kind of reset. And so I get adjusted to that time zone before I leave for the time zone. So if I know that the hours are gonna change, so I'll try a day or two before, I'm sorry, 2 or 3 days before to change my sleep schedule a little bit. So, if I need to go to bed a little bit earlier or maybe try and stay up a little bit later, if that makes sense. So, I'll pre-change my sleep schedule. So, I'm just not like, bow, just put into it. And also, what I recommend, this is a spot case where you can use something like melatonin as well. According to the research, this is something where if you're using melatonin, and I cited this study in Sleep Smarter, it's not the best idea to use it consistently, like a daily thing or nightly thing, because it downregulates your receptor sites for melatonin. So, what I thought was, and based on some of the other experts that I would talk to, is that taking an exogenous melatonin, which your body produces it, it might trick your body into not producing it itself anymore, but that's not the case. What it does do is reduce the function of the receptor site. So even though you're producing melatonin, your body can't use it as well. And so we don't wanna take melatonin long-term. And so what I recommend is in spot cases, if you're traveling, changing time zones, you've had maybe a couple rough nights of sleep, and I like sprayable or liquid forms because it absorbs much more efficiently. It doesn't go through the digestive process. So, like sublingual, like spray under your tongue, that kind of thing. And so, I'll do that when I travel, definitely bring that along with me. And there's just a couple of tips there. There's so many more that we can discuss, but these are all simple strategies that anybody can employ. And I just want to make one point of just because you can buy melatonin at your local drugstore does not mean that it's safe to take. We have to be more careful and adamant about the supplements that we're taking and do a little bit of research on our own. Any of us can go to Dr. Google for a consultation and not just take for granted that, hey, this is here, let me take this to help my sleep, but look at what's going on behind the scenes. And also, there are other things that you can use that are much safer to use long-term.

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