896 The Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson

This is episode number eight, nine, six with the sleep. Dr. Shawn Stevenson. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Buddha said, to keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep the mind strong and clear. My friends, welcome to this episode. I am pumped because man, I used to sleep in like crazy when I was a kid. I don't know if you were like me where you slept in till like 10, 11, 12, 1pm sometimes and your mom would scream at you and rip the covers off your bed and say, wake up, get up, it's time to get up. My mom used to do that to me all the time. But there's something that she had wrong because she didn't know the power of sleep and sleep science and the key to actually allowing your mind to be clear, allowing your body to heal with the optimal sleep. Now, she didn't know I was staying up late. She didn't know how much sleep I was actually getting. She just thought I needed to get up at a decent time and I would usually stay up too late. I was up till like 1, 2, 3am A lot of those times. And what I realized is that I didn't have great sleep patterns growing up. I wish I had better patterns. Some years I would sleep a lot and I remember those years being the most productive in sports and the most alert in school, which was already hard for me to do because I struggled in school. I was in the special needs classes and it was hard for me to retain information in books. But this is all about the science of sleep. And I'm telling you, sleep is everything. If you want to get, if you want to burn fat, if you want to be smarter, if you want to remember more, if you want to look younger. We're going to talk about the science of all of this and how Shawn Stevenson dives into explaining this and the keys on how to have better sleep for yourself and how it affects everything in your life, your relationships to your finances, to everything, Everything. It all comes down to sleep. Now Shawn Stevenson is a best selling author and creator of the nutrition and fitness podcast the Model Health Show. Amazing show if you haven't listened to it yet. He's got a background in biology and kinesiology and he has over 11 years of working with clients as one of the top nutrition experts in the country and on his podcast, the Model Health show, he interviews world renowned experts on the topics of health, fitness, nutrition, personal development and of course, sleep. And he breaks down dozens and dozens of research articles in almost every one of his episodes where he reveals the top science for the body, nutrition and sleep. And in this interview we talk about the different types of sleep that are out there and how they affect cognitive abilities and memory. So if you want to have a better memory, there's a different type of sleep that you need. Sean's family culture and the importance of being playful why playfulness actually allows you to sleep better, why Sean's body deteriorated at 22 years old and how he turned his life around. How food is connected to sleep and the foods can aid in better quality sleep which ones to eat before bed, which ones not to eat, Biology versus Willpower and how to avoid setting yourself up for failure when you're trying to stay healthy. This is perfect for the start of the year, start of a decade. I'm telling you, you need to get great sleep in order to achieve great things in your life. If you want to have energy, clarity, focus, if you want to make sure you make better decisions, if you want to make sure you have better intuition, if you want to earn more, all these things come down to having the right sleep. The Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid has a.

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All right, welcome back to the School of Greatness podcast. My man, Sean Stevenson in the house.

It's been a while, brother.

Yeah, it's been a minute.

We had.

We had you on. You were saying four years ago. I thought it was two years almost.

I know time has flown by, man. That's crazy time.

So, for those that don't know, Sean, you are the expert on sleep and more than sleep now, but you are known for sleep. You've got a book about sleep, but you're just an amazing researcher on the body and on human performance and on nutrition, food, training, sleep. And you're doing more on the emotions and everything on how we can perform better as human beings. Yeah. When I say that's about accurate.

Absolutely. Yeah, man.

And you just moved to la, so welcome. Yeah.

You've been telling me for years, man, to come out here.

We have some stuff in common. I lived in St. Louis for six years. You grew up there?

Born and raised.

Born and raised, man.

St. Louis.

I still have 314. There you go.

Myself.

Yeah, me too.

Do you. So I still held that. That's been like 20 years. Having that cell phone number since 1999. And we're here, man. You've done some amazing things. You've got a book on Audible. It's one of the top books, Sleep Smarter on Audible. That helps so many people sleep better. And I thought it'd be perfect going into a new year and new decade to figure out how can we sleep better. What are the main keys for sleeping better moving forward? We talked about this four years ago. What's the same and what's updated on.

How we can sleep better? Yeah.

You know, the thing for everybody to understand, I think it always starts with us asking the right question, you know, And a lot of us, sleep has become. It's just exploded. And I'm so grateful that I was there to kind of thrust this new movement in sleep wellness.

I mean, now there's even so many apps that are podcasts that are just storytelling to go to sleep.

Yeah.

Calm has, like, this series which is just Sleep stories, I think it's called to help people go to sleep because it's so hard for us.

Yeah. And now we know. But why is it so hard to go to sleep? It's just the environment that we live in today. And it's looking again at the question, so what is sleep? Actually, we have to start there.

What is it?

So this is this thing we're chasing after. We're trying to get more of it. We know it's important, but sleep is really, first of all, it's very strange. You know, if you look at some of the characteristics from the outside, it's like you're unconscious. You know what I mean?

You lay there for hours, you're vulnerable.

You'Re not really moving. Your senses are dulled and gone down. Obviously your visual senses are reduced or just none, unless you're weird and you have your eyes open. But you know, even your auditory, your sense of smell, your sense of touch, all those things reduce. And your. But what's different from that in like a coma is that it's easily. You can come out of it if somebody nudges you enough or, you know, you have something that goes on.

It's a light coma.

Yeah, it's like a little minor coma, mini hibernation. You're like a baby bear for a minute, you know. But what we see in the inside, and this is what's so cool now, is that we can track and we can study the brain and see what happens. We know you're sleeping based on changes that happen in your brain waves. And so right now we're in a kind of normal waking state of beta frequency in our brainwaves. Maybe a little gamma if we get to, like, you know, Bruce Banner, like, amped up a little bit. But from our normal waking state of Beta, we shift into alpha. It's just a slower pattern. And Alpha is really aligned with what we would refer to as like, getting in a flow state. Right. It's just a calm, relaxed state of presence. And we naturally transition into that state when we're getting close to sleep. This is when a lot of creativity can kind of manifest.

So when we're getting ready for sleep, we get into alpha.

Yeah.

Okay.

This is why it's said it's very good to, like, when you first wake up, because you go in reverse when you wake up, you know, to, you know, focus on your day, your goals for the day. Because, okay, so we move from beta to Alpha, and then we go to theta. And theta is a really strong transitionary state in Theta, you're in what it would be considered if we looked at it as compared to something like a hypnotic trance. All right, Theta, Theta, Theta. And so this is when you're asleep, this is when you're not asleep. This is a transitionary state, very close to sleep. And when you're in hypnotic trance, like we were just talking about Marissa Peer, I was just talking with her the other day. But we're kind of trying to manipulate that data frequency to kind of get in there deeper in the brain. And to give a good analogy, like kids up until the age of about seven are spending a lot more time in theta. And so you're very impressionable. Right. This is why kids like believe everything. You know, I'm not going to throw out any names, you know, Santa Claus and anything like that. I'm not going to say it's not real. But you know, like everything is just taken in very deeply. Right. And this is where a lot of our programming that even lasts into our childhood takes place. So theta, you're very impressionable. And then from there we transition into delta. And so this is when we know that we're in sleep. And then within our sleep there are four primary stages. We have the big two that people know is non REM sleep and REM sleep. Right. So REM sleep, that's rapid eye movement sleep. This is when you're getting your dream on and this is when your eyes literally like it is freaky, right? This is just a weird, weird thing. Yeah. So it's rapid eye moving, your eyes.

Are moving and that's the best type of sleep.

No.

Okay.

I'm not going to say best. It's a part, you know, we need all of them. And this is the point we're going to come to. And so this is when a process, for example, during REM sleep is when you have something called memory consolidation. This is where things that you're learning even right now get converted into your short term memory. Right. So it gets filed away and becomes more of a permanent potential thing in your brain. You need sleep in order to remember stuff. Really? Yeah. And so there's a study recently and what they did was they had folks to do a memory test and they had one set of the participants take the study, take the test in the morning, and then they had them to repeat the test at 2 hour increments for 12 hours. And then they tracked their results. Then they had another set of study participants, they had them take the test and then they had them just kind of wait all day, get A good night's sleep and then retest in the morning without doing it over and over again. And they performed 20% better on the memory test. Only testing once and then getting a good night's sleep and repeating. All right. We tend to think that we need to keep hammering over and over again.

We shouldn't do the overnight stay, up all night testing and quizzing ourselves. We should be actually practice for an hour, get a good night's sleep, and hopefully have better results.

Yeah, I mean, pulling all nighters. The thing is, you know, we've been in this situation where we're pulling all nighter because we don't know anything.

We don't know nothing. We gotta study the whole book, so.

Yeah, man, but that's REM sleep. And then we have non REM sleep. This is. It's considered more of the anabolic deep sleep. This is where a lot of the anabolic hormones like HGH get secreted. Right. And it's also known as the youth hormone. So kids have a lot of HGH. Up until around 18 to 20, we have a big, sharp decline in our HGH production.

So how do we get more of that sleep?

You produce the greatest amount of HGH because we secrete it during the day. All of our hormones are based on the time of day. And this is another really important point, is that we're lined up with nature's clock, but we just don't realize it because humans have the unique ability we can cut ourselves off from it. We could shut all the blinds and, you know, we could just create eternal daytime in this room if we wanted to. You know what I mean? But all of our hormones are getting released in a cyclical pattern. And human growth hormone, our greatest secretion or skeet of the hgh, happens during sleep. And specifically during that first stage of sleep when we go for the first time into deep delta non REM sleep.

That's when we're producing hgh.

Yeah, we're creating more of it. The biggest secretion happens then. And so if you're not getting optimal sleep, you're missing out on this powerful vital hormone. And whenever I would hear HGH when I first started doing this research, getting close to a decade ago, I would think of Barry Bonds and like, Jason Giambi.

Yeah, yeah.

A rod. No disrespect. Disrespect Marion Jones, but it's because of espn, just seeing the highlights in the news. But human growth hormone is something that we produce, you know, within our. Within our own bodies. Right. You know what I'M saying, so how.

Do we produce more of it? It's only through sleep.

No, no, we could with exercise, you know, especially like drivers of anabolic growth, so resistance training, but more so like power lifts. You can get a really good power lifting will produce.

Help produce more hgh.

Yeah. And so the benefit, what does HGH.

Do for you when you have.

That's what I was gonna go to. So the benefit of hgh, it's not that what we tend to think is that it makes you perform better, specifically makes you bigger. Right, that's what we think. If you see the transformation of somebody like Barry Bonds body, it's not that it just makes you bigger and you can hit the baseball faster. They already have these skills. It's the recovery, it helps you recover a lot faster. My son, my 8 year old son can get out and run, do sprints with us like crazy where we're just demolished the next day. And he's totally fine, doesn't feel a thing.

He's just producing HJ sleep babies.

He's healing, you know, he's healing. So it helps with healing. It does help with protein synthesis and also retention of muscle mass. So this is huge. This is something we tend to lose as we get older, is our muscle mass. And I think it's really important for us to understand when we're talking about body composition, weight loss, fat loss, all that stuff. Muscle is your body's fat burning machinery, really, that's on your frame.

You have more of it if you want to burn fat.

Yeah, because even as we're sitting, we're not training right now. But depending on the amount of muscle mass that we carry on our bodies has a huge impact on how many calories we're burning just sitting here, you know, our resting metabolic rate, you know, so HGH helps you to retain that muscle that you're out there working hard to build, you know, so those are just a few of the things.

So what are the main lifts that you would say?

Oh man, I'll tell you straight up. Deadlift is like it's money in the bank for producing hgh.

You're talking like heavy, heavy or is this just like if you're doing it.

At 70, 80%, I mean even 80% is pretty good, you know, but we're talking like getting up there close to your max. Really, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And that's for a lot of people, it's like that might be a little bit of fear comes up, like, I don't want to lift that heavy. I'll tell you right now for my. I've been in this field for almost 20 years and what I've seen, people don't get hurt deadlifting. People getting hurt picking up a feather, you know, they're getting hurt picking up a pillow.

Why is that?

You know, just because our bodies are so conditioned to sitting and not performing and we're not doing the things that kids do that keep them healthy. Right.

One of those things like jumping on the couch or just running around or just picking up stuff.

When do we do that? We do it as a kid and then something happens and we're just like, you know, our environment starts to say, stop playing, stop playing so much. Especially from where I'm from. It's like leaving that something. We say, you play too much.

Wow, so true, man. You play too much.

But it's, you should play a lot.

You should play a lot.

You know what it does? And this is the thing, this is why both of us love sports. It's a dimension of that that's still socially acceptable, but we love it. You learn boundaries, you learn how to communicate in different ways besides just vocally. You learn how to move your body in space and like things like proprioception, this is the awareness of your body in space. You improve your proprioception, your neuroception, all these different aspects of our bodies interacting with our environment and also our internal environment. And if we're not playing, we're missing out on this vital part of our development.

Yeah. You know, what are the best ways we can play, you think as adults, oh man, is it sports or is it just go out and throw a football or play Frisbee or what are the activities you think are best?

It's such a great question, man. You know, this is so funny. I've been thinking about this like the last two weeks I have. So I didn't realize I was doing this because I have my two sons living with me. I have three kids. My daughter's oldest, my two sons live with me. I have a 19 year old son and an 8 year old son that live in my house. And we just have a culture of like we're dancing every day, you know, like, I don't know why, we just do it. We're playing every day. Just the other night, my sons, we had, you know, we sat down and ate dinners together. And then afterwards they were fighting for like 20 minutes. But it was like, you know, they're play fighting.

Sure, sure.

But. And there's with you being a parent, after a while, she's like, would you shut up? You know, like, stop. You know, like, we start getting irritated. You play too much.

You play too much.

But then I catch myself. Like, they're just having a good. They're learning how to have those boundaries, how to play with each other, how to move in space, how to grab somebody and not hurt them versus hurt them. You know what I mean? So. And they're playing, they're having a good time. And the thing is, I'm the one who usually initiates it. I just want to do it for a couple of minutes, and then I'm just like, all right, guys, chill out. You know what I mean? And so that's one of the things, is if you have children, play with your kids.

What's that mean? Play wrestle 1.

A great exercise is. And what I used to do with my son, I mean, we just moved out to la, so I don't know the landscape as much, but I would take my son to the park and then I would just follow him and do whatever he does.

Whatever he wants to do.

Yeah. Running around, going through the tunnels, climbing stuff. I follow you. He's the boss. You know, Simon says. You know what I mean?

I like that.

That's one thing.

Okay. By the way, your wife has some, like. Some of the best home cooking I've ever had is with your wife at your place. It's amazing. I can't remember what it was, but it was some, like, casserole type.

Oh, the casserole. Yeah.

So good, man.

The buffalo casserole.

Oh, man, it was amazing.

And then she made cookies. And I know we were both, like, so done. And then she made cookies. Yep.

You know, Crash, those cookies can always eat those cookies. That's my downfall. Sugar. How bad is sugar for sleep?

That's such a great question, man.

Because that's the only. I wouldn't say it's the only, but it's one of the negatives about me is that I eat too much sugar and then I'll go off of it for, like, 60 days. Right. I'm like, stream.

Yeah.

I'm all in on a bag of cookies. I can't just do one or I'll do nothing for a long time.

But I think that deprivation can lead to the rebound behavior, probably because I'm.

Saying now I need it.

Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing. So there was an incredible study that was done, and there's. It's difficult to do human studies when it comes to addiction because of the implications. Right. But there was a fantastic study done using rodents, using mice. And what they allowed the mice to do was have free access to either cocaine or sugar. And they picked sugar 96% of the time.

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Probably tastes better too, right?

They rats that were already even addicted to cocaine and they quickly progressed and shifted over to an addiction to sugar.

Wow.

It's that strong. And like we humans, we're hardwired. If we're just looking at our biology. We're hardwired through evolution to crave and to enjoy sweet things for our biology. It's an implication that there's a lot of dense carbo, I mean dense calories there. It's a dense calorie source. Yeah.

It's not a calorie rich. It's not like a healthy calories.

Right, right. Not necessarily. But even the sugar we'd be exposed to through our evolution would be something like the biggest gift we'd run into maybe was some honey, you know. But today we have everything 24 7. It's a whole. We're not, we're not wired up for this exposure.

That's the thing.

Yeah.

And honey was probably like a nice, it was probably so strong and you just put a little bit on to add. Not like dump the whole thing in there like a Winnie to poo or something. Just like licking out of the jar. Because I can drink a whole jar of honey.

Yeah.

I wanted to. You know what I mean?

I was so addicted to honey nut Cheerios like that.

Oh my God. Those are so.

That little bee man. It was like my bestie man. But even when I met my wife and I was like shifting like I changed my health and I've been working as a personal trainer for like a year and a half. But that was my thing. I was like eating organic whatever, but I had my honey night. Cheerios was my midnight snack. Right. But here's the thing.

Afterwards, the milk, oh, my gosh, it's so good.

Don't get me started, man.

I haven't had cereal in a long time. That was one of the things that was the hardest for me to let go of. But that's something I eliminated essentially from my diet and I just replaced with cookies or something.

Yeah, man. It's crazy, dude. The culture, again, that's the big thing. But just on that point of how does this affect our sleep? I think it's a really great question. And so the first thing to understand is the impact that sugar has on various hormones. If we're thinking about, you know, cortisol, for example, or, you know, stress response. And basically what happens is when we eat a high concentration of sugar, we get this hit and it feels good. You know, we like, we get like a serotonin hit, you know, and this is why some carbohydrates, like, if we are select selectively getting our carbohydrates, it can be a good thing. Right. But it's just when we go too far and we go, we have a hypoglycemic response, right. And so we get a blood sugar spike and then a blood sugar crash. And that for us, that's emergency to our biology because when your blood sugar goes too low, you have reduced brain function and your body, if we're talking about survival in the conditions that we evolved in, you're not sharp, you're tired. Exactly. And you can be more of a victim. Right. And so. Or prey. And so what happens is you get a response from your sympathetic nervous system and your cortisol levels, norepinephrine, adrenaline, all those things start to spike to lift your blood sugar back up again.

So you're not vulnerable.

Exactly, exactly. So that you're just sharp and ready and okay. And prepared.

So your body's just going up and down all day as opposed to a steady and maybe a spike when you eat a little bit and then steady.

Right.

Or if we're talking close in proximity to sleep, that's gonna really mess that soup up.

So when, you know, there's all these different people that talk about intermittent fasting or when you should stop eating by. What does the research say about eating before sleep? Anything. Whether it's healthy, a snack, dark chocolate, wine, I don't care what it is. Is there a time limit? You should stop eating by before sleep. And is There certain foods you can eat before sleep that'll actually benefit or.

Or not.

Yeah, this is a good question. I've been looking into this for quite some time now. So we. Let's address both of these things. Let's address wine, let's address alcohol, and let's address food. All right. So when it. With alcohol. So what we do know is that alcohol does in fact help you to fall asleep faster. This is a fact across the board.

Yeah, it relaxes you.

It's a sedative, you know, and that's all good. The issue, however, is that we experience something with alcohol in your system and how your body metabolizes alcohol. It's called a rim rebound effect. Rim rebound effect. And so what happens is we go into. Earlier we talked about those sleep stages. Basically you are unconscious, but your sleep stages are fragmented and broken. And so we'll go into a deep sleep.

What are the stages again of sleep?

So we're transitioning as we go from you're awake waking state to sleep. We go from beta alpha theta delta. But within our sleep we have these four stages. So we have non REM sleep, REM sleep, and some transitionary stages.

Gotcha.

And so some of these stages when we're actually asleep and unconscious get broken. And so our REM sleep is suppressed. Right. And remember, REM sleep is where a lot of memory processing takes place.

So if you're drinking a lot at night, you'll have less memory. Is that what I'm hearing?

Do you know anybody who is drunk before they went to sleep and not remember what happened?

Lots of people.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow.

Because of the sleep.

So it doesn't matter that you got sleep. It's the quality of your sleep that matters.

Yes. Yeah. And you can literally forget what happened. You know, this whole.

So many people say that. I don't remember a thing.

Yeah, yeah. It's because their REM sleep is damaged. But then there's a big rebound effect with the REM sleep towards the end of the sleep cycle if somebody is getting eight hours of sleep on alcohol. And so again, but this is not to say you can't drink. It's just, I would recommend give yourself a little bit of a curfew with alcohol of a couple hours if you can. Like if you plan on getting to bed at midnight, you know, maybe just stop drinking around 10. Give your body. Your body metabolizes alcohol relatively quickly for most folks, and you can accelerate and support the process by having some more water.

Is there a thing as having too.

Much water before Sleep, if peeing is a problem, you know. Yeah. Like so many, you know, people come into my clinic and they're just like, you know, I keep getting up in the middle of the night, they don't drink water all day, then they guzzle it before they go to bed, you know. But there are, obviously there are some situations when folks have issues with, you know, their bladder and things like that. But for most folks, if you're drinking.

Water before bed and you're waking up once, even once messes up your sleep.

Is what I'm hearing.

I mean, it can, but I don't want to make a psychological big deal out of it because it's okay. There's even research now and it's come out recently, just in the last couple of years, about humans having basically two phases of sleep. You know, it's okay to wake up.

For a moment and then go back to sleep.

Yeah. So what would happen if we're talking, you know, a thousand years ago, let's go back even further. Ten thousand years ago, when folks are, you know, you're living in tribes, you got a hut going, right. So you go to sleep, you know. But first of all, we would go to sleep earlier because when it gets dark.

Yeah.

Seven o' clock at night, safety. Right. You're not out and about on the tundra, you know what I'm saying? Where the lion can see you but you can't see it. Right.

You're pretending.

Cave.

Yeah.

This is.

And even if you think about sleep, because again, like I've been just processing this stuff for the last few years, if it wasn't as valuable as it is, we would have evolved out of it a long time ago. Just if you think about how vulnerable you are. Right. It's just so much magic happens when you're sleeping that we just can't get anywhere else. And so anyways, we would go to sleep when the sun goes down and wake up maybe. So just say somebody goes to sleep at 9 o'. Clock, they sleep until maybe one you get up, maybe have a little snacky, maybe have sex, maybe, you know, if you got fire, maybe you write or read by fire. But today, phone, right. If we get up, midnight snack, beaming light coming out of the refrigerator.

Crazy, right?

And you know, and we're grabbing one.

Of the bathroom kind of lights, you.

Know what I mean? But then you go back to sleep and you'd have time to get another, you know, three, four hours of sleep in addition to that. So what I'm trying to say is it's not a problem that we wake up at night. And I've seen so many people get just very. Just psychologically troubled, messed up, you know, that I wake up at night. It's okay. It's okay. We have to relax into it and understand that, you know, things happen, our bodies. But for some folks, it is chronic. It's a chronic issue, and it usually has to do with what's happening with their hormones. And if we did a hormone panel, we'd see that a lot of times we call them clinically tired and wired, where even though they're physiologically tired, their body's wired at night, Cortisol is spiking way too early in the evening because your cortisol is actually supposed to elevate first thing in the morning, like between. You know, like when the sun comes up.

Yeah.

That's how we are hardwired. Cortisol is not a bad thing. And that's another thing I want to make clear today. None of our hormones are bad. We wouldn't have them, you know, but it just gets all of the bad press now. But cortisol helps your thyroid to work.

Right.

Your thyroid is regulating your metabolism. You want to burn fat, you need cortisol. All right? It's not a bad guy. It's just if it's producing the wrong times or the wrong amounts, it could be a little bit of.

Yeah, okay.

You know, it's kind of. I think of it like Hulk, you know, in the Avengers. You know, it's like he's got a role, but, you know, he might smash some stuff on accident. He's, like, giving too much responsibility, you know what I mean? So. Yeah. So if we're looking at alcohol, just to go back on that two hours before.

Don't be excessive with it, I'm assuming.

Right.

Don't get drunk.

Yeah. If you're getting. If you're getting drunk, you better believe, like, you're screwed.

Doesn't matter how much time you got. Yeah.

The hangover is a result of the sleep damage. That's really the big thing. Really? Yeah.

So if you get a great sleep, you shouldn't have a hangover.

Absolutely. Yeah.

But it's hard to have great sleep if you're drunk.

Yeah. You can forget. I mean, you forget about it. But also. And I know that a lot of people experience this, that you can handle it more when you're younger. Right?

Yeah. But it's still. You're not gonna remember things.

Yeah, I'm not saying that. That part.

Yeah.

And also, we're Accelerating our aging when we do stuff like that. Sleep deprivation. I don't know if you talked with her, but I was talking with Alyssa Epel and so her co author of the telomere effect, they Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, she won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of telomerase.

And so telomeres, you need them to.

Be longer for you to have longer life.

Telomerase is an enzyme that can add length back onto your telomeres, essentially reversing the aging process. Essentially. It's very complicated, but just as essential. But what shortens your telomeres faster than anything apparently is sleep deprivation.

So if you're pulling all nighters, you're doing four hours of sleep only and you think that's cool. It's not cool.

It's not cool. You're accelerating the time that you're going to kick off.

You're going to die quicker.

Diabetes, heart disease. We used to see this stuff in folks who we describe as quote, in the elderly population, arthritis. Then it started to happen generations younger and younger and younger. Now we even have children who are getting adult onset diabetes. We had to change the name to type 2 diabetes. Right. Because it's no longer just adults getting it. All right? And so just to make that clear, and I know this from experience because this happened to me, I had basically arthritis of the spine when I was 20, right. In track practice in St. Louis. I'm just doing a 200 meter time trial and I broke my hip from running because my body, I was, I accelerated the aging process so much, really, because of the way I was living my life.

You weren't sleeping well, Nothing was well.

But a big part of me is, for me is like, what are you making your body out of? Which we know we'll get into and talk about another time. But you know, if you're not giving your body the raw materials to build your house, your physical house, it's just going to do a patchwork job, you know.

I don't remember you saying that you broke your hip in practice at track practice.

No, no trauma. Nobody hit me. 200 meter time trial broke my hip, man.

Bo Jackson up in here, dude.

I ran a, I ran a 4540 when I was 15.

Wow.

You know what I mean? Like, everything was looking great.

But what were you doing?

Man? I was made out of like, true story. I was made out of probably like 5% emo's pizza.

You know what I mean?

Oh my gosh. It's so good though. Clayton, Missouri, man. Emo's pizza. So good.

Like I barely ate. I didn't eat a salad until I was in my 20s.

Like, I didn't eat salad until about five years ago. Till my 30s, man.

Yeah. But you were sneaking other stuff in, though.

I was doing veggies. I was doing other stuff. But, yeah, I didn't eat a salad because I was a picky. I'm still a picky SOB Right now. But it's like every year, I evolve more and more and I try new things. But I figured out a way to make a salad taste great because I never liked the dressings. They always smelled bad for me. But sweet green. Have you been to sweetgreen yet?

I don't think so.

Placed.

Amazing. There's gotta be one by you. Sweet green. It's kind of like just a build your own salad. So it's like I can throw some chicken in there, or I can throw something else, but it's got a dressing. I found one dressing that I like. It's like this cashew, spicy cashew. And that made the difference for me. So I'm just like, fill up all the veggies in there and just a tiny bit of cashew dressing. It's like a. And good. And I try to eat that almost every day.

Ooh. So now we know your secret, man. So it's the cashew. Spicy cashews.

A little bit. Not too much, because I don't want to be drizzled with calories and all this stuff, but it's just a little bit.

And what's in the salad?

So I put. I put romaine and arugula and romaine or baby spinach. I mix up that three combination. Usually just do two of them. Sometimes I do kale, but it's a little too hard for me now. So I do arugula and baby spinach usually, and then romaine. And then I put carrots, onions, sometimes squash, cauliflower, broccoli, sometimes sweet potato. Based on what I'm doing, then I'll put. Yeah, Then I'll put chicken and a little bit of cashew sauce, and that's it, man.

Congratulations. You're adulting. So adulting.

Right?

But it's like those are the only ingredients that I'll put. Yeah, same thing over and over.

You're winning on a whole different level. So I just. And I've been talking about this a lot recently, but I've been studying the brain for a new project I've been doing, and a recent study. This was done at Chicago's Rush University, and they compiled all this Data, they had thousands and thousands of study participants, and they found that test participants who were consuming two servings of green leafy vegetables a day had brains that were 11 years younger than the rest of the study participants who weren't getting that much in.

Wow.

Crazy, right?

So leafy greens every day, two servings.

Yeah. And this, this was done on elderly folks. And so you can keep your brain 11 years younger by getting in two servings. Two servings a day.

So let's get back to the. What should we eat before sleep, if anything? And when should we finish eating? Before we go to sleep.

Perfect, perfect.

So we talked about alcohol. Don't have too much. Don't get drunk, but you can have some wine if you want to a couple hours before. Don't drink too much water, because if you're gonna wake up all the time, that's not good either.

Yeah, yeah.

So what about food?

So with food, there's contradicting information out there on this, you know, and so some of the best data shows that having a little bit of carbohydrates for your evening meal, for your dinner. So I'm not saying like eat a choc, a dial and then go to bed. I'm saying like, you know, if you have dinner at 7, 8 o', clock, having a little whack of carbohydrates, it helps it produce serotonin.

What are the best carbohydrates? Like sweet potato.

You just mentioned it. Sweet potato. I mean, you know, vegetables are carbohydrate dominant foods, but, you know, some a little bit denser, you know, so we could say sweet potatoes. There's quinoa. When we get into these things, everybody's different. Okay. We can.

Yeah.

You know, there's like saponins in, you know, the quinoa. That might be trouble for some people. Right, right, right, right. It could be white rice, brown rice, it could be, you know, a little pasta. You know, it depends on the person. There's different kinds of pasta nowadays.

Exactly.

You know what I'm saying? There's like that cauliflower pasta. They make pasta out of everything.

Yeah, zucchini pasta.

Right, zucchini pasta. I think I saw like, there's some coffee pasta. I don't know. I'm just kidding. That would be crazy though.

Pasta.

Yeah.

Okay, so you can have a little bit of carbohydrates for your meal.

Fruit, it's another obviously carbon dominant category of foods.

So what will that do for you?

So this causes a boost in serotonin when we have A little bit of carbohydrates. And so I know the big, you know, there's a big keto movement, which again is a wonderful framework. I use all these different frameworks in my nutrition practice as a consultant and as a nutritionist for again, you know, almost 20 years now I've been in this field, but. And I would base it on what the person needed. Right. And it's always dependent on you and where you are right now, which might change. And so when we're getting in the conversation about keto, you can even have a certain percentage of carbohydrates on the keto. You might even just reserve those for your evening meal, really. Right. And so beans could be another one, you know, depending on your digestion, how the beans are prepared. And so with that said, so serotonin, here's what's so cool about it. Serotonin is a precursor to making melatonin. Right. So your body produces this kind of glorified sleep hormone. But man, when we talked earlier about how our body is lined up with nature and how our body is secreting hormones on a pattern or cycles. Melatonin is arguably the biggest controller of your body's metabolic or circadian rhythm, your circadian clock that's determining when you're producing all your hormones. Melatonin is not just about sleep, it's about regulating your whole body.

That's why there's so many supplements coming out, melatonin supplements that are doing so well.

Right? Yeah, but you got to be careful. Like that's straight up hormone therapy, you know what I mean? It's such a big regulator controller. And you know, just talking with the bosses in the space, you know, talking with Dr. Oz and Dr. Michael Bruce and all these guys and we're having these conversations. We've seen clearly that folks that get dependent taking too high of a dose or taking melatonin too frequently. And here's what we thought it was just a hypothesis. We thought that like some other type of, like taking exogenous testosterone, it might reduce your body's production. It doesn't reduce your body's production of melatonin, which we gotta come back to where this is happening. But what it does is it depresses or shuts down your body's receptor sites for melatonin, so you still make it, but your cells receptor sites can't engage and receive it and turn on the sleep related processes and everything else. Okay, problem, Right. Okay. So stress down your body's ability to receive melatonin. And so the great Thing is that we do have access to these supplements, which is wonderful. I'm a big fan of using them in micro doses and. Or even more so for me would be in spot cases. Right. Just use them temporarily.

I'm deficient of something B12 or whatever. It's like, take this for a few months until you feel like you're caught up to speed.

Our sleep is so important with so many things. And so if you just need to get on track, but we just don't want to create a dependency. I love it for travel. Like if you're changing time zones, you want to get back on schedule. If you've had a couple rough nights of sleep, you know, maybe it's work or whatever. That's a great spot for something.

Yeah.

Or whatever. Yeah. Okay, so melatonin has its place, but just to go back to where this is produced and why even taking a supplement you still continue to produce is that. And this is crazy because in my conventional university class I was taught that your pineal gland produces melatonin. That's it. We now know today that there's 400 times more melatonin in your gut, in your belly than in your brain. All right, so this microbiome, all the science and all of this discussion happening now, it really is the final frontier when we're talking about health. It's the interface between the outside world and us. You know, it's like what we're taking and putting in our bodies. That's the most intimate experience in the world. And what's happening in your microbiome determine what becomes you and what is waste, you know, so that's a whole other conversation. But I just want people to know that, that we have to take care of our gut health. And we'll come back, we'll talk about that another time. But so melatonin is tied to all these things, but with serotonin, with getting that little hit of carbohydrates can be helpful for producing serotonin and melatonin in these evening. Now, there was a study that was conducted and they found that when folks who were overweight ate close to bedtime, they had a greater secretion of cortisol. All right, so upwards of like over 50% greater cortisol secretion. All of us, by the way, produce a little bit of cortisol when we eat a meal because it's a big like all hands on deck experience. Because again, you're taking stuff from the outside world and putting it in you, your body. Got to make sure that you're safe.

It's got to simulate it. It's got to, you know, check it all, make sure it doesn't throw it up or, yeah, everything.

Like, it's so much that happens. But if you're the folks who were overweight in this study who consumed right before bed had like over 50% higher secretion of cortisol. And the problem with that is that cortisol is kind of like the antithesis or like has an inverse relationship with melatonin. So if cortisol is high, melatonin gets.

So you're not sleeping well if you're eating right before bed.

Yeah.

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And this is why there's some efficacy behind the statement of don't eat before bed. I don't like that statement as a blanket statement across the board. I don't. However, I do like the research. It's saying, you know, so just to be a little bit more mindful of that. But the problem is, like, number one, if you want to have something, have something. It's more stressful trying not to have a snack, if you want a snack. But also part of the reason we might want to have a snack, you know, at 12 o' clock at night is because we're up, you know, Netflix and chilling. You know what I mean?

You should be asleep, by the way. Right? You should be asleep.

So that's part of. It's just our practices and our culture around food and us not getting the nutrition we need, but it's just, it's our culture around food. And so it goes back to like, you need to be sleeping. A sleepy brain is a hungry brain. Really? A sleepy brain is a hungry brain.

If you're tired, you're hungry.

Absolutely. I call it tungry.

You got hangry and tungry.

That just happened? Yes.

An angry brain is a hungry brain, too, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

So why is that? Why is a sleepy brain hungry for food?

Oh, man, this is so crazy. Listen to this. So there was a study that was conducted, and it was crazy. And what happens with the brain and your nutrition and glucose reaching the brain when you're sleepy? And so across the board, even though we can use ketones for processes in the brain, we all know this, but there are certain parts of your brain that can only run on glucose. And so what the studies found, what the study found was that when folks were sleep deprived just one night, all right, so one night of total sleep deprivation was used in the study. So that's basically if we stayed up for 24 hours from now until the same time tomorrow, they found that there was a 14, I'm sorry, a 12% reduction in glucose reaching the brain. All right, so this is literally your brain is starting to starve. And what happens when that happens? When we go back to that evolutionary perspective, it's danger. Right? All hands on deck. Cortisol response, adrenaline response. It is a dangerous situation. And they found specifically 14% of that carbohydrate reduction or glucose reduction reaching your brain cells was from the prefrontal cortex. So that's the most human part of your brain, responsible for executive function, social control, distinguishing between right and wrong. So your ability to even choose whether or not to eat a food is dramatically reduced because your brain is like starving. If you've ever had ice cream, if you've ever had cookies, if you've ever had a candy bar, your brain knows hardwiring. I can get a dense source of glucose to shoot it back to my brain because I need it. And so that's when we get into a battle of our biology versus our willpower. Your willpower is going to lose out eventually. It's true, you know, even for the toughest among us, you know what I'm saying? But why stack conditions against yourself? And we do that when we're sleep deprived? And so that's what I want people to know, is that it's not a lot of times these things aren't necessarily your fault when you're trying to battle it out and not eat a food. It's because our brains are usually a tired brain is a hungry brain.

Wow.

So what would you say is the optimal evening routine or the one that you do?

Yeah, that's a great question, man. Great question. It's evolved. You know what I mean? And that's what I want people to take away, too, is that you can change. There's so much cool stuff that we can do today. You know, you got meditation, you got journaling, you got tai chi, you know what I'm saying? There's all this stuff you could do playing board games. There's that. Cool. Have you played the heads up?

Oh, yeah, it's great, right?

So you've got all these cool things you could do to hang out with your friends, spend time with your significant other. How do we fit it all in? Well, you don't have to do everything or you can do each thing in a micro way. But so for me, my current evening routine is number one. Just kind of the hallmark thing for me is giving myself some tech free time before I go to bed, before I lay my head down, at least 30 minutes. We all can do this. And Harvard researchers have confirmed I talked about this and I pushed this into Culture, like the last five years. Hard. So if people have heard this, you know where it came from. All right, I've been really working to get this out here. And we've got them right here, man. We got the new iPhone. It's got three cameras.

Sick, dude.

It's fun to play. It's amazing, right? But this device is the greatest deterrent for our sleep quality today.

So bad.

And so Harvard research has confirmed that the light exposure, blue light specifically, and white light, that kind of shoot out from our devices that we can't really see if we're sitting here and we have this light around us, this ambient light. But if you're in a dark room and you see that phone, Right. It's like emanating like this bluish alien light. Right. And so what they found was that this light does in fact, suppress your melatonin secretion and dramatically increases cortisol. And they got numbers on this. So what they found is that approximately every hour you're on your device at night, you suppress melatonin for 30 minutes. Oh, all right. Every hour you're on your device, you suppress melatonin for 30 minutes. So if you're on your device three hours, melatonin suppressed for 90 minutes.

Wow.

Right. And so again, even though you might be unconscious and go to bed and you're not aware anymore, you're not going through your sleep cycles efficiently. So that's what it's really about is optimizing our sleep cycles. And we do that with the way we live our lives. And so just to go back on that point with me, just 30 minutes.

At least. No FOMO.

Yeah, at least. Ideally, we want to see more like 60 minutes.

60, 90.

Yeah. I mean, then we're like. You get into that place of like. What do I do, though?

You read a book, you hang out with your friends, you go to bed.

Some people just are trying to hear that, man. You know?

So that's no phone and no tv.

Yeah.

So no, you can't watch your show or your movie.

Here's a. Here's a. Here's a couple of hacks and a lot, I'm sure.

Put the glasses on.

You got the blue light blocking glasses. You've got blue light blocking apps for your phone. Like it's built into the iPhone now, you know, and folks who have Android, they have like night shift. I'm sorry, what is it called? Twilight.

Yeah.

Is another thing. I believe that's what it's called.

Okay, so there's some things you can do.

Yeah. So there's things that you can do to kind of reduce that experience. And for many folks, and I know, myself included, I definitely do feel like sometimes even it's a neuro association just putting, putting the glasses on. Excuse me. I would get sleepy, you know what I'm saying? Just by putting the glasses. Chilling out. Or we can also, you know, dim the lights around us, maybe even change some bulbs. A couple of bulbs in your house. Candlelight. That's sexy, you know what I'm saying? So you just change and we evolve with those kinds of lights in the evening. Those tones, right. These kind of warmer colors. And so that's what I do. I give myself a 30 minute curfew. I really love to just kind of take some time, hang out with my wife. We'll talk, you know, I'll do some reading. This is when I, you know, but we again like got. It's a light dimmer. Yeah, light's a little bit dimmer. I'll do at least probably 10 minutes of reading. 20 minutes sometimes if we're not, you know, spending some time together. You know what I mean? So we have that. And then for me, I love if I get a chance to do a magnesium bath in the evening. So this is a big, this is a big one, man. So magnesium has been found to be responsible for over 650 biochemical processes in the body. Many of them related to relaxation and sleep. All right, so magnesium is needed to like contraction and relaxation of your muscles. So the relaxation response of your muscles, like if somebody's cramping, that kind of thing. Magnesium helps a lot. Wow.

Okay.

Right, so. But also it relaxes your nervous system. So you, it helps to shift over from your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system. Magnesium helps to shift you into the parasympathetic rest and digest part of your nervous system. And so people have been doing this for centuries. Like Epsom salt baths has helped to improve sleep and relax sore muscles, help you to heal faster, all that stuff. It has some credence. Now we got some like supercharged magnesium salts and.

Really? So you do this almost every night?

No, a couple times a week. You know what I'm saying?

But even once a week could be good.

What I have also I have a topical magnesium spray.

Wow.

So I use that almost every night. So I'll just like massage, rub that in. And that's another thing that you could do to get a massage. All right. If you can more sleep from your significant other or self massage, you know, there's even acupressure Points. And I talk about this in sleep smarter because I'm very analytical in how I think. I'm like, ah, you could, like, touch a point. And, you know, but there is some evidence that this, you know, they did this in a clinic. I'm sorry, in a hospital. And so what they did was manipulate this acupressure point. And they saw higher levels of melatonin metabolites in their urine by manipulating this pressure point. So it's doing something with melatonin, but with massage, you produce endorphins, serotonin. Right. So this all helps with that relaxation response. I don't know anybody that's ever gotten a massage. And like, God number is like, I'm so ready to fight now. You know what I mean?

You just want to chill for another few hours.

Yeah, that's. That's it, man.

Okay.

So if I can, you know, my wife, like, I massage her feet or if she wants to massage my feet, that's so great, man, by the way. Or I got like a little tennis ball and I'll just like, put that on the floor and rub that around on my feet, you know, the bottom of my feet. So there's another couple things. And so some of these things are not as consistent. Consistent things for me is screen curfew, reading time with my wife, and magnesium. Those are my things.

And knowing food at a certain time, probably.

Right.

Yeah. I don't even think about it because I'm nourished and I don't have a hungry brain. So if I eat, you know, we finish eating at, you know, seven or eight, whatever it is. Like, I feel good. Like I don't need to jam any food before bed. But the other thing I do as I'm walking into the bedroom is I turn the thermostat down, make it cold. Yeah. And we've talked about this before.

Yes.

And so 69. Yeah, that's where I keep it at, man.

Every night.

Yeah.

So good.

It is. You know, and this goes back to that evolutionary process, evolutionary biology. We have a natural drop in our core body temperature at night, 1 to 2 degrees. And what the theory is, because again, like, a lot of stuff, we don't know specifically why, but is that our body uses a lot of energy to try to keep us keep our temperature up. So by bringing that down a little bit, more energy is being dispersed to do things like memory consolidation, like detoxification of your brain via the glymphatic system. Like, there's like a changing of the guard that happens in your gut. Microbiome, like, all this energy is needed to bring you back better. Right. And so if your environment is too hot, no matter where you live on the planet, whether if it's like Chile or it's, you know, Antarctica.

Yeah.

It gets. Well, that might not be a good example, but during the daytime and during the nighttime, the temperature is different. The temperature goes down a little bit at night, no matter where you are. And so if you artificially keep it high, your body's gonna kind of be trying to fight to bring itself down, so help it a little bit. Today we do have access, a lot of us, to regulate our thermostat. Yeah. At least, you know, like during this time of year here in LA, like, you can get down, you know, 50s and 60s, like, you can just open a window.

Yeah.

You know, and so. Yeah, so that's what I do. I turn the thermostat down or turn the heat off if it's been on.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

Amazing. So that's your evening routine. What else do we need to know about sleep? You know, we've talked about sleep sanctuaries and making sure you have the snake plants and all these other things. Do you still do the snake plant?

I have not got. We just moved, so I haven't gotten my whole thing optimized except, like, we got some blackout curtains because, you know, when you came to my house, like, we were out in the woods, you.

Know what I mean?

Dark.

It was dark. Dark.

He's blackout. You got, you got.

It was like, you know, maybe a little moonlight. But that's our bodies, we evolve with that. You know, that's a natural spectrum of light. And the lux is so much less than what's beaming out of your telephone or the sun. But now, you know, kind of, you know, we're like in a neighborhood. So I got some blackout curtains again. But something else that I would. I think people would be interested in is still the buy in, like, why does this matter? Why should I be looking at optimizing myself for 2020? You know, like, this is a new decade. This could be the best decade of your life.

But it's also with all these opportunities and work harder mentality and be more productive, you're going to get less sleep, less quality sleep if you have that mentality as well.

Right.

If you're like, so many opportunities, it's a new decade. Let's crush the decade. That type of thinking could make you hurtful in sleep.

Right.

When you said crush, I immediately thought of Gary Vee, of course, and he's like the guy everybody seems like, you know, he's, you know, he's out there just, just dominating his thing now that he's out talking about. He gets seven hours of sleep a night. I talked with him maybe four years ago. We were having dinner. And this is when. This is Beard Gary Vee. I don't know. He did his little moment of beard and so. And I was just like, inquiring, like, hey, man, so what's with your health practices? Like, you're trying to play the long game. You're talking about buying the jets. How you gonna do that if you're dead? Yeah, if you're dead. If you're dead. D, E, A, D. Dead.

Dead, Exactly.

So what he was like, you know, he's hired a trainer to travel with him because he know. Knows himself to keep him accountable on that end. And he gets his sleep despite what people think. Right. And so just keep that in mind. The people that you're looking at and the people that. Even the ones that are saying, you know, sleep is for suckers, I promise they're sleeping. I promise they gotta be, you can't operate or. And also, they might not be sleeping enough and they're not reaching their full potential. You know what I mean? So be very careful about that, because what you want to do, you don't want to just execute. You want to be the very best version of yourself, to get up and execute. You can accomplish so much more when you feel.

Well, I think I saw Steve Harvey talk about. He. He's mentioned something he said. I think he said, sleep. Sleep is for those who are broke.

Or something like that. Yeah.

Did you see this?

I know what you're talking about.

Yeah, I think he said something like that.

I don't know if that was Steve. It might have been him. Yeah.

He said this recently or I saw a video came up about a month ago. He's like, sleep is for.

For broke people.

For broke people or something like that. Where it's like, you got to work harder.

Yeah.

Then people, if you want to make money, right, you got to spend extra hours and things like that.

But yeah, again, like, I know a lot of these people have these messages and even, you know, another really good friend of mine, and yours too, Eric Thomas. Right. He's another person, you know, out there. But what he. And he shared this, and he's like.

I wake up at 4am or 5am.

But he goes to sleep early. Like, we've been. We've been hanging out for a long time.

He's asleep at like 8pm he's knocked.

Out all right, but he's getting up and grinding right when he's up, he's trouble. So his thing is sleep. Get enough sleep, but don't sleep in, don't oversleep, don't be lazy. That's the difference. It's not don't sleep. That's killing yourself and you're not showing up as the best you. As we kind of gone through today.

Is there too much sleep?

Absolutely. Yeah, we can. And I know that many of us have experienced this where we maybe we sleep longer than normal and we're tired, we're super tired when we get up and tired for a while. And a big part of that is just kind of even how we're interrupting our sleep cycles. But that's a really unique conversation.

What is the optimal amount of hours for most people who live busy lives, who are pushing the envelope on work, family activities? They're doing a lot of things. They're trying to fill it all on their plate, achieve their goals and do everything? What would be the optimal amount of hours of sleep for those types of people?

I'll tell you right now that 8 hours is not enough for some people. For some people. For some people it's six, for some people it's seven, for some people it's nine. It depends, man. It's the answer that nobody wants to hear because you know, these so called experts are like giving people these cookie cutter answers like you need to get eight hours of sleep. I think that's wildly negligent to tell people that because you become neurotic about something that you don't even really need. What it really boils down to if you're getting eight hours of shitty sleep. For me, I liken sleep minutes to calories. Like today most people are well aware that it's not just the quantity of calories, it's the quality of those calories for same thing, it's the quality of those sleep minutes, not just the quantity. Right. So you can get like if you're looking at what did I mention earlier? Achaka dao. Yeah, right. Versus wild caught salmon or you know, Lewis's salad. Is there a name of the salad?

I should call it the great salad or something because it's a custom bowl, it's greatness bowl. Yes.

The salad of greatness. Yes. So choca dao versus the salad of greatness. It's gonna have wildly different impact on what it does to your metabolism. Right. And so the same thing with your sleep Minutes, you can be getting like 8 hours of choc A dial sleep because of your blue light exposure, because of you not tapping into thermal regulation, because you having issues with blood sugar regulation. And listing goes on and on and on. Some of the things we talked about. Or you can get an incredible optimized version of that sleep that only takes you six and a half hours, where you're going through your sleep cycles efficiently and you're waking up feeling like a beast, right? The answer is it depends the quality of your sleep and who you are and what you're doing right now. Because there are times in your life when you know you've had to sleep more, right? If you're like somebody's training for whatever, your body just needs a little bit more sleep. Maybe you're under a lot of stress. Whatever the case might be, it's going to change and we have to honor our bodies. Obviously, I'm a big fan of routine because your body's always looking for routine. But when you're up, life is dynamic, like things are gonna happen. And so I allow myself to change my sleep schedule a little bit and I try to stay within a nice framework. But if something's going on, like, and I know that I'm stressed, like, man, you know, like, I really need to back off, I need to recover. I don't need to push it down more. And this also just comes with experience too. Sure, you know what I mean? So that I can wake up, recovered and get back on my grind, you know what I mean? But just a little quick thing that I wanna share with people, that's another big buying point, is that our sleep quality affects our parents, right? Specifically, you know, our. Everybody, nobody's waking up. Like, you know what? I just want to be super ugly today. Like as ugly as possible, you know what I mean? I want to scare children, you know what I mean? And there was this really cool study that was done recently. So this was just in 2017. And the Swedish researchers and what they did was they had study participants take a picture after a full night of good sleep, and then they had them take a picture after sleep, depriving them where they're getting about five hours, five, six hours of sleep for two days. So they sleep deprived them for two days. Take their picture again. There's a mixture of pictures that these raters, the people who are rating all the people's beauty and what they did was they looked at all the different pictures and this is looking at what's happening in our brains just again, through Evolutionary biology, when we see people, we get feedback. And what the scientists were wanting to do was to find out, does sleep deprivation cause a hesitance to want to be around somebody? Wow. Right. And so what the raiders found was that when people were sleep deprived, they were deemed to be less attractive, they were deemed to be less healthy. And they also decided, like, I would be less interested in socializing with this person. Okay, just in two days of sleep deprivation. And another study by Swedish researchers found that just five days of sleep deprivation, you know, just Getting less than six hours of sleep led to 45% increase in fine lines and wrinkles in the face. It aged you very quickly. But the good news is it reverses. Not as quickly, it rebounds. Yeah.

Wow.

It's called beauty sleep. Why don't we talk about this more? You know what I mean? It's called beauty sleep for a reason. There's real rejuvenative magic in this, in sleeping, you know what I mean? And so looking at how we feel about other people and how we're showing up in the world, like, your sleep has a big impact on that.

And tell people about sleep debt. You mentioned this before. If you've gone 25 years of just horrible sleep, can you oversleep for 20 years?

25 years. That's a long time. I like that.

A few years. Five years, 10 years. You know, if you've been bad in your 20s and you've been partying late nights and you're a promoter and you get horrible sleep every night, can you rebound and put more sleep in that bank debt and recover?

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We think about sleep debt, it doesn't work like that. The good news is, again, this kind of goes back to the conversation about telomeres. Once we change our habits and our practices, you can do things to start to reverse that aging process in some aspects. Right, by lengthening those telomeres, by doing good things for your body, which includes getting more sleep. So you burning the candle at both Ends or burning the telomeres at both ends, you can reverse that process. That's the good news.

That's good.

Now, in the context of sleep debt, so if you're accumulating, if you're just sleep deprived for, you know, just say you're going like months at a time, getting, you know, four, whatever hours, your incidence of heart disease is skyrocketing. Heart attack, stroke, diabetes, all this stuff is going up. Chances are you're not going to make it very far. Some people that even people listening like, well, I'm fine. You gotta be careful about that. Now, that sleep debt is a lot to pay back. If it's like a day or two, maybe three, four days at the most, and you kind of catch up, you know, you know, maybe on the weekend, that can be helpful. But it's still like you're not getting back as much as you're taking out, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

So the best strategy is to get back high quality. The keywords, high quality, sleep more consistently. And then if something happens where it throws you off, like, you know, you go out, whatever, you know, like you got an event for a couple of days, all good. But guess what, you're gonna probably be pretty destroyed and you're going to want to sleep more and recover.

Of course.

Yeah, of course.

You know what I mean? But if you're constantly dipping into that bank account, you can't readily pay it back as much as we think.

Got it, man. Dude, this is awesome stuff. And you cover a lot of this in your podcast, your book. Where can we find your podcast and listen to that?

Yeah, I mean, they're listening to this amazing podcast. They find my show. It's called the Model Health Show.

Yeah.

And we've been, I think we started like maybe six, seven, eight months after you.

Okay.

And so we've got.

I'm about to be seven years end of January.

So you're like, we're coming up in six years. Yep. Yeah. And so what we do is we create master classes on specific subjects. So whether it's obviously sleep, wellness or metabolism, fat burning, natural treatments for things like depression and diabetes, and then I really strive to bring on the very best people in the world in their respective fields of health and wellness. And so we do masterclasses where it's solo episodes with me and we bring on the best people in the world.

It's amazing, man.

It's a really great show.

Yeah, it's a great show.

I love it.

Thank you.

It's really powerful because you break down all the research that you're finding, and you kind of share people with all the science and the proof of these things, which I think is powerful. You're not just sharing ideas or thoughts. You're really digging in. So. And you've got some other projects that you're not talking about right now, but we'll have you come back on sometime and talk about those things. Talk about everything, man. So we'll have to. Now that you're here in town, we'll have you come back on more. Let's share the three truths. Because I don't know if people probably didn't hear you four years ago, all my new audience members. So I don't even know if I.

Asked you this last time.

I don't know, man, maybe.

So imagine it's your last day on Earth many years from now, and you've created everything you want to create. You've done all the research, the books, the podcast, whatever it is, you've done it all. But for whatever reason, you got to take all of your work with you to the next world, heaven, wherever you go, right?

Yeah.

But you get to leave behind a piece of paper, and you can write down three things you know to be true about your whole life experience. Of all the lessons and truths that you know that you'd want to share behind, what would you say are your three truths?

What was coming up for me, the first thing is that this might sound a little strange. Love wins. That's what's coming up for me. Love wins for me. Over these years, man, I really believe that our relationships are the most impactful thing on our health, on our success in life, on our ability to, you know, problem solve and to just be happy. Our happiness quotient, it's our relationships. Sleep is amazing, but our relationships affect our sleep. You know what I'm saying? So I think it's just a huge governing force. And love wins, you know, and finding ways to not try to win, but to love more. So that would be one. I hope that makes sense.

Love wins.

Number two would be, wow, this is tough, man. Is self care, you know, make sure that you're taking care of yourself so that you can show up as the best version of yourself for the people that need you. You know, there's a big culture today of, you know, pushing yourself to the limit, sacrificing this word sacrifice. Sacrifice yourself so that you can do good for the people that you're trying to help or, you know, even do good for the world. But the word sacrifice is from a Root meaning to make sacred, right? And so if we're making sacred the. The craft of taking care of oneself. So I can be the best version of myself. I don't really see it as a sacrifice. Like if I'm getting to bed early, if I'm skipping out on the party a little bit early, it's not a sacrifice. It's a sacred practice for me so that I can be the best me possible. So make sure that you're focusing on self care as you move into the future. So that would be number two, and number three would be to laugh as much as possible and have fun. You know, be with people who make you laugh. Cultivate humor. I came from a place where there was a lot of. It was crazy, man. Like, people from. Where I'm from, you can have post traumatic stress syndrome. You don't even realize it, you know, the sirens, the gunshots, the violence. When you go outside, you don't know what's gonna happen. You know what I'm saying? It could be a nice day. Everybody's out playing, shooting hoops on the crate, you know what I mean? Or, you know, it could be a drive by, you know, and you got the drug dealer right next door. And, you know, those are my idols, you know what I mean? And coming from that environment. And I think part of the reason that we made it out of those circumstances and did it somewhat gracefully is that we had laughter. You know, we still had laughter in our household. And, you know, even though, like, even, you know, my family members that weren't necessarily the best role models, we still had laughter, you know, and just being able to play, have fun. And so I think it's super important. And also, just as we move into this next decade, you know, I think that laughter, humor, smiling, kindness, these are going to be the things that really help to bring us together. We got enough stuff bringing us apart, you know, but if we stop taking ourselves so seriously and understand that we are just a cell in this incredible body that we call earth, and our job is to be a light, you know, and to. We have the ability to light up any room we go into. And I've just literally yesterday ran an experiment, and, you know, it's like the holiday season around this time. And I was just smiling at people, whether it's in the store, just people driving by in the parking lot, Boom. Smiles. Nine times out of ten, smile back. Yeah, man. It's a responsive, reflexive thing. And we. And then they can carry that on to the next person.

Tip, man, I love that for me, I love that. So instead of saying you play too much, don't play too much, say you don't play enough, right?

Yes.

Keep playing.

Keep playing.

Why are you playing? Keep playing.

Keep playing.

I like that.

Awesome, man.

Well, I acknowledge you, brother. I appreciate your wisdom. I appreciate all the research that you, that you spend so much time on to give us clarity and peace of mind, because these are scary topics and ideas that there's so much noise out there and we don't know what's true and what's not true, and we don't know what to do. There's usually too many options, too many things to try. So thank you for creating clarity, creating the research and the foundation for us to have routines and simplifying all this mess. So I acknowledge you, brother.

Thank you, man. I receive that, man. Thank you, brother.

Of course.

Okay, final question. What's your definition of greatness?

My definition of greatness, coming from where I come from. And, you know, I went to the other extreme. I just started to give myself, my time, my energy to everybody else.

Yeah.

And I kind of lost myself. And I was trying to find, like, enlightenment and, you know, doing all this meditation. And I was brought this concept of non attachment. And I believe that a lot of my suffering was a result of my attachment to, you know, my kids, my wife, and, you know, my family members, all the people that I want to serve. And I get the concept because without as much attachment, you experience less suffering. I decided to consciously attach myself to my wife. It's not a ignorant love and attachment. It's a chosen, decisive, intentional attachment. And so for me, greatness is loving somebody more than anything else you can imagine. I love her so much. I would, of course, like many of us, feel like, you know, we're jumping from a bus for somebody, but I more so than give my life for her, I want to live for her.

Wow.

You know, so that's how I feel. That's what greatness is to me. You know, it's being able to live fully and completely for somebody.

Sean Stevenson. Thanks, brother. Beautiful, man.

Appreciate that. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Shawn Stevenson. If you did. If this is your first time here, subscribe to the podcast over on Apple podcast and leave us a review. We've got over 6,000 five star reviews and we'd love to hear from you. So every comment. We'd love to see your comments and share them with our internal team and let other people know how much you enjoyed the School of Greatness podcast. If you've been around for almost seven years now. Then make sure to subscribe if you haven't yet and leave us a review as well. We'd love to hear anyone's thoughts and ideas on this episode and on the show in general, and also share this with a friend. If you know someone who wants to feel better, be healthier, be fitter, lose weight, earn more money, have better relationships, have better sex, all that, then send them this link Lewishouse.com 896 to listen to this episode on the Science of Sleep for ultimate success with Shawn Stevenson and share with your friends on social media, tag mewishouse over on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all the places and tag Sean Stephenson as well and let him know that you're listening to this or watching this on YouTube. Make sure to subscribe to all the different places we're at YouTube. Over a half a million subscribers over there. We got some incredible content we post there. I'm on the TikToks now as well, so if you love TikTok, I'm Louis over there on TikTok and we're just trying to build this thing into something that is a powerful machine of inspiration to bring hope, to bring clarity, to bring insights, resources to you, your friends, your family and to the world. So please share this with your friends and let's continue to stay connected. This is going to be a massive year 2020 and I'm super excited about what we have coming up, the people we have coming on the topics, what we're going to be diving into, all of it. This is going to be amazing. So I'm so grateful that you're here and I'm so glad that you enjoy the School of Greatness again. If this is your first time, welcome. We welcome you into the community. This is a incredible community where people from all over the world have a growth mindset and you are part of this community now. So welcome. And again, please leave us a review and subscribe over on Apple Podcast. Make sure to check out Shawn Stevenson all that he's up to. Check out his book. It is amazing. We'll have it all linked up on the show notes@lewish.com 8 and also I want you to go to greatness.com check out greatness.com we are launching something very soon over there. Go over there, opt in and be a part of the launch of something really exciting we have coming on over there@greatness.com so check that out. And as the Buddha said, to keep the body in good health is a duty. Otherwise we shall not be able to keep the mind strong and healthy. Clear Take care of yourself today, this week, this year, this decade. The body is all you have. You've got one body, and it dictates a lot of your life. It dictates your mindset and everything else in your life. So take care of yourself. I love you. I hope you know that. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

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