The 5 REASONS Why SLEEP Is More Important Than DIET | Shawn Stevenson & Lewis Howes

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 just in two days of sleep deprivation. Why is it so hard to go to sleep? It's just the environment that we live in today, you know?

And it's looking again at the question, so what is sleep actually?

Losing out on sleep is one of the worst things you can do for your health. And in this video, Shawn Stevenson breaks.

Down the importance.

Of sleep. You got 21 strategies and what I want to do is maybe we cover 10 strategies.

Let's do it.

So maybe I'm going to look through the chapter outline and I'm going to go through 10. Let's do one of them here is get more sunlight during the day. Get more sunlight during the day. So tell me about why is it important to have sunlight.

Awesome. Yes. First thing to understand is that serotonin, right? Serotonin is a neurotransmitter and it's supposed to be like a feel-good kind of compound. This is why so many antidepressant medications, they're serotonin reuptake inhibitors to help keep serotonin active in your system longer. Here's what's so cool is that serotonin gets converted into melatonin. And we already talked about how important this is.

That's the anti-precursor.

It's a precursor to that. Right, right, right. Right. Exposure to sunlight boosts your serotonin immediately. But also, exposure to sunlight helps to set your cortisol rhythm. So cortisol has been getting a pretty bad name in the media lately because it's like glorified stress hormone. We've got like 50 hormones and cortisol is the only bad guy now. But cortisol is incredibly important and valuable. It's just when it's out of balance, it can become a problem. And so sunlight is clinically proven. I cited one of the studies in the book. to help to normalize your cortisol rhythm. So it helps to keep your cortisol lower in the evening if you get sunlight during the day, which will elevate your cortisol. In cortisol, melatonin have basically an inverse relationship. So when cortisol is high, melatonin is low. When melatonin is high, cortisol is low. So it helps to get that on track again. And it's not like rocket science, you know, like we know that Sunlight is valuable to human health, but we've been dissuaded in the media because of photo aging of the skin and skin care and things like that. And I actually talk about in the book and kind of demystify some of that. Because then we get into conversation about UVA and UVB and all this stuff. But bottom line, make sure you're getting some exposure to sunlight every day. It's going to help you sleep better at night. And this can also be through your photo receptors, so through your eyes as well. And just getting light in the room, natural sunlight. you know, every day and that's going to help to kind of set your circadian rhythm.

What if in Chicago in the winter and there's no sunlight for St. Louis.

And there's no sunlight for three months? Check this out. So, and I do recommend and I share some hacks, right? There are light boxes that are used clinically to help to address things like seasonal affective disorder. Okay.

Right.

There are earbuds that shoot light through your ear canal, right? There's visors you can wear and they're.

Clinically proven to be effective. to sunbathing in a tanning salon or.

Or.

Or no.

That actually does work. If it's the right. So you need more UVB, actually. And really, depending on where you are in the world, pretty much the United States period is not getting UVB at certain times of the year. All right, so we want to be proactive with this. But understand, it's not just the exposure on your skin, is what I'm talking about. Your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light, but just the exposure in your in your room, all right? So making sure you have an office with windows, access to windows. There was another study done, and this is crazy, because some people work in like a cubicle dungeon.

A dungeon, yeah.

You know? And what they found was that office workers who were not exposed to windows actually got 173% less exposure to natural light, and they ended up sleeping 46 minutes less every night as a result of that. And they saw this correlation, which was so interesting, and they reported more physical ailments, less energy, and also a higher propensity towards diseases. Wow.

Right?

So this is super important. And even getting some exposure to sunlight on an overcast day is like 50 times more valuable than any fancy light you can get exposed to. But those things are great hacks for sure. There's so many things there.

Of course. Okay, that was the first one. Second one, avoid screens before bedtime. And I think this is probably something that a lot of us are at a fault with.

I know you're kissing that phone goodnight.

Of course, man. Yeah, you know, I always tell myself, like, okay, shutting it off by a certain time and, like, not having it in the room and all these other things. But it's a challenge, man.

It's definitely a challenge. Here's why, dude. Like, this is in. With this book, I was able to dissect that because I knew that that would be the. The toughest one of the 21 strategies. This one is the toughest. Yes. Because we're addicted. We are in fact addicted. Here's why, here's what's happening. So there's this interesting compound called dopamine, right? And it was once thought that dopamine was related to pleasure, but it's not. Dopamine is all about seeking. It's driving you to seek, right? And so the internet is perfect for this because there's infinite seeking. Instagram is perfect for this because you're continuously going and just there's more to see. But every time you find, you get a little hit from your opioid system. So it's like a slow drip of drugs. I seek, I find, I seek, I find, and you get looped in and it's very difficult to break that pattern. And everybody's had this happen where you're like, I'm gonna check my Instagram for a minute. I'll check Twitter for a minute. And then it's 30 minutes later, an hour later, and you're still scrolling. This is what's going on. Like our brain is hardwired to get addicted to stuff like this. And these awesome social media apps know how to manipulate our mind and to take advantage of that. So this is a call to take your brain back. I'm not saying I love this stuff. I absolutely love it, but it has a place. And it's being more aware. Now that you're aware, you can catch yourself and break the pattern. So here's why it's an issue at night in particular. So there was a study done at Rizzler Polytechnic that found that just two hours of your device usage before bed was enough to suppress melatonin secretion. All right, so again, you can pass out, just being on it two hours before, you know, like that span. And so you can go to sleep or pass out, but that doesn't mean you're getting that rejuvenative sleep. So this is why a lot of people are sleeping eight hours, but they're still tired when they wake up in the morning, because melatonin is suppressed because they're on their device right before bed. And it's this blue spectrum of light.

That'S shooting out, kind of pouring into your optical system. What if you can stop that? that spectrum.

Is there shades?

Is there screen protectors? Is there glasses?

There's all of those things.

So now is that okay then if you have the better than?

It's a hack.

It's not the optimal, but it's the better than.

Yes. So absolutely, everybody today can get Flux F.F.L.U.X. Sorry, F.L.U.X. Which basically cools off your screen, you know, pulls off that Do you have that? Troublesome. Of course.

So I've got all my different. I want to see what it looks.

Like or is it just a film that goes over the top?

Yeah, so it's a cool app. It does this automatically.

It's an app.

Yeah.

So you just download it on your phone. Yeah, and it does this automatically based on your time zone. Oh, wow. And the time of year, all that stuff. Amazing. So it pulls out that most troublesome spectrum of light. And so Harvard researchers found that it's not just light exposure, it's the color and it's the luminance. It's the the strength of the light. Yes. You know, so green light was like three times less impactful to your sleep than blue light in their studies. Wow. So cool stuff like that. So flux, you can get the blue blocking glasses. Basically they're like sunglasses.

Use those too.

With the orange tint. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I've got those. Watch TV or something. Yeah. You know, like if you're gonna stay up late and watch a movie a little bit later.

Yeah.

You know, but the whole thing is to not make that a habit because these are, of course, you know, these are hacks. But the best thing is, and this is so important, especially for For our audiences, you know, who are really about taking their life to the next level, and they're missing out on this key component, which is you have to find something that's of greater or equal value to the device. So people, you know, actually connecting with real people. You know, playing games with your kids, talking to your family, have sex. You know, there's other things that you could do.

Sleep well.

Yeah, I talk about that in the book too. you have to find something that fills you up because that addiction is so strong and that's really the best tool which is to avoid the screens in the first place.

Yeah, okay, that's number two. Number three, have a caffeine curfew. So, what time, I mean, here's the thing, I feel like I don't have that much caffeine and I almost never drink coffee except for about a month ago I started doing some intermittent fasting testing and so I'll have Bulletproof in the morning. It's like, what time is it? It's almost two o'clock, I still haven't eaten today. But before, if I'd have a cappuccino after dinner or something, it would never affect me. I never felt, oh, I'm wired now, I could always fall asleep. But I'm assuming that it still does something to my brain and my body, even in my system, and not allow me to fully rest. So what is the optimal time to, how many hours before you sleep should we not have any caffeine?

Got it. And by the way, the hours before with the screen time, 60 to 90 minutes, that's all I recommend. So with the caffeine thing, you just set it perfectly. You can definitely go to sleep, but your nervous system can still be active because caffeine has something called-- I'm talking to you, yeah. Yeah, it has a half-life of about eight hours. So if you have 200 milligrams of caffeine, eight hours later, 100 is still active in your system. And so this can keep you out of normal stages of REM sleep and deep sleep. All right, so you can be physiologically laying down and think that you're getting eight hours sleep. And so this study that was done, they gave people caffeine right before bed, three hours before bed, and six hours before bed. And they found that even six hours out was enough to have noticeable and they use like monitoring systems, you know, measuring their brain waves to find out that, whoa, their sleep is actually getting interrupted because of the caffeine. And then there was the subjective, so there's objective and subjective parts of this test. And people thought like, hey, I got enough sleep. Like, I feel great. but in actuality, their body was lacking that rejuvenative sleep. And what that does is you have this false sense of being well rested and you automatically unknowingly start using more caffeine at some point during the day because you're going to have more daytime sleepiness. All right? So, and that creates that whole vicious circle with caffeine to keep you going.

Sure. Okay, so how many hours before?

I recommend, and I'm a fan of caffeine.

Right?

Just do it in the morning, do it in the early part of the day. It depends on how sensitive you are, by the way, too. Yeah, before noon, would be ideal. But some people are hypersensitive to caffeine, everybody's metabolism is different. Some people might need to lay off of it completely, but that's a whole 'nother book on how to make it work.

Sure, sure, sure. Okay, so no caffeine afternoon. This is my fourth one that I see here that I like. This is one of my favorites that I was doing that I needed before I learned about the power and the importance of sleep. And that's be cool. I remember growing up in Ohio, my dad, we did not have air conditioning in our house. And my dad was just like, well, I don't want to spend the money on this. And it's only two months in the summer where you got to deal with it. But St. Louis is the same as Ohio. And man, it was miserable. Because I couldn't wear sheets or anything. I'd just be laying there sweating with the fan on. And my dad would make me turn the fan down because he didn't want me to get whatever. I don't know. And so it was just miserable. And I couldn't sleep. I'm up all night. And I wish my dad would have read this book. So you gotta understand the importance of being cool. But what does it mean to be cool? What's the optimal coolness that you should be in?

Or does it matter? Yeah, absolutely, man. And my story is very similar with yours.

My bedroom was upstairs.

It's on top of the freaking house. You know, heat rises. Oh, coolness drops. So this is why basements tend to be cooler. Upstairs, I would literally see those heat waves. Oh my gosh. Walking up there, 100 degree St. Louis weather. And so I would spray myself with a water bottle and then lay there butt naked and hope my brother doesn't come in the room when I'm trying to sleep. But yeah, man, it's not good sleep.

No.

And so this is really simple. Your body goes through a process, it's something called thermoregulation. And it does this every night, and we'll just say around 9 p.m. average. It does this process to lower your core body temperature to create the ideal environment for deep sleep. Your body cools you off. to sleep better. So you want to support it and not work against it. So some simple tips, and it's gonna sound a little frosty to some people, but ideally your room temperature is gonna be, and this is according to research, what the experts say, 62 degrees to 68 degrees for sleeping, all right? And some people like, no way! Like my wife is actually, she's from Kenya. So hot climate, no, she's not having that. So I find a happy medium.

You're at the top, you're at 68, 69.

Like 69, you know? But and also, you know, our friend Kelly Starrett, Dr. Kelly Starrett, he had a pretty big struggle with this, with being too hot. And he got it cold in the room, but it still wasn't enough and he didn't want his wife to suffer. So he got something called a chili pad, which basically sits on your side of the bed and he's like, he swears by it.

Underneath the mattress or underneath the sheet.

Right on top of the mattress. Yeah, right on top of the sheet. Exactly. But it just keeps you cool underneath you.

Yeah, it's been a game changer for him.

So just cooling your body temperature, even just one degree difference, it's huge. It's huge. It's huge.

Okay, cool. So be cool at night. Doesn't mean you can still wrap yourself.

In a blanket, but cozy.

Make the room cool.

Yeah.

Gotcha. I like that. Okay, so that was number four. Number five, let's do is get to bed at the right time. So why is it important to be at the right time? Should we be at the right same time every night? And what is that optimal time?

Good, good question, man. So timing your sleep is like timing an investment. If you invest a lot at the wrong time, you're gonna get pain. But if you invest even a little bit at the right time, you get some big rewards. And so according to research, our money time sleep is between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. And why that is, is this is when you're gonna get your greatest increase of melatonin. which is going to help you to go through your normal sleep cycle and the greatest secretion of things like human growth hormone as well. So more recovery, more anabolic growth and development.

Between 10 and 2 a.m. That's right.

Yeah.

Is when you should be going to.

Sleep or that's when you get your optimal sleep.

Right.

If you can get some sleep in that window and some experts say that.

It'S like twice as much value per hour. Wow.

Right?

So if you go to bed at 9:30, 9:45 and you're, you know, asleep in that window, that whole time, that's the optimal time.

Yeah, people will notice this when they tend to get to bed a little bit earlier, they're just like, wow, I slept really great.

Right.

You know, I see your face like, yeah, when that happens, but it rarely happens, you know? And so that's the kind of money time window. But it's not, again, it's not about being perfect. If this doesn't fit your lifestyle, stack the other conditions, do the other things, you know, because the timing does matter because your body's wired up to work with nature. Yeah. You know, and only recently can we basically manufacture a second daytime. You know, and our systems, our genes, are expecting a night cycle for us to get cozy, to get sleep, but we can throw on the, you know, do the laptop lap dance all night long today, you know, watch YouTube videos and Netflix and be on our social media, but our genes are not different from our ancestors even, you know, 100 years ago, let alone thousands.

I hear that, man.

So we can evolve through this stuff, you know, like some X-Men stuff, but it's gonna take a little bit of time.

I hear that, man. Here is a good one. I mean, there's so many good strategies here, but I'm only gonna pick 10. Get it blacked out. Yeah, I think this is number five. Is this number five that I'm saying now?

I don't know.

Number five.

Let's say it's five.

Get it blacked out. Now, why is it, I know I did this after I talked to you a while ago and I got, you'll see in my room, it's got like blackout, pretty much blackout. There's a little light that comes through in the morning, but It's pretty dark. Why is this important to have a room pitch black so you can't even see your hand?

Awesome. Again, so that normal sleep cycle, just helping to support that. Your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light.

Even the littlest amount of light.

Yeah, there was a study I put in the book that the room was otherwise pitch black, but they put just a tiny light behind somebody's knee.

No.

And it was enough. Yes.

Shut up.

It was enough to take them out of their normal stage of sleep. It's crazy, right? It's crazy. Because again, we've evolved in darkness. And it's not all light, it's unnatural light. Like moonlight, if you look at the Luxe, and I put a Luxe chart in the book, it's not even a problem, but that unnatural light. And so your skin has photoreceptors that pick up information and basically send it to your brain to secrete more daytime hormones, namely cortisol. All right, so your neighbor's porch light, you know, street lights outside, that kind of stuff, this unnatural light. It's been dubbed light pollution now, so getting your room pitch black can keep that stuff out of your room, but also the internal light too. So if you've got an ugly alarm clock staring at you, you know, that kind of stuff, you might want to consider, you know, getting a dimmer shut off or, you know, throwing a blanket over it or something like that.

I like that.

Okay, that was actually number six.

Got it.

So this is number seven. Let's see. Train hard, but smart. Number seven. What does that mean?

Awesome. Well, I think a lot of people know that a good workout can help you sleep. However, it is the difference between going to sleep and passing out, you know, as we've mentioned. So a lot of people, you know, I just, I talk with Rich Roll and if he doesn't do one of his, you know, he's like running for days, you know, if he doesn't do one of his workouts, like he says his sleep isn't, isn't the same. And he's, it's because of his cortisol rhythm, which he's changed. But that's a whole nother story. Bottom line is There's a difference number one between going to sleep and passing out and here's how to do this the right way. So this study done with Appalachian State University, they broke exercise up into three groups. Group A exercised at 7:00 a.m. in the morning, Group B 1:00 p.m., Group C 7:00 p.m. at night. Group A spent up to 75% more time in deep anabolic sleep. Earlier in the morning. So early in the morning, if you can get a workout in, it doesn't mean it has to be the time you hit the gym, you can work out in the afternoon. But that initial morning activity is important because going back to our evolutionary biology, it encourages that normal cortisol spike.

So, getting up and taking a walk.

Yeah, you could do a power walk, you can do four-minute Tabata session, do.

Some body weight stuff. Or you can do your full workout.

Air squats. Yes.

Some stretch, yoga stretching, whatever it may be. You're helping to encourage that movement towards something. First thing in the morning.

Yeah.

First hour or something. Yeah, exactly.

Interesting. And then what about the full workout? What about if you're like, okay, I'm going to do my hour workout today.

When should that optimal time be?

If you want to do it in the morning, perfect. If it is, and there wasn't much benefit to the afternoon as far as sleep is concerned, but in the evening there was some benefit, but it has to be the early evening.

All right, because if I do work.

Out in the evening, it's okay. If it's the early evening, so 6:00, 7:00. You need about four hours. So if your planned bedtime is 11:00, you need about four hours for your cortisol to get normalized and your core body temperature to come back down, which.

We talked about how important that is. Yeah, because I'll work out and then.

I'll take a cold shower, but I'm still sweating an hour later.

Yeah, but cold shower is a great.

Great help though to help to lower your body, your core body temperature.

It's still the, you know, the burn is just like, you know, a big guy, just still sweating. So that makes sense. Okay, so four hours after the workout.

You should take before you go to sleep. Right, right. And some people are like hitting, you know, their jiu-jitsu class at like 8:00 p.m. and then trying to get to sleep at 10.

That's not optimal. Yeah, it's not. But it is good.

You still get benefit if you go up till 7:00 or four hours before. It's okay. Just try and time it different, you know, a lot of times that we get in issues with this is because we Tell ourselves there's not another option. You know, we are infinite beings that have plenty of different ways that we can change things.

Gotcha. Okay. I believe that was seven. Okay, so number eight, use smart supplementation. What does that mean?

Oh, man, this is a great chapter, man. This whole working in a clinic, people would sometimes see me like allopathic treatment, like, what can I take? you know, so I'm having problems with losing weight. What can I take for that? What can I take for my sleep? And that sent me down a path of researching some stuff, and some of the stuff I found wasn't, it didn't feel good. One of the first things in the biggest supplement for sleep is melatonin. We've talked about melatonin a lot already. Just because you could buy it at a natural food store doesn't mean that it's okay.

Not all melatonin is made equally.

Is that what you're saying? No, not that. This is a hormone, man. This is a hormone. Like, you're taking a hormone. And so I cited a study in the book that right now, and there's.

A lot more being done on this.

But right now what's. What's seen clinically is that taking melatonin supplementation decreases the function of your melatonin receptor receptor sites. So they start to down regulate. Basically, your body stops being able to use it. No, you can produce it, but your.

Body won't be able to use it. oh, all right. So, like, taking creatine where you're, like, takes so much creatine back in the day, and then it stops using it.

Because it's something like overload of creatine or something. Okay. But, yeah, man.

So.

So you shouldn't be taking melatonin, ideally, not. Not consistently, you know, and this is coming out. Dr. Michael Bruce is somebody I mentioned in the book, board certified sleep specialist and really smart guy, and he's recommended people to back off the. The melatonin, but. I say everything has a place, everything has value. If you're changing time zones, if you're wanting to just kind of for short term to help to set your normal sleep cycle, it can be okay. But getting that dependency on it and using too much, the amount that's in a normal, just everyday supplement is way too high.

Right.

And your body will start to down regulate. And so what do people do? They'll take more. So melatonin is not the way to go. The ideal way is to start with things that are natural first, things that have a story, long lineage of use to the human body. You can start as simple as chamomile tea, can be really helpful. Clinically proven to be effective. Kava kava is another one. That's the national drink of Fiji, which Tony Robbins always come to mind when I think of Fiji. But it's been shown to be a mild sedative as well as valerian. So these are three options. Then we can get into the chemical isolates, which I would do that later, but 5-HTP is effective. L-tryptophan, 5-HTP is a precursor to melatonin. So it gives your body the chance to do a step still and produce it versus you taking the end product and lowering your ability for your body to actually use it.

Gotcha. Wow, that's powerful. Okay, so that was number eight. Number nine, go easy on the bottle.

What does that mean? So this was one of the funnest chapters of the book and wow. Just some of the... I'm assuming you're talking about alcohol.

This is alcohol, yeah, yeah. What about my late night glass of wine or going out to the bars.

And drinking until I'm passed out? That's not gonna help me sleep better? So here's what's so interesting is that the research shows that drinking alcohol before bed does in fact help you to fall asleep faster. Hands down, no doubt about it. It passes you out, right? What also has been found is that you're not getting into normal REM sleep in particular. Your sleep stages are broken. This is why you wake up with what's known as a hangover, because it's interrupting your sleep cycles. So you're passed out, you're physiologically sleeping, but your brain isn't doing the right processes. Why not? Alcohol interrupts those processes. So one of the things that I mentioned earlier, and I didn't want to get into it, but adenosine, which we talked about in the book in regards to the caffeine. So adenosine is this end product from your body. It's producing this compound to basically nudge you to go to sleep. And caffeine sits in the receptor sites for adenosine, so you don't really know you're tired even though you are. Alright, alcohol does something similar to that. So it makes you feel tired even though physiologically you might not be ready to go to sleep for some people. So this has a lot to do with it with the impact with the adenosine as far as alcohol is concerned. And so it does work again to put you to sleep but getting good sleep not so much. One of the other things that was fascinating about writing this chapter was looking at how similar sleep deprivation is to being drunk. And actually seeing right there statistical correlation between, and when you see this man, the National Highway Patrol and all of the deaths that occur every year due to people falling asleep or driving while drowsy is shocking because there isn't an easy test for that, as there is with testing with blood alcohol. And there was a great myth Busters episode that I talk about in the book that actually showed, wow, like you can actually be even worse off with your sleep deprived.

Of course.

You can't open your eyes.

Exactly. I mean, you know, I'll wake up sometimes and I'll feel like drowsy and sleep deprived. I've never been drunk in my life, so I don't know what the feeling is. But I think a few nights ago I woke up, you know, I was coming back from my international trip for two weeks, so I was just waking up at 3 a.m. and it was just all off. I woke up and I remember just.

Like walking around the room, like hitting the wall and I'm like, man, I feel so drunk.

That's what drunk is. That's what it feels like.

Man, I don't know what it is.

You know, so I can only imagine, you know, when you don't have a stable footing and you're just like, where am I? Yeah, that's interesting.

So, yeah, but there are benefits to drinking, especially, like you mentioned, drinking wine, you know, red wine, the resveratrol. There's a lot of great benefits. It's just how about we go for a happy hour or how about you give yourself the opportunity? I talk about how it's four hours before you sleep. Yeah, a couple, even two. Okay. Even two. and drink plenty of water to help your body to essentially flush it out. And you know, when you're drinking alcohol, well you don't know this, but you tend to go pee a lot. Your body's trying to eliminate the poison, you know? Sure, sure. And so just encourage that, you know.

Just by drinking, getting really hydrated and just giving yourself a couple hours before you go to bed. It's really that simple. Gotcha, okay, cool. So that was number nine. Number 10, let's do early to rise. Be early to rise. Why?

How about let's do the get grounded, since correlation.

Let's do it. Get grounded.

This was the way your book kicked off, right?

Yeah.

And this is the way that mine wraps up.

I like it.

And it means psychologically but also physiologically. And wow, this was some of the most fascinating research that I got to dig into. And I got to talk to Dr. Jeff Spencer, who's, he's not been on your show, right?

Yeah, he has.

Yeah. So, and he was, he's directly connected to like 40 national championships, Olympic gold medals, Tour de France victories combined, you know, all together with his coaching and his being a team physician for the Tour de France, for example. One of his leverage points and his kind of secret sauce was through utilizing grounding and earthing equipment. And so what is it? So getting grounded basically means getting your body connected with the Earth's surface. And again, me being very analytical, I'm not, you know, I don't like to get too unicorn, you know, but respect to that, there is some of that relevant in the world, but I want to see the science, like I want to know how it works. And so the Earth itself is brimming with free electrons, okay? And so your body is really operating off of this interesting combination of protons and electrons for events to happen. So positive event in your body is an inflammatory event basically. And you need inflammation to get better, to grow, to develop. Inflammation is actually good, but we don't want it to go too far. Bringing an electron molecule into an inflammatory process because what happens today is people are having too many inflammatory overreactions.

Right?

So this is like autoimmune condition where your body's doing too much. Yes. And bringing an electron in basically neutralizes that inflammatory event. So one of the things that's seen is when you get grounded, and there's so much cool research on this, inflammation goes down. Your parasympathetic nervous system kicks on.

Right?

And so there was a study done, and this was a Journal of Environmental and Public Health, and I cited this one in the book, that found that as soon as you get grounded, instantly your parasympathetic nervous system is turning on and your sympathetic nervous system is turning off. So what are those? Parasympathetic is basically your rest and digest system. Sympathetic is fight or flight. And most of us are chronically in this. It's a binary system. It's either off or on. You're not a little big sympathetic. So getting grounded immediately does that. And why does that work? Human bodies conductive. you know, like, it's not some magic. Right now, you know, if somebody might be listening to podcasts, matter of fact, let's, I'm gonna use a different example. Scary movies, right? One of the worst ways to go out is like you're taking a bath and here comes Freddy Kruger and he throws an electric device in the bathtub.

Yeah, right. That would suck.

It sucks, right? Because we're conductive, we can be electrocuted because we're conductive. We can electrocute each other just with static electricity. you know, happens every day. You're very, very conductive. So that should help to kind of buffer that disconnection of like what's going on. You just can't see the electricity, the electrons coming from the ground, but they're there. So conductive surfaces are mainly like grass, dirt, you know, soil. Concrete is a little bit conductive. Asphalt is not. Bodies of water is why we feel grounded and ideas come in the shower.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, because those pipes are grounded.

Sure.

All right. Sand, things like that. So get in your body in touch with those things. And that's why people feel so good when they go to the beach. They feel relaxed. They get better sleep. Some people fall asleep at the beach. Of course, yeah, absolutely. Because your body's actually getting re-- it's setting the circadian timing is getting back on track. So that's one thing. And also getting grounded, and this was so cool that I saw this, clinically proven. And so let me preface this. So what Dr. Jeff was using was grounding equipment. So this is equipment that basically connects to the grounding prong in your outlets and it's basically like sheets that align with this particular material that sends that energy basically to the human body. And so there's grounding mats, like I think you have one. I got one for a buddy, John Lee Dumas, that he uses all the time. I have a mouse pad, there's grounding sheets, there's all this other cool stuff that basically connects you to the electrons that the earth is eminating. And so by, there was one study that I cited, getting grounded using this equipment, number one, it lowered nighttime cortisol. So they monitored the person all night, the people all night long in the study, lowered nighttime cortisol. All right. And also it helped to normalize cortisol during the daytime. So they're not hyper fight or flight just by getting yourself grounded.

Right.

All right. So super powerful stuff. The inexpensive way to do it, which it helps if you're in California, you know, it's so great to be, I was shoveling snow the day before I came here. But it's easy to get grounded. But other places, you know, depending on the time of year, can be a little bit more difficult. But I encourage you to explore. You know, if it's a little chilly outside and you've got a patch of grass in your backyard, still get out there, roll up your pants and do that. Or you can get yourself some of.

The earthing equipment that I talk about in the book. Why is it so hard to go to sleep?

It's just the environment that we live in today, you know?

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're laying there for hours. You're vulnerable. You're not really moving. Your senses are dulled and gone down. You know, obviously your visual actual senses are reduced or just none unless you're.

Weird and you have your eyes open.

But even your auditory, your sense of smell, your sense of touch, all those things reduce. 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 have something that goes.

It's a light coma.

It's like a little mini hibernation. You're like a baby bear for a minute. 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 brain waves. Maybe a little gamma if we get to Bruce Banner 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 to, it's very good to like, you know, 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.

Theta.

Theta.

Theta.

And so this is-- 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 a hypnotic trance, like we were just talking about Marissa Pier, I was just talking with her the other day, but we're kind of trying to manipulate that theta 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 believe everything, you know? I'm not gonna throw out any names, you know, Santa Claus and anything like that. I'm not gonna say it's not real. But everything is just taken in very deeply. 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. 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.

Really?

It is just a weird, weird thing.

Yeah.

So it's rapid eye movement, your eyes aren't moving. And that's the best type of sleep?

No.

Okay. I'm not gonna say best, it's a part. Okay. You know, we need all of them. And this is the point we're gonna 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. 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 two 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, you know, 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. We tend to think that we need to keep hammering.

So 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.

They're 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 got to study the whole book.

So yeah, man, but that's rim sleep. And then we have non-rim sleep. It's considered more of the anabolic deep sleep. This is where a lot of the anabolic hormones like HGH gets secreted. 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.

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 an 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 the greatest secretion or sweat 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. We're creating more of it.

The biggest secretion happens then.

Okay.

Yeah.

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, you know, getting close to a decade ago, I would think of Barry Bonds and like Jason Giambi.

A-Rod, no disrespect.

Yeah, yeah. Disrespect, Mary and 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 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, especially like drivers of anabolic growth. So resistance training, but more so like power lifts. You can get a really good power.

Lifting will help produce more HGH.

Yeah, and so the benefit-- what does.

HGH do for you when you have that?

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 eight-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 just produced an HGH, that sleep baby. 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 need to 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.

Right.

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 it, 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, I've been in this field for almost 20 years, all right? And what I've seen, people don't get hurt deadlifting. People getting hurt picking up a feather. You know, they're getting her picking up a pillow. Why is that? 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- I'm jumping on.

The couch or just running around or just picking up stuff. When do we do it?

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.

You know, it's true, man. You play too much. But it's still- 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 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 football or play Frisbee or what's. What are the activities you think are best? It's such a great question, man.

You know, I've been. 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 live 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 eight-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 played too much. But then I catch myself, like they're just having a good time. 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 I'm, the thing is, I'm the.

One who usually initiates it.

I just wanna do it for a couple of minutes.

Right, not for an hour.

Alright guys, chill. 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.

One of the great exercises 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.

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 of the best home cooking I've ever had with your wife at your place. It's amazing. I can't remember what it was specifically, but it was something like casserole type of food.

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 it's not just sugar.

I can always throw a cookie.

Yeah.

You know that.

Crush 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 wanna 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 extreme. 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've seen- you- know what I mean?

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, that cocaína was not enough, right? They were so addicted to the sugar.

And they took- Sugar probably tastes better too, right?

They took 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 are 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 calories there. It's a dense calorie source.

It's not a calorie rich, it's not like a healthy calorie, right?

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

That's the thing. Yeah, honey was probably like a nice, it was probably so strong and you just put a little bit on to add, not like you dump the whole thing in there. Like a winning the pool or something. It's just like licking on the jar, because I can drink a whole jar of honey. If I wanted to, you know what I mean?

I was so addicted to Honey Nut Cheerios.

Oh my God, those were so good.

That little bee, man. It was like my bestie, man.

Oh, it's so cool. 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 Nut Cheerios.

It was my midnight snack, right?

But here's the thing.

The milk is amazing. I have to work the milk. Oh my gosh, it's so good. 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, It's something I eliminated essentially from my diet.

Yeah.

And I just replaced with cookies or something else.

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. We get like a serotonin hit. And this is why some carbohydrates, like if we are 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 and right or. If we're talking close in proximity to.

Sleep, that's gonna really mess your sleep 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 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 are actually benefit or not?

Yeah, this is a good question. I've been looking into this for quite some time now. So let's address both of these things. Let's address wine, let's address alcohol, and let's address food. All right, so 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.

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 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.

It's 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.

Wow.

But then there's a big rebound effect with the REM sleep towards to 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 the 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 10:00. 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 is having too much water before sleep.

If peeing is a problem, you know, yeah, like so many 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 wanna 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, there's two phases. Okay, wake up for a moment and then go back to sleep. So what would happen if we're talking, you know, a thousand years ago, let's go back even further, 10,000 years ago.

Yeah.

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 at a cave. 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, 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 nine 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 we're grabbing the bathroom.

Bathroom, twice.

You know what I mean? But then you go back to sleep and you'd have time to get another 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 psychologically troubled, messed up with it. You know that I wake up at night, it's okay. It's okay. We have to relax into it, 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. 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. 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 a problem. 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. She'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. Yeah, on that two hours before.

Don't be excessive with it.

Yeah, 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.

It 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, 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 still, you're not going to 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 Epple 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 a longer life. Telomerase is an enzyme that can add length back on 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 gonna 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? And track practice in St. Louis, I was doing a 200 meter time trial and I broke my hip from running because my body, I was 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 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 was-- I don't remember you saying that.

You broke your hip in practice. At track practice. No trauma, nobody hit me.

200-Meter time trial, broke my hip.

Man, bro. Bo Jackson up in here. Dude, I ran a 4:54:40 when I was 15.

Wow.

You know what I mean?

Like, everything was looking great, but just--.

What were you doing? Man, I was made out of, like, true story. I was made out of probably like 5% Emo's pizza.

Oh.

You know what I mean? Oh, my gosh. It's so good, though.

Clayton, Missouri, man.

Emo's pizza, that's so good. like, I. 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 to my 30s, man.

Yeah.

But you were sneaking other stuff in, though. I was doing veggies. I was doing other stuff.

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.

Yeah.

Because I never liked the dressings. They always smelled bad.

For me.

But sweet green, have you been to sweet green yet? I don't think so. It's amazing. There's got to 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 I'm good.

And I try to eat that almost every day.

Ooh.

So now we know your secret, man. So it's the spicy cashew.

Not too much, 'cause I don't wanna be drizzled with calories and all this stuff. It's just a little bit.

And what's in the salad?

So 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.

Adulting, right? But it's like, those are the only ingredients that I'll It's like the same thing over and over.

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 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. Yep. Yep. Don't have too much, don't get drunk, but you can have someone if you went 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 chocadillo and then go to bed. I'm saying like, you know, if you have dinner at seven, eight o'clock, having a little whack of carbohydrates, it helps to 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 do a grain-free.

It might be that, yeah, yeah.

You know, there's like saponins in, you know, the quinoa that might be trouble 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 now.

Exactly.

You know what I'm saying?

There's like cauliflower pasta. They make pasta out of everything. Yeah, zucchini pasta. Right, zucchini pasta.

I think I saw like there's some coffee pasta out of there. I'm just kidding.

That would be crazy though.

Yeah, yeah.

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

Yeah.

For your meal.

Fruit is another obviously carb, dominant category of foods. So what would 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 a 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. Mm.

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 and controller. And you know, just talking with the bosses in 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 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've got to 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?

Yeah.

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.

Efficient 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, Right. 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. I don't want to wash something, you know, whatever.

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. 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. We'll come back, we'll talk about that another time. 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 the 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 assimilate 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 it 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. you're overweight, obese, there's a higher propensity. 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. Yeah, that's. It's more stressful trying not to have a snack if you want to snack. but also part of the reason we might want to have a snack at 12 o'clock at night is because we're up Netflix and chilling, you know what I mean?

You should be asleep by now.

You should be asleep.

So, that's part of it is just our practices and our culture around food and us not getting the nutrition we need but 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.

So, if you're tired, you're hungry? Absolutely, I call it toungey.

You got hangry and toungey.

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 they found that eating a meal, I'm sorry, let me get a drink.

So sorry.

Get a little cotton mouth. Okay, so there was a study that was conducted and it was crazy in 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.

That's true.

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.

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, you know, Tai Chi. You know what I'm saying? There's all this stuff you could do, you know, playing board games. There's that cool, have you played the heads up? Oh yeah, that's right.

Right?

So you've got all these cool things you could do to hang out with your friends, you know, spend some 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've pushed this in the 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've got the new iPhone. It's got three cameras.

Sick.

It's fun to play.

Amazing.

Right?

But this device is the greatest deterrent for our sleep quality today. So bad. And so Harvard researchers 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 they've got this light around us. ambient light. But if you're in a dark room and you see that phone, 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 30 minutes you're on your device at night, you suppress melatonin. I'm sorry, I said it wrong. Every 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.

So just to go back on that.

Point with me, just 30 minutes at least no phone.

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

60 minutes, you know, if possible.

Yeah, I mean, then we're like, but this ninja. We 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 aren't trying to hear that, man. You know what I mean?

So that's no phone and no TV.

Yeah.

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

Here's a couple of hacks. And I'm sure you've 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 a 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 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 on.

Yeah.

Chilling out. Yeah. Or we can also, you know, dim the lights around us, you know, 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 evolved 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 and 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've again, like we've got, it's a light dimmer.

Yeah.

Lights a little bit dimmer. I'll do at least probably 10 minutes of reading, 20 minutes sometimes if we're not 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 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 your muscles. Like if somebody's cramping, that kind of thing, magnesium helps a lot. Oh, okay. All 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 can be good.

Yeah.

What I have also, I have the topical magnesium spray. 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, too. 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, you could touch a point. But there is some evidence that this, 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. 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, it's like, I'm so ready to fight now.

You know what I mean?

You just want to chill for a few hours.

That's it, man.

Okay.

So if I can, you know, my wife, like, I'm a 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, 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 no we have 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 what I keep it at, man. Every night.

Yeah.

It's so good.

It is, you know, and this is goes back to that evolutionary, process, evolutionary biology, we have a natural drop in our core body temperature at night, one to two 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.

Yeah. 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 night time, 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. 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.

I love it, man.

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. Nice. Except like we got some blackout curtains.

Yeah.

Because you know when you came to.

My house, we were out in the woods.

Yeah.

Dark.

It was dark, dark.

Dark.

You need black out.

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 my sleep for 2020?

Yes.

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 gonna 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 V. Of course.

And he's like the guy everybody seems like, you know, he's out there 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 Beard Gary V. I don't know, he did his little moment of beard.

Yeah.

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.

D-E-A-D dead.

Yeah, exactly. So what he was like, you know, he's hired a trainer to travel with him because he's like, he 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 got to 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.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Did you see this?

I know what you're talking about.

Yeah.

I think he said something. 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 who 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. He's like, I wake up at 4.

A.M. or 5 a.m.

He goes to sleep early. Like we've been, we've been hanging out.

For a long time.

Sleep like 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. He's knocked out, all right, but he's getting up and grinding, right? He's get, when he's up, he's troubled. So his thing is, sleep, get enough sleep, but don't sleep in. Don't oversleep. Don't be lazy.

Yeah.

That's the difference. It's not don't sleep. That's killing yourself. And that's, you're not showing up as the best you as we've 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. Like, we're super tired when we get up and, like, tired for a while. And a big part of that is just kind of. even how we're interrupting our sleep cycles, you know? But that's a, you know, 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, you know, 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 eight 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 these so-called experts are 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 can become neurotic about something that you don't even really 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. So you can get, like, if you're looking at, what did I mention earlier? A chocodile, right? versus wild caught salmon or, you know, Lewis's salad. Is there a name of the salad?

I should call it Lewis's salad. It's a great salad or something. Because it's a custom ball. It's greatness ball.

Yes, sir.

A salad of greatness.

Yes.

So chocolate versus the salad of greatness, it's going to have wildly different impact on what it does to your metabolism.

Yeah. Right.

And so the same thing with your sleep minutes, you can be getting like. eight hours of chocodaw sleep because of your blue light exposure, because of you not tapping into thermal regulation, because you having issues with blood sugar regulation. And listen, 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. -Absolutely. -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. Then 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 going to 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 is 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?

And so but just a little quick.

Thing that I want to share with people that's another big buy-in point is that our sleep quality affects our appearance. right? Specifically, you know, are everybody, nobody's waking up like, you know what? I just want to be super ugly today.

Like, it's ugly 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, you know, 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 to six hours of sleep for two days. All right, so they sleep deprived them for two days, take their picture again. There's a mixture of pictures that these raiders, the people who are raiding 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? 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 I would be less interested in socializing with this person. 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 beauty sleep? It's called beauty sleep for a reason. There's real rejuvenative magic in this. You know what I mean? And so looking at how we feel about other people and how we're showing up in the world, your sleep has a big impact on that.

And tell people about sleep debt. I 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.

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?

And the way that 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. 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 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 got to 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 high quality for 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.

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.

Yeah.

As much as we think.

Why did decide to talk about sleep in the first place.

Wow.

Because you talk a lot about health too. You've got the Model Health Show. But why sleep? Why is that your expertise?

Why? Well, man, it was really, I'm a very analytical person by nature, you know? And so working in my clinical practice, seeing incredible results with people over the years, for example, working with people with type 2 diabetes. and helping people to get off things like the metformin and potentially being on insulin, things like that. And we had over 80% success rate. That was pretty shocking. But there was always this category of people who weren't getting the results. It was like a thorn in my side, maybe 20-30% of my patients. And so after doing a deeper dive and a deeper introspection myself, I start to see, hey, there's a problem going on with stress or sleep, with these people. And after we get their sleep dialed in, then all of these results will come flushing in.

And so that was number one.

Number two, having my show, you know, the Model Health Show, we were about 50 episodes in. We were still a baby at the time. And I did three episodes on sleep and I looked at the downloads and they were in the top 10, those three episodes. So it was like, people want to know about this. And that's when I put the initial book together. And like you said, it did amazing. It just kind of took off on its own. but even hearing the name Sleep Smarter, a lot of people are like, yeah, I need that. So the best form of marketing is a great product.

Absolutely. Were you a sleep expert before or did you just start saying, okay, my audience wants this information, I did a couple podcasts on this, so let me just put out a book. Or did you say, okay, now I'm actually going to dive into the research. Are there other sleep doctors or experts who add to this information that you learn from or what makes you credible in this space?

So the first thing is personal experience always. You know, I tell people you don't truly know anything until you've done it yourself. And little did I know that, you know, my story really was coupled with a change in the way that I was sleeping helped to transform my body and my health. So when I was 20 years old, I was diagnosed with something called degenerative bone disease and degenerative disc disease. So the disc in between the vertebrae and my spine were breaking down. And my first physician told me I had the spine of an 80 year old. Wow. And I was 20.

Right.

And even take a step back before that, you know, you being from St. Louis playing high school sports there, I went to Lafayette, which is number one school in the state currently.

Yeah.

For a couple of things. And no big deal.

Yeah.

You know, you know, but at the time. So when I was 15 years old, I ran a 4:54:40 right before the football season.

Wow.

So football went through, yeah, when I was 15. And so, but I was really in the track, like that was my thing. And so at track practice, I was doing a 200 meter time trial. And as I was coming off the curve into the straightaway, my hip broke.

Broke. Just, I broke my hip. Wow.

No trauma. Some Bo Jackson stuff right there, you know? So random, right? But, you know, I just thought I pulled a muscle, you know, being a hard-headed guy, I just kept coming to practice for a couple of days until my coach made me go. And I got a scan done and there was my iliac crest, the tip of my hip bone had just broken off. And so standard of treatment, ultrasound.

Ice.

Ice, crutches for a couple of weeks. Got to get out of class early. So I thought it was cool, but nobody stopped to ask how did this 15 year old kid's hip break?

Just running.

And this is something usually reserved for people when they're older, you know, and generally people think that people fall and break their hip, but in reality they break their hip then fall. All right, and that's kind of what was happening with me. So I was so malnourished with just kind of cut to the chase that my bones were just breaking down rapidly. It wasn't until five years later when I got that diagnosis. And, you know, being an aspiring athlete, it just kind of made my whole world come crashing down. Very scared, you know, especially getting the diagnosis that there's nothing that I can do about it. And this was an incurable condition, according to my physician. I was smart enough to get multiple opinions. but it was the same story. So two and a half years went by until things changed. And I definitely dipped into a state of depression for sure, you know, kind of mingled around in that and gained about 50 pounds of unsexiness. And I was fluffy version of myself, man. Just was definitely off track in my life. But ultimately things changed when, man, I just really decided to get well. I got the last note from the last physician I saw, and he said the same thing the other ones did. And it's just like, if I don't change my life now, I'm never gonna change. So, and most people never make the decision to get well. That's the issue. You know, it's like, I'm gonna try like you. I'm gonna try to hit the New York Times bestseller list. No, this is done, you know? So when you make a real decision about something, you know, it's from the Latin day, meaning from, and kaidir, which means to cut. So you cut away the possibility of anything else. And so I made a decision to get well and that really drove me into when I initially went to school It's so funny taking a pre-med track you don't have to take nutrition, but I just happened to take nutrition the first semester and I remember so clearly there's a big auditorium style classroom and the teacher walked in but his belly came in first. Wow, I was like oh, he's gonna teach me the nutritionist.

Yes, it's funny when you see a big doctor, you know, it's like just overweight and trying to prescribe you something about your health and you're like, how is this?

It's kind of ironic in a way, but the thing is these are generally really great people and they're doing what they're teaching.

Yeah, what they were taught too.

And a lot of people don't know this, but a lot of nutrition programs in colleges are funded by General Mills. So there's a vested interest to get people to eat the bottom of the pyramid, right? Which is the number one kind of glycemic loading food, you know, the highest spiking food, which is a tragedy, you know. So, people are just chronically elevating their blood sugar, which is keeping insulin turned on, which is keeping them storing fat.

You know, really simple thing. I think I heard recently that the government just put out an updated version of my plate. Right? They just put out an updated version saying, well, actually, you're not supposed to have this much grains or whatever it is, like they used to say is a staple.

You're not supposed to have this much milk or something. I'm not sure. Slightly slightly different, but still there's a lot of work to be done.

Yeah.

But with the podcast world, with what's going on online, millions of people are getting connected to this information every year and changing the way that they're eating. And so for me, man, it was.

Were you just eating a lot of sugar yourself before?

I was on the college diet, so I'm like, there's something called the Papa John's special.

So it's five bucks.

I love Papa John's. So large.

Yeah.

I would crush a large pizza by myself on a regular basis. McDonald's breakfast if I got up in time. That's how I was living, man. I had no idea that food mattered.

No vegetables, no fruits.

That's something I never thought in my life. Rarely would a veggie pass my lips. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's because really, you don't know what you don't know. And at that time, I didn't know that there was a difference with food. I just thought if you can eat it, it's healthy. Of course. And that's what a lot of people kind of fall into that, that reality, you know? And so once I understood it, by the way, I asked my first doctor, I don't know to this day if it was like my spirit animal or like my future self jumped into my body, but I asked him, does this have anything to do with what I'm eating? You know, this disease that I have. And he looked at me, he just cocked his head and like shook his head.

He's like, this has nothing to do.

With what you're eating. Really? He's like, you were born with this. This is something you just have to deal with. Genetically. I'm sorry. Yeah. And so yeah, but that was, it never sat right with me because he told me this has nothing to do with I'm putting my mouth, but then he wrote me a prescription to put some drugs in my mouth.

Mm-.

Right, so that's the level of, you know, but I didn't know what to do. I just knew what he told me to do. Yeah, that's the experts. Yeah, and it's effectively like we just mentioned Dr. Lissa Rankin, who I just talked to. It's a nocebo effect, which is giving somebody a negative injunction saying there's nothing you can do about this, or, you know, you've got one month to live. And seeing people who walk into the hospital are wheelchair bound within a day after getting a, you know, terminal illness diagnosis.

Right.

And so the power of our minds is very powerful, man. But for me, so to kind of wrap up the story and see the light at the end of the tunnel, I'm a very analytical person by nature, like I mentioned. So it wasn't like I made this decision and unicorns came out and the clouds parted. I really dug in and decided, I remember going to school and learning this stuff, but I was taught a lot about disease, you know, and problems. I'm gonna learn everything that I can about health in the human body. So, there was basically three things I did. Number one, I changed the way I was eating, you know, funny enough. Number two, I started to move again. And it's shocking how many people are diagnosed with something and their doctor tells them to be careful, don't do anything, bed rest. Your body requires movement in order to heal itself. So, I started to exercise again. And the third thing was-- so, not.

Actually resting and requires movement.

Yes.

Is that true? There's this crazy study, and I actually mentioned it in the book, It was done on horses. And, you know, a racehorse can be potentially millions of dollars, the value.

Yeah, of course.

And if they break a bone, that's grounds for the animal to get put down, quote, put down.

Yes.

And so there's a really vested interest in keeping that horse's bones healthy. And so with the study, they had the horses start taking calcium and other supplements to increase the bone density. And there was some change, but there was even more change, more radical change, if they walked the horses and gave them the supplements. So there was a study with, you know, so one group of horses just got the supplements improved walking and supplements radical transformation. So this is because... Go ahead, sir. This is because your body really assimilates nutrients through movement.

Not through sitting there and resting.

Right.

I mean, you can do some stuff, but when you really move your body, it's actually turning on activating biochemical pathways for your body actually assimilates Now if.

You have a broken leg, of course, you're not supposed to be moving on it.

And especially, you know, if you have an acute situation where, you know, you just got hurt, take a couple days off. But then from there, you need to do what you can.

A little bit of movement at a time.

Right. Do what you can.

Not like to extreme pain.

Yeah, that's just silly.

It's a little bit of movement on time. Okay. I just want to make sure we're.

Clear, like, oh, I broke my back. You're telling me to run? Not today.

Not today.

Yeah.

You want to take your time, but you want to do what you can.

Some movement.

And it's also, especially being an athlete, you start to fall into a victim status very quickly. That something's wrong, things are just going bad now, and we start to self-pity instead of just being proactive. It's easier said than done, but a big cause of you getting well is you usually hear about causes of problems. A big cause of you getting well is you being active, for sure.

Okay. So what was the third thing?

So the third thing, and really quickly, so with the nutrition piece, and that's really my domain, that's where I've been operating for a decade and a half now, clinically, and man, it was really simple, man. I did the low hanging fruit. So instead of eating like a McDonald's burger and fries, I'd go to, you know, I was shopping at Whole Foods.

Which just opened in St. Louis, which.

The Midwest is kind of late to getting a lot of stuff. Really, it just opened there?

Yeah, it's been there for a while.

Yeah, this was, let's see, so this is about, yeah, this is about 16 years ago. Gosh, I was like, no, it's just there, but it's packed there too now, man. but when I was first start shopping, there was like me and some random old guy and then like a lady with a tie-dye shirt on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And so, but I thought it was so cool. It's like all of this stuff. And of course, I would meet a lot of major athletes there as well, like Isaac Bruce. I'll bump into regularly there. So it was really interesting and kind of changed my Paradigm. So I started to eat grass-fed beef instead of whatever conventionally farmed. factory farm beef from McDonald's, a sprouted grain bun instead of fries, I'd get a bunch of broccoli. You know, I just did small changes that I could and I was drinking water like I was getting paid for it, you know? And so here's the thing. This is, this is so cool, guys. This is, this is really what transformed my body. So I started to ask the right question, you know, questions are so powerful. So I asked, what is my spine actually made of? And then dug into the research and I was shocked because When you think of your bones, what's the first mineral nutrient you think of?

I think of calcium.

I don't know. Exactly, exactly. I'm ignorant though. No, this is where everybody lives. The majority of us, there's like 200 other factors that are equally as important. That's just the big marketing one.

Right.

Right, and so it's things like magnesium, silica, I needed vitamin C to help to regenerate tissues. I didn't know that. Sulfur-bearing amino acids, all these interesting things I'd never heard of. And no way was I getting that via Papa John's and Sunny Delight, you know? So I changed the way that I.

Was eating and I was- Egg McMuffin.

Wasn'T bringing the nutrients, man. No, it was missing it, man. It was missing the mark. And so I started to look for the foods that had those things in them. And then there was a radical transformation in my health. So the last piece was sleep, rest and recovery, man. When I started to do all this good stuff for my body and training again, and again, I just started where I could. I started off on an elliptical, then a stationary bike, walked, picked up the weights again. and I naturally fell into a normal sleep pattern. And six weeks later, man, after making that decision, I lost 28 pounds. The pain I'd been experiencing every day for two and a half years was gone. Ultimately, about nine months later, I got a scan done and I had two herniated discs that retracted on their own. I lost three-fourths of an inch in height and I grew half an inch back.

Wow.

Which was crazy, right? And the degeneration was starting to essentially be reversed. And the last position I worked with he was just standing there looking at the picture, you know, the MRI, and it's just like, wow, son, whatever you're.

Doing, keep doing it.

I haven't seen this before. We had no clue. Yeah. And so that's when I fired my doctor. Wow. But with love.

With love.

But yeah, I kind of got what I needed from that experience. And even when I went to get the scan done, I already knew I was well. It was just kind of an affirmation. So, and that was the birthing of my career, man. Amazing. People at my university saw the physical transformation that took place. I didn't look like a guy who lost weight. I looked like a guy who healthy. And I remember walking out of class and my professor stopped me who had seen me, you know, prior, the semester prior, and he was like, what happened to you? You look so healthy. And I was like, Is that wrong? Is that a problem? He's like, no, what did you do? And so I started to work with him. I started to work with my fellow students. And working at a university, I had such a great bank of people from different cultures and different countries to work with. And it really taught me a lot. Mm-. And so since then, you know, I've worked with thousands of people clinically, but, you know, hundreds of thousands through, you know, the podcast, speaking and all that good stuff through books. And it's just been an amazing ride, man.

Amazing, man. Okay, so you. When did you really dive into sleep? It's like, I'm gonna understand every, you know, you're an analytical guy. You go all in with something. You do it to, like, the max. Let me know what's in that water, how it was processed, but you have everything. you like don't touch, water doesn't touch your body unless it's filtered a specific way. I know that about you. You don't take a shower unless it's filtered away. So everything is like to the extreme in the way you do it. So why don't you say, okay, I'm gonna know everything about sleep.

Yeah.

Like more than anyone else in the world.

I'm gonna learn from all the experts. When would that happen?

Yeah.

So that was, that was about five years ago and seeing this transformation in my, in my clinic and seeing it with people. firsthand.

What type of clinic do you have?

So this was a nutrition consulting practice. So I've worked with a lot of physicians would bring their patients over to me, chiropractors, things like that. And so I would help their patients. And it was a great team, great network of people and just seeing some really remarkable results. But across the board, man, and by the way, you mentioned about physicians not necessarily being healthy. It's because it's the way the system is set up. Some of the most important people and the smartest people in our culture, Our physicians are brilliant. But the system really beats them down, you know, and puts them through a lot just to be able to serve.

A lot of stress.

Yes, of course, of course. And so all of us teaming up and it really kind of opened the door for me to do this research. And right off the bat, man, I started to understand why I got well. And so I dug into that first, like, what's going on during sleep? that makes you recover faster. And so here's what's so cool. If you and I right now, we go to the gym after this interview and we're standing there looking at the gym, we're just like, we're gonna have the best workout of our lives, we're gonna crush it. We're in better shape then than after the workout. All right? After the workout, if we go get some blood work done, and I get you a hormone panel done, it might look like there's something wrong with you. Sure. You know, your cortisol is gonna be elevated, blood sugar is gonna be wacky, your inflammatory biomarkers are going to be up. But the only thing you did was just, it's called a hormetic stressor. You just did a workout and your body will recover from that when you sleep. All right? Sleep is really where your body comes back better from that workout. Sleep is where your body helps to convert food into you. A big portion of that and most importantly is to eliminate the metabolic waste products, get stuff out of the way so you can have more room for growth. and actually same thing with your brain. And this was some, some of the new research that went into the book. Dude, this is so crazy because your brain creates your body. But when you're sleeping, so there's something called the lymphatic system, right? Your lymphatic system is basically your extracellular fluid. You have four, four times more lymph than you have blood. All right. So this is kind of the body's channel for eliminating waste. If that lymphatic system gets clogged, nasty stuff is going to start happening. Just kind of like your plumbing in your house. If it gets backed up, stuff's gonna get kind of gross. But your brain has something called the blood-brain barrier. And so stuff can't just readily get there. Matter of fact, your lymphatic system basically stops at your neck. So your brain has its own lymphatic system. It's called the glymphatic system, which a little shout out to the glial cells in your brain that control it. And it's for the purpose of eliminating, and your brain is doing millions of processes every second. eliminating all the byproducts from all this change it's constantly doing. And it turns on the glymphatic system is 10 times more active when you're asleep than when you're awake. And your brain cells actually shrink about 60% while you're asleep to make more room to eliminate waste. It's really important. So what they're finding is that conditions like Alzheimer's is probably an inability of your brain to eliminate waste. It's compiling all of this stuff. started learning all of that, you know, but I didn't, I didn't talk about all of that stuff publicly, but because it's just, it was too much, man. There's so much information out there that people didn't know about unless they start to ask the right questions.

Sure, sure.

You know, so crazy.

Okay. What actually happens when we sleep? What is the process? Like, what is our body doing specifically? Just so I'm aware in terms of how does it take in the nutrients or burn the fat or whatever it does? What happens? How's it recovering?

Sleep is so weird though, you know, it's and this is part of the reason that culture looks down on it in a way in a weird way like if you got 10 things to do sleep is one of them yeah, you know you know sleep when you're dead. Exactly. Hashtag no sleep. Yeah, right you know and the only.

Thing that's like a bad rating honor like right who slept less?

It's just accelerating the day to when you are sleeping when you're dead, you know because your body is really transforming itself while while you're asleep and so sleep is sort of weird because I.

Think they did it before you go into that. I think some documentary I saw, I think it was unhappiness talked about like the happiest people in the world or the oldest people in the world. They, one of the things they say is like we slept a lot.

Mm-.

And the people, like people over a hundred years old, like the key to living a long life was sleeping a lot. It's taking value, maps or whatever it may be.

It also getting like eight hours of sleep every night. Yeah. And so that's one of the things too, is that You know, at no point in the book do I say you need to get blank hours. It's more about the sleep quality. Sleep quality. You know, making sure that your body's getting the natural normal stages of REM and non-REM sleep, because that's really what's changing you. So we can start with the brain first. So this interesting process happens. It's actually called memory processing with your brain. So you've got these synaptic connections that happen just from people right now listening. data is changing what's going on with their brain and becoming physical structure. So this is why, number one, you wouldn't want to mind what you're listening to, by the way. But then there's this myelination process that basically makes these connections like a super highway. And a lot of that is going on while you're sleeping. So this memory processing, especially during REM sleep, is converting your experiences into short-term memories. And then eventually long-term memories. But if you're not sleeping, you're going to miss a lot. You're going to miss a lot of that process. so this is why it's really important for the brain as far as physically, man, there's so much going on here. Let's just talk about the whole weight loss thing, you know, because we, we know how our society is doing right now. It's not the best, but a lot is changing for the good. And there was a study done. It was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, two groups of exercisers, and they put them on the same diet, group a. got to sleep eight plus hours a night. Group B, they sleep deprived them. So they're getting like around five hours sleep per night. Group A lost far more weight and body fat than Group B. Only difference was the amount of sleep they were getting. So again, just kind of piggybacking on the point that your body is changing physically while you're asleep. One of the big reasons for that is something called human growth hormone, which people already probably know about thanks to, you know, Barry Bonds and, you know. Mark McGuire. Jason, yeah, Big Mac, Jason Giambi, Mariano Joe. Exactly. if you listen to the show, hey, shout out to you guys. But it's just understanding that this is an endogenous hormone that your body produces. And so human growth hormone is also known as, quote, the youth hormone, right? So kids have a lot of it, and that's why they have so much energy, right? And a lot of parents are just kind of sitting there watching their kids, you know, run around at the park like they're crazy, you know, and it's just they have so much of this human growth hormone going through the system and According to the research, when we get around the age of 18, we have a pretty sharp decline in human growth hormone. But my argument is that that's not necessarily the case. When we were around 18, we go to college and we stopped doing the things that help to encourage human growth hormone production because like, you know, Mom, you can't tell me what to do anymore. You know, I'm gonna stay up and, you know, do whatever we're doing because it's college, you know, and you, you're getting the biggest secretion of human growth hormone when you go to sleep. All right, so this is helping with lean muscle growth. This is helping with a lot of anti-aging factors. And speaking of that, another one is melatonin. So melatonin is like the quote sleep hormone, but it's not really that. It really is a get good sleep hormone. It helps you to go through the normal stages of sleep properly. And here's another thing though, is that melatonin is quite possibly our body's most important endogenous anti-cancer hormone. Okay? So this is why there's a study that I cited in the book done on nurses who work overnight. There was like over 50% increased incidence of them having breast cancer. No way. Yeah. And then so that's what I do, man. It's like crazy. Here's the research and why it's a problem, but here's why it actually is happening. It's because of melatonin, you know, and just if you're throwing off your sleep.

Cycle like that, you're missing a lot of these.

Benefit.

You want to learn about the key foods you need to eat to master your health, make sure to watch this video right here. And stress, all of those are contributing to disease. But by far the biggest cause is food.

Really?

By far. And it affects, I mean, what's amazing is it's not just like a little bit.