These 5 HEALTH FACTORS Are Killing You Unless You CHANGE THIS! | Lewis Howes

There's no medication that reverses diabetes. There's no medication that reverses heart disease. There's no medication that reverses Alzheimer's dementia. They manage the symptoms, you know, and maybe.

Maybe some relief a little here and there.

Relief, but they do not create health. And what health is? Health is.

I've also heard examples of people who, let's say, eat perfectly, but still have challenges. Maybe their relationships are off and they're in a stressful environment in their relationship or their marriage or whatever it might be, or they just react poorly, they worry often to things they see and experience. They're a warrior. And so every time they worry, there's a, I guess the stress hormone is spiking, right? And sending hormones to the body, which is spiking blood levels. Is that right? Yeah. Blood sugar. So it sounds like the psychological side of things is also extremely important to understand and that every time you're allowing your body or your mind to ruminate on a consistent basis, it's sending a signal to the body in a negative way. which is helpful if there's a real life threat, but not when it's on a repeat every day, is that right?

That's exactly right. It's that chronically low-grade stress that can be really damaging. And there's, you know, something that's been really fun to experiment with is, you know, there's now heart rate variability monitors like Oura Ring or Whoop or Leaf Therapeutics. And what these do is heart rate variability is a metric that you can track that looks at actually the Time between each heartbeat. And oddly enough, we want the time between each heartbeat to actually not be consistent like a metronome. We want it to have some variability. Yeah, like maybe 0.7 seconds and then 1 point, I'm sorry, 0.7 seconds, 1.1 second, 0.9 seconds. That's variability.

Why do we want that?

It really is a symbol of a dynamic system. You know, you want elasticity in the system and that can sometimes have some irregularity to it. Sort of the way I kind of think about it is like a stiffer system is going to be a little bit more regular and there's sort of that-- and it's-- these are subtle. You know, it's not like you can feel it in your pulse if you just feel your pulse, but you can pick it up. And so we want more heart rate variability. And usually less lower heart rate variability is an objective measure of stress. And I've worn these things and been giving a talk on Zoom or something like that. And I'm looking at my data afterwards and my heart rate variability plummeted during the talk or I'm processing email, my heart rate variability goes down. And then, of course, glucose may go up. And so you see these things happening together. And the immediate thing, I think, is this is where our tools come in. This is where the deep diaphragmatic breath, where the mindfulness, where having awareness of this happening, and then there are so many things we can do to modify that stress response, even telling your body, you're safe. Everything is actually okay, can have a huge difference. So really dialing into awareness and then where can I apply the tools. So I would say I take about 100 times more diaphragmatic breaths now than I did a couple years ago because I realized, wow, if this is happening all the time throughout the day without my awareness, that's going to add up over the next 30, 40, 50 years and have a huge impact. But it's not actually just the chronic low-grade stress. There's been a lot of research showing that acute traumatic events, like loss of a loved one or divorce or childhood events, so adverse childhood events, which are usually there's an acronym, ACEs. People who have many of these tend to actually have worse metabolic health. And this actually may be related to changes in the brain that affect metabolism, so really changing our set point for stress thresholds early on in life. So sometimes we'll have that patient like you talked about who's doing everything right. They're eating really healthy, but they're just really not quite making that progress towards driving that they want. And a lot of those patients, I'm thinking about what is the deep core wounds and what's the set point that's causing you to feel that this world is not a safe place, that is causing you to be inherently hypervigilant. and doing that work even on myself has been so positive because I think what you start to unpack as you go down that journey is that your perception of the world and whether it's safe is very much dictated by your lifetime of experience. And I think for those of us who have been on a journey of like therapy and now people are very interested in of course how psychedelics can fit into this and then, you know, other modalities long-term meditation, deep meditation events and things like this that can really unwind some of those kind of amygdala-based, fear-based responses in the brain. I think there's huge potential there for that to potentially unlock a new level of health because what it's doing is changing the fundamental way you see the world as a place of threat or a place of safety. Unfortunately, I think in our modern world, fear has become a currency that we've used to profit in a lot of ways. If we can get people to be fearful, we can get them coming back for information that assuages that fear. And we see that with social media. We see it with the news. There was that undercover reporting of one of the CNN executives who said, recorded saying, if it bleeds, it leads, you know, that we need to get people fearful for them to come back and watch. And what that's doing to our stress hormones, to our brain set point, to our desire to have dopamine stimulation to kind of get some pleasure in the face of all this fear, the way that's affecting our cellular biology is profound. And so, you know, I think all of this movement that we're seeing right now towards helping people, towards normalizing mental health care, normalizing You know, psychedelic use is not an end-all be-all, but I think it's interesting how that's now being talked about as a way to really help people unlock some of this chronic fear. I think it's going to have, you know, could have positive impacts on the body, because if we're living with chronic fear, our bodies are not functioning properly, and many of us are.

Did you live with chronic fear for a while?

I think that, The healthcare system, the conventional healthcare system unfortunately uses fear as a way to control patients in a lot of ways. You think about a conversation between a physician and a patient and it's like, you know, your cholesterol is a little high, you need to take a statin. And the patient might say, well, can I have some time to work on diet and lifestyle? Well, I mean, it's your choice. I mean, I'd recommend the statin right now because obviously I don't want you to have a heart attack. But, you know, sure, if you want to try diet and lifestyle, that's the type of thing that's happening every day. Where this fear of bad outcomes is, I think, driving very much a pharmaceutical and invasive intervention type of strategy.

And.

I think that that really was unsavory to me because it's very disempowered. It's like, if I can drive fear in a patient, then I can essentially get them to do whatever intervention I recommend.

And as a surgeon-- Medicines, procedures, anything.

Right, exactly. You know, oh, well, if we don't treat this ear infection with antibiotics, then could travel to the brain and create a brain infection. And it's like most ear infections resolve on their own without antibiotics. And overuse of antibiotics is causing huge, huge problems with our gut, which then leads to mental health issues and metabolic problems. And it's like, but if people are scared of the potential outcome that may be very rare, then of course you can kind of get them to do stuff. And I think that, I don't think that doctors are intentionally doing this. I think we have an incentive system in Western healthcare that really drives people to towards intervention. But I think that, you know, I also think that with COVID we saw this happen where, you know, this fear of, you know, anyone, you know, being harmed from COVID or, you know, that we, you know, kind of got people to do anything and everything. And we're kind of losing this, we're losing kind of that rational sense of, the risk that is inherent in living. We get in a car every day and there is risk involved in that, but we choose to do it. And I think that there's just a lot of sort of fear-based thinking that happens in the healthcare system that unfortunately disempowers patients and pushes them to do interventions more quickly. When I think that there is so much opportunity to help coach them with diet and lifestyle, which takes longer, it's harder. But ultimately it generates health rather than just putting a band-aid on disease. There's no medication that actually generates health. Only diet and lifestyle strategies generate health. And so that should obviously be the foundation of our medical system, but unfortunately we're not very well trained as physicians to know that information or to coach on it. But yeah, to answer your question, I think a large part of my personal journey has been trying to overcome fear.

Really, one of them.

Personal fear. One of the biggest examples of this is my mom just passed away. And about a year ago from cancer, and just as any normal person, I spent my life fearing my parents' mortality. Like, it's like, oh, this is gonna be horrible and devastating. And I think a lot of people worry about premature loss of a parent. And, you know, I think going through that experience and it actually being a very beautiful transformational experience. It was sort of a surprise and she had two weeks between her diagnosis and her death. We had this beautiful time together as a family. She was actually very much on the same page about sort of holistic health as me and knew in her heart that she was dying very rapidly. She chose to stay at home, be with the family. We were all together. had this spectacular two weeks. The hospital system through every possible medium was trying to pull her into the system. It was pancreatic cancer, so it's like, you need a liver stem, you need a liver biopsy, you need a blood transfusion, you need to start chemo immediately. And the reality was she knew I'm dying right now. She ended up dying in two weeks. None of the interventions would have helped. We wouldn't even have had a--: Would.

Have lasted maybe a few more months.

Or a few more weeks, maybe you don't know. I actually don't think at all.

I think that--: Might have caused more stress. stress and more.

Well, and it was COVID, so she would have been in the hospital and we could have not visited her.

Oh, that'd be tough.

So, anyways, that experience of seeing her approach, seeing her pure joy in the face, she was just ended her last two weeks very joyfully, was very at peace. We had that time together. She was not just like locked in the hospital doing interventions that would not have helped very much. I realized, oh, something I've been fearing my entire life happened was the most transformational growth experience I've ever had. I still feel way more connected to my mom than I ever could have imagined. No one can tell you, oh, you're gonna still feel connected until you maybe experience that. And it kind of made me realize fear is kind of not useful. So I think that something like that, and I think it probably lots of people have their own examples, Just kind of makes you realize the futility of living in fear. And, you know, what does it do? It damages your body. It doesn't really change the outcome. A little bit of healthy fear is useful, of course. Like, you don't want to cross the street without looking. But the idea that we should be fearful all the time, like, then that's going to protect us, is such a fallacy. So turning to stoic philosophers, turning to, you know, some sort of Eastern texts, Buddhist and Taoist texts, like sort of looking into traditions that have thought this way has been a really useful part of my journey and I think needs to be a part of how the healthcare system reforms because we weaponize fear of death as a way to control patients into doing anything we want. And I think fundamentally overcoming your fear of mortality, which is the the only thing we can be certain of in this world. And really approaching that with a sense of awe and a sense of curiosity and a sense of what can this teach us about how to live, I think is an absolute foundational part of what we need to do as individuals, but also the healthcare system, because otherwise we're just using fear as this thing, fear of death as this thing, to just wrangle people into as many interventions and as pharmaceuticals as possible with the off chance that people think it's gonna somewhat reduce their chance of mortality.

So what I heard you saying there was that there is no medicine that can actually make you healthier, is that correct? Or that could actually solve the issue on the medicine itself?

The vast majority of all medications, I probably wouldn't say all on a record, but I would say the vast majority.

Most.

Do not generate health in the body.

They manage-- They don't cure the disease or whatever.

If you take away a diabetes medication from someone, their diabetes is not gone. It's right back there where it was. Whereas if you get someone to really foundationally improve their cellular function, which can only be done through consistent dietary and lifestyle habits, they can truly reverse their disease. But there's no medication that reverses diabetes. There's no medication that reverses heart disease. There's no medication that reverses Alzheimer's dementia.

They just kind of manage the symptoms.

They manage the symptoms.

And maybe some relief a little here and there.

Relief, you know, life extension for some of them, but they do not create health. And what health is, Health is optimal cellular functioning. We are just a big bag of cells and each cell needs to be functioning properly for us to have health. What is a symptom? What is disease? That is cellular dysfunction happening on the individual level. If that's happening in mass, that might be tissue dysfunction. If that's happening in a bigger way, it's organ dysfunction and that's when we see symptoms and disease. So we have to really zoom in on what's happening in the cell. And what is a cell is being, getting its information from what you're eating, what it's being built from, which is your food, what stress hormones it's seeing binding to its little cell membrane, you know, what's happening with your hormones, which of course is dictated by stress and by sleep and by exercise and by food. It's the super complex milieu that can only be optimized by the choices that we're making every day, day in and day out consistently. even by the sunlight we're exposing ourselves to in the morning. And, you know, Andrew Huberman talks about this all the time, but literally the consistent exposure of sunlight first thing in the morning is chemical information to your body through the sunlight's energy to tell your cells how to function. You can't put that in a pill. You know, it has to happen through these millions of years of evolutionary involved processes. And so, yes, like medications can't with their one pathway that they might be intervening on truly generate foundational cellular health, which is what we need to achieve.

They don't bring wholeness back to the cell. I guess there's what, some creams or something that might help you heal a cut or something like that, but we're talking about a chronic illness medication, right?

Yeah, but even if you think about a cut, I mean, A cut is like, it seems so simple, but it's actually so complex. It's like, if you think about people with disease, like diabetes for instance, one of the reasons that people with type 2 diabetes die is because of chronic wounds. They have wounds that won't heal. Interesting.

Oh yeah, and I know that.

Are they internal wounds or external wounds? External wounds. People can get, something that happens with people with diabetes is they often have nerve damage because of the way the blood sugar is affecting the nerves, so then their feet become numb, and then they might get a cut on their foot, they don't feel and then that festers and because of their high blood sugar, their immune cells don't work so they can't heal the wound.

And then they die from the wound.

And then they get a huge systemic infection that might lead to death or an amputation. So the majority of lower limb amputations are caused by diabetes, diabetic ulcers that are like wounds.

How many people have type 2 diabetes in the US? Do we know the number?

Oh yeah, well there's 128 million people Million Americans with pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. Of those 30 million have full-on type 2 diabetes.

30 million out of what? 300 and what is that 300 something?

Yeah, it's about 13% of the population.

Has type 2 diabetes.

Yeah, and it was less than 1% in the 50s and 60s.

And pre-diabetic you're saying 100 million.

Yep.

What is pre-diabetic mean? Who is someone who might be pre-diabetic?

Well, it actually can be quite surprising. There are lots of young, healthy people walking around who look otherwise fit who have pre-diabetes and don't know it. 90% of people with pre-diabetes do not know that they have it.

How do you know if you have it?

Well, the easiest way to do it is through a blood test. So you basically get a fasting blood sugar test from your doctor and if it's between 100 and 125 milligrams per deciliter of fasting glucose, that's considered Pre-diabetes.

100 to 125. 100 to 125. What do you want to be at?

What's a healthy range? So what's considered normal is 100 or below. 100 or below. But I would say that that is way too lenient of a range because what we figured out is that people in the low end of normal are much less likely to develop long-term problems with heart disease, stroke, or diabetes. So even if you're in the high normal range and your doctor says to you, oh, your fasting blood sugar is 97, you're great, you're normal. That's very close to 100. I see that as a huge red flag.

Wow.

You are metabolically dysfunctional if that's the case. And so really where you wanna shoot for is about 70 to 85 milligrams per deciliter.

Do people get a test that they can order and do this themselves or do you have to go to a doctor? Sure.

You can actually buy it at CVS or at the pharmacy. What's it called? Prick your finger. Or what are these called? One drop. They're called glucometers. Glucometers. So you can just, they're like literally $20 on Amazon.

There's Keto Mojo. You just prick your finger and then.

It'Ll tell you right away or in a few minutes. Five seconds.

Yeah. So then it just tells you what your level's at.

What it is. And it's cool to check it actually day to day, like for a few weeks, because one thing you'll find is that let's say you have one poor night of sleep. Let's say you had a big work thing do and you got six hours instead of eight hours. Your blood sugar in the morning might be 10 points higher. Come on. Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

Or let's say you had a really late meal the night before. Your blood sugar might be higher the next morning. So when it starts putting together for you is this is very dynamic. And if I did these activities day after day, year after year for my whole life, I'm building. So figure out what allows you to be in that 70 to 85 range. Maybe it's like a really awesome workout in the middle of the day prior and getting to bed a little bit earlier and getting morning sunlight exposure and doing some deep breathing in the morning. And all of a sudden you're like, oh cool, my blood sugar is 72 milligrams per deciliter, you know? or fasting for 16 hours or something like that. But figuring out what works for you to stay in that low range and then dial it in for as many days of the week as possible as you can. The other really interesting thing about fasting blood sugar as a test is that the body, like we were talking about with the insulin resistance, it's very adaptable. And when the body starts becoming insulin resistant, so it's saying we're seeing too much glucose around, we're producing, like, we're gonna create an insulin block. What the body does is it's like, well, we've got to get this glucose out of the bloodstream. So it starts producing more insulin. So your insulin levels will actually start rising as you become insulin resistant to push more of that glucose into the cells. And so a study in the Lancet, a big medical journal, showed that you can actually keep your blood sugar levels normal for like 13 years prior to them elevating and all the while insulin is rising, but it's compensating to keep glucose low. Unfortunately, because we don't check fasting insulin in this country, we're missing that window where people are clearly becoming insulin resistant, but their glucose still looks normal on their yearly check. So to just make this concrete, you and I could both go to the primary care doctor and have a fasting glucose of 80 milligrams per deciliter. And so the doctor says to both of us, you're both in perfect health. if I'm really insulin resistant because I'm on that glucose roller coaster and I'm getting poor sleep and I'm chronically stressed and not managing it and I have childhood trauma that I haven't addressed, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, I could be at 80, but I'm doing that by my insulin being elevated to like 35 or 40 and your insulin might be 2. So your body's not working hard at all to keep your insulin at 80 and my body is having to produce so much insulin. So, I am clearly on the path towards metabolic disease, diabetes, and all the associated conditions, heart disease, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer's, fatty liver disease, gout, infertility, erectile dysfunction, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're in the clear, but our doctor tells us that we're the same. So, this is why I recommend that every patient ask their doctor for a.

Fasting insulin check because you have a sense of what's actually happening under the hood. Have you seen anyone who is the mind is under so much attack that they've been addicted to substances, they've tried to get off, and they're unable to stay consistent with healthier habits because they had some type of mental condition that was so aggressive that they were just like, I need to drink, I need to smoke because I've tried the other way and it doesn't work. Or have you seen people who have been successful time after time if they're able to follow the challenging practices consistently to improve the quality of their brain.

So, I would say they're simple practices. I've seen people-- It's challenging for people to-- I've seen people both ways.

Yeah.

Right. And often it takes enough pain for them to change. But sometimes like losing their kids. But sometimes even when they lose their kids, they don't change because their brain has been highjacked. I mean, I don't know if you're like me, but one of the reasons I never did drugs is I never wanted something else to control my life.

Yeah, that was one of the reasons. I also never wanted to make an excuse if, because I would see people, especially playing football in college, guys would get drunk after a game and then they would, they would not be well the next day at practice. That was one. I was like, I want to have an advantage, but then people would do things and they're like, cheat on their girlfriend. They're like, Well, I was drunk. I'm sorry. I was like, if I cheat or do something bad, I want to own it. I want to be responsible for being a jerk or being an asshole or whatever I did, as opposed to blaming.

A substance that did that thing. So you want to be in control. Absolutely. Of your whole life. And that's what I want. I don't want anything else controlling me. And if you know these things are potentially addictive. It's like playing Russian roulette. It's like, I would never play Russian roulette. I'm like, that's stupid. why would I increase my chance of trouble? To think you're invulnerable.

What about the wave of plant medicine use and normalization of plant medicine, the people saying it's transformational work, helping them heal their pain of their past, helping them overcome trauma, helping them break through things they've never been able to mentally break through with? this work of ayahuasca, plant medicine, all these different things. What are your thoughts on that in terms of brain scan results?

Well, I actually did a study with ibogaine, which is one of the plant medications.

It's like an ayahuasca or.

It's like ayahuasca and it wasn't good from a brain perspective.

Really?

But I think it's gonna be an interesting, exciting part of psychiatry. And there are lots of studies that's just recently legalized. Not now, but in two years in Oregon.

They legalized what? Plant medicine?

Plant medicine.

In Oregon.

Mushrooms.

Oh, they are.

Psilocybin.

In Oregon.

Yeah.

Microdosing.

Because there's so much stress.

The problem is, I wish, so the big innovations in psychiatry now are magic mushrooms and marijuana and more medications. And I'm like, how about diet exercise and learning how to not believe every stupid thing you think? Don't you think we should at least.

Start- Let's start and sleep.

Let's start with brain health. But I think it's going to be an interesting, exciting thing. But, you know, psychiatrists were really interested and excited about Valium. And they were really interested and excited about cocaine. Freud used cocaine. And they went, oh, they're interested and excited about marijuana. And they go, well, the brain has cannabinoid receptor sites. Well, the brain also has benzoreceptor sites and that didn't work out well. And the brain also has opiate receptor sites and that didn't work out. Well, we should be finding ways to naturally increase opiates and that's exercise.

Well, people say, well, plants are natural. You know, and this has been happening for centuries with our ancestors.

And cocaine is natural.

Right? Right.

I mean, just because... Sugar is natural, I guess. Sugar is natural.

Right.

I mean, is it helpful? That's the question.

So, what about magic mushrooms or mushrooms are microdosing this? You know, I've heard mushrooms are good to eat, you know, food mushrooms.

Well, I actually make, I have a supplement company called BrainMD, and we make something called Smart Mushrooms. I put a scoop in my shake every morning. It's got lion's mane and cordyceps. and Rishi, and they have both immune system benefits and cognitive benefits. And I feel at 66, every bit as sharp as when I was 20.

So, what's the difference between those mushrooms.

Versus the- They don't make hallucinogenic effects.

What happens to the brain when we hallucinate?

It activates. It actually turns on some of the limbic or emotional parts of the brain. And if you're doing it in a therapeutic environment, you might be able to reprocess some of those painful memories in a different way. You might be able to separate from them, get a different perspective of them. But there are other ways to do that that might not have side effects. Like there's a treatment for trauma I like called EMDR.

I'm just going to ask you.

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. I studied that in police offices.

I hear amazing things.

So helpful.

And that does a similar strategy of.

Activates your emotional brain and then calms it. So I did a study with police officers who had PTSD from being involved in shootings. And most police officers don't want to be involved in shootings, that it becomes traumatic for them if they hurt someone and like soldiers in war, and they were all off work. And on average of eight EMDR sessions, they all went back to work and it calmed down the emotional parts of their brain. So that's pretty exciting. There's another technique I use called Havening, which is bilateral hemisphere stimulation. That's what EMDR is. You bring up the trauma, get your eyes to go back and forth, and that trauma connects to another trauma, which can connect to another trauma. It's really interesting. But Havening is just really simple. It's thinking about the trauma. I want people always to go into their pain, not away from their pain. And so, for example, I told you my dad died May 5th last year. And a couple of days later, I'm at my mom's house and we're just going through paperwork. I mean, it's what you do after somebody dies. Somebody, some idiot, had a picture of my dead father in the mortuary, in that stack of papers. And I'm just, and all of a sudden I find it and it hits me. And it just bothered me. And a couple of hours later, I realized it was bothering me. It was circling in my head. And so I teach my patients this. It's Havening. It's like, think about what's bothering you. And for 30 seconds, stimulate both hemispheres of your brain. So as I do this, it's stimulating that side. If I do that, stimulate, while you bring up the trauma, and do that like up to six times. And after the first time, I'm like, that's the last picture my dad will ever see. And it was okay. And then I did it twice more. And the picture became my favorite picture of my dad, 'cause he was at peace. And I slept like a baby that night. And the picture never bothered me again. It's just simple, and there's these simple techniques that everybody should know. Why do you have to be sick to learn how to be well? Shouldn't we have, and we have a high school course called Brain Thrive by 25. that we teach kids how to love and care for their brains, their minds, their relationships and be purposeful.

Inflammation seems like sort of like a ghost in the machine, you know, it's like, ooh, inflammation, but it truly is, you know, if you look at the root word, you know, coming from the Greek and the Latin, it means to set on fire, right? And so there are these... Flame, it's like... And these are some of the outward symptoms we might think about is just like pain, swelling, bruising, burning, aching, those type of things. But there's a massive, the majority of the information that folks are experiencing oftentimes go unnoticed. There are these little kind of chronic low-grade fevers or little fires burning that are contributing to a lot of different metabolic disorders. And the reason that our bodies are doing it is really the inflammation is sending out a distress signal from different tissues to recruit and call in the immune system to support in defending against infections and repair. The list goes on and on. Inflammation is actually not a bad thing. It's a heal, right?

Right.

If we would get a wound, we would never heal without inflammation. If we got an infection, it would be deadly without inflammation. It's an important part of our evolution and our health.

What's the difference between that and chronic inflammation?

Right.

So, what we generally think about is acute inflammation when we think about like a short-term intrusion, maybe an injury or an infection, for example, which the inflammation might last a few hours, even a few days. Right. But if inflammation is lasting for a long amount of time and also showing up in the wrong places, it can be devastating. And so now we're talking about chronic inflammation. And if we're venturing into chronic inflammation, we've got to look at what are the underlying components, what is, what is creating the fire, what is throwing gasoline on fire as well. And so if we take one of the conditions that you mentioned, so right now here in the United States, we've got about 242 million of our citizens are overweight or obese. 240 million.

Out of how many? Out of how many?

Right around 330,000.

330 million.

Sorry, 330 million.

So 240 million.

Yeah.

So we're looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 70 to even upwards of 80%.

How is that possible now?

Exactly.

That's how we've gotten this far. How is it just food is too accessible, the wrong kinds of foods are too accessible to so many people now? Social media, is it laziness? Why have we shifted from being a healthy nation, I don't know, probably 60-70 years ago, to an unhealthy nation?

It's really a perfect storm of all the things. The first thing to look at and to ask is what's going on? Our genes expect certain things from us. Our DNA expects certain things to have healthy outcomes or healthy cell replication, healthy expression. And so we've got to look at what are the things our genes expect of us. Our genes expect us to move. For example, we're the most sedentary culture in the history of humanity and recorded human history. We're the most sedentary culture to ever exist right now.

All of humanity or just USA?

Especially the US. We're the LeBron James. We're the king of sedentary behavior.

We're the Homer Simpsons.

We're the... Stove? Yeah, we're really leading the league in these things. And so that's number one. Also, our genes expect us to get adequate sleep. This is something that we've talked about multiple times on the show, but it's built into our evolution. And if you think about sleep, it's very strange because you're incredibly vulnerable, you're unconscious, You'd think we might evolve out of it just for safety. But the thing is, so many wonderful, absolutely amazing things take place during sleep that we just haven't found a way to replicate. Right? So even with the reduction of inflammation, which we'll talk about more, you know, we have microglial cells in our brain, which is kind of the brain's immune system. And it's primarily active when we're sleeping to reduce inflammation, to clean out metabolic waste, and things of the like.

What would you say are the five biggest benefits of the greatest night of sleep consistently? What are the five main benefits that you get if you get deep REM sleep for seven, eight hours a night consistently? No interruptions, no light exposure, all the things you talked about in your other book, Sleep Smarter. What are the five main benefits that come from that versus interrupted sleep, four hours of sleep, staying up late with the phone, you know, having coffee late at night, all that stuff. What's the benefits?

Well, just power, power pack, bullet point, these. Number one, and this is because our culture, we are, I always like to connect to something visceral and people, we care about how we look.

Of course.

And so, you,'re young guys. Nobody's, right, nobody's waking up like, I want to look so old today. I want to get my George Burns on. I want to be as old as possible, or I want to feel bad today about the way that I look, or they're not waking up like, I just want to look terrible and feel terrible today. And in my clinical practice, I never met one person, and people might argue these things and get into a, because of our cognitive biases, I never met anybody who wants to be unhealthy. Every single person wants to be healthy. Now, with that said, this is where sleep really comes into the fray because over the years, me being a nutritionist, I really, me being a nutritionist, I thought that food was everything, you know? Because it was for me, it was my bridge, but there's many paths to the goal. When you're sleeping, it is the most powerful anabolic state that you can be in. So it's just, you're just teeming with what we call these quote, anti-aging hormones, you know, the release of human growth hormone, for example, that really, it's also known as the youth hormone. you know, and also in that lane of body composition and overall health and fitness, researchers at the University of Chicago did a very simple study. They brought folks in and they wanted to see what would happen with their weight loss. They put them on a calorie restricted diet and they wanted to see what would happen with weight loss when they were well rested versus when they're sleep deprived. And so they put them under both conditions and I love studies that do that. They put people under both conditions to see what would happen. and so they allow folks to get eight and a half hours of sleep in one phase of the study, and they tracked all their metrics, their weight loss, Etc. And then they sleep deprived them for the other phase. So they was getting eight and a half hours. Now they're getting five and a half hours.

Tracked all their metrics.

Same group, same group on the same exact calorie restricted diet. Same calories. Yeah, everything. But when they were sleep deprived, when they were sleep deprived versus when they were adequately adequately rested when they were getting enough sleep, they lost 55% more body fat just by sleeping more. That's crazy.

It doesn't even make sense. Were they working out the same or was it like no movement?

What was it just like? Everything is the same. This is what I love too. It's a ward study. So they're under the conditions where they can track everything. Now, here's another part of study I don't often talk about is that they actually did biopsies. So they actually took fat cells to see what would happen with their fat cells under the different conditions. And what they came to the conclusion was that your fat cells actually need sleep too.

Oh.

Because when the fat cells were not, when you, when they weren't adequately adequately rested, their fat cells actually became more insulin resistant, which should become like, that should put up a huge red flag because insulin resistance is one of the classic signs is carrying more belly fat.

Right.

So the fat cells themselves, looking at them versus when you're well rested versus when you're sleep deprived, your fat cells themselves become insulin resistant. And it's just gonna lead to downstream problems with your liver, lipogenesis, the creation of new fat, the list goes on and on. So that's just one part, one thing. So number one, number two, the cognitive performance. And I love this study, this was published in the Lancet, and they wanted to see what would happen when physicians, they took physicians and had them to complete a task and tracked all their numbers. And they sleep deprived them for 24 hours, which is not abnormal in the field of medicine and had them to complete the same task, which is a simulation of different like surgical type of simulation. They made 20% more mistakes doing the exact same thing and it took them 14% longer to do the exact same thing. And this is a big problem in our culture. Again, we mistake being busy for being effective. And so that's the number two thing, the cognitive performance. Number three, and it parallels with cognitive performance is the health of our brain. And so researchers at UC Berkeley did brain imaging scans and we talked about this before, but they actually looked at the sleep deprived brain, just again, 24 hours of sleep deprivation and the part of the brain that's associated with executive function, right? So decision making, distinguishing between right and wrong, social control, so the prefrontal cortex, the more human part of our brain, that part of the brain goes cold. The activity of that part of the brain just literally, as we're more and more tired, just shuts down.

With the lack of sleep.

With the lack of sleep coupled with more activity in the amygdala, which is very much more primitive, driven by emotion, very much concerned with survival of self. And so that part of the brain just lights up like a Christmas tree or Las Vegas sign. You just came back from Vegas. So these changes happen in the brain very quickly, and that leads into number. Well, number three. reduce cognitive performance. So being able to manage our emotions, being able to manage our decisions. And then we'll go to number four is going to lean into this as well with the brain function is, I talked a little bit about this earlier. During sleep is when your glymphatic system, which is the brain's waste management system, cleansing it all out, is 10 times more active when you're sleeping than when you're awake. So this, and your brain is doing literally trillions of activities every second. And there's a lot of metabolic waste that takes place. And you have to have this cleansing system, this cleaning system, or you're going to have a buildup of things like amyloid beta plaque, for example, which that is strongly, strongly correlated with Alzheimer's disease. It's an inability of the brain to clean itself. And also insulin resistance in the brain we can talk about later. But we're wondering, again, why are these issues going up? Why is brain inflammation going up? These are the things. Are we getting enough sleep for the processes that normally just naturally want to happen? They do it on their own. Are we getting that?

The final thing, so four is the cleansing.

Right. Right.

Cleansing. So this is associated with disease prevention of the brain, longevity of the brain. And number five, you know, this is tough. There's so many different different things that this can benefit. But I would say for me and you as well, like we want to be able to perform. You know, we want to be able to use our body and our mind to compete, to get out and to play, to have a good time. And one of the fun things I've talked about in my first book, Sleep Smarter, was research that was done on basketball players, collegiate basketball players at Stanford. And they found that simply by increasing the amount of sleep that they were getting, not training more, not doing anything else differently, this shaved a full second off of their sprint time just by increasing their sleep. They improved, significantly improved their free throw shooting and their three-point shooting just by getting more sleep. And these are things that we just kind of, on a periphery, you kind of know that, but at the same time, are we utilizing it? So some of the greatest athletes in the world right now, Sleep is a part of their training. LeBron James, it's a part of his training. Usain Bolt, same thing. It's a part of his training. Now Serena Williams, the list goes on and on and on.

These things weren't taught to us when we were in high school. No.

They were just like, Get up at 4:00 a.m. and lift.

Yeah, right.

Just go right into somebody.

You know what I mean?

Make a play. Make a play. Keep your head on a swivel. But today, you know, it's really built into the system. Also the strength. strength training programs are built into the system, which is beautiful because again, when we were in high school, it was very, I mean, some stuff was starting to take place with folks being in the weight room, but it wasn't a big emphasis. Whereas now if you look at different sports, like a good friend, which I'm, it's so weird for me to say this right now. This is like the coolest thing. I actually got chills. Ozzy Smith. All right. So have an opportunity.

St. Louis icon, man.

Icon. When I was a kid, My two idols were Ozzie Smith and Michael Jackson. Wow. Yeah. I tried to wear the Thriller jacket to school and I got drove. That was not a good look. But Ozzie Smith could be my role model and I could just, I wanted to play, I wanted to compete, I played baseball. And so I actually met him at the gym. And so he was there, I think he was probably in his, around in his mid-60s maybe at the time. But he was there getting strong. Like, and he was one of the first, if not the first high level elite baseball players to really embrace strength training way back in the 80s. The reason that he did it, funny enough, was he tore his rotator cuff and he didn't want to be out. Like this was back in the day where it's just like literally you pat, you do whatever it takes to get on the field and he wanted to be there for his team. And so he just tried, had to find out a way to strengthen everything around it because he didn't want to have surgery. He would have been out for a year at the time. And now, you know, of course, Surgery has advanced tremendously since then. But so he found that he strengthened everything in his shoulder, but also he started throwing from a completely different arm angle. And still won 13 consecutive gold gloves.

It's crazy.

It's crazy. It's crazy.

Back flipping at the same time.

Right.

He's out there back flipping with the glove on. It's so powerful. But it's a big part of what our genes expect is to is to be strong in some different domain. And we talked about this before the show, that translates over into our lives as well. So that strength, if you can train your body and your mind, because your mind is in play too, life gets a little bit easier in many aspects. You feel more physically ready to handle whatever life throws at you. And so in the context that final one is being able to to perform at a high level, to recover from the training that we do, all the magic happens when you're sleeping. Absolutely. When you're up in the gym and training or you're out on the field competing, you're just tearing your body up.

That's all catabolic stuff. Yeah. You get the anabolic reward when you go to sleep. How much does alcohol, smoking, or marijuana, or psychedelics actually affect lifespan?

Do we have enough research on this yet or? Well, we do on tobacco smoking. Obviously, it's very clear that's a decade off your life. And what's interesting is that what we're learning about these various things that you can do to hurt yourself or to protect yourself is that what's happening is that your body is aging at a different rate. So smokers, you can measure it, are older biologically than people who've never smoked. That's why they look older too. We can measure that now in my lab. If I took your blood, I could tell you how old you are biologically. not just your chronology.

I want to do that. I saw you post this on Instagram.

That you're like 46, is that right? Or you're 42 or what is it? I went down to, what was it, 44 I think? Okay, 42. It bounces around but it's usually a.

Decade younger than I put on social media. So what do you do? You take a blood sample and then you what?

Measure the blood? There's two ways of doing it. There's one company that I advise called Inside Tracker and that's what I use. I've had that too, yeah. You've done that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they come to your home or you donate and then you get this readout of, I think it's 40 different parameters and they use an algorithm and tell you how old you are. So I'm 42 or something like that. I'm in the top 2% of people my age for youthfulness. So I'm happy with that. Just dust it off, a little brag over there.

I like it, yeah. Yeah, well, you better be if you're researching this and the top scientists in the world on this.

Yeah, I don't like to brag. That's not what Australians and scientists do. But what I do want to say is I use my body as an experiment.

Yeah.

And trying to be a role model. And I've been optimizing my lifestyle for 20 years now based on this feedback from InsideTracker for the last 12-13 years.

Wow.

And you can see the graphs of things going out of the optimal zone and then I make a change based on science and it comes back or even better.

So we know from smokers that their biological age is older when they smoke is what you're saying, right?

Yeah, well, that's one test. The Insight Tracker test is what I do routinely every few months. But there's a new type of test that my colleagues and in my lab we've developed. It's called the DNA methylation test. It's also known as the Horvath test named after my friend Stephen Horvath at UCLA. The way to think of this is if you've ever heard of the epigenome. I've heard of that. These are the control systems that control our DNA. It turns out that that system you can measure, it's chemicals on your DNA that change over time predictably. And we've just developed a way to measure that 100 times cheaper than it was before. And I'm going to bring this test to the public so people can test their biological age. At home or something? It should be a cheek swab.

That's what we're developing.

So you don't have to prick or.

Take blood or anything. You do a cheek swab. Exactly. And then you ship it in or something?

Yeah, you'll post it in. and then you get hopefully just a week later or less, here's your credit score for your body.

That's cool.

And then even better, here's how you slow down or reverse it based on everything we know about you.

Wow.

That's cool.

We'll take you on that journey. So do this, eat this, swallow this.

That is cool. I gotta take that test.

Yeah, well, you can get on the wait list if you want. Okay, there's a website because we are taking. names right now. We may do some studies with early adopters too.

That's cool. Where's the list?

It's called Tally. T-A-L-L-Y tallyhealth.com and the reason I'm excited about it is it's very hard to focus on what works because we have no idea. You exercise, you hope that it's good. Is it too much, too little? If I eat this, does it help me? We need a dashboard for our bodies and that's what these give you.

That is really cool. Okay. So, We know that smoking makes you age biologically. That's why it makes you look older smoking. What about drinking alcohol? We've talked about wine and the substance in wine that could be supportive, but alcohol in general, does that affect biological age and aging?

Well, it all depends on quantity. One glass a day, most doctors would say, especially if it's red wine, It's fine. And the alcohol actually can help with the cardiovascular system, reduces bad cholesterol, and more importantly, raises the good cholesterol HDL.

This is for red wine.

And the alcohol in white wine does a little bit of good too.

But beer.

So beer will raise the levels of uric acid, which is a breakdown product of a protein breakdown product that you can pee out. But if you have too much beer and other types of food that contain a lot of this type of protein, you will raise your uric acid level. So why does that matter? It's becoming very clear that if you have high uric acid levels, your body will age faster.

We just had Dr. David Perlmutter on who has a book about uric acid talking about this is one of the root causes of poor health and aging faster and things like that. So, I'll call it. You talk to him a lot? Yeah, yeah.

I actually was one of the first people to read his book before it came out.

Yeah, it's really good.

It blew my mind. I now measure my uric acid levels. You can get little test strips. You can just buy them online, usually.

You just pee on a stick.

You just sit on it and 10 seconds later you see.

You see your levels.

Acid levels, yeah.

And so, the lower the level, the better.

Right.

The higher the level means there's risk for, What?

Everything, according to David, it's really bad for cancers and heart disease mainly. But I think he's right that it's a sign of accelerated aging.

The higher the uric level, the faster you're gonna be aging.

Yeah.

And a larger amount of consumption of alcohol, specifically beer, I'm hearing, raises that level.

Beer in particular has a lot of the chemicals in it. that will raise uric acid, unfortunately. And that's from David Perlmutter. He gave me a list of foods. I still have it on there.

Like, that's so... Now, is there any benefit to beer in biology, in science? Does it help you improve the quality of your health? Does your brain get better? Does your body, your system get better? Does it make you younger at all? Or are there no benefits to beer biologically and in your brain?

There are benefits because there's alcohol in there and a little bit of alcohol is good for your cardiovascular system.

But there's other things that's good for your cardiovascular system, right? That you don't need.

So beer on the list of alcohols is at the bottom for health. Got it. Mostly, unless it's full of sugar, like those very sweet wines I think would be a problem. But beer does have a lot of vitamin B, B group vitamins, B3, tons of it.

But you can get that in other ways too.

You can.

So, what can you do? I mean, you gotta live as well.

Right, right.

I don't prescribe a life that's prolonging and feels longer. You gotta live a little.

Right, right. Enjoyment, the enjoyment of the richness of life. Yeah.

Right.

Though I am trying not to drink alcohol these days.

I've never been drunk in my life.

Yeah, amazing.

Never been drunk. I don't find it amazing because I just never found the that is, I never had the desire to do it. I never, I like tasted some when I was 16 and I was like, I don't understand why I would ever drink this. Plus it was also for me, maybe that's one of the reasons in your mind I look younger, I look like I haven't aged more, is because I found it as an advantage in sports. When everyone else was drinking, I was like, oh, it's weakening their immune system, it's making them slower. Mentally, this will give me an edge. in athletics. They were hung over after games in practice and I was like, I'm gonna be sharp. And so I just kept on with it. I was like, this is just gonna make me sharper. Now, I have my other vice. I use, you know, sugar in other ways is my vice. So, I'm not perfect, but does alcohol make you look older too?

In excess.

In excess. Gotcha.

Yeah, yeah. So, a little bit every day is okay. A little bit. But most doctors, like physicians would say, if you overdo it, you will age. And actually what you do as a researcher is you look at people who live a long time and compare them to either their twin, which has been done, or family members. Interesting. Yeah. And actually, how you live your life has a massive impact on how long you live. There's a twin study. They took identical twins, genetically identical, in Denmark and they said, okay, let's look at them through their life. And there were massive differences in how they looked and how long they lived. And when they went back to see what the causes were, they could figure out, first of all, that 80% of their lifespan was determined by how they lived, not their genetics.

You mean the way they felt about themselves, the people they hung out with, their environment, the activities they took on, or what do you mean?

Well, mostly their lifestyle. What they ate, did they smoke, did they drink, did they exercise? Those that did- Did they sleep well, all that stuff? Right, and those that did all the good things, the same genetics, twins born the same day, one could live 10.

Years longer than the other. Now this is what I'm curious about, were these twins hanging out all the time? Or were they, because usually when you're hanging out with someone all the time, you pick up the similar habits, right? You pick up a similar lifestyle habit as your parents, as your partner, and you kind of eat the same things. It's really hard to be like, I'm gonna drink every day and I'm not gonna drink every day if you're living.

Together and in the same room, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I wonder how that is. Maybe they, they got separated at birth or something. Interesting. But it does tell you a lot that the fact that 80 of our future health is in our own hands is, is liberating. That's really good. Because often we think, oh, it's not going to make a big difference. It really makes a big difference how you live your life every day. Focus on that. And one thing that I do is I look at my future self and I ask myself, What's that guy saying to me today if he could speak to me? What's he saying?

Please don't eat that.

Exactly.

Please don't drink that anymore. You had enough, like you're gonna hurt.

Me in 10 years.

That's how you need to think about it. It's coaching yourself 10, 20, 30 years out. Right. It's interesting, I asked David Perlmutter, I said, what are some things you wish you would have done sooner to improve the quality of your health? And he was like, Flossing. He was like, and I didn't go deeper into that, but I remember him saying that. I was like, there's wisdom in whatever it is. Maybe he had some gum issues or something he had to deal with at one point that was really affecting him for a year or two. I don't know. I'm just making this up. But if he can go back, he'd be like, I wish you would have done this better so I didn't have to suffer later.

Right? Yeah.

What are the things you've done or you're doing now that your 10-year-old self will be so happy for. But if he was in front of you right now, he'd just be hugging you and high-fiving you non-stop the things you're doing that he will appreciate in 10 years. And then what are a few things that he's gonna say, man, I really wish you wouldn't do that right now.

Oh, yeah. Okay. All right, so let's see. So I'm. So I measure myself so I can speak scientifically, not just that it makes me feel good. It's the. The one meal, one main meal a day.

He would be grateful for.

I'm sure of it. And as a result, I'm leaner and, you know, more ripped. I hate to say it.

You look lean.

I am lean.

You look really lean.

I've gone over the last two years from 150 pounds to 133. Yeah.

You look leaner even from when I. The first time I had you on, your face is leaner and chiseled.

Yeah. I don't think I can lose any. I want to lose anymore.

Yeah.

I need to go back to to the gym and do a little bit more.

So the one meal a day, but you weren't doing one meal a day.

What, five, ten years ago? No, I only started during the pandemic. Yeah, this is new for me too. It's hard actually when you begin.

Very hard.

You feel hungry because you've got those crashes that make you really hungry and you've got this hormone called ghrelin that makes you hungry. But once you get through that, it takes about three weeks. So anyone who tries it, make sure that you don't give up. early. Just power through and then your liver will wake up.

One main meal a day.

So that's one. The other thing I think that he will be happy is don't eat sugary foods.

Oh, man.

Yeah. Don't eat that cake. So at a restaurant, when they say, do you want dessert? I always say no. But then I'm hoping that someone at the table orders what I want. Yeah, but that's all you all I I need to taste it. I don't need to fill myself with a cake. Gotcha.

Because you still want to enjoy your life and live a full life, but you don't want to in 10 years be like, why do they eat cake every day?

It's not worth it.

Yeah.

Really. Your future self will thank you for it. Lifting weights, I know you do that, so I need to do more of that. I got a standing desk, so most of the day I'm standing, which is great. Again, you have to get used to it. You'll feel tired for the first few weeks.

Yes.

Your legs will. I'm now mostly focused on eating plants.

When did you start that?

That's recently.

Eating mostly plants?

Yeah, I've switched. I love meat. I wish that I could eat more. But you just gotta look at the science. There's some really good studies of thousands of people who just look at how long people live and what they eat. And I mean, it's not even an argument.

But there's so many people that bring in the argument, well, all these people have cured these diseases or whatever, you know, gotten rid of these things from meat only. But people make the argument, right? Like you see it online, people making the argument for meat, meat, meat. So where are they finding these research studies of people living longer on an only meat diet?

I don't know.

But you're not seeing them. You're not seeing studies of anyone that lives over 100 that all they do is eat meat.

Well, there might be one person or two, but when you look at 10,000 people, it's the vegan and the pescetarian that win out.

In the blue zones, right.

Yeah, and the numbers are something like that. You drop it down to you've got 88% less chance, or actually it's 12% chance for most diseases. So most diseases are protected by these diets.

Really?

Wait a minute, 88% less chance of what?

Of dying at any one point in the age range of the study, which is.

Oh, wow. By being a pescatarian.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's vegan pescatarian. Those are the best. Then above that would be actually pescatarian was better than vegetarian. A little bit of meat seemed to help, but it has to be fish.

What's the omega-3s in there, right?

Yeah. And. And particularly a laic acid is good. which is found in avocados and olive oil. That activates one of the protective enzymes that we study in the lab. Which acid? Oleic, O-L-E-I-C. What is some of that.

But not a lot of it.

It's a monounsaturated fatty acid or a MUFA. If you have a bit of olive oil, there's a supplement online that I get that has high levels of oleic acid in it that I take every day. Okay, cool.

With the DHA and EPA.

All that stuff. Yeah, all that good stuff.

Yes.

So that's my fish intake as a pill.

You don't eat fish, you eat very little.

Well, you know, I'm evolving my diet. So I've gone from a Mediterranean diet over the last 10 years to the last two, three months to all plant-based, no dairy, and yeah, no meat. And I'm just seeing what happens to my body. I'm measuring things. It's an experiment.

Yes.

It's not a philosophy. And if things don't work out biologically, I'll go back. I mean, I'd love to go back to a steak. I'm Australian after all. But I'm driven by science and that's all that is. Yeah.

Okay, so you got these four. Is there another thing that your future self would thank you for? One meal a day, don't eat sugary foods, that's going to be one of the most challenging for me. Lifting weights, eating mostly plants, was there anything else?

Get control over psychological stress.

Oh, yeah.

Why is this so important?

Well, the main problem is you have high levels of cortisol when you're stressed out psychologically. And it's clear that people who have high levels of, really high levels of stress are chronically ill and even it accelerates gray hair. That's actually a fact. It's not just a myth. You really are getting older. if you have stress.

Really? This is scientifically proven that if you're stressed out all the time or more frequently, you're gonna get older biologically.

Correct. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. And can you reverse gray hair without dyes?

Yes.

Really?

Well, not routinely, but there are examples of that. There are some drugs that have shown in the clinic that make hair go gray from gray to brown. The best example I can tell you is that when people are stressed out, let's say they're in the banking world and they're losing their minds, you can find hairs that start to turn gray.

Okay?

So you look at them and they're a little bit gray at the bottom. Oh, good, turning gray, okay. Then they get given a vacation and they go away for a couple of weeks and guess what happens to the hair shaft?

It gets brown.

It's brown again. You can find these gray brown segments of hair.

Interesting.

And people.

Yeah.

And what they tracked it down to was that the cells that make the hair pigment start to shut down, but they can be reinvigorated. But I suspect once you've been gray for a number of years, it's really.

Hard to reverse that.

It's hard to reverse that, yeah. But I'm the first person to say aging is not unidirectional. In my lab, we're driving it forwards and backwards at will. It's not really difficult anymore once you figure it out.

If we just sleep poorly one night or over and over and over again, how does that impact the brain chemistry?

Yeah, so I think firstly in response to the general question, sleep is probably the single most effective thing that you can do to reset both your brain, but also your body health of course as well. And I don't say that flippantly. against the notions of diet and exercise. Of course, both of those are fundamentally critical. But if I were to take you, Lewis, and I were to deprive you of sleep for 24 hours, deprive you of food for 24 hours, or deprive you of even water or exercise for 24 hours, and then I were to map the brain and body impairment that you would suffer after each one of those four, hands down by a country mile, a lack of sleep will implode your brain and body far more significantly. The only one I would probably lose out on is oxygen. At that point, I'll give it up. Sleep will take the silver medal. Oxygen definitely gets the gold. But thereafter, sleep seems to be paramount.

Over sleep, food and water, sleep is the most important thing.

I would say, yeah, I used to say that sleep was the third pillar of good health alongside diet I think the evidence has suggested that I was utterly wrong that sleep in fact is the foundation on which those two other things sit. And you can do wonderful things in those two domains, but if you're not getting sufficient sleep, those things tend to be far more futile as a consequence.

And so what is sufficient sleep then?

So right now we recommend somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult. once we know that you go below seven hours of sleep, we can start to measure objective impairments in your brain and your body. And in fact, the number of people who can survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing any impairment rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is zero.

Without any impairment, what does that mean?

So, if I can measure lots of different operations of your brain, let's say your cognition, your attention, your learning and memory, also your moods and your emotions and your anxiety, or downstairs in the body, I can measure aspects of your cardiovascular system or your blood pressure, or I could measure your immune system or your metabolic system, how it's regulating your blood sugar and your glucose. I can measure this sort of pinwheel, this kaleidoscope of health metrics on Lewis Howes. And then I can see when I keep dialing you back with less and less sleep, at what point do I see at least one of those things demonstrating a breaking point? And it's very rare for us to be able to find any individual who can go below six hours of sleep and not show some kind of impairment. And a great, even frightening demonstration of this A study took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week. And then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hour night of sleep.

And what happened?

And there were two critical findings. The first was that a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that one week of short sleep. And that's, you know, in some ways, I think about this, Lewis, because it's reality. We know that almost a third of the population is trying to survive on six hours of sleep or less. So it's not just, you know, total sleep deprivation, which doesn't happen very frequently. This is a common occurrence. What I found most interesting was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity the other half were decreased. Now, those genes that were suppressed were genes associated with your immune system. So you became immune compromised or immune deficient. Those genes that were increased in their activity or what we call overexpressed were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes that were associated with cardiovascular disease and stress, and genes that were associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body. and I make that point just because, you know, many people, I think, have this concern about things such as genetically modified embryos or even genetically modified food. But when we don't get sufficient sleep, we are unwittingly performing a genetic manipulation on ourselves. You know, if we don't let our kids get the sleep that they need, then we're inflicting a similar genetic engineering experiment on them as well.

Wow, this is crazy. So, what if you've been sleeping less than six hours a night for years? What is that saying to your genes? And is there a way to recover the gene damage and reverse and go back to a healthy genes, healthy body, healthy life?

So firstly, we know that short sleep duration, so using that sweet spot and we can speak about oversleeping or excess sleep because I think that's an interesting part that hasn't been spoken about too much. But using that recommended CDC amount of seven to nine hours of sleep, there is a simple fact, firstly, across the lifespan, which is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. That short sleep predicts all-cause mortality. But then we can dig a little bit deeper and start to sort of ask, you know, exactly what is going on? Why is there such mortality risk? caused by insufficient sleep. And what we know is that a lack of sleep and typically getting certainly less than six hours of sleep is associated with a high risk of cardiovascular disease, high risk of diabetes, high risk of stroke, high risk of dementia. And I would love to double click on that and go into the Alzheimer's disease risk because that now evidence is very, very strong. And then downstairs in the body, we know that there is links between a lack of sleep and certain forms of cancer. after, if I were to take you and limit you to, let's say, four or five hours of sleep for one week, your blood sugar levels would be so disrupted that your doctor would classify you as being pre-diabetic.

Oh, my goodness.

So that's not a lifetime. That's just one week. And there's an even more interesting experiment that I think speaks to the subtlety of this, because there is the largest sleep study that's ever been conducted. and it happens actually to around 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called Daylight Savings Time. Now, in the spring, when we lose just one hour of sleep opportunity, firstly, what we've seen is that there seems to be a 24% increase in relative heart attack risk the next day, which stuns me. And what's fascinating, in the fall, in the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, There's a 21% reduction in heart attacks. So it's bidirectional and that's just one hour of sleep. And you see, there was some great recent data, you see a very similar profile regarding that daylight saving shift for road traffic accidents on our streets.

I've heard about this.

Tragically, suicide rates as well. And then even more recently, what we discovered is that During that spring time shift when you lose an hour of sleep, the sentencing of federal judges is significantly harsher because their mood and their emotion is that much worse because of that one hour of lost sleep that they dole out harsher sentences. So, you know, we can walk, you know, you can ask the question, what about a lifetime? We don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep. We can ask about these really one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep. And I think that is how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep. And you could then ask, well, why are we so sensitive? Because I can go without food for 24 hours, and I can go without water for 24 hours. I am still not too bad. fairly decent shape. Why is sleep the exception to that rule? And the answer seems to be this: human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason.

Why is that?

And it was such a unique thing. And what that means is that mother nature, through the course of evolution, because no other species does this without real need for survival. And I can speak about some of the exceptions, but human beings are strange like this. In other words, Mother Nature hasn't have to face the challenge of coming up with a solution called sleep deprivation, because she's never faced it in the course of evolution. And so there is no safety net in place here. And that's why we think human beings implode so quickly and thoroughly mentally, cognitively, and physically caused by insufficient sleep.

And why do you think, why are the majority of people bad at getting good sleep? Is it, is it we're distracted? Is it we think we need to be doing more? Is it we're stressed and worried about the past and the future? Is it, you know, what we just want to work harder? What is the main cause of why we get poor sleep?

That's such a fundamental question. And in some ways, all of the above plus. So I think the first, and I've thought about this a great deal, why are we suffering this global sleep loss epidemic that we're under right now? I think the first thing is that unfortunately sleep has an image problem. That, you know, the PR agent for sleep should be fired because we associate sufficient sleep with this concept of being lazy. of being slothful. And that's a terrible disservice to this thing called sleep. And it is very different to things like diet and exercise. You know, I think a lot of people like to virtue signal with, you know, what they eat. And they certainly are very proud to tell you, you know, I work out five times a week. I'm in the gym at this time of morning. And, you know, all of which I think are great and to be applauded and to support it. But we have the very opposite. We have this almost, you know, well, we, we don't. Some, some niches of society have this sleep machismo attitude. You know, this kind of, you can sleep when you're dead, mentality, which, by the way, based on the evidence, is mortally unwise. Yeah, it will lead to both a shorter life and a life that is significantly less healthy. So I think the first thing is we need to change our cultural appreciation of sleep. from something that is a waste of time to something that in fact is an incredible investment. It is probably the very best and the most freely available, democratic and painless health insurance policy that I could ever imagine. I think the next thing is the way that we work in society. We are working for longer hours and before the pandemic, people were commuting increasingly longer amounts of time. What that meant was that people were leaving the house earlier, they were arriving home later, and no one wants to shortchange time with family or Netflix or whatever it is. You're poison. And so the one thing that has become squeezed like vice grips in the middle of the night is this thing called a sufficient bout of slumber. But then there are plenty of people who give themselves the opportunity to get enough sleep, but they can't obtain it. And that is where things such as insomnia or sleep disorders, things like snoring, come into play. And you touch on, and I know that you've spoken, and I'm so grateful for what you've done regarding discussions of mental health. We know that one of the principal roadblocks to getting this thing called a good night of sleep is anxiety.

Stress, worry, anxiety, regret, all those things.

Yep.

Resentment and holding on to all that stuff.

It is, that is toxic to sleep. You're absolutely right. And in fact, anxiety and physiological stress is our principal model for the explanation of insomnia right now. It's not the only cause, but it seems to be one of the principal causes. And in modern society, it's become so easy, and I'm not finger wagging, I'm just as guilty. We are constantly on reception, but rarely do we do reflection. And unfortunately, the time when most of us do reflection is when we turn off the light and our head hits the pillow. And that's the last time. Oh, you know, because I don't know about you, Lewis, but at night in the dark, thoughts are not the same thing. Concerns become twice as big or the 10x the size of concerns. I start to worry, I ruminate, I catastrophize. Yet in the light of day, those things seem very different. And so we can speak about sleep tips perhaps later on, but certainly getting right with your emotions and your anxiety is key to good sleep. And that's one of the things that prevents sleep. I also think that there's an issue at the public health level. You know, we've had in many first world nations wonderful government mandates regarding health, regarding drink driving, regarding, you know, safe sex, regarding drugs and alcohol and even food and even inactivity and sitting. And when was the last time you heard of a first world nation provide a public health message and memorandum regarding sleep?

Never.

And I don't remember one either. So from every level at, you know, at a public health global, you know, government level down to a workplace level, you know, we laud the airport warrior who's flown through four different time zones in the past three days. They were on email at two and then they're back in the office at six. So we need to- We celebrated those people. We did. And the funny thing, by the way, is that after about 20 hours of being awake straight, you are as cognitively impaired as you would be if you were legally drunk. Now, I would never, as a CEO, say, I have got this fantastic team of people. They're drunk all of the time. But we do say, I've got this fantastic group of people. They just are at it all hours. They are dedicated. They're always working. You know, they spend minimal time sleeping. They're just all out. They love this project. But we've got this strange mentality. And then I think it comes down to, you know, even within schools, we've got this incessant model of early school start times.

Super early, isn't it?

It's incredible.

We got to be there, what, 6:30 or 7:00 or something, right?

6:30, 7:00, 7:30. And that data is actually very powerful. What we found is that when we delay school start times, first academic grades increase, truancy rates decrease, psychological and psychiatric issues decrease. But then what we also discovered is that the life expectancy of students increased. And you may be thinking, well, hang on a sec. You know, how do you how do you measure that? And the leading cause of death in teenagers 16 to 18 is actually not suicide. That's second. It's road traffic accidents.

Really?

And here sleep matters enormously. And I'll give you one example. It was in Teton County in Wyoming. they delayed their school start times from 7 30 in the morning to night to 8 55. By the way, what are we doing trying to educate our children at 7 30 in the morning?

No, I can't think. Yeah, I mean, I remember being in school and being. Every day was hard for me. Every day I was tired. Every day I was hard to focus or I'd be irritable. I wanted to, like, you know, jittery or something, but it was, like, so hard to focus. And then you're. at lunchtime and then I eat and I'm tired again afterwards and you want me to focus and pay attention at a desk. It's like, it doesn't work like that for me, especially with no sleep or very little sleep.

Well, for any, any, you know, sort of developing brain, it doesn't work like that. And for some people to make a 7 30 a.m. start time, school buses will begin leaving at six o'clock or 5 30 in the morning. That means that some kids are having to wake up 5, 5:15, this is lunacy. And what we've understood from the academic grades, and I'll come back to the car accidents in a second, when sleep is abundant, minds flourish. And when it's not, they don't. And what we've discovered with the road traffic accident in Tetten County, when they made that shift, the only thing more remarkable than the extra one hour of sleep that those kids reported getting was the reduction in car crashes. The following year, there was a 70% drop in vehicle accidents.

Wow.

And to put that in context, you know, the advent of ABS technology, anti-lock brake systems, that dropped accident rates by 20 to 25%, and it was deemed a revolution. Here is the simple fact of getting enough sleep that will drop accident rates by 70%. So, I need to get off my soapbox, but what I would say is this. I think if our goal as educators is to educate and not risk lives in the process, then we are failing our children in the most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times.

The current theory of depression, which is dominant medicine, it's called the serotonin hypothesis of depression, is that it's a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. That's why we give these drugs that increase serotonin. Yes. Which don't work that well. You know, there's increasing evidence that they don't work that great. Well, there's an alternative hypothesis that's been out there that's been building, which is right.