Unlock the Power of Sleep: 3 BRAIN HACKS to Transform Your Neurological System

Sleep is the fundamental layer of mental and physical health. If there's one thing that we should all be doing is working toward sleeping long enough and deeply enough. There are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep, but the primary.

One is a welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. The Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid has a bold design, a spacious interior with 232 horsepower and a 12.3 in panoramic display to keep the adventure going and fit with the way you live. And with SiriusXM, every drive comes alive, bringing you closer to the music, the sports, the talk and podcasts that you love right in your vehicle or on the Sirius XM app. Every SiriusXM equipped Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid includes a three month trial, so the experience begins the moment you drive. Learn more@kia.com sportage-hybrid Kia Movement that inspires this message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and more@applecard.com the School of Greatness is sponsored by Capital One. Nowadays, most people subscribe to everything music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block or cancel reoccurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more at Capital1.comsubscriptions Terms and Conditions apply. Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful. So let's go ahead and dive in.

Until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough. 80% of the nights of your life you are functioning suboptimally.

And what's the biggest risk then if we're not getting enough sleep?

Okay, so there are a number of risks to not getting Enough sleep. Deficits in learning, deficits in the immune system, reduction in testosterone and estrogen in both men and women. So disruption of hormones, disruption of gut microbiome, increased cancer risk. There are a bunch of things. The severity of those things depends on a lot of other things too. Prior health, other health conditions, context, age, occupation. You know, if you're not getting enough sleep and you're a high rise construction worker, different than if you're an office worker. So we need to sleep enough now. What's enough sleep? This is an interesting question. Enough sleep has been argued it's six hours, other people it's seven hours, other people it's eight hours. It's basically waking up without an alarm clock and feeling rested. Insomnia is actually a medical term nowadays. And insomnia is essentially diagnosed as falling asleep during the middle of the day due to lack of sleep at nighttime. But many people who are having trouble sleeping at night are not falling asleep during the middle of the day. They're dealing with grogginess or crankiness or other effects of having fragmented sleep.

What are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep? Is it rumination? Is it traumas that you're holding onto? Is it arguments? Is it self doubt or insecurities? Is it you napped too much? Is it the foods you ate too late? Like, what would you say are the main causes, Causes of not being able to fall asleep?

All of the above. But the primary one is a failure to turn off your thoughts.

Okay.

And I think that might provide a good anchor point for us to talk about some protocols. Really, a excellent night's sleep begins in the morning. I talked about this on the previous episode, so I won't go into detail, but everyone should get as much bright light in their eyes, ideally from sunlight, first thing in the morning, 10 to 30 minutes outside, depending on how bright it is. Eyeglasses or contact lenses are fine. Don't wear sunglasses if you can do it safely. If you wake up before the sun rises, turn on bright lights, then go outside once the sun rises. If you have no access to sunlight, use a daytime simulator or similar like a ring light and get that light in your eyes. Okay, so that's all of that in a compact form. Caffeine. You can inhibit falling asleep with caffeine. You have to figure out when your threshold is. For me, I can drink caffeine up until about 3, 3, even 4 o' clock in the afternoon and sleep like.

A baby and still sleep well.

Yes. As Matt Walker, our good friend Matt Walker, would say that my sleep isn't as good as it would be had I cut caffeine out earlier by like.

11 or 12am Right.

And, and I, I want to acknowledge, you know, Matt is the Michael Jordan of sleep science. And so I'm not going to.

You're the LeBron James.

Well, no, no. And in fair. Thank you for the, the compliment, but. But no, I'm not. I know a lot of the science and the protocols, but. But that's Matt's wheelhouse. And so if he says something, it's true. And if I say something and our opinions conflict, it's likely to be something that the data are still emerging or in that case, default to Matt being correct because I just. Out of due respect for his expertise. So caffeine, you know, for some people, they can have a 2 o' clock espresso, 2pm espresso. Some people, it's 4pm Some people can drink caffeine at 8pm and fall asleep. But there, I would say it's problematic because you're disrupting the architecture of sleep and the brain waves associated with sleep, the chemicals and so forth. So get that morning light, cut your caffeine off at the time that allows you to fall asleep. That morning light also sets the timer on your melatonin rhythm. So you have this gland in your brain called the pineal gland. That pineal is the source of melatonin. Melatonin makes you sleepy and. But it does not keep you asleep.

Okay.

Melatonin starts to rise in the late evening and continues into the night and then eventually tapers off. This is naturally occurring melatonin release, not supplemented melatonin release. The fastest way to slam melatonin to the pavement and eliminate it in your system is to look at bright light for, I hate to tell you this, even a few seconds.

So you mean at night?

At night is typically when melatonin rises. It's when it's released in the bloodstream. And when it has this effect of making us sleepy, it does a number of other things.

You want more melatonin at night is right. Right.

You do. And if you wake up in the middle of the night or it's 8 o' clock and you decide you want to go to bed at 9 or it's 9 o', clock, you want to go to bed at 10, you go into the bathroom and you flip on the bright lights, your melatonin levels just got crushed down.

So having lights on is a. The worst thing you can do?

Yes. And it doesn't matter if it's blue light, red light, purple light, green light. Bright lights inhibit melatonin very acutely. And therefore you want to avoid exposure to bright lights at night if your goal is to be asleep. So the simple rule that governs all this stuff is when you want to be alert, get bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight. So that's true in the morning and throughout the day. And when you want to be sleepy or sleep, avoid bright light in your eyes. Now, many home environments don't allow you to have zero lights, and that's not actually necessary. You can just dim the lights in the evening. Ideally, you also avoid overhead lights because the neurons in the eye that trigger this melatonin suppression and so forth, they reside in an area of the eye that views upper visual space. So you could have desk lamps or. And just dim those down. If you're going to work on a screen, dim it way down. Will blue blockers help? Yes. But if the light is bright enough, they, it's still gonna go through. It's still gonna inhibit melatonin.

So how bad is watching TV at.

Night if the TV isn't too bright.

And it's farther away.

Yeah.

And you're. And maybe you wear blue blockers.

Yeah.

And, or, or I mean some people are, go take this to the extreme. They wear sunglasses. I think that's a little extreme. Now, candlelight and moonlight surprisingly doesn't seem to block melatonin. Now maybe a really bright moonlit night, full moon can. You know, the lunacy associated with the full moon might actually be due to a suppression of melatonin and an increase in alertness. So those are the things as it relates to light.

Yes.

Then there's this issue of people who have trouble staying asleep. So they can fall asleep, fine, but they wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I happen to do this. If I go to bed around 10:30, I tend to wake up around 3 and I use the restroom. Yeah, I tend to drink a lot of fluids and I have to use the restroom. This is true at every age. This is not just some aging related thing. That's fine. I just keep the lights dim and use the bathroom. And then you go back to fall back to sleep. Very normal, very healthy. One of the best things I ever did for my sleep was to keep my phone out of the room so that when I wake up at three in the morning, I just didn't start scrolling the newspapers. Is typically what I would read online.

Gotcha.

And then you're just waking up your brain, not just by the light, but by the content.

And you know, you're activating it again as opposed to going back to sleep.

Exactly. And sometimes there's a comment and they're like, why is it, you know, your thinking is not very good in the middle of the night? The other thing is you want to keep the room cool. So in order to fall asleep, your body has to undergo a drop of. In temperature of 1 to 3 degrees. There are a couple ways to accomplish this. One is keeping the room cool. The other is to. And that's ideal, actually, because you can put a hand or a foot out. We actually lose a lot of our heat through what's called our glabrous skin. So the palms of our hands, the bottoms of the fe.

Put my feet out of the sheets and just let them feel the cool air.

That's right. And that's a great way to cool off your core body temperature. You're probably doing that unconsciously in your sleep as well. If the room were too warm, the only way for you to cool off would be for you to put your hand in a bucket of cold water. And generally people don't have that accessible.

And then you're going to go pee if you're doing that too.

Right, exactly. And then of course, there are all these products nowadays of, you know, things that cover. Yeah. That cover. That cool the bed. I'm supposed to try one of these soon. I haven't tried one yet. I tend to just keep the room cool.

Yeah. What do you keep it at? I keep it around 67, 65.

That's a little cooler than what I do. I put it at about 67, 68.

Okay.

But I tend to wake up hot in the middle of the night, like throw the comforter off and go put some cold water on my face. So don't obsess over waking up too much. And if you do, try and stay away from screens or if you, you know, some people will read a book. Dim light again.

Yeah.

And then falling back asleep. Some people are waking up at 2 or 3 because they are going to bed too late. Their melatonin has run out. So imagine that you're. That you're naturally somebody who should go to bed early around nine. But we all have this ability to push forward and stay awake if we have to. Much easier to stay awake than to force yourself to go to sleep. Yes, very hard to force yourself to go to sleep. So let's say your system, you start releasing melatonin around 9pm but you stay up until 11, then you get into bed, you fall asleep around 11:30 and at 3 in the morning you suddenly wake up. Well, that's because your melatonin tapered off and there's a wakefulness that's occurring. And so ideally you would start going to bed earlier. Now there's a lot of discussion out there about so called chronotypes. So night owls, morning people, people that follow a more typical schedule. Typical would be going to sleep somewhere between 10:30 and 11:30, waking up somewhere between 6:30 and 8. Then there are the people that like to go to bed at 2am, sleep till 10, and then there are people that like to go to bed at 8 and wake up at 4. Huge variation out there. It tends to change across the lifetime.

Yeah. Your season of life for years.

That's right. And adolescents and teenagers tend to stay up later and want to sleep in. And there's actually some evidence that they can learn better if they are allowed to, to use that schedule. But most schools won't adhere to that schedule.

You gotta wake up at 6 and go to school at 8 or whatever. Yeah.

Once you enter adult life, you're generally somebody who's gonna have to learn how to go to bed early and wake up early or at least wake up early. Now, naps, you should feel comfortable, the data say naps, you should feel comfortable napping for 90 minutes or less at any point throughout the day, as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep. So some people, like me, I love naps, but it doesn't interfere with my nighttime sleep.

It doesn't.

Does not.

So you can take a 60 minute.

Nap, generally 20 to 45 minutes, and.

Then you, you fully fall asleep or you're kind of like awake and just resting.

Yeah, I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime. I can fall asleep at a gun range. Yeah, it's what it's in.

Can we sleep sitting up too, like this?

Oh yeah. Playing anywhere.

It is.

Although it, it could reflect that I'm pushing my system a little too hard.

Oh.

But it's, it is a, it is useful at times.

Incredible.

It is.

Fall asleep right on a plane or anywhere.

Leaning against a. Oh my gosh. In a subway station. If I need sleep, I'm going down.

That's incredible.

Yeah. So the, the other thing is that during sleep a number of things happen and we can talk about slow wave sleep and REM sleep, but one of the most important physiological functions of sleep is to clear out some of the cellular debris that accumulates throughout the day. The cellular debris creates cognitive deficits it actually may be related to the aggregation of proteins and things that relate to dementia and Alzheimer's. It's the so called glymphatic system. The lymphatic system is a system of moving through immune cells and clearing out of debris from the body. The glymphatic system is a kind of a, a equivalent system that exists in the brain that involves so called glial cells, which are support cells, but also do many things actively. They're not just doing support. The glymphatic system is like a washout of the brain's debris. And that system seems to function best when feet are slightly elevated above the brain. There's some interesting data from University of South Carolina coming out now that show that if you can get your ankles elevated a little bit higher than your chin, that's great. So when you're sleeping, while you're sleeping.

What'S it do for you?

It increases the glymphatic clearance and there's some data that it can improve function of the brain. The studies that are happening now that I'm aware of, I'm in touch with that group, are mainly geared towards people that have had head injuries, so concussion and TBI of various kinds. But they also are seeing interesting effects in typical folks that don't have any traumatic brain injury. So I put a pillow underneath my ankles when I fall asleep and to get a little bit of that elevation. And then during the day, if ever you can't get a nap or you are going to get a nap, put your ankles up on the couch and lie down on the floor. That itself can get some of the clearance of the glymphatic.

And that helps you sleep better. It helps you just clean out the system.

It helps your brain function better when you wake up from sleep.

Interesting.

That's what the data are starting to show. Some of the things I describe, like the light viewing is baked into the neuroscience literature. Hundreds of papers, yes, published papers. Some of the things like the glymphatic system, it's kind of cutting edge, it's on the way. But because the safety margins of raising your ankles are so large, I mean, there's nothing dangerous about that.

How long do you need to do it for to get the benefits?

Oh, I think these are immediate benefits.

Two minutes or 10 minutes, you're doing.

This the whole night that you're asleep, your ankles are elevated. If you wake up and you happen to kick the pillow out, it's not the end of the world. But the idea is that you don't want to be sleeping with your head above your ankles either. There is some evidence that when people travel on planes and they're sleeping in chairs, that that's not equivalent to the kind of sleep they'd get when they're lying flat, independent of all the other things that are happening. And we know this because there are great sleep labs at Stanford School of Medicine, at UPenn back east and elsewhere where people actually go into a clinic and sleep either upright or at different angles. And they're looking at all this at the level of data.

Okay, so here's one for you. What's the best position to sleep? On your back? On your side, on your stomach?

Ah, great question. And it really, truly depends. And it probably depends on how hot you run. So I tend to run really warm. A lot of the cooling of the body occurs from the palms and bottoms of the feet, but also from the upper back and scapulae because we accumulate what's called brown fat there. It's not the blubbery fat that's under the skin. It's like a furnace. Actually. You can increase the density of brown fat by going into cold water repeatedly for, you know, one to three minutes several times each week. It means your furnace actually burns hotter. It allows you to be in cold temperatures more comfortably. Some really beautiful data just published on this. So I don't like to sleep on my back because I start heating up, start sweating. That's right. So I tend to sleep on my side. I sleep in that. What is that? It's like soldier position. But then again, there are some people that have shoulder issues, and then they can't do that. I'm relatively flexible through my shoulders, not super flexible, so I can do that. It really depends. Now, of course, if you're sleeping on your stomach, how do you elevate your ankles? It starts becoming a little bit. We are not just science experiments. And so you have to assume that you're not going to get everything exactly right. But keeping the room cool, keeping cool, being under a warm enough blanket, but then extending a hand or an ankle out so that you can cool off during the middle of the night, that's going to be good. Keep the room dark, although complete pitch black doesn't seem to be as good as having a little bit of light somewhere in the room. But you don't want a bright blue light or red light anywhere in the room that's going to wake you up. Some people, like me, have very thin eyelids, exceedingly thin eyelids. Some people have very Thick eyelids. So some people are more bothered by a light in the room than others. It really varies. So you have to just tune things to your particular environment.

I'm curious about the neuroscience. Before you go to sleep, how do we set our minds up to. You were saying before about a lot of people, it's hard for them to sleep because they can't shut their mind off.

Right.

Is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally and then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling like clear minded and without this brain fog, where we have more motivation, where we have more, you know, energy and excitement towards the next day and then doing that in a pattern every night. Is there any science around that? Is it like listening to a hypnosis?

That could be very helpful which will.

Help you clean, clean out whatever is going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day, but also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it. You know, is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep better? Like what have you found there in the neuroscience?

Yeah.

So the. So glad you asked this question. There's some really interesting data from a guy named Chuck Charles Zeisler, who's at Harvard Medicine, beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades and a really fantastic physician and researcher. They observed something interesting which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime, there's a spike in alertness, planning and almost anxiety that all people undergo. And it's a normal, healthy pattern. The idea, and it's a just so story because we don't really know. I, nor Chuck Zeisler nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase, as we say. But we assume this was. This came about because prior to going to sleep we need to shore up everything for safety. We need to, you know, lock things down, make sure everything's in its place because we are very vulnerable in sleep nowadays. This might manifest as, you know, you need to go to bed at 10:30 because you have to get up at 6, etc. And then right around 8:30 or 9 you start finding yourself running around doing various things. Many people worry about that and they think, oh, I'm really stressed because I actually need to go to sleep and here I am wide awake. It tends to subside very quickly. So just the knowledge that that's a normal, healthy spike in alertness and activity I think can help a number of people. I want to make sure I mention that. Yeah, the other thing is preparing the mind. As you said, turning thoughts off. Turning thoughts off is a skill. We've talked before, gosh, almost a year or more now about Yoga Nidra.

Yes.

Which is. There are many, many Yoga Nidra scripts available on YouTube free of cost. The ones I particularly like are the ones by Kamini Desai. K A M I N I D E S A I Kamini Desai. I just really like her voice. I don't know Kamini. Never met her. These are free scripts. They're Yoga Nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes. They involve some breathing, some meditation type stuff. They. But they teach you to turn your thoughts off, which is really wonderful because a lot of people, they just get stuck in this rumination.

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Ideal protocol prior to sleep? It depends because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there. So I wouldn't say don't work or do work. You know, you do want to avoid strong stimuli before sleep. So do you really want to watch, you know, a politically charged or a violent movie right before sleep? Well, that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence. Some people aren't triggered, other people are. But you know, that aside, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full because that can inhibit your sleep. So for most people, that's going to be finishing your last bite of food about two hours before bedtime.

We used to think that aging was a one way street. You couldn't do anything about it. We now know from studying twins that 80% of your health in old age is up to you. How you live your life.

Right. Your community, your positivity, your thinking, your food, the sleep you have. Like all those things, right?

Yeah. And the reason that they Work we discovered is because they turn on the longevity genes. That's the breakthrough. Okay, so now we're artificially tweaking these longevity genes genetically or with supplements or hopefully medicine soon.

Gotcha. But you could do it in more natural, organic ways is what I'm hearing.

Well, right now that's what we've got. And even if you just do the five obvious things, things like skip meals and don't smoke and exercise, that'll get you an extra 14 years on average.

Really?

It's that big? That's not even using tech.

That's just.

There's no technology. Just like living a good life.

Right.

So what are the main things to turning on the longevity that anyone can do without technology, without money, you know, science.

Yeah.

Well, okay, so we've first of all, don't smoke.

Yeah.

That'll damage your DNA. That'll accelerate the aging process.

Does that include like e cigarettes and all these other vaping does that also.

Well, I'm a big advocate for. For putting nothing artificial in your body, including vaping.

Yeah.

My mother died from lung cancer, so I'm pretty militant about it.

Wow.

I don't think vaping is as bad in terms of the number of chemicals getting into your body.

Yeah.

But we've seen recently, it's probably not healthy anyway.

Yeah. Okay, so no smoking. That's one.

That's one. Next one is don't eat so much, eat less often. So not malnutrition, of course. You don't want to get too thin, but this three meals a day plus snacks is ridiculous in the future.

I need to get rid of that.

Yeah.

Well, you're also working it out. But someone like me who's not an athlete.

Yeah.

The most exercise I do during the day typically is typing. Three meals a day is too much. Actually, one meal is enough for someone like me.

Wow.

Yeah, I'm now 50, so my metabolism is way down.

You look like you're 37.

Oh, thanks.

It's great.

You might need.

I thought you, you're like 100 and you're like, look, at 37. You probably reverse the aging.

Well, I'm glad I don't look 80 because that would really be bad for your message.

Okay, so we got no smoking, eating less. Yeah.

Next one would be the obvious. High intensity interval training. Lose your breath once in a while.

Lose your breath? What do you mean just by like working out, like.

Yeah. Become hypoxic, Tell your body that you're being chased by a saber toothed tiger or something like that. The reason all of this stuff works in terms of the diet and exercise. It's not that your blood flows more or that being hungry is just healthy for the body. It's actually that your longevity genes get turned on by these things. And why does that happen? Why does it happen in humans, in mice, even in yeast cells for bread and beer? The reason is that the body senses adversity and says, crap, we gotta fight back. We might die next week without food. And we're running away from tigers and lions. That's what this survival network, this longevity gene.

So it turns it on when it feels like it's in survival mode.

That's it. We want to be in survival mode. And we spend our whole lives trying to reduce our adversity. Right?

Being comfortable, right.

Don't be hungry, don't be puffed, don't walk, you know, valet your car, roll your suitcase, don't carry it, for goodness sakes. We've done the worst. No wonder we're getting sicker and sicker.

We're in a world of convenience, right?

And it's the worst thing we could do for our bodies in terms of longevity. So those three things, the other two, let's see, what else is there? Oh, the type of food you eat is important. There's a big debate, of course, let's.

Say like plant based is going to extend the telomeres. Right. If you're eating leafy greens, that's what I've heard.

Right.

Well, among other things, it's also going to have a couple of really important types of molecules. One are the monounsaturated fats, fatty acids. You get that from olive oil and avocados. Those are great. And we've just learned that that's a really important trigger for a certain longevity.

Olive oil.

Yeah.

I think when I had gundry on, he was like, I drink a cup of olive oil a day or something like teaspoons of olive oil. He's just eating it. He's like, I'm trying to get as much in as I can, putting it on everything.

Well, let's get back to that because there's a new discovery as of a week ago that says we think we understand how that works, but in olive oil there's also water called. The other important component of a plant based diet are polyphenols, which are the molecules that plants make when they're under adversity, when they're stressed. And I believe that we've evolved to sense when our food is running out. So we get that signal when our plants are stressed. So you don't want to eat plants that are like this withered white liquid lettuce. You can buy Californian lettuce.

Right, right.

You want these colored vegetables that have been a little bit stressed, a little bit dried out. Wine is a perfect example. It's full of polyphenols, one called resveratrol that we've worked on for 20 years and it activates these longevity pathways really well. Wow. So stress your food organic? Yeah, I am for a plant based diet, but I do eat meat occasionally. It tastes pretty good, but, but you know, it's very clear. Dan Buettner is right. Where you go to the longest lived places in the world, the blue zones. Sardinia. Right. The Okinawa island in Japan. They're not eating all meat. And actually we know that if you eat a lot of meat, you shut down some of these longevity pathways.

Really?

Yeah. So you actually, you might look good and grow muscle. That's great. When you're young, you want to find a mate, you want to look good, you want to feel good. But in the long run, I don't think that's healthy really.

So cutting down less and less meat, at least having more plants is the way to go.

Yeah, that's what I've done. I was on an Okinawa diet in my 20s and 30s, which is what.

This is rice and leaves and it's.

A bit of rice. You got to watch out for white rice because it's a lot. Spike your sugar. Yeah, it's a lot, but it's, it's a lot of tofu miso soup, green leafy vegetables, dark greens for these phytochemicals. And then what else was it? There was a bit of fish.

Okay.

Yeah, but, but also what's important is not a lot of food these days. I'm stopping eating when I'm about 60, 70% full. And I'm trying.

I just never feel full until I'm like eating so much and then I'm like, okay, I'm full.

Well, you're a young so I probably hungry man.

Well, here's one of the things I think one, when you eat slower, you start to get fuller, you start to feel it. And I've, I'm the youngest of four and so as a kid, we didn't have a lot of money growing up in a small town in Ohio and there wasn't much food. So I learned to like grab and just shove it in my mouth. And that became a habit that I've kind of stuck with. And I'm not starving Anymore. Like, the food's available at any time. I can afford it, and I have it all the time. But I think it's reconditioning my mind or a habit or routine of, like, I'm not scarfing my face down right now. But, you know, it's that mindset of, what if I'm going to go hungry?

For sure. We all suffer from that. Well, not all of us, but those of us who grew up in regular families. We were told to finish our meals.

Right, don't leave anything on the plate.

And keep hungry kids everywhere stealing your food. My wife grew up in a very poor family, and even when she was a student, she could barely afford food. She would scrounge and buy potatoes, and at the dinner table, she'll kill me for this, but she will eat. Like, it's gonna all go away tomorrow. But I have to remind her and everybody, everyone should know this. There's always gonna be another meal. There will be another meal. Don't worry. But we're conditioned to eat food when it's in front of us.

I think it's a mental conditioning. And it's also like, either your body's tricking you or it's your brain or it's your gut, or something is tricking you. Like, I'm still hungry. Even though you had 2,000 calories in 10 minutes, you're still like, oh, there's food. It's like turning something on. We're like, I want to eat that. I don't know why that is.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's the reason that sugar is. Our ancestors put on fat, and they survived the famine. We don't have famines anymore, thank goodness. But we've descended from those people. So we've got the genes in our brain that say, eat, eat, eat.

How do you turn that gene off?

Well, you can take certain types of food. I drink a lot of tea and coffee, hot water even, just to fill up my stomach. That works really well.

Hot water, not cold water.

I just like the feeling of hot water. Cold water isn't as.

Actually.

It might be something about the heat. I've never thought about it, but for me, that's what works. So when I get a little bit hungry at lunchtime, I'll just. I'm basically drinking tea.

One more tea. Yeah, you put it like some interesting.

But it's a fight all the time.

Yeah.

You know, I fly a lot, and.

People are bringing nuts and cookies and ice cream and.

And you gotta fight it. And it's really hard to fight how.

Do you say no?

Well, I do, you die. But how do I do that? So I've trained myself.

Yeah.

To fight it. And the best thing that I do, besides saying can have a cup of tea, is what do I want to look like next week? What I want to look like a year from now? What do I want to look like when I'm 80?

So you, you tell yourself that. You ask yourself the question. I think it's also, how do you want to feel tonight, tomorrow, next week when you're 80? It's like look like and feel combination is powerful.

Right.

Because your mind is saying now is important. And you got to train yourself to say tomorrow and the next year is just my life.

Yeah.

Right. And that's more important.

Okay, so is that the fourth thing or the fifth thing?

The fifth thing I didn't mention. There are a couple of things. Let's divide it up. One is get good night's sleep.

Sleep is everything.

Yeah. And then surround yourself by friends and people who take care of you.

Yeah. That's like the blue zone way too right. It's like be around a good community, get lots of rest and naps, move a little bit, eat healthy.

Right.

Well, these are things that most people should know, but they don't do. So you and I are here to motivate people to do that.

Exactly.

But the research that I discuss in the book is how to take that to a new level, how to optimize those things and add some science in there.

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, Louis 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 say 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. You know, sleep will take the silver medal. Oxygen definitely gets the gold. But thereafter, sleep seems to be paramount.

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

I would. Yeah. You know, I used to say that sleep was the third pillar of good Health alongside diet and exercise. But 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 main 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 7 to 9 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, Louis, because it's, 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, 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, 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 that, 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, I think speaks to the subtlety of this because the, 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 springtime 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.

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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, you know, one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep. And I think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep. And you could then ask, well, you know, why are we so sensitive? Because I can go without food for 24 hours and I can go without water for 24 hours. You know, I'm still not too bad. I'm in 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 is the, why are the majority of people bad at getting good sleep? Is it, what is it we're distracted? Is it we think we need to be doing more? Is 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. It's such a fundamental question. And in some ways it's 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, 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 supported. 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 your 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 up. 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. 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 suffer. You know, 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, Louis, but, you know, at night in the dark, thoughts are not the same thing. You know, concerns become twice as big or you 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 is 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. But so from every level at, you know, at a public health, global, you know, government level down to a workplace level, you know, we lord the airport warrior who's flown through four different time zones in the past three days. They were on email at 2, and then they're back in the office at 6. You know, we. So we need to.

We celebrated those people.

We did. You know, 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, you know, 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.

And super early, isn't it?

It's, it's going to be there what.

6:30 or 7 or something?

37, 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 is in teenagers 16 to 18 is actually not suicide. That 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 tonight to 8:55. By the way, what are we doing? Trying to educate our children at 7:30 in the morning?

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 no sleep or very.

Well for any, any you know, sort of developing brain. It doesn't work like that. And for some people to make a 7:30am start time, school buses will begin leaving at 6:00 or 5:30 in the morning. That means that some kids are having to wake up at 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 Teton 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 you know, 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.

Is anyone listening to this that you've been speaking about this too? And they're actually adopting this new model, whether it be work time or school time, or just, you know, integrating this. Do you know systems that are integrating this?

There have been some. And I think I. I've tried to do this in the education domain. I've tried to do this within medicine because the way that we train residents is. Is almost inhumane. Actually, it's. It's not almost. It absolutely is inhumane. And the statistics there are stunning as well. And then I've tried to do it in the workplace too, because I do a lot of speaking events at sort of Fortune 500 companies. And at first I think I took the wrong approach where I was really speaking a little bit more about sort of the compassionate approach. You know, why it's good and kind for. For people to gift them more sleep, Because I see sleep as a biological necessity. And if it's a biological necessity, then I think it's a civil necessity. And if it's a civil necessity, sleep is a civil right. But what I would say is that that wasn't particularly well received. You know, I'd go into business companies and say, your employees, you know, they're desperate for more sleep. They will be happier and healthier. Or I would speak about medicine and I would speak about, you know, what it was doing to the patients and the harm, and it would fall on deaf ears. What I then realized is that if you're going to change large organizations, you have to speak in their currency, which is money. Money.

Yeah, yeah. You need to.

And then I would describe the medical malpractice lawsuits that would commonly cost savings within medicine, firstly. And then administration started to change the tune because before that, you know, there was almost this old boys network in medicine where we went through residency and it's almost a hazing. And despite armed with incredible data to the contrary, I think the mentality 10 years ago when I started trying to do that was my mind's made up. Don't confuse me with the evidence.

Crazy. Why? It's because they went through that theme themselves and so they want to pay it back or something.

I think so. I think there's some of that.

I went through hell, so everyone else has to go through hell.

Yeah, right. It's a rite of passage, you know, if you are tough enough, you'll make it through. It's kind of like boot camp, which I don't think we need to do anymore. And then within business, you could describe, you know, the Rand Corporation did an independent survey a couple of years ago and what they found was that insufficient sleep will cost most nations about 2% of their GDP. GDP of their gross domestic product. So here in the US that number was $411 billion of lost productivity due to insufficient sleep. In Japan, it was $130 billion. My home country, the UK was over $50 billion. So if I could solve the sleep loss crisis within the workplace, I could almost double the budget for education in the US Or I could halve the healthcare deficit. So when you speak about money, then people start to listen. So that's how I've tried to communicate. But. And I don't think I'm a. I don't think I'm a particularly good communicator. And I've been sometimes bull in a china shop, as I probably have been for the first however long we've been talking. But it's just because I'm so, you know, I'm just desperately passionate about this thing called sleep. And some years ago, before I started trying to, I wrote a book and then I've been doing podcasts. Sleep was the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today. It was a second citizen. And I was so sad to see the disease, the sickness, the harm, the lack of productivity, the impact on education that a lack of sleep was having.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description. Description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great. Hey everybody, Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co host, Woody Harrelson. It's called Where Everybody Knows yous Name. And we're back for another season. I'm so excited to be joined this season by friends like John Mulaney, David Spade, Sarah Silverman, Ed Helms, and many more. You don't want to miss it. Listen to Where Everybody Knows yous Name with me, Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson sometimes, wherever you get your podcasts.

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