Sleep, Longevity, and the ROOT of disease with Jason Prall

Today on my Life Conversations, I've got Jason Prawl. Because I wanted to talk about sleep, I was specifically looking for a guest expert to talk about sleep because it all fits into the equation now. Jason is a health educator and practitioner and author and filmmaker. He's got a whole big resume but, and he's most known for it. Back in 2018 he did an independent research and experience as a practitioner which led him to create the Human Longevity Project, which is a nine part film, film series that uncovers the true nature of chronic disease. And that definitely got my attention because those of you that have been following my journey have learned that it's not always just what we think it is on the surface. There's a whole picture, there's a whole bunch of things that we have to uncover to understand what's going on with us. It's not always just hormones or just aging or just insert whatever it is there. So thank you so much, Jason for being here today.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

So let's back up a little bit. How did you even get into what you're doing? Because you go deep on these topics. I'm sure that's not what you were jumping into initially. Like, how did this evolve into becoming a focus?

Yeah, I mean, you name it, right? It's like, it's that pain to purpose type of story, right. I was, I was an engineer for. That's really what I was trained in. I did that for 10 years. And it was my, my own health issues that really prompted me to go deep into the health world because I wasn't getting answers. I think probably moving like you, like many of your, your listeners, we kind of run into these challenges and we're not really sure where to turn.

Right.

And I think the traditional systems that most of us grew up with kind of failed us in a lot of regard.

Right.

I mean, I know you have the, the explanation situation and like that's one of those things where who's gonna finally give you that information, right? Like that's, it's sometimes hard to find. It's not generally a doctor that's gonna say, oh well, this is probably what's causing your, you know, thyroid issues or whatever the case might be.

Right.

And so for me it was just having to dig deep into my own health issues and ultimately that, that led me to a certain level of, I guess, expertise, confidence, I guess in, in what I was uncovering.

Right.

And, and so I kind of became the guy that my friends kind of asked some general things to and, and ultimately I realized, you know, this is actually what I want to do. This is it. It fits well with my kind of personality, my natural skill set, which is kind of one, I've always been good at puzzles. You know, I'm kind of a systems thinker, big picture, putting things together. And so as I, as I kind of pursued that, I thought, you know, I'd rather do that than, than do this engineering thing and, and kind of pursue the path of, to become an integrative health practitioner. And I decided not to follow any kind of formal training in terms of, of getting, you know, becoming a doctor or anything like that because the licensure actually is restrictive.

Right.

I knew I didn't agree do anything with, with medications. And so I thought this is actually a really good avenue. And with the Internet and kind of the way people are moving, which is they're open to whoever can help them, I thought this was a good path for me. So that's kind of where I started.

I love that. And you know what's, it's so funny because I, I teach women and I think most people in the space that we're in, we all would say we're, we're detectives. Like, we like to solve puzzles. And it's interesting because I'll tell women all the time, you've got to be your own health detective. But I feel like a lot of them still stop at, just because the doctor said this, because the doc, like you go to your one doctor appointment, they are typically rushing you and they tell you one thing and you're like, that's it. That's not to me being a health detective. I'm assuming it's not to you either.

Yeah. And it's a tricky situation, right. Because you only know what you know. And, and you, you, you, you, you do the detective work. But at, to some, at, at every point you're, you're kind of, you're, you get stuck.

Right.

And so there is this like a little bit of leaning into expertise and some of the practitioners and doct that you might kind of resonate with. And then there's a little bit of like, you don't know who to trust because the information is just unbelievably diverse.

Right.

I mean, just look at the foodscape alone and it's like, how do you know what to believe?

Right.

And so that's been kind of, my mission is to, to, to dive into that world and, and I moved out of more of the one on one practitioner work.

Okay.

I was working with people with, you know, chronic issues like cancer and autoimmune conditions and basically syndromes. People that have all this stuff going on, they just doesn't even have a name. And they've been to 10 different practitioners of, of all kinds. And they came to me because of, of word of mouth. And I moved away from that into more of the health education piece because of this very reason. I wanted to help people learn to think about health. So, you know, at the end of the day it's, it's an individual journey. And for example, going back to the food thing, what to eat it, it, it depends, right? Like that's what we need to recognize is how old are you, you know, what sex are you? That, that actually makes a big difference in terms of like fasting really tolerable for, for men and women. You know, you're not going to feed a, a 2 year old the same as a 9 year old, same as a 22 year old, same as a 90 year old.

Right.

So the seasons can actually shift.

Right.

How much dysfunction you have? You know, what's your, your, your sort of genetic makeup. Some people are, have really good digestive capacity just based on their constitution, whereas others tend not to.

Right.

And these are things that Ayurveda has mapped out, these are things that Chinese medicine have mapped out for thousands of years in Western medicine. And Western research is just starting to come around to recognizing that, the genetic differences that we have and how that plays out now we have our own maps. But this is really what I wanted to get into is how do we think about these things? Because there's amazing wisdom from the past that really, really deserves to be preserved. And there's this amazing new research and regenerative medicine that's coming out. And so how do we kind of take the best of both worlds and apply them to ourselves as an individual? How do we even think about that?

You're totally speaking my language and I know a lot of listeners right now are resonating with this, but then there's a lot of listeners too, that this is new to them and they very much only know Western medicine and they only see the marketing behind that. And what do you want them to know? Because there's a place for Western medicine. Absolutely. I mean, gosh, I've had surgeries. I need Western medicine for that. But what do you want people to know about that?

I would say I had a, for, for a long time I had a battle with Western medicine and I held this kind of grudge because I had knee pain at 13 and it didn't go away. I, I was. Chronic knee issues from 13 years old that I dealt with for 30 plus years and I couldn't find answers. So I had a little bit of a combative relationship and every time, and I had this, what's called separate dermatitis, which essentially is, is dandruff that was on my face. I was, I was peeling off like three or four layers of skin and just chucking it to the ground.

Not good as a kid.

I mean it's unbelievable. This is my twenties too, so it' social time right. In college. And, and so every, every solution that I was given by the traditional system made things worse. And so I, I was, I was angry, I was upset, I was, you know, there was just a lot of, of combative energy. So I want to say I understand that if anybody's holding that with regard to their health issues and there's some that are fully bought into the system or they're just, they're, they're not quite sure what to make of it because I mean, let's face it, Western medicine has saved more lives than we can count.

Right.

I mean, antibiotics alone have been unbelievable lifesavers. Now if used incorrectly, then it starts to become a problem. Right. So I think it's just really healthy to have to put western medicine in its proper place, which is, it's amazing for crisis care. So if I'm in a car accident, if I'm on a battlefield, if I need surgery of any kind, Western medicine is fantastic for that.

I love that.

And medications, they actually have a purpose too. Antibiotics products can save lives. Then the trouble that we run into is we start leaning into medications, drugs and surgeries as a sort of, as the only option without sort of assisting or thinking about lifestyle.

Right.

So it should be lifestyle first.

Right.

Then do, can we use alternative or natural, let's say not alternative natural therapies and modalities that are congruent with, with, with life. In other words, they're life affirming.

Right.

And then, and then third, let's look at these other sort of man made pharmaceutical, you know, artificially kind of driven mechanisms for, for trying to, to keep somebody from sliding downhill.

Right.

But at the end of the day, no medication will make you healthy. Not a single one.

No, you're right, you're to. You just made me really think of something here because you're right, it's, it's crisis care, it's sick carefully, it's emergency care, but when it crosses over into preventative, that's the problem. I'll know when I, when I. Every time I've had a surgery and I had my share of surgeries, they always want to give you an antibiotic before the surgery. Like, and I always say, no, I'm not taking it. Do I have to? And I always challenge the doctor on that, and they ultimately say, I do not have to. I can do it if, but if I get an infection, I always promise that I will, and I've never gotten an infection. But, like, just even that, like, why are we given that as a preventative medicine there's such a downside to antibiotics. So.

Yeah, so, so here's the thing. This is really important and it's a, it's a, it's a tangled web that we've woven in the medical industry. There's a lot of legal aspects, right? There's a lot of standard of care. So there's kind of like, if you look at the whole medical education system, they're not taught nutrition, they're not taught how a lot of natural health works. They don't believe in a lot of things that have been proven that are literally proven by the research that are. That, that, that fail to be disproven over and over again in the research, and it's still not being taught. So that the education itself is decades behind where we are scientifically in terms of our understanding. The other aspect is, again, legal aspects, right? So you're given this, the, the medications, the, the antibiotics initially, not because there's a need for it. It's a preventative measure to, to cya. To cover your.

Yeah, right.

So it's, it's a preventative measure for a legal perspective, really. In other words, we're taking the precaution because we don't want a severe issue. Now, the, the. They do recognize a downside, but they view the downside as very minimal.

Right?

And so the reality of what we know now is that, is that one round of antibiotics can wipe out your microbiome to the point where it's decimated the, the, the, the diversity, right? So, so diversity of the microbiome of the, of the bacteria and the microbes that line not only the gut, but the entire system. They're in your eyes, they're in your ear, right? So microbes are a part of us. They're a critical part of us. And when we lose this diversity, when we, when we kill off these key strains, that's creating an imbalance, right? It's, it's setting up a situation where we have these Opportunistic organisms can start to grow and this can be where we start to run into these fungal issues, these candida issues. Whatever the case might be. It also, when we lose these keystone strains, we lose the ability to detox.

Right.

We lose the ability to metabolize certain things that are really important to metabolize. So we start to lose our function when we kill off and wipe out these, these, these bacteria that are so critical. So it's preventative. Yes. And it can create a short term issue that may even lead to a long term issue if it's not corrected with, you know, things like short term fasting, probiotics, prebiotics, postbiotics.

Right.

And these type of things.

Important. You know, my, my own mom, she's 77, she's not overweight, she walks every day, she eats the way that I teach her. Like, she's, she's great. She's. In fact, she's been pre diabetic and then like monitored all that, changed it with food and fantastic. But when I saw her last, she had this like, huge protruding stomach. I'm like, mom, what is going on with. Something's going on with your gut? No, no, no. I'm like, something's going on with your gut. I said, I want you to do a GI mapping. I want you to do. She's like, my doctor already did that. I said, okay, let me see this report. And I'm certainly not a doctor, but right away I caught like all kinds of things. I'm like, mom, you got a serious gut issue. And when I started asking her questions, her same doctor that did the GI mapping had given her a low dose antibiotic take every day. Every day as a preventative measure. Like what, what, what do you mean you're taking this as a preventative measure? And then I had given her heartburn stuff as a preventative. Like, like there was like three things as a preventative. It's like destroying her gut. So like just everything. When we just, when we start taking all of this stuff that's meant for crisis and treatment and we put it as preventative, we're creating other issues.

That's right. And the preventative measures that we should be taking should revolve around natural things.

Right?

Herbs.

Right.

These are fantastic as a preventative antibiotic.

Right.

Things like garlic.

Right.

Things like grapefruit seed extract.

Right.

Like there's all kinds of things that can, that can be used as, as preventative from a sort of microbial standpoint. But the key is that we've evolved to Work with these.

Right.

So in other words, the, the strains and the, and the beneficial aspects of our microbiome remain intact and the overgrowth, the, the, the dysbiotic bacteria can start to kind of fade in the background.

Right.

So there's always a balance at play. But the key thing to recognize about the microbiome and about that digestive system as a whole is that it's interacting with everything else. So it's wild. You know, we, you hear things like, oh, blueberries are fantastic because of, of, of the, the color, right? So these phytochemicals that are in something like blueberries, the reality is that you don't actually digest much of those phytochemicals. The bacteria do. So they metabolize these phytochemicals that are found in the blueberry skin, and then they, as a, as a part of that metabolism, spit off these sort of, these molecules that interact with your own cells, your mitochondria and the cell itself. So these signals that are being sent are representative of the environment. So everything that you're eating is not only just metabolized by, by you, it's metabolized by things that aren't you. The microbes, right? So those genes and those microbes that we contain are the things that are really responsible for the beneficial aspects of eating. Things like turmeric and blueberries and all these, these amazing fruits and compounds that are sort of talked about in the natural health world. So we need these guys. We do not want to kill them off and we do not want them to be, to become dysbiotic.

Right?

That, that's, that's really the key. We want a nice, robust, diverse microbiome that is flexible, that is adaptable, that is capable of metabolizing the foods that we're eating.

Because if you don't have that, then you, that you might be the person that is saying, I'm eating all the good foods, but it's not doing anything. That's. And that's what I know I can say that was on me before I understood what's going on. My gut. Like, you can eat all the healthy foods in the world, but if your body's not doing the right things with them, you're not digesting them, you're not processing.

Right, exactly right. So, so it's, it's not what you eat, right? It's what you metabolize. Well, it's not what you only metabolize, it's what your gut mic. Microbiota also metabolize. Right? So this is a very Very key factor. And this is why recently, you know, you've seen things like fecal transplants. So they will actually take the stool from a quote unquote healthy individual. They've screened tremendously, and they will take those and go rectally and insert those into another subject. And they will see microbiome shifts, weight loss, immune system shifts.

Right.

Like this is, it's wild what they've done in both rodents and with humans now. So this is actually an approved procedure for certain, certain people that have pretty severe gut issues. So just that alone, like the fact that we can take the feces from one person, put it into another person and radically shift their immune system, radically shift their metabolism, that should tell you that that's unbelievably powerful. There's something going on there that is outside of just the human genome itself.

And you don't have to do a fecal transplant. You can learn about your own gut biome and do.

That's right.

The right balancing and changing of things. It doesn't, it's actually not that complicated when you can really understand what's going on there.

That's right.

Okay, let's. I want to move into. Because my gosh, they've heard me. I've been shouting from the rooftops about gut biome. Hopefully by now they've listened and they're. And they've jumped into some more of that. But there's some other variables that also go with how we're processing things, how our body's working. One of them really important to me is sleep. And I want to talk about that a little bit because to me, if we're not getting good quality sleep, we also aren't giving our bodies a chance to regenerate, restore, rest, all of those things. I wanted to get your thoughts around sleep and the different types of sleep that there are.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So sleep is critical, right. Even, even connected to the microbiome. So we actually see the, the, the types of bacteria will shift for somebody who gets a poor night's sleep, who sleeps, who stays up all night, right? So this, this, this shifts, right? Everything in us is so dynamic and it's based on our environment, right? So everything that we do, everything that we think, everything that we believe is impacting our microbiome, how we're metabolizing things, our mitochondria, our cellular function, our gene expression, right? So it's literally everything that. And believe, right? So, so it's very, very powerful in this way. Now, with sleep, there's a couple things that I think are really, really critical to understand at the outset. We have sleep itself, right? So this sort of cyclical aspect, right? So we go into the stages of sleep. It includes things like deep sleep and REM sleep and light sleep. And we know some of the things that are happening there, and we still are learning a lot with respect to what's really happening.

Right?

But at the end of the day, each of these sort of phases of sleep seems to serve its own unique function, right? Deep sleep tends to be where we. We have a lot more restoration with, with regard to the body itself. There's also different sort of things that are happening because we, we cycle through, right? We cycle through a few times at night, the deep sleep, REM sleep, light sleep. And in each time we do, there's actually different things happening at, at different points in the night. So there's, there's all kinds of things happening during sleep itself. So to qualify or even quantify sleep as is good or bad or excellent, is still a little bit nascent, right. We have things like the oura ring, which are fantastic and they kind of try to give us a score and really help us understand it, but it's still not a perfected sort of science. So it's the sleep quality itself. Yes. And there's another aspect which is circadian rhythm. So this idea of chronobiology, this is something that has exploded in Western research over the last 10 years. And in fact, in 2017, the Nobel Prize was given to three scientists who, who sort of really elucidated some key mechanisms with regard to chronobiology. So this idea that our biology is rhythmic, right? In other words, it's operating with the time of day, or rather with the light cycle. So at different times of day we have different functions going on. Now, we know this with respect to melatonin, right? And cortisol. These are the two big ones that we talk about a lot with regard to sleep, right? In the morning we want a nice high cortisol spike. It's called a cortisol waking response. We want a nice high response in the morning, nice cortisol spike, and then it kind of starts to dip. And at night it starts to become very, very low. Meanwhile, you have melatonin that starts to climb up and starts to peak around 8, 9, 10pm start to really climb up. So when you get this high melatonin, low cortisol tends to be when we start to fall asleep and again vice versa when we wake up. So this is all well and good. Well, the reason that your body's, you know, following these rhythms is due to the light cycle itself. So sleep quality important. Yes. And sort of separately but related circadian rhythm is also very critical. In other words, if you got really great sleep in the middle of the day, that's not the same thing as getting really great sleep in the middle of the night. So we have people that are working night shifts and swing shifts.

Yeah.

They're about to get real mad on the comments. But it's not our fault.

I know.

It's just the truth.

Is it? Well, it's important to recognize that the reality of it.

Right.

And so I do. I've done a lot of things throughout my life that are unhealthy and I still do things that are unhealthy. And there's a certain level of just acceptance to the fact that I cannot be perfect. And sometimes making an unhealthy choice is for the greater good. I had a child recently, four years ago.

Congratulations.

For the first couple years I slept like crap.

Yeah.

If we have another child, it'll probably be the same thing. In other words, I will be making choices that I know will be, aren't not the best for my health, but it's the best for my child's well being.

Right.

So we make these choices all the time.

Right.

So the reality is though is that if we're not sleeping Basically, let's say 10pm to 6am kind of in that window and it shifts.

Right.

Depending on the seasons.

Right.

So actually our natural rhythmic function would change based on season, based on, on, on, on latitude as well or longitude. So yeah. Where we are on the, in the globe.

And then insert again, it's not western medicine, but insert man, like does time changes and stuff like that. I happen to live in a place where we don't have that.

But this is well studied by the way.

Yeah, it's. It's just so wild. Like we just interfere with what already working and what's there.

That's right. When we, when we mess with the clocks and we, we lose an hour of sleep due to time zone to daylight savings, we actually see increase in all chronic issues.

Wow.

Increase in death, increase in car accidents, Kids. Same thing. They've studied this with kids in school. Test scores are lower, sports injuries are higher. Everything is worse when we start messing with sleep. And again, I'll go back to when I was a new parent and I was getting horrible sleep. Even though I knew the science behind all this, I still was unable, I was, I wouldn't say powerless but my, my willpower was drastically reduced with respect to making food choices. So I ate, I ate worse foods, I didn't exercise as much, my mood was dysregulated.

Right.

All because my sleep was off.

Right.

And so these are the choices that start happening when you start messing with sleep. Once my sleep was able to come back online, I was making better food choices, I was exercising more regularly, my mood was more stable.

Right.

Like everything starts to shift. A relationship shift, shift. Everything starts to shift because sleep was, was so improved.

Right.

So, yeah, it's so, it's so critical. I have so many questions that I want to ask because I want to, I want to make sure I know what people are thinking. So I want to, I want to ask these questions before I forget them. So I want to talk first about circadian rhythm. Because, like, I'll tell you, I am clockwork circadian rhythm. Like the sunsets, I'm ready for bed, sun rises, I am awake like that. And I always joke with my aura ring because I get like a 98. I'm always like, I got an A plus to my husband. He's like, it's not a great, it's not a school. I'm like, yes, it is. But he is the opposite. Like, he comes alive at 10 o'. Clock, he wants to work until 1 or 2 in the morning, and then he wants to sleep till 8 or 9. How do, do we, how much do we want to work with what our body wants to do versus try to force it to, to work with that?

Beautiful question. Yeah. So this is a little bit nuanced. So it's been shown that we actually have different sleep types. So some people are more night owls, some people are early birds, and some people are kind of in between. The reality is, is that I've met, I've worked with so many people that think they're night owls, but they're not. They're just night owls because their circadian rhythms off because they're doing things at the wrong time of day. So look, we are entrainable creatures, we are adaptable creatures. So if you are somebody who's working till 11pm night after night after night after night, staring at a screen, brain activated, not slowing down, and then you wake up at 9am, then your body's gonna on some level entrain to that, that. Now it doesn't mean that that's optimal. It means that you may actually, may be working against your natural biological rhythms. But again, we're entrained. And so if that person were to go camping, right? And they're out at night and there's.

Fire, there's insert my husband here again because that's what he happens, he goes camping and it's normal, right?

And everything starts to shift again, right? So their natural rhythm starts to come into play because it's working with the natural light cycle. So if you've been camping for a few days, what you'll notice is that after the sun goes down and you get the fire going and there's not a lot to do, you start getting tired kind of early, right? And then you wake up early, right? The birds are waking up, so the sounds are waking up, the temperature's starting to rise, the sun's starting to come up. These are all cues to your biology that it's time to wake up. So that's what happens, right? And then again at night, temperature starts to drop, the light starts to shift, things get quiet. These are all cues to your biology saying it's time to go to bed. So the main one is the light cycle. So if you think about again going to the camping example, sun starts to set and even if you watch a sunset, if you look at a sunset, the only colors you see are orange, red and yellow. Now you might see some purples and blues and greens, but that's only because it's reflected off of the clouds. So in other words, all those blues, greens and purples get reflected off of the atmosphere and bounce back out into space. Unless there's clouds reflecting them back down, in which case you see this beautiful candy cotton candy sunset.

Right.

So, but the reality is, is that all you see is red, orange and yellow. Your eyes are, are highly capable of detecting that. So these frequencies that your eyes are able to see help your, your brain determine what time of day it is.

Right?

So these, these frequencies come into the eye, they talk to the optic chiasm, right. The super chic nucleus is a part of the brain that's right above the optic chasm, hypothalamus, pituitary, these parts of the brain and, and of course the pineal gland. These parts of the brain are, are, are understanding what time of day it is. They, they see the light and they say, ah, it's nighttime. Okay, turn on these programs, turn off those programs, do this, do this, do that. So it's setting your rhythm. And then same thing in the morning, your eyelids are very thin. Well, certain frequencies can actually penetrate through your eyelids again, hitting the, the optic nerve, optic suprachiasmatic nucleus, talking to the brain.

Boom.

It's time to wake up.

Right.

So all the cortisol starts to come on. Even when light hits the skin, you have adrenocorticotropin releasing hormone that actually gets activated. So now your body started to produce cortisol from light on the skin. We used to think it was only the brain that could produce this hormone, but now we start. So our entire biology is queuing to the environment. And this is what's setting everything in your body, every function, every function in your body. We have these things called clock genes. So these various genes inside the cell that are determining the function of the genes of that cell. So if it's a thyroid cell, then your thyroid function is going to be dictated by these cues, by these environmental cues. So if you have thyroid disorders, thyroid dysfunction, this is one of the things you want to get right. You want to get your circadian rhythm dialed in. If you have diabetes or any kind of glucose tolerance issues, we know that that glucose and glucagon, which is a hormone that's related to your ability to metabolize, utilize glucose effectively. These fluctuate with the circadian cycle, right. So everything that you're doing, your pancreas, your insulin levels, your estrogen, every hormone, every cell, every function, even down inside the bones, are. Are controlled by the circadian clocks. And those circadian clocks, the cell level are the master regulator is in the hypothalamus and the pituitary, which again is govern primarily by the eyes.

And so then insert humans, we add things like sunglasses first thing in the morning, which doesn't just disrupts that. And then I'll call out my own husband right now, like we. He wanted LED lights everywhere because they're like natural light. But what that creates then at night, if you turn on the lights where it's like thinking as daytime, where we should have amber or yet like you said, the colors of a sunset, you should have amber lights or the yellow lights. We should not have LED lights all over the house for nighttime.

Yeah.

And what's cool is. And there's like in Ayurveda, they've. They've done something called color therapy for a long time. In other words, using colors to, to affect the energy of a person. Now if you wear certain colored lenses, you'll. You'll notice that, that it changes your entire reality, Your mood, your behavior, you start to shift. So when you do this, like the, the best way, the optimal way I think is to have those kind of LEDs during the day. And then at night you have all these lamps and Y candles or fire. Exactly. And you turn all those on. And when you do that at night, everything starts to calm down, right? It's like you. It's like your whole house becomes this. This experiment. And what happens is, I've done this with so many clients, they think I'm crazy when I'm telling them to do all this stuff, they do it. And then eventually, after a few days, they start recognizing, oh, my gosh, it's so peaceful and calm. And then your behavior changes, and then your food choices change, and then you're. When you go to bed changes, right? Everything starts to shift because you're influencing such a key aspect of.

Of.

Of your reality.

I just realized, based on what you said, that's probably why I like, if I do wear sunglasses, I love Maui gyms because they are so bright. Like, you see, colors are, like, enhanced, right?

Yes.

Versus, like, other sunglasses that mute everything and make it more so totally. That's probably why they can charge what they charge for their sunglasses.

I mean, this is. This is the thing to really pay attention to. Like, I mean, there's a reason I used to live in. In Seattle, right? And in the. In the winter, it's just like the seasonal effective disorder is real. Like, the depression is real. And so there's a reason that people get these. These lights, right? These UV lights. There's a reason people go to tanning mitts. It actually changes the way you perceive the world.

That makes sense, right?

So this is. Light is the most powerful drug that we know of. It is unbelievably powerful.

Okay, how does red light therapy? This might be beyond your scope, but maybe it's not. How does red. Like, I use red lights, and I have red lights in my infrared sauna too, so. And I know I feel different with that, but is that. Am I timing that wrong too, since that is a red light? Like, does that matter when you do something like that?

No. Red light is. Is. Is more related to, you know, heat.

Right.

So any time of day can be effective to use red light. It's honestly, I would say more of a personal. You kind of play around with it. There's not a really a bad time to use red. Some people use it before bed. Some people use it when they wake up. But essentially, red light and infrared, there's different frequencies, but it's more working with the water and the mitochondria. There's something called cytochrome C oxidase, which is a protein inside mitochondria that we know actually accepts red light. It absorbs red light and essentially makes your mitochondria more efficient, more effective. And so in that sense, there's kind of this energy boosting effect, you could say. But there's also a ton of other signals related to inflammation and this type of thing. So it's really good for the skin, it's really good for mitochondria, it's good for wound healing, good for joints. You can overdo it. You know, I've actually done it myself. I'm, I tend to be one that's, that's me too.

Probably.

I just push things to the limit.

Yeah.

Because I'm in the sauna with the red light for like 45 minutes to an hour and then I have a red light in my office that I'll do in between calls. So I'm probably overdoing.

Like a little bit's good. More.

What happens if you, if you overdo it? What can happen?

You can. So there's a, there's a, there's sort of like a U curve. So a little bit like there's a sweet spot where, you know, depending on what you're dealing with, that 20 minutes, 30 minutes of a specific frequency could be good. And then once you start going beyond that, it actually starts to sort of stress the cell. So you can actually. I had an injury, sort of soft tissue injury that I was hoping to expedite the, the healing on, the recovery.

On and red lighted all day long.

I was like, I was watching a movie and I had this like red light on it. And then I woke up the next day and it was just like completely stiff. And I was like. And I knew what I did and I was like, oh, shoot, that's funny.

I just did that recently with vitamin to totally get off topic. But I was lower on vitamin D. I'm like, well, a little bit is okay, so more must be better. So I was, you know, I was using the droppers of vitamin D and you're supposed to like measure your drops. I'm like, no, I'll just pour the whole thing in. And I just started doing that every day. And then next thing you know, my liver numbers are all elevated. I'm like, like, okay, wait a minute. So I do that same thing. I get it.

Yeah. And there's, that's, and, and, and kind of what we're illustrating here is actually a very important point, which is that going more toward the natural means is fantastic. And there's a way to do it right. There's timings, there's, there's Appropriate doses. There's balancing effects, right? Magnesium is a good example of people thinking magnesium is this, this amazing mineral. Well, it is, but it also needs to be balanced, right? Magnesium and zinc and, and they all have a relationship, right? So we can overdo everything, right? So pushing something to the, to the extreme is, is really not the, the best way. And going back to kind of the circadian rhythm aspect, there's a, there's a thing here that becomes really, really important, which is to recognize that nature has a way, right? Nature has a natural way of doing things. This is why I'm not an expert in Ayurveda, but I love studying Ayurveda because they map out these energies. There's an energy to each season. In the summer, we tend to accumulate pitta, which is this kind of fiery metabolism. But if it gets out of balance, then that's not a good thing. That's inflammation. There's a lot of other things that can happen in the winter. We start to accumulate it vata, which is this cold, dry energy, right? This movement energy now inside the body, it behaves in a different way. So the point is, is that there's a natural fluctuation. There's a natural rhythm to things, right? There's a natural rhythm to our entire life, right? There's a, there's a natural arc. So it, it's, it's. It's important to honor that. It's important to flow with it. It's important to align with it, right? Even kind of. I mentioned thyroid earlier. Thyroid hormones should naturally be lower during the winter, right? That means that we're going to metabolize things slower, right? So we're not going to. It's the winter. This is an important sort of adaptation based on the winter. So there's a seasonal aspect of things, right? If we're flowing with things in the proper way, then our biology will naturally balance itself out. So with circadian rhythm, it's, it's. You go with the sun. So when the sun starts to wake up, that the first thing you should do when you wake up in the morning is go outside. Go outside within 15, 20 minutes. Now you can sit on your back porch. If you wear glasses or contacts, hopefully you're taking those out and you let the light naturally hit your retina, right? So if you do that and you could be sitting there drinking your tea 15, 20 minutes, you don't have to be looking at the sun or anything. It could be cloudy. Just being out there in that natural daylight starts to turn on your biology Your biology is so sensitive to this stuff. It knows, okay, now it's morning, morning. So it's like it's setting a clock. Now if you do that for two, three, four weeks, your body's going to start to recognize. Now I know when, when, when it's morning. So it's going to anticipate the time of day. This is what happens once you get in trained. You get this anticipation your body anticipates. And you know this if you've ever traveled a great distance and you've experienced jet lag. So if I go to the UK eight hours ahead, my, my body, when I get there is going to anticipate still San Diego time.

Sure.

But the reality is I'm on a totally different circadian clock. But my body's anticipating a different time so it has to adjust. So it's going to take the readings of the environment and it will slowly adjust and start to anticipate UK time until I fly back and then it's going to be anticipated UK time.

Right.

So that's what jet lag is. It's an anticipation based on these entrainment cues that involve light, temperature to some degree, movement and food. Those are the main key mechanisms that entrain our biological clock.

So this is what I actually hate. Shades and blinds and blackout curtains and all that. So that's another thing that my husband and I don't agree on. He wants it like as dark as it can be and I just want to wake up with the natural light. So it's all making sense though. But if I'm hearing you correctly, we can change this like if you want, if you feel like you're a night person and you feel like that's what's. But you understand the benefits of circadian rhythm and living that way you can change it. It's just a practice thing. I want to ask you about REM and deep sleep, but before I do that, I want to really quick ask about melatonin because our bodies should be naturally producing that. Some people owe for dose on taking their own melatonin. I personally will use it if I'm traveling just to help me regulate. I'm curious your thoughts on melatonin. If you would do that for travel, not use it at all. Like what about people that take it every day?

Yeah, this is a, this is a controversial one, but I, I, in my book I actually dedicated a most of a chapter to melatonin. Melatonin is a very fascinating molecule. So we should be producing it endogenously.

Right?

It's produced in the pineal gland as part of our sleep wake cycle. It's also produced in every cell of our body at the mitochondrial level. Most people aren't aware of this. Melatonin is one of the most powerful antioxidants. It is the most powerful antioxidant the body makes. So it's capable of squelching reactive oxygen species directly oxidative stress just completely canceling it out. It's also capable of turning on anti inflammatory mechanisms and it's, it's capable of, of, of boy. Another. There's three mechanisms and I'm forgetting the third one. It's, it's the only molecule in the human body that, that is capable of, of defending against reactive oxygen species in three different ways. So it's really, really important at every cell level. It's important in the gut. So the gut actually that fluctuates in, in melatonin production based off of all kinds of different factors. So you're, there's bacteria in your, in your gut that respond to melatonin. Akkermansia is one of these. So there's, there's. Melatonin plays a huge role in the human body. What's really fascinating is that you, you can take large, large doses of melatonin without really any negative effects. So there's, there's been 6,600 milligrams of melatonin per day for, for weeks or months in a study. No ill effects. I've taken upwards of 400 milligrams.

So you're a fan of taking it?

There's, there's a use case for it. So I'm not saying everybody should. I'm not saying it's even necessary.

I know it can be detoxifying too. So there's like, it's like this balance. So to me I struggle with this because like there's, you can take some products that have melatonin to help you detoxify. But then there's the whole like it could really mess up your sleep if you're taking it the wrong time. There's a lot of, of variables there.

There, there's a lot of misconception around it. If you dig into the research, there's really not a lot of negatives. Like okay, there's stories, there's people talking about it, but there's really, in the research there's no real negatives. The, it's, it's used in, in premature births if you have a really, really sick baby, they will give them high doses of melatonin.

Okay.

It's really effective for autism spectrum ADD, ADHD. There's, there's, I think it's 10 milligrams.

Is it because it's calming you or what's the reason that that's doing that?

It's not totally clear, but there's a lot of different effects with respect to inflammation, the brain, mitochondria, the gut. So there's, there's a lot of different effects and it's not totally elucidated. But, but again, this is one of those things where, you know, they, there's something called an LD50. In other words, they try to. Lethal dose.

Right.

So they try to find a lethal dose of anything like table salt. They'll figure out how much table salt it takes to kill a mouse, right?

Yeah.

And they'll come up with it, with it and then they'll say, okay, what's the, what's 50 of that lethal dose? That's called the LD50. They haven't found an LD50 for melatonin. In other words, they, they try to dose up a mouse to the hilt with melatonin and they can't find a.

Dose other than he's sleeping all day.

Exactly. So but what they have found is that it is, that it is that it rebuilds the thymus gland.

Gland.

So the thymus gland is actually something. The peak function is right around 18.

Right.

Or actually maybe less puberty. It's around puberty and it starts to decline. The thymus is really important for immune function. It's really important for longevity. There's an intimate relationship between the thymus gland, the pineal gland, and melatonin.

So.

It'S functional in so many ways with respect to longevity, brain health, hormones. So there's a, a, there's. When you take high doses around puberty, it can delay puberty. So there's an, there's a. I wouldn't recommend that per se, but, but there's a very interesting relationship. It's almost like it puts the brakes on some of these sex hormones. It's actually been known to bring women out of early menopause and bring them back into their cycle.

Wow.

So there's a very interesting use case for a lot of people because of the hormonal aspect of it and its relationships with, with, with the sex hormones, with the brain. So again, there, there's, there's. It can be really powerful. So if, if a woman is entering perimenopause at, at 40 or 50 and they feel like this is too early for me, I actually want to stay on my cycle. They can come off, they can come off that perimenopause with things like high dose melatonin. So it's the, the thing with melatonin and, and sleep is sometimes all it takes is a tiny dose. It can take 0.1 milligrams or 0.5 milligrams and, and it will, it will induce sleep in somebody. It will make them the, the sleep onset will be faster or it'll help them sleep more throughout the night. Some, some people, when I take 400mg doesn't affect my sleep.

Wow.

I don't know why. I don't know that many. I don't know that we know why. Here's the thing about melatonin that, that I find that there's probably a lot of use cases with respect to health and people that, that are, that are suffering from a dysfunctional health aspect. The, the challenge is that nobody's going to study it because it takes a lot of money to do proper studies and there's no money behind melatonin. You cannot patent it. So no, there's, there's nobody behind Ambien and other. That's right. So nobody's going to fund this stuff. In fact, there's incentive to create studies that kind of, you know, make it look bad.

Yeah, right.

And there's plenty of ways to do this with, with research like this is. There's a lot of ways and most of the research, um, there's a lot of research that's fraudulent and there's a lot of research that gets done that is good research that never makes, never gets published because it doesn't serve the interests of those who are paying for it.

So that's wild.

There's lots of challenges with that. So melatonin is very fascinating, but the key is get good circadian rhythm dialed in. So in other words, if you get the morning sunlight, that spikes your melatonin at night. If you get more daylight, more sunlight during the day, spikes your melatonin at night. If you exercise improves melatonin, if you fast and you eat good foods and improves melatonin production. So dialing in your circadian rhythm, doing all the other healthy things actually improves sleep, improves melatonin production, improves your cortisol waking response. It all kind of ties together. And when you start producing melatonin at high levels, you detoxify better. I mean it's, it's an amazing detoxifier, to be honest. It's fantastic for the brain. It balances out estrogen Dominance. There's all kinds of benefits to having a good natural spike in melatonin. And I would say there's very little downside in playing with exogenous melatonin. There's very little downside.

Okay, you've convinced me. I never do it. Now I'm convinced differently. So this is good. Talk to me a little bit about deep and rem. So we were talking before we started recording. You and your wife have a similar thing that me and my husband have. So Jason was saying that he gets a tremendous amount of deep sleep, very little REM sleep, and his wife is opposite. And I'm the same way. I get a ton of REM sleep, which is your dream state. I think it's like a lot of. I'm surprised you don't, because you're a creative person. But like, a lot of creative people have a lot of REM sleep. But I have very little deep sleep. Or I had very little deep sleep. I finally kind of dialed in the right magnesium to help me some more with that. So I'm. I am getting better deep sleep now. But can you talk what, you know about the difference of it and do we. How much do we need to be stressed about improving one or the other there?

Yeah. I mean, maybe the research is out, and maybe there's sleep experts in terms of the scientific realm that understand more than I do. I'm sure there are. But as far as I've seen, I don't know that we actually have a definitive answer in terms of what the optimal amount of REM sleep and deep sleep are. You know, what are the constitutional differences between the two? Because as far as I can tell, my wife and I are very different sleepers. I only need about six and a half hours to feel very.

Because you're getting like 100 hours of deep sleep.

Exactly.

That's right.

Yeah.

And. And. And I mean, I'm the type of person that as long as my.

My.

My little one doesn't bug me, I can. I can lay down in bed. I fall asleep within two minutes. You're like, I hardly. Yeah, I hardly move. I'm like. I'm like a robot powering down. And then at 5:36, I wake up and I'm ready to go. And I'm. I'm.

I'm.

There's. I'm great. My wife is totally different. She can go to bed earlier, get as best sleep as she can, and then wake and then. And sleep longer and then still not feel quite as rested. Right. Believe this has to do with sort of the differences between REM sleep and deep sleep. I get a lot of deep sleep. It tends to be more restorative for the body. You know, you tend to recover from exercise faster and these type of things. REM sleep is more related to the mind, so it's more related to memory consolidation. I personally believe that dreaming is a very interesting thing that we don't fully understand. There's some very deep thinkers throughout the years who want to understand sleep. You know, there's, there's people who practice, you know, analyzing their dreams, who, who practice getting into their dreams and, and controlling their dreams. And so I think, I think there's some really interesting things that we don't fully understand. But it tends to be more related to memory consolidation. So now for, for somebody like you who wants to improve their deep sleep, is that worth focusing on? I think so, but I, but I suspect that there's a limit based on your constitution and your, who you are that in other words you, you won't get to the point where maybe like your husband is naturally right and he same thing with him with regard to REM sleep. I don't know that he's going to get to that point where you are because there's a trade off with all this, right? Like if you're in deep sleep, you ain't going to be in REM sleep.

Here's the wild thing about it though. This is based on Natalie's own studies of herself. This is not like anything really like studied, but my own, my own experience. If, let's just say I'm at a seminar, like a four day seminar and I, it's completely out of my comfort zone. Like I'm 12 hours in the seminar a day. Like I'm not, I'm not a sitter but I'm like sitting in a dark room and I'm just, I'm out of my norm and I'm getting access to very little sleep time. So this just happened to me recently. I was in a four day seminar. I wasn't getting home till like midnight and I had to be back there the next day at like 8 o', clock, right? So very little time to get sleep. So I would go to sleep way past my normal bedtime, wake up without as many hours. But when I would look at my aura ring, I actually was getting more deep sleep those days. It was almost like my body was saying you are not going to have your 8 hours sleep tonight or you're not going to have your long sleep. Therefore we in your five hours you're gonna have, you're going to get primarily deep sleep. And I've noticed that, I don't know if you, your wife has seen that too, but it's almost like your body's smart. Like if you give it the eight hours sleep, it'll, you're still going to get what you need. If you give it six hours, you're going to get. So it's like, I feel like it's like which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Yeah, I, I, here's what you're pointing to. I mean again, there may be, be people that have answers. I, I certainly don't have answers to this and I suspect it's not like I haven't looked either. So I've, I've looked and I, I can't figure out really what's happening. My suspicion is that sleep is much more complicated than we, than we know it. There's a lot more interesting aspects to it. My suspicion is that sleep is worth, it's worth investigating in your own personal world.

Right.

So doing what you're doing I think is really valuable to get to some ultimate answer. And like that there's a thing that you're shooting for. I'm not sure that that's a, that's reality. It's more like how do you feel? You know, what did you notice?

Right?

Like, oh, it's interesting. When I did red light therapy before bed, mama aura ring, I noticed that my REM sleep was negatively impacted. Interesting. Let's try that again. Oh, I noticed my sleep shifted based off of when I'm cycling.

Right.

Oh, I noticed. And this is men and women, Right? Men and women. I noticed that when the moon is full, my deep sleep tends to suffer. Interesting. I noticed that when I had one glass of wine at 5 o' clock with dinner, my sleep latency was increased. Right. So to me this is worth getting interesting. And when I eat almonds, whatever the case is, whatever it is, like start to play with that, get curious with it. You know, getting something like an oura ring is really cool because you can, you could if you're the type of person that likes it. If you're, don't, if you don't like doing this, don't do it.

You don't want the data.

Yeah.

And just go off of your internal field. Some people are very internal. They have a really good compass for how they feel. But, but it's still worth paying attention to.

Right.

In fact, for a long time this is what women would do. They would track Their, their body temperature to see, to, to measure their cycle.

Right.

So we can actually do this by taking temperatures, by tracking how we feel when we wake up. Do whatever your method is. But I do think it is worthwhile exploring these things. Again, not to think that science has our answers. In fact, I found that Ayurveda and Chinese medicine have a lot more answers for us with regard to these type of things than modern science. But it's still interesting to sort of ask these questions. Like that's, that's my approach is to, to, to notice things, to get curious and look, as we get older in our 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, our sleep tends to change, right? We actually tend to sleep less, we tend to wake up earlier. So I think there's just, there's interesting things to play with. You know, what happens if I do the 4, 7, 8 breath, which is a parasympathetic, relaxing breath before I go to bed? What happens, what happens when I meditate, what happens when I journal? What happens when I do a gratitude practice right before bed and I ease my mind and I start to feel gratitude for things. These are worth playing around with. And you're going to find more answers if you start to play and get curious and investigate and pay attention than you are ever going to dig into scientific journals and try to understand the different stages of sleep and how to do this. And that's a very like left brain, Western mind approach which is kind of like, like that's, that's a territory I grew up and I'm trying to kind of like balance it out with more of this sort of feminine feel, curiosity kind of like way of doing things right. Because there's, there's value in both. But I think we're, we're severely lacking in the paying attention to my own body type of data.

Well, gosh, Jason, this has been so much knowledge I'll have to have you back on because you just have so much good information. This has been incredible, so helpful. I want everyone to know that number one, he has a book called Beyond Longevity that you can get anywhere. And also at the time of you listening to this, depending on when you're listening to it, if you're listening to it soon after we release it, if you go to midlifeconversations.com forward slash human longevity. So midlife conversations.com forward slash human longevity, it's going to link you to a nine part video series, film series that he is doing. All about the stuff he's talking about. But next level, anything you want him to know about that too, Jason.

Yeah, it's definitely next level. It's. It's for those who really are curious about some of the depths of this stuff. But, I mean, what we tried to do with the film series actually is, is bring forth modern science and what it says about gut health and mitochondria and aging and sleep and, and light and, and trauma and, and all the aspects that are related to, to health. But we did it in a fun way, too. We traveled around to the Blue Zone, so we went into Icaria, Greece and Sardinia, Italy and, and Nicoya Peninsula and Okinawa and. And we. We met with these people that are in their 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond, 100. And we asked them about their life. So we really got. Got intimate to find out from them all around the world what was it that they feel was the biggest contributors to their health. Why are we seeing such health challenges today in not only the west, but in their cultures? It's showing up as well. So we kind of wove that into the storyline. So it's quite fun to watch and to get to meet these people.

Yeah, I can't wait to dive in and watch this. Thank you so much, Jason. Thank you.

Thanks, Natalie.