Kind: captions
Language: en
sleep is undeniably essential to our
health and longevity more than half of
adults worldwide report that they are
getting less sleep than they need on
average per night making sleep problems
a global epidemic in this episode i have
three sleep experts join me to talk
about how we can approach this program
shawn stevenson author of sleep smarter
give yourself a screen curfew just 30
minutes matthew walker author of the new
york times bestseller why we sleep
cognitive behavioral therapy for
insomnia that must be the first line
recommended treatment and dan pardee ceo
of human os dot me and dan's plan.com
sleep ends up being is a very great
window into your soul you know even to
the into the workings of the brain pay
attention to get the inside scoop on
sleep and it's necessity in today's
world number one is to remember that
your night sleep begins
the morning before and one of the most
important things that you can do is get
direct sun exposure into your eyes and
on your skin first thing in the morning
now i know a lot of people live in
northern latitudes and you're stepping
outside and it's basically just a gray
day but even that helps it's better than
nothing you want to get out you want
that sunlight to hit your eyes you want
that sunlight to hit your skin because
it helps to set your circadian rhythms
it's one of the most important things
you can do for actually getting a good
night's sleep but it starts the morning
before and by the way as a pro tip when
you're traveling this is one of the
critical things that you want to do to
adjust to the new time zone the second
you wake up get out go outside and get
that sun exposure and i try to look up
into the sky not at the sun as that will
burn your eyes out but i try to look up
into this guide and make sure that i'm
getting the maximum amount of sunlight
into my eyes i'm not wearing sunglasses
i'm not wearing blue blockers like i'm
wearing now
which is part of the night routine
but in the morning when i'm trying to
get all that sunlight in to set my
circadian rhythms then i'm making sure
that i get that exposure
make sure that you're using your body
throughout the day it's incredibly
important to actually be physically
active to burn that energy off to make
sure that you earn your night's sleep in
a modern lifestyle so often we're
spending so much time sedentary that we
don't actually tax our body in any
meaningful way which means that by the
time we're trying to lay down to go to
bed we don't have the impulse to sleep
and so doing things that are physically
taxing throughout the day is an
extraordinarily useful way of being
ready to actually go to bed
as you go through the day i find that
there are certain things you need to be
very careful about in terms of what you
in take so eating and drinking so a big
one for me is the last meal that i eat
and what time that happens at now i get
up very early which we'll cover as we
get later in my day around what time i
go to bed but i typically get up very
early somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m
so my day already is skewed that way but
my last meal i eat usually around 115 to
1 45 pm and that is the last meal i will
eat for the day i won't have anything
after that literally nothing i don't
even have water
after 2 pm
now the reason that i don't eat after 1
45-ish is because i want to do
intermittent fasting and it's much
easier for me to get through the rest of
the evening without intaking any more
food than it is to spend the whole
morning hungry until say 12 or 1 o'clock
which i know a lot of people do it's
dealer's choice whatever works better
for you but having an extended fast is
very very helpful
now also
another reason that i end it early is
that i think you will notice a massive
difference in how you sleep if you have
your last meal at least at least bare
minimum
three hours before bedtime so if you go
to bed at 9 00 pm like it's a religion
like i do then your last meal is going
to be at 6 00 pm anyway so you're gonna
want to get that out of the way and i
wouldn't start chewing at six i would
try to be done chewing at six so that
you actually have a full three hours
rest between when you had that last bite
and when you go to bed your digestion
stops in the middle of the night so it
can create discomfort if your digestion
stops sort of mid process and you're
sitting with something sitting either
still in your stomach or in your
upper intestines so that can be very
uncomfortable so that disrupts people's
sleep and makes it hard for them to get
to sleep and remember that you have
trillions of microbes inside of you and
when they're being asked to sit in all
the things that they're
digesting it can create issues so i find
that i sleep way better by not just
eating three hours before bedtime but
taking that all the way back to where
i'm done chewing at about 1 15. 145
excuse me
so that's worked out really really well
for me and if you're worried that you're
going to get hungry remember you're
taking in a normal amount of calories
you're just having your last meal later
and what i have heard said before and i
think is really clever and brilliant is
that as i get hungry i have sleep for
dinner
and i love that i love that idea of
right when i'm about like yeah i could
eat now i brush my teeth which for
whatever reason the taste taste of
toothpaste
kills hunger so
just as i'm thinking i want to eat i
brush my teeth and then boom i go to bed
i fell asleep with no problems and i'm
able to stay asleep now the reason that
i stop drinking at 2 p.m is i find that
if i have any substantial amount of
water because i'll still have a sip of
water here and there but sips and the
reason is that i'll wake up in the
middle of the night to pee if i
and by the way if i'm eating too close
to bedtime same thing because there's so
much water in the food that you eat
but i don't want to wake up in the
middle of the night if i can at all
avoid it so the times where i eat later
drink late i find myself waking up in
the middle of the night to pee and then
my brain kicks back in and i start
problem solving and it makes it
impossible for me to fall back asleep
and i was losing two sometimes three
hours a night of productivity because i
wasn't sleeping i was trying to fall
back asleep i wasn't doing anything
useful other than tossing and turning
and ruminating over everything that had
happened during the day that i need to
do that i could have done better
it was nightmarish so not only are you
fatigued sub-optimal cognitively but
it's just really a lame way to spend
time
because there's an interesting part of
your brain that shuts off in the middle
of the night that makes fears seem way
bigger than they will as soon as you're
up and are actually attacking your day
it all feels very manageable but in the
middle of the night it feels terrifying
it feels overwhelming feels like you
know just absolute stress inducing and
so that makes it even less likely that
you're going to be able to fall asleep
so anything that i can do to mitigate
waking up in the middle of the night
and starting that death loop
i'm going to do so that's one of the
reasons that i stopped eating and is
definitely the reason that i stop
drinking at 2 p.m every day
okay the next thing that i do for
sleep hygiene as it's called is as the
evening wears on i make sure that i'm
not getting a substantial amount of blue
light and
bright light into my eyes so i'm going
to dim my computer screen i'm going to
put my computer screen on screen on
night mode so you can go into your
phone you can go into your computer and
set them just automatically at a certain
time i think i set mine for
6 p.m if i remember right and it just
automatically flips over to an orange or
light
i dim the screen so i'm not getting
super bright light happens again both on
my phone and my computer and then on top
of that just to make sure i put on blue
blocking glasses to make sure that i'm
not getting too much of my eyes and
there are some days if i'm going to be
at the computer for a really extended
amount of time i'll wear blue blockers
even during the day just so i'm not
getting an overwhelming amount of the
artificial blue light from my screen
so that's how i curb that and then
another thing that i do around my
computer is i try not to do any work
that i think will be stress inducing for
the final hour before my bedtime so i'm
still gonna work right up until i go to
bed my rule in life is monday through
friday if i'm awake i'm either working
or working out
now i love my work so this isn't a
torture chamber i'm sure some people are
imagining that and thinking it's
horrible but for me it's completely
joyful
and
i do though have to acknowledge that
there are some things that i work on
that stress me out and so i don't check
test text messages after 8 pm i'm not
looking at emails after 8 pm um i'm
doing things that are work but enjoyable
now i'm not religious about it there are
definitely times where
i feel that something really just has to
be done in a timely fashion and so i
will break that
rule light
occasionally but i try not to because i
do find that i sleep much better if for
the last hour before bed i'm doing fun
things i'm doing things that
give me energy that make me feel light
that are part of that passion that feel
good and i can feel a difference in
my
stress and anxiety levels there's a
lightness to it that i don't know i
don't have a better word for it but as
i'm going to bed i just feel relaxed i
feel
joyful i have a sense of purpose and
it's like i can let everything go for
the day and when i climb into bed i
remind myself that i only have one job
now that i'm going to bed and that job
is to sleep
and that mantra the only job i have now
is to sleep has helped me a lot
especially when i wake up in the middle
of the night
so when i lay down then i have a host of
different mechanical things that i do
one of them
is to make sure that i have my own
blankets i use a two blanket system so i
myself have two blankets that way if at
any point during the night i'm getting
cold i can pull the other blanket up so
i start it down where it's basically
just covering my shins and below and
then if i'm getting cold i can pull that
up to my waist if i'm a little cold but
not too cold or i can pull all the way
up if i'm really cold and that allows me
to better control my temperature and
then this is the one that people think
is weird but i've been doing it forever
so it seems so normal to me i do not
ever under any circumstance share
blankets with my wife
now the reason is when they move it
becomes your movement or you're playing
tug of war for the blanket or worse the
other person might actually pull the
blanket off you or
you might pull the blanket off them and
give them a bad night's sleep so that
was a lesson i learned very early on
because for whatever weird reason i like
to sleep with the blankets up over my
head i like to be completely cocooned
feels so nice there is no light which by
the way is another thing
make sure your room is dark
make sure your room is dark so no light
no light leaks no phones no night lights
nothing as dark as you can get it cover
up if things have like little led power
lights cover those up do whatever you
can to get the room actually dark
for me i have another layer which is i
sleep under the blankets now if you like
my wife lisa the last thing you're ever
going to do is cover your head with a
blanket she absolutely hates it and
feels like you know she's just
claustrophobic and has to get it off of
her but for me it just feels
like i'm in a womb and it's so wonderful
so i love it so i have slept with the
blankets over my head for decades at
this point which is another reason why i
need to have my own blankets so get my
own blankets i can meter them based on
the temperature in the room which brings
me to another point
one of the
best
signifiers to your body that it's time
to go to bed that's going to kick you
into sleep mode
is making sure that your room is cool so
we keep our room somewhere around 67 to
68 degrees it should be cool enough that
when you go to
take your clothes off and get in your
pajamas you kind of don't want to
because it's that cold so that's the
right temperature so whatever that
temperature is for you you want to get
it there get under the covers you're
nice and warm it's not like you're
sleeping cold but you want the room to
be cool to signal to your body that it's
night time right we've come up through
evolution with all of these signals from
daylight from the
brightness
the color temperature the difference
between fire light which is dim and
orange to daylight which is bright and
blue and so we have all of these subtle
signals including a drop in temperature
so as the temperature comes down it's
yet another signal to your body that
it's time to go to sleep so from setting
our circadian rhythm with getting that
sunlight directly in our eyes on our
skin actually being outside to the
temperature dropping the color
temperature of the light changing
the brightness of the light changing all
of these are signals that keep your
circadian rhythm where you want it to be
so that you can fall asleep what is up
my friend tom bilyu here and i have a
big question to ask you how would you
rate your level of personal discipline
on a scale of one to ten if your answer
is anything less than a 10 i've got
something cool for you and let me tell
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difficult things that are stressful
boring which is what kills most people
or possibly scary or even painful now
here is the thing achieving huge goals
and stretching to reach your potential
requires you to do those challenging
stressful things and to stick with them
even when it gets boring and it will get
boring building your levels of personal
discipline is not easy but let me tell
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you're never going to achieve anything
meaningful unless you develop discipline
right i've just released a class from
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right click the link on the screen
register for this class right now and
let's get to work i will see you inside
this workshop from impact theory
university until then my friends be
legendary peace out
this particular topic
is and me being a nutritionist like i
was all like food matters food first
food is the most important thing
but
in my practice and seeing people coming
in that
you know we've got these folks over here
you know 80 percent of the time are able
to reverse type 2 diabetes heart disease
get off their lisinoprils and all this
different stuff and then we've got this
category of people who just like
literally sometimes would ironically
kind of keep me up at night like what is
wrong like i'm doing all these things
right are they lying to me and
it wasn't until i started to ask people
about their sleep that it just like it
changed everything this was about six
years ago
and so
then and here's the key
i can't just tell people they need to
sleep more
you know this like people don't want to
change
that much like we want change but we
want to be a little bit right and so i
found clinically proven strategies that
are super easy to implement almost
things that can happen on automatic to
help them improve their sleep quality
right and once we did that it's like the
floodgates would open for people you
know we've been struggling for sometimes
you know 15 20 years with their weight
finally the weight comes off you know
and seeing people struggling with heart
disease or high cholesterol you know the
so-called bad cholesterol
and seeing those numbers finally get
regulated once we got their sleep
optimized
and i knew that this was incredibly
important part of the conversation that
was left out and as we'll talk about i
know now that our sleep quality is more
important than our diet and exercise
combined and what it does for our health
and also literally our physical
appearance
fascinating stuff how much more fat you
lose when you get optimal sleep it's
it's insane that's a bold statement so
walk me through what are some of the um
the just
core benefits that i'm going to get
assuming that i'm sleeping suboptimally
like
why is that a problem since that's
probably one of the most celebrated like
things like when you get a little sleep
people like champion you normally i'd
sleep five to six hours a night with no
alarm okay i haven't set an alarm in 15
years so that's just that was my cycle
i go to bed early very consistently my
diet is on point my exercise is on point
and so i'd wake up feeling awesome
and so i thought this is cash money but
because i don't set an alarm that my
sleep cycle will change and right now
i'm getting like seven to nine hours out
of nowhere and super consistently and i
literally have no idea why i'm warmer
now
so i used to be freezing cold at all
times
and then at the same time that my and i
don't know correlated cause of no idea
um i've started being warmer while i
sleep
and then during the day so what are like
the core components of sleep was
something bad happening to me or less
than optimal when i was only getting six
hours even though i felt good
um any correlation between the heat and
the extra sleep there's there's for
there's a lot to unpack there number one
uh what's so interesting is that you you
were doing something exceptionally right
as far as what the research shows with
improving your sleep
which is you're going to bed kind of
consistently a little bit earlier than
other folks might and so what we call
what we call this is this anabolic
window or what we call money time sleep
and this is generally between the hours
of 10 and two because it's more lined up
with their natural melatonin secretion
so if you go to sleep during those times
you actually spend more time in the
deepest most anabolic stages of sleep
and you tend to produce more human
growth hormone than other folks so you
were already winning with that this is
why you have a tendency to feel better
even if you're getting less sleep
because
i this isn't called sleep more right it
sleeps smarter
and there are many people who sleep you
know eight to nine hours and they wake
up feeling like
straight ups you know hot garbage you
know what i'm saying and they're just
wondering why it's because it's the
quality of sleep and when i say quality
of sleep what does that mean let's break
that down so your sleep is regulated by
changes in your in your brain waves it's
really fascinating stuff and we still
don't know
really what sleep is trying to define
sleep is like trying to define
um you know when forced gump is like
life is like a box of chocolates sleep
is like pretending to be dead we don't
really know right but we do know the
changes that happen in the brain we
cycle from kind of a normal waking state
with with gamma beta
um we're probably in beta right now we
move to alpha theta delta is where the
deep anabolic dreamless sleep takes
place and we need all of them
and there's a certain percentage we
spend in each that helps to rejuvenate
our mind and bodies
and if you optimize certain things
you'll do it more efficiently one of
those gear shifts
like if you think about your body like
this kind of manual transmission is
melatonin like people hear about
melatonin as a sleep hormone it just
helps your body to efficiently go
through your sleep cycles and if your
melatonin is suppressed by various
things you know i'll share a couple
then you're not going through those
efficiently and you can wake up feeling
like a pinata after the party the next
day even though you're spending all this
time on the mattress
so that's number one
number two there's this interesting
process called thermoregulation there's
a natural drop in your core body
temperature at night
to help facilitate sleep for all of us
if things are running properly but what
was fascinating and i shared a study
about this is that
they tested insomniacs and everyone in
this particular clinical study all had
too high body temperature at night it
would not go down and so what they did
was they fit them with these thermosuits
right that lowers their skin temperature
not even their core temperature just one
degree and virtually eliminated all the
symptoms of insomnia whoa ambien can't
do that all right
and it's as simple as paying attention
to how your body temperature influences
your sleep and so with your body
temperature changing like that it's kind
of feeling more of an insulation
as a result of having more sleep there's
a ton of different things that could be
correlated there so i'm not going to say
that the sleep is a causative factor but
it's really interesting how your body
does change in accordance to sleep
there's a natural rise in your core body
temperature as the day goes
as i'm sorry as the night goes on that
helps to kind of wake you up
um so what i did want to share though
when i said that kind of bold statement
in the beginning
when we're talking about
how sleep influences your body
composition i think everybody needs to
know this
there was a this study really blew my
mind and this was done at the university
of chicago and they took people
and they put them on a calorie
restricted diet kind of typical stuff
again i'm taught in college to see the
impact on weight loss
when they're sleep deprived or getting
enough sleep all right so they put the
people on this particular diet monitor
everything
one phase of study they're getting eight
and a half hours of sleep all right then
they track all their metrics another
phase of the study same exact diet same
exercise they don't change anything else
but now they sleep deprive them and they
take away three hours of sleep so now
they're getting five and a half hours of
sleep versus eight and a half hours of
sleep at the end of the study they found
that when individuals were well rested
they burned 55 more body fat
just by getting more sleep and so the
question is how does this happen
melatonin when i talked about this a
little bit earlier
it's not just that it's involved in
sleep it's also involved in fat loss and
this study that was done in the journal
pineal research
found that
melatonin production helps to increase
your body's mobilization of something
called brown adipose tissue right this
is a type of fat that burns fat all
right the reason that it's brown is that
it has more mitochondria so it's very
energy dense right these mitochondria
just for people who i'm sure people have
heard of this but it's like these energy
power plants in your cells that are
creating the energy currency of your
body like how you experience energy the
energy exchange something called atp
and so when you are producing adequate
melatonin you're producing immobilizing
adequate amounts of brown adipose tissue
which just puts you in a metabolically
advantaged state all right but if you're
not getting the melatonin production
which you've got to meet two
requirements
number one you need a biological night
so that means this could actually be
during the day but it's a consistent
cycle of when it gets produced
but the other requirement needs to be
met that you need darkness your body
produces melatonin exclusively in
darkness and so that's one also how do
you how do they get that body fat change
hgh production which we talked about too
human growth hormone is muscle sparing
and it's a big driver of energy it's
also known as a youth hormone kids have
an insane amount of hgh being produced
this is why they have so much energy we
have a pretty sharp decline in our
production right around 18 to 20. but my
argument is that around 18 to 20 we
generally in our culture like we leave
the house we might go to college that
kind of thing and we no longer have
structure we no longer have rules and
we're not going to produce as much hgh
third thing really quickly
um is and this is all has to do with the
diet and the food choices is leptin all
right and i know people have talked
about leptin before
but leptin is your body's kind of
glorified satiety hormone and so when
you're producing adequate amounts of
leptin
you feel more in control right you feel
more satiated
but when when leptin kind of falls off
the map or you have leptin uh resistance
can take place
then we're gonna have some pretty big
issues with you regulating your cravings
and your appetite and so stanford
university researchers found that just
one night of sleep deprivation radically
suppresses your leptin
and now i hope folks can start to pay
attention whenever you might not get the
best sleep how your cravings change the
next day you're gonna have a tendency to
want to number one eat more number two
to want to eat more kind of the starchy
crunchy salty sugary type things and i
remember
my wife who's actually here when we had
our son and she she's never seen me eat
this food i was sitting there like
waiting for the baby to come i was
eating uh chocolate covered raisins i'm
just like and i didn't even realize i
was doing it you know it was like three
o'clock in the morning you know
and so that's another thing and uh last
one i'll share and there's so many that
create that change in your body
composition
but this one is incredibly important
it's cortisol
cortisol has been drug through the mud
recently you know it's getting blamed
for everything but it's not really a bad
guy it's just misunderstood all right
cortisol is incredibly important
for example
cortisol is important for your thyroid
to work right and that's kind of like
the metabolism regulator of your body
but here's the thing
just one night of sleep deprivation
radically increases your cortisol and
suppresses melatonin actually as well
but this rise in cortisol has a really
powerful ability to start to break down
your muscle tissue with your muscles
your body's kind of fat burning
machinery
and so it can convert your muscle tissue
into glucose it's a process called
gluconeogenesis
as a kind of fight-or-flight response
because your physiology doesn't know why
you're not sleeping you know it must be
some danger about you know and so
understanding those major hormones and
there's many others you start to see the
picture that gets painted with just how
much your sleep quality impacts your
physical appearance it's really crazy
i've always known you need sleep but i
didn't know why and so getting into
or transitioning i should say because i
always knew you needed sleep because if
i didn't get it i felt terrible but that
was sort of the the end of it and i even
let myself just stop it though we don't
really know why you sleep but not diving
into the real breakdown which is really
fascinating so what are things then that
people can do to actually optimize their
sleep yeah this is what it's really all
about
you know i like to start with the
low-hanging fruit first
and something really really fascinating
is just simply
changing or embracing
the time of day that you exercise can
improve your sleep quality
and so appalachian state university did
a really cool study and they wanted to
see what time of day exercising at
various times of day how does it impact
your sleep quality and so they had the
study participants to exercise
exclusively at 7 a.m
and another phase exclusively at 1 pm in
the afternoon another phase exclusively
at 7 pm in the evening
they compiled all the data and at the
end of the study they found that morning
exercisers
spend more time in the deepest most
anabolic stages of sleep so they're
producing more human growth hormone they
have more efficient sleep cycles what
we've been talking about
they also tend to sleep longer and this
is the one that kind of can get glanced
past
on average they had about a 25 percent
greater drop in blood pressure at night
so what's what's up with that that's
correlated with a deactivation of your
sympathetic fight-or-flight nervous
system right so you're actually able to
shift gears get to that parasympathetic
rest and digest
calming down by getting some exercise in
in the morning
and so how do we employ this though
that's the question because some people
just like you know i can't exercise in
the morning and there's also people who
exercise in the morning who might have
terrible sleep
and it's because this is not like the
magic bullet this is a thing to stack in
your condition if you're doing this and
then messing up the one i'm gonna talk
about next
you're probably not gonna have the best
sleep so
here's how to employ this just five
minutes
and i tested this each morning i do this
five minutes of exercise you know it
might be just jumping on a rebounder you
know a little mini trampoline for five
minutes go for a quick power walk uh do
some tabata which is just four minutes
and a little mobility work
and i guess most people don't know what
tabata is high intensity interval
training basically is 20 seconds of
exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest
repeated over and over again for four
minutes
and
in his clinical studies this was found
to outperform
you know traditional cardio like the
kind of moderate intensity 45 minutes of
exercise in four minutes wow the change
in your cardiovascular benefits body
composition
and also changing your mitochondria as
well this is why it works it does
something called a cortisol reset all
right we talked about cortisol
but again it's a good thing if it's in
the right time and the right amount
clinically i would call these people
tired and wire that would come in i'm
looking at the hormone panels and the
cortisol would be really low in the
morning and high at night
thus they have sleep problems
so you naturally if your heart if your
cortisol is on a natural hormone rhythm
it would be elevated at its peak in the
morning right around 6 a.m to 8 a.m and
then gradually decline as the day goes
does that have to do with what time you
wake up
sort of i mean the cortisol will kind of
tend to nudge you out of sleep but also
will tend to notice that as the day as
it your sleep goes on it becomes lighter
and lighter anyways right this is when
you tend to remember your dreams like at
the at the end of the sleep
and so
getting this little boost like helping
your body to propel and get your
cortisol up via exercise helps to reset
that rhythm and get you back on track so
that's why it works
so that's number one low hanging fruit
just get in five minutes of exercise
start in the morning no matter what just
five minutes is all you need it's gonna
help to
create this snowball effect of good
things for you you know five minutes if
this is the time you do go to the gym
and do your full workout so be it all
good but everybody who's not already
doing that just get that five minutes in
the second one
and this one is more of the tough love
and the most difficult but this is the
most important one in our culture today
and this has to do with our tech all
right so harvard researchers have
confirmed that blue light exposure from
our favorite devices you know ipads
iphones
androids tablets televisions they do in
fact suppress your melatonin
substantially because it your body
essentially thinks the sun's out is that
the problem so we have photoreceptors
that are always trying to gauge what
time it is
right because our bodies are wired up to
be in sync with nature
but only recently like literally just
the past few decades have we been able
to manipulate and basically create a
second day time right so your body's
just it doesn't really know how to
figure it out and so the blue and white
spectrum specifically are the ones that
are more similar to daylight and so what
it's doing is and so here's what the
researchers found basically
every hour you're on your device at
night suppresses melatonin for about 30
minutes right so if you're
on your you know you watch a movie a
three hour movie for example
your melatonin is going to be suppressed
even if you go to bed right after you're
not producing adequate melatonin for
about an hour and a half
and so again you can be unconscious from
sheer physical exhaustion but you're not
going to go through your sleep cycles
efficiently
and so just be mindful of that what i
encourage people to do is to give
yourself a screen curfew just 30 minutes
all right i don't want to make this
complicated just 30 minutes
but here's the rub
we're addicted to our devices like
straight up we just need to be honest i
am we all are you know basically it's
because of
this dopamine loop right dopamine is so
powerful so interesting
dopamine is one of the things i truly
feel has helped to create our
civilization as it is because it drives
us to seek right dopamine drives us
to to seek and and to grow and to find
to discover the internet is perfect for
manipulating this because every time you
look for something you find something
especially social media you seek fine
seek fine you produce the dopamine it
drives you to look but why do you keep
going is every time you find something
you get a little bit of a hit from your
opioid system like it's like this slow
drip i have morphine and so it starts to
like feel really good and to the point
where you might be doing your work and
like you've got a deadline and you're
just you know like i'll check instagram
real quick before you know it's like 30
minutes later you fall into the internet
black hole just like it just pulls you
in so be aware of that i'm not saying
again
our connection with tech is just going
to grow so i'm not bashing that it's
just be aware of it and that when you
try to abide by this principle which
will really really help your sleep
quality to give yourself a screen curfew
you can't just sit there and twiddle
your thumbs
because you'll get what i call the
internet jitters right you'll start
getting like um a little bit of a
withdrawal effect like
let me just check one this one one post
what we have to do is this you have to
replace it with something of greater or
equal value it's really that simple
hopefully it's what i encourage people
to do this is an opportunity to connect
right connect with your significant
other your kids the people like physical
like have a real conversation with
somebody right i know it sounds crazy
but it really works it's really really
good
and also this is a great opportunity if
you you know if you're in a relationship
or not whatever you're into you could
you know
utilize and i have got a chapter on this
as well intimate time because there's a
big connection between sex and sleep and
there's also a big connection between
sleep and sex and how it impacts your
sex life
and so when we have an orgasm for
example we produce a chemical i'm sorry
cocktail of chemicals including oxytocin
norepinephrine prolactin and oxytocin
for example has been found clinically to
basically combat the effects of cortisol
and hopefully sex is more interesting
than instagram but you know i don't know
it depends on how you're doing it and so
that's what i want people to do a screen
curfew and or use these hacks utilize
some blue light block blockers and so
for your desktops laptops things like
that you can get an app called flux
that pulls out the most troublesome
sleep sucking spectrum of light from
your screen it basically cools your
screen off
and it's a simple app you set it and
forget it's totally free just go to dr
google type in f.l.u.x
and a couple clicks and it's on your
device i've been using it for maybe five
or six years i love it
and uh for your
uh telephone you know your cell phone
we've got on the iphones built in now is
night shift uh with androids the best
one out there
uh from my research is one called
twilight you know so there's options for
everybody then what about the ambient
light at night or if you're watching the
movie again i don't want to get don't
get too neurotic about it but if this is
a problem for you and you're not
sleeping as well as you could be or your
results your body composition not
changing you're not getting that blood
pressure down you're not having that
focus you need through the day
then you might want to address this but
another little hack is to get some blue
light blocking glasses the first ones i
had was straight up like i just built
the birdhouse but now there's some
really cool stylish ones that you can
rock as a matter of fact you'll create a
neural association when you put the
glasses on and you'll start to get
sleepy you know it's nuts and that is
another thing right there
is to create an evening ritual right
your brain is always looking for
patterns a lot of successful people
especially listening to the things that
you're putting out there have a success
ritual in the morning
but
a great morning starts the night before
you know a truly great morning
and so
a couple of quick things people can do
is the thermal regulation piece turn
down your thermostat all right now this
one's again this is going to hit a
pressure point for some people but
according to research between 62 and 68
degrees fahrenheit is ideal
for sleep
and so
for some people it's going to sound a
little bit frosty but lowering the
thermostat a little bit can
have incredible benefit
uh for your sleep but this doesn't mean
you can't use your covers and put on
some warm socks that kind of thing so
cooling off this thermostat
making sure that your bedroom ideally i
call it a sleep sanctuary and so that
when you walk into your bedroom at night
if your brain has a neural association
when i go into my bedroom i'm watching
television or i'm working
those channels are going to fire because
of the myelin getting laid down over the
years of you doing that behavior or even
months it can get laid down and so you
might have the intention of going to bed
but if your tv is in there
your brain is going to be firing
expecting to watch television and parts
of your brain will be waking up in a way
and so
i encourage people to get the tech out
of your room have your sleep have your
bedroom be a sleep sanctuary you know or
some place that's just for the the
double s which is sleep and sex here's
also a really interesting reason why
there's an italian study done they found
that couples who have a television in
their bedroom have 50 less sex really
yeah yeah that's interesting and you
know this is a little bit more
middle-aged little past middle-aged the
people in the study but and i know some
people like that's not true i have sex
all the time you probably do it in a
snowstorm like it doesn't matter where
you are like you're a human rabbit it
doesn't matter but for other people it's
like
a distraction right it's a distraction
and it can also you know um create all
of those kind of chemical soup issues
that we've been talking about with
elevating cortisol and those kind of
things so
i ideally get your television out of the
room uh the other tech
and last thing with the sleep
environment i'll share when i talked
about melatonin you need those two
conditions biological night
and you also need a dark environment
and so if you're in an environment where
you're maybe in a
suburban or city environment where
there's like neighbors porch lights
coming in
there's leds outside cars coming up and
down the street
as crazy as this sounds that
that small amount of light where we're
now dubbing light pollution
can have a significant impact on your
sleep quality and here's here's why we
know this cornell university i think did
the best study on this and they took a
test subject and had them sleep in an
otherwise dark room and they took a a
light a fiber optic cable and a light
the size of a quarter and put it behind
their knee and that was enough to
disrupt their sleep cycle
because your skin also has
photoreceptors that is sending
information to your brain your nervous
system your internal organs to try to
tell your body what time it is is trying
to figure it out
you know so we want to get rid of that
artificial light exposure
now does this mean moonlight and stars
no humans have evolved with those things
and their lux like i actually put a lux
chart in the book it's so small compared
to even the weakest fluorescent bulbs
and so get yourself some blackout
curtains if that
external light is an issue internal
light you know your alarm clocks and you
know light you know lamps you know some
people still are sleeping with their
lights on and things like that
be mindful of that and also what you can
do is just change the bulb color you
know if you still have issues with the
dark which some adults do and that's
okay
um
you can change the bulb cover color and
i actually had some nasa scientists or
people that work with them to send me
some different bulbs because
folks in space they don't have that
biological clock
and so they would experience all these
different health challenges and they had
to try to figure it out they knew that
it was an issue with their sleep and so
they start to give them different bulbs
for different times of
day in a way you know even though
they're in outer space so it's really
cool what you can do with these little
hacks but bottom line is you want to
have a dark cycle so you can produce
melatonin and you know those are just a
few those are just a few of the
different things people can do if sleep
is so good for me and dreams are amazing
and they help with creativity and they
take the sharp edges off my emotions why
the hell do i have nightmares
yeah so what we know is that nightmares
aren't necessarily pathological
and we we know that in some conditions
and ptsd is a is a very good example of
this that they can sort of step over
that threshold from being normative to
non-normative i mean they can be very
concerning and and disruptive to people
and it's also very traumatic too to
relive those and and wake up from them
we do think it's part of the same
process of sort of emotional regulation
but it's the brain trying to understand
and better comprehend what this thing
called waking life and all of its
emotional peaks and troughs are all
about
so
the bottom line here is that as long as
they're not causing you distress and
harm then you don't have to worry about
them
if they are doing that though there are
new clinical therapies for
what we call nightmare disorders
and it involves usually just what you
were describing before
which is speaking with a therapist
writing down
the nightmare and then replaying it
while you are awake sort of you know
speaking about it writing it back down
working with the therapist and
essentially trying to sort of just say
look okay in that context it's safe
let's better understand that
and repeatedly doing that type of work
where you're sort of
reactivating the nightmare and then
trying to change the context to
something that's safe or that's less
fearful or that's less negative
gradually over time that type of work
can dissipate the frequency and the
severity of those nightmares so
nightmares by themselves not necessarily
a bad thing if they are causing you
problems you can go and speak to your
doctor and there are some therapies for
that that you can sort of just google
around
nightmare therapy etc
those will help
yeah and
that like the way in which your brain
chooses to interpret
its sort of dream reassessment of the
real world will have huge implications
in your life it could be ptsd it could
be a bazillion things i have a feeling
i've never had this thought before but i
have a feeling that
the more we learn about how individual
brains re-contextualize things and how
much the conscious mind and subconscious
mind sort of come into cahoots to decide
how they're going to line things up
because when i was in my early 20s and i
was convinced i was stupid i was
interpreting the world one way that was
just had me paralyzed by fear and then
as i began to realize sort of the nature
of the brain and oh just because i'm
stupid now doesn't mean i can't learn
about this
you know that carol dweck's notion of
yet right i'm not good yet and so that
since then consciously i have changed
the way that i frame things
but i would bet a bazillion dollars that
i'm also doing that subconsciously as my
brain sort of
processes the day
i think that's what you know dreaming if
it's one of its functions is that
recontextualizing of those experiences
you know dreaming i think is a is a way
for us to understand the world in which
we live
and we can do it whilst we're awake you
know i'm not suggesting that we don't
form connections and we don't see
links between different pieces of
information but the way that we do it in
dreaming is very different you know i
often liken it to when we're awake
you're sort of inputting this
information into the brain and it's
almost like a google search page one
where you insert your search term you
hit return and you get the most obvious
immediate hits the direct connections
that's what waking is all about
dreaming
is you inserting the search term hitting
the return button and being taken
straight to page 20
you know and you inserted you know
impact theory university
and all of a sudden on page 20 it's
about a field hockey game in utah and
you think hang on a second what on earth
is but then you read it and you think
ah i can it's a distant wacky connection
and it's not obvious to me that i would
have made that but it's a potentially
powerful one because when you start to
fuse things together that shouldn't
normally go together but they cause
these marked advances evolutionary
fitness it sounds like the biological
basis of creativity
and that's one of the things that we're
learning about with dream sleep as well
contextualization emotional resolution
creativity
yeah so you know as we start talking
about dreaming and nightmares and all of
the different ways that the brain is
sort of interacting
uh
trying to make sense of the conscious
world one thing i heard you talk about
is cognitive behavioral therapy for
insomnia which i found very interesting
and i know so little about it but
knowing what i know about cognitive
behavioral therapy in terms of pattern
interrupting and things like that are
you is this like us sending a sort of
subconscious signal to our brain like
how does that work
not quite so i what we know obviously
has been the rise of sleep difficulties
in society and that has been matched by
unfortunately a rise in pharmacology and
particularly sleeping pills and i say
unfortunately not because i'm
anti-medication and i know a lot of
people who work at these pharmaceutical
companies and they're good people great
scientists wanting to do good things
but unfortunately sleeping pills are
largely blunt instruments and they don't
produce naturalistic sleep
they're in a class of drugs that we call
the sedative hypnotics
and when we take sleeping pills we
mistake sedation for sleep but it's not
natural sleep
and in fact um sleeping pills have been
associated with a significantly higher
risk of death as well as cancer
so much so that in 2016 the american
college of physicians made a landmark
recommended um intervention they said
that sleeping pills must no longer be
the first line treatment for
uh insomnia instead the american college
of physicians said it has to be
cognitive behavioral therapy for
insomnia that must be the first line
recommended treatment for those sleep
problems
and so cognitive behavioral therapy in
general really tries to target two
things
cognitive and behavioral
and so the cognitive aspects for
insomnia are aspects where we try to
correct your beliefs or your misbeliefs
around sleep and some of your ideas
around sleep some of those things that
can be either inappropriate incorrect or
just triggering anxiety or worry
so we try to modify those cognitions
those beliefs but then we also look at
what you're doing in your life the
different behaviors that you're doing or
things that you're not doing and try to
correct the behaviors as well for
example how's your caffeine intake how's
your alcohol intake uh what time are you
going to bed what time are you waking up
what's your chronotype are you a morning
type evening type are you sleeping in
harmony with your chronotype or against
your chronotype
um are you getting daylight in the
morning are you getting too much
daylight
light at night artificial light at night
do you exercise
and so we change behaviors and we change
thought patterns and together
cognitive behavioral therapy for
insomnia is just as effective as
sleeping pills in the short term but
what's great is that when you start
working with that clinician um or your
online program and i should say that i
um i
work with a company i'm an advisor to a
company called chuni
it's s-h-u-n-i
dot io if people want to go and explore
it and you can get cognitive behavioral
therapy online there
but you work with your therapist and
after about
five or six sessions
you can continue that benefit of
improved sleep for up to five years the
studies have demonstrated now whereas
with sleeping pills when you stop their
use then not only do you go back to the
bad sleep that you behave you are having
you typically go back to even worse
sleep it's called rebound insomnia and
now you have to go back onto the use so
you become dependent there is an
addiction dependency cycle
so that's really what cbti is and that's
really the best approach for sleeping uh
problems right now
all right so i have two sleeping
problems one is that there are times
where i will get um either really
stressed or i'll get really excited and
i have a very easy time falling asleep
but then i'll wake up after three or
four hours
and i find it very difficult to fall
back asleep and then the second part
just so i don't forget is sleep inertia
in the morning
but what can i do to um optimize for
staying asleep
yes so there it's a case of trying to
deal with that sort of downgrade the
activation of the nervous system the
reason that people typically wake up uh
in the middle of the night and can't get
back to sleep not always but often
is because they have this sort of stress
related they're carrying this anxiety
and anxiety biologically is the
principal mechanism that we think
underlies most insomnia
and what happens in part is that the
fight or flight branch of the nervous
system becomes overactive
and that's exactly why does it shut down
like i find it so easy to fall asleep
but i can tell on the nights where i'm
gonna wake up
yeah it just seems weird
but then my subconscious mind kicks it
back alive yeah why why would it be that
way and the reason is because after
about 16 hours of wakefulness you've
built up a lot of that healthy
sleepiness what we call sleep pressure
and the longer that you're awake the
more of that sleep pressure builds up
and it's a chemical that builds up in
the brain called adenosine
and then when we go into sleep it's the
time when the brain can actually start
to clear out that adenosine and it's so
it starts to lower the sleep pressure
and after about eight hours of sleep
you've cleared away 16 hours of that
adenosine of that sleepiness and so you
wake up naturally and you feel refreshed
and restored
but what will happen is that you can be
stressed and sort of or excited but the
sleepiness the weight of sleepiness
pulling you down is so heavy at that
point that you can get to sleep but then
three or four hours later you've
jettisoned maybe 50 of all of that
adenosine maybe even more because it
principally happens during deep sleep
and so now your brain is much more
vulnerable to those awakenings because
it doesn't have the weight of that
sleepiness does that make some sense it
makes total sense and it makes me want
to punch myself back to sleep it's so
obnoxious
well because the benefits or i should
say the
the damage that you do by not getting
sleep is so
terrifying that every time i wake up i'm
like
come on like you know how much better
you will perform if you just sleep and i
am not one of those guys that's like hey
you gotta grind and four hours sleep i'm
like if i need nine hours of sleep i
want to get nine hours of sleep every
single night forever until the end of
time
so it's just always super nice if you're
hoisting that flag i will salute it and
i definitely
you know not everyone but certainly in
the type a sort of particularly business
culture maybe there is this sort of
sleep machismo attitude where people
were there lack of sleep like a badge of
honor um but you're right it's it's
foolhardy for a number of reasons but
let me come back to that issue of you
know beating ourselves up because
we need to have some degree of
self-compassion when it comes to sleep
you know i am not invulnerable to sleep
problems myself i've had bouts of
insomnia throughout my life to be
completely transparent and open with you
um
and
everyone every one of us is gonna have a
bad night of sleep it's not unusual
don't worry don't stress you know back
when i was starting to write the book it
took me about four years to write it in
2014 you know sleep was sort of the
neglected stepsister in the health
conversation of that time
and i was so saddened by the sickness
and the disease and the suffering that
was happening because of a lack of sleep
you know i came out you know all guns
blazing
and
i think that that was important but
for those people who were struggling
with sleep those people who had sleep
problems with insomnia you know the book
kind of felt almost as though it was you
know sleep or else dot dot dot um
and i didn't mean it to be that way so i
want to say right now because i've
learned to soften and become a much
better appreciator of these conditions
just like you described
if you wake up and you can't get back to
sleep don't worry just realize tonight
is not my night it's not the end of the
world i'm still going to be able to
function somewhat tomorrow
don't stay in bed awake for too long
though that's the important message here
because very quickly i'm super curious
to see what you think about yes because
i know where you're going right you're
training yourself that being in bed is
is being awake is okay while you're in
bed so that's right i used to get up and
whether i slept for two hours three
hours whatever if i couldn't fall back
to sleep in like 15 minutes i'd get out
of bed
and i would go to work and start doing
my thing and then i would go lay back
down and sleep and sometimes i'd fall
asleep for you know two or three more
hours but the number of times i would
wake up with a headache after that was
just too much so it was way frustrated
and i'm like alright there's got to be
something else so what i found is if i
put an audio book on dude i will be back
asleep in like 10 or 15 minutes it's
crazy and the only thing that wakes me
up is the fact that i have
headphones in my ears or if they start
yelling in the book or something like
that which always pisses me off uh but
it puts me back to sleep so reliably
it's crazy
that's great that's exactly what we
recommend so don't go to work don't
start checking emails don't eat because
it trains the brain to expect food but
instead in a dim room somewhere
different so you change the context so
you're changing the learned association
just read a book listen to an audio book
meditate in dim light all of these
things are great find out whatever works
for you
and then only when you're sleepy do you
return to bed and there's no time limit
for that
and that way you train the brain back
out of a bad association that it's
learned which is my bed is this place of
being awake which if you repeat that
over time you become trained to be awake
in the bed
and then you will relearn the
association that your bed is the place
where you're asleep so you're 100 right
that's exactly what we recommend
um to your second question which is
sleep inertia it's a real thing sleep
inertia is typically where we wake up
and your brain requires some time to
kind of warm up to operating temperature
like an old vintage car you know you
can't just turn the engine on and start
you know flooring it and going up to red
line you need to sort of circulate the
fluids and warm the oil up and get the
engine warm and then you can really
start to push it it's the same way with
our brain in some ways now
different people have different
severities of sleep inertia i'm actually
like you i suffer from quite bad sleep
in ausha you know for the first hour you
know my partnership when i come through
in the morning she wakes up a little bit
earlier than me you know she kind of
knows that i can say look honey i am not
the best version of myself in the first
hour i i know that i may have done
something bad yesterday and we should
talk about it and i want to resolve that
but
can we not do it in the first hour
because i'm not the best version so
firstly accepting that it's normal and
it's real
the second thing though however is
you can
sleep inertia typically happens in very
severe amounts if you're mismatched
between your sleep schedule
and your chronotype schedule
and so you can go on um and you can go
online and type google and morningness
eveningness questioner
and it's a questionnaire that you fill
out and it figures out what your
chronotype is are you a morning type
somewhere in between or are you an
evening type
and what we find is that morning types
when they wake up in the morning at
their normal time which is very early or
early they don't have sleep inertia
they're good to go they can jump into
the gym and they're like energizer
bunnies and they're all happy and you
know joyful and to me i'm just like oh
you know
whereas evening types waking up at the
time that morning types have to wake up
which is in some ways the way society is
designed society is desperately biased
against evening types
and wrongfully so because it's not your
fault it's genetically determined there
are about six or seven genes that we
know right now that dictate what your
chronotype is it's not your fault it's
gifted to you at birth
you don't get to choose
now if you are suffering from sleep
inertia what
we find is that if you can
sleep a little bit later into the
morning go to bed maybe a little bit
later sleep later play around with that
and see if the speed with which you wake
up
is better that your sleep inertia is
less
that's one way it may not always work
another way is temperature
now it turns out that when people have a
cup of coffee they say look i just need
like five minutes and i i swig a couple
of you know mouthfuls of coffee and now
i'm alert that's nonsense caffeine
doesn't actually get into your system
until about 12 to 15 minutes so if
you're feeling any effects of caffeine
before that it's not the caffeine
it turns out that
when we go to sleep we drop off our core
body temperature we get very cold we
become almost hypothermic
now to wake up we have to warm up
so to to get to sleep we need to get
cold to stay asleep we need to stay cold
and to wake up we need to warm up
and so one way that you can artificially
accelerate or try accelerating
your inertia in a quicker dissipating
manner is to try to warm up more quickly
so get a hot drink in the morning
doesn't have to be caffeine if that's
not your thing i don't drink caffeine
but i'm not against it
caffeine is an issue
it's not really the dose that makes the
poison it's the timing that makes the
poison when it comes to sleep and
caffeine which we can come on to but
drink a hot drink get your body
temperature up if you like if you've got
a smart thermostat program it to start
to rise temperature in your bedroom or
in the house in the last hour before
your alarm
and you can it can really start to help
you wake up and then play around with
these smart lights i have one where it
sort of starts to bring me out of sleep
about five minutes before my alarm that
can help but the data is not good on
that the data on temperature much better
does that help you tom it does but i'm
surprised that you say to get warm
because have you done cold showers
before
yeah cold showers are a
sort of more of a norah adrenaline thing
yes they they wake you up
in daylight
they do now that's not necessarily a
normative thing you know that's you
you know shocking your fight-or-flight
branch of the nervous system to go from
a temperature that it's become
accustomed to and it's acclimated to so
then all of a sudden being dumped in ice
water as it were and it doesn't know
it's a threat mechanism it thinks you're
under attack and so of course you're
going to wake up
now that comes with an adrenergic spike
in the body it comes with an accelerated
heart rate it could come with a cortisol
spike so i'm not against that
but we don't have to go to those
extremes you can do it in these more
subtle manners which are the more
natural ways
fair enough um
i have a question going back to waking
up in the middle of the night
one thing that is super weird
is things that during the day
are not in any way shape or form
intimidating or daunting
when i'm supposed to be sleeping so if i
wake up in the middle of the night i'll
start stressing about something and i'll
i'm literally like once i get out of bed
this is not going to stress me out so
why is it stressing me out at night is
there a part of my brain that shuts off
is there a part of my brain that becomes
active like why are things at night do
they seem so big and dramatic whereas in
the day it's like man it's not a big
deal
yeah i we actually don't really fully
understand in truth but part of this is
to do with context that it's dark
you don't have full awareness you don't
have full
functioning of the brain because when we
wake up that sleep inertia by the way in
part is because your prefrontal cortex
which is the part of the brain that
makes us most human it's like the ceo of
the brain it's very good at
understanding high-level concepts
putting things into contextually
appropriate boxes making top-down
control decisions it regulates our
emotions
that part of the brain's the last thing
to come back online as we wake up and
that's why we're not very you know
brilliant if we have sleep inertia but
when we're waking up out of sleep in the
middle of the night we also have some of
that so we don't have the rational
logical part of our brain fully engaged
plus the context is one that's dark and
so we don't have sort of the daylight
sort of giving us this sort of normative
safe feeling
and so what happens is that the brain
starts to default to rumination and
catastrophization you know it's almost
like this rolodex of anxiety that then
starts to unfold and that one memory
that you know you bring back into mind
um at that moment of waking up is the
finger that flicks the domino on that
cascade of you know rumination so
again just realize i've done this before
i've experienced this before i know that
tomorrow by you know one or two p.m in
the afternoon i think about this and i
think that was ridiculous to be worrying
about it's it's okay try to remind
yourself of that
what is up my friend you and i are
living in a golden era of
self-improvement we have books platforms
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of never ending improvement all right
back to today's episode did you read the
book change or die i haven't so the the
concept is pretty straightforward you
tell people to change and most people
don't so even if the outcome is hey if
you don't take this pill and i think it
was that simple it's like you have to
take a pill once a day every day and
compliance after like three months or
something drops to like five percent
yeah which is crazy but what i love is
that you didn't hit that and go oh well
that's just the thing you dive into
human behavior what did you learn in
that discovery process about human
behavior what's working against us how
do we begin to take hold of it
and then maybe most interestingly what
is the loop method sure
the idea is in order for somebody to
adopt and sustain a health behavior for
a long term not just a 30-day trial or
60-day period so this becomes a part of
their pattern of living
they should know why they are doing
something
how to do it
if they're doing it and if it's working
and you can see that each one of those
four components independently
will reinforce
somebody's ability to pick something up
and take and go with it
so oftentimes what you'll see is that if
somebody doesn't
let's say change their behavior what
information is given to them you might
just lob more information provisions at
them right oh here's more information
but maybe they just didn't have the
skills to implement that good idea or
they tried it for a little bit and then
their old behaviors were swept back up
they didn't have any feedback to say
this is actually are you living in
accordance with your own goals
or maybe they just didn't know if it was
actually working or not and because one
you know insidiously challenging aspect
of our health is that a lot of things
that are good for us
might be what i call the meaningful but
invisible
they matter but we don't get that
feedback to make us immediately detect
if it's having a presence and it might
be right you might have a significant
improvement in let's say memory
performance over a 12-week period but
year but you might not recognize it by
the time you get there it might actually
feel like you're just performing as
you've always been and that actually can
go up and down improvements and
decrements
so is there a way to then use technology
to then make people more informed about
things that can help them
more informed about their own patterns
of living and then empowered to put all
that into practice and i actually think
that we need technology in this world
to help us take care of our health well
i found this so interesting in some of
your talks define health yes
so that question was posed to me a while
ago
and i totally stumbled on it it's one of
those broad questions
that
is hard to define i think probably the
explanation that i like the most is that
it is the ability to maintain balance or
homeostasis within the body
so if you are challenged by some sort of
you know infection or arm break your
ability to get back to a place of
balance is a marker of health but it is
also more than that it is it is
something that can we can use as a
currency to realize our goals and
aspirations in our life and i think if
you take that if you drink that in and
you believe it
then all these things that can feel like
friction
might actually
just be opportunities to live in through
the fullest version of yourself
i love that definition so now let's say
that i have that but i'm still
struggling to implement what are the
behaviors
and like what are the behavior
modification tools that people can put
in place to comply i think the first
aspect of this is to clearly understand
the problem at hand
right if you don't really know what your
your challenge is
your
own efforts will be either inefficient
or you won't really know if you're
headed in the right direction even
though you're spinning your wheels we're
born into a time where the default
settings around us and the expectations
of our environment of the pressures of
culture and work
and even the built environment will
predictably lead to issues with our
health chronic disease
we have to be a little bit weird we have
to make a daily effort to counteract
those forces to affect our pattern of
living so that
we actually are being good stewards of
our health it's not something that is
just there until it's gone it's
something that you need to cultivate and
nurture
the next you want to be a lifetime
learner because 15 20 years ago
circadian rhythms the gut microbiota
things like that were not a part of any
model that was used to predict or
describe health
we know information is changing
regularly so i love that saying
have strong opinions held loosely
which means to me
that you take the time to form an
understanding now but you don't defend
that at all in the face of new
information so you need to be have the
ability to upgrade that to up level that
and then you have to have be able to
take big concepts that you learn about
and personalize it into the fabric of
your life your family your kids whatever
that is how can you take this idea that
you think is going to benefit you and
make it real for you
because if it's too if it there's too
much friction and conflict you don't
personalize it you follow rules you
might be able to do that for two weeks
three weeks but then you'll you're
really likely to go back to whatever
patterns you had previously
what else i think your response to
failure right failure is a part of the
process a regular part of the process
can you address failure with compassion
for yourself and also with resilience
where you're like uh what can i learn
about the fact that i wanted to go to
the gym four times this week but i went
twice
what was it about the week constant
assessment
uh to then just
know how you can do better next week
it's so interesting that as you're
talking about how to get people to
comply with health stuff that you're
talking about mindset in the beginning
so when i first started this
film uh everything journey and talk
through all these problems it was why is
the protein bar guy talking about
mindset yeah and then when i exited
quest and started impact theory and did
all this mindset stuff and then i said
guys we're going to do a show called
health theory everyone's like why is the
mindset guy talking about health and
it's been like this constant frustration
for me for people to understand if you
want to optimize for your health you
have to optimize your mindset if you
want to optimize for your mindset you
have to take care of your health yeah
and because i talk a lot about working
hard and busting ass and all that and
what greatness demands people think that
i don't sleep they think that i just
grind my way to success the reality is
that if and you've talked really
powerfully about this if you want to
even have good decision-making abilities
you've got to sleep run us through like
a sleep 101 why it's so foundational to
your work
and
what people should be doing yeah i left
a company that i loved at a job that i
loved to start a startup in my phd
and i thought it could
all implode it would be too much for me
to handle
and so i thought if i'm going to up
regulate my ability to show up every day
i need to then
basically take care of the machinery
that is doing the work
so
what is it that makes me feel sharp
every day and sleep then is of course
one component of that
and
what i've realized it's so it's funny we
kind of encapsulate sleep as it's this
packaged thing but it's almost like tell
me about daytime right that's a big
window you know and what sleep ends up
being is a very great window into your
soul you know even to the into the
workings of the brain and how
like what is happening physiologically
so you really understand
um it gives you a window to like narrow
the field a little bit to then
understand how our physiology works in
general if you had to make a hypothesis
about two or three reasons why we sleep
what do you think are the two or three
most important things that happen while
people are sleeping yeah it's a good
question because it's been
almost like definition of health
under what is the solitary unitary
purpose of sleep has been notably hard
to define we know very important things
can happen it's purging of energetic
byproducts it's purging of potentially
neurotoxic products that are a result of
that it is plasticity that's forming it
is re-regulation of our immune system
there's a lot going on
and i there has not yet been one i think
model that explains everything but we do
know that incredibly important things
occur so what are people doing that
messes up their sleep yeah so that's a
it's a really good question and the
the common question that you get is how
much loop do you need right how much
time should i be in bed
it's easy but the things that matter for
sleep are timing intensity and duration
so duration is sort of the easy one it's
that what i tell people is spend enough
time in bed so that you wake naturally
that means you're not waking by an alarm
and so what i like to get what i call
complete sleep is aim to spend half an
hour more in bed than what you think
you'll need so that if your body needs
it on that night you'll get it
no you might not ever need it or you
might not need it or you might need it
rarely but allow for complete sleep to
happen
you also want the timing of your sleep
to
be regular so if for instance you go to
bed usually from midnight and wake up at
eight but tonight you go to bed at 4am
and you wake up at noon it's 8 hours but
the sleep will not be as restorative
as it was if you were sleeping in that
same window every night because we now
are introducing the concept of circadian
rhythms which are repeatable 24-hour
processes so when you're getting rem
sleep
at 4 am your body because of your past
experience over the last several weeks
knows do rem-like activities at that
time and so it'll be more efficient
sleep itself will be more efficient at
doing what it wants to do if you
regularize the timing of your sleep
and then you have intensity and that is
really not something that you can take
action on directly right go sleep hard
yeah run do it but you can do things
during the day that then will facilitate
depth and you can also create an
environment that is less disruptive
okay so talk to me what can i do during
the day to make sure that i'm sleeping
hard yeah so if you look at people that
undergo bed rest because they have a
broken leg or in studies that put people
on under bed rests to then see what
their sleep is like you know they end up
having a fragmentation of their sleep so
they have more naps during the day
and they have more periods at night
where they are without adequate amounts
of physical activity there is a
fragmentation of your sleep you don't
need a ton
to then get better sleep but then where
does that sensitivity sort of drop off
you
use running as an example because we can
just define it by time you go regularly
for a 20 minute run today you go for a
four hour run
you've now overloaded your system to a
degree that might actually impair the
amount of sleep that you get there's a
bi-directional relationship there where
a little bit of the stimulus aids in the
depth of sleep and too much can
overwhelm it now it doesn't
automatically mean you will sleep poorly
but you have a higher risk of doing so
you might sleep like a rock
and then there's temperature
fluctuations so this is actually a newer
area but we live in a very insulated
world right even if we go outside and
there's not much variation in the
temperature we can layer ourselves so
that our what we're being exposed to is
very narrow
we also know that signals from
a wider breadth of temperature within
the day
might actually feed into that what's
called a homeostat these things that are
collecting the signals of daytime usage
that then help you sleep deeply and then
a big important one is light so light
coming into your eye
will communicate with receptors at the
back of the eye that are not
actually communicating with the visual
cortex that help us see but that are
communicating with the master clock and
we spend 90 percent of our time indoors
now so if
we are not getting
as much light as we used to so if you go
outside don't wear glasses
get outside for at least a half an hour
sunglasses sunglasses yes yeah thanks
and then in the evening you really just
want to have whatever internal and light
environment is reflect what's going on
outside so as the sun goes down dim the
lights
uh and then also change the tone so
you're getting less blue light because
that is the blue is the major signal to
these retinal ganglion cells that says
to the master clock it's daytime yeah
speaking of which yeah i was listening
to one of your talks and you talk about
how the fact the fact that fat
has photoreceptors or light receptors
how is it possible
probably like one of the coolest
discoveries of last year but
those same receptors
that are in the back of our eye they're
called opsin receptors and all opsin
receptors and there are many over 100
they have the ability to transduce a
light signal
into a nerve signal of some sort so
peter light in alberta researcher
professor peter light you have to be
joking
i know isn't that i mean he's that is
that's hilarious yeah
i rolled right over that one peter light
who studies light
uh i don't think there was a name change
there i think that's his given name
he did a screen to see are these
receptors anywhere else in the body and
he's found them in fat tissue wow and
he's like this has to be an artifact
this can't be
this can't be a thing
and so he was able to test if
light
hitting fat tissue had an effect
and he put his hand over the light and
the signal went away he took his hand
away from the light and the signal
reappeared
so we thought wow this there's something
here and that made him investigate it
more thoroughly and what he found is
that fat tissue
has light receptors the same ones in our
eye and they respond to light and it
makes the fat cells shrink become less
inflammatory
and they release a whole different
profile of hormones
and
we might actually have a light
deficiency not just for vitamin d but
for our regulation of fat
the conversation around fats regulation
is oftentimes fairly uninformed we
regulate fat tissue like we do
temperature it is it is something that
is not simply just a matter of
did we you know the calories and
calories out your body is making a lot
of adjustments now those calories do
matter but it is making a ton of
adjustments
to those calories to then say do i want
that fat storage to shrink or to expand
and you and it's trying to regulate it
similar to how a thermostat would
regulate
uh temperature in a home you said it at
72.
this is super interesting so we can say
that the fat in our body works as a
gland is that fair yeah you could say
that it's a yeah but is there logic to
like the the hypothalamus that um
thermostat you've talked about fat
trying to stay in range
that it goes up and down sort of
regularly
but it stays in that type band like this
is so interesting to think of it as
secreting hormones and being a gland
walk us through the details of that
yeah so we now know that fat releases i
think over 50 different what are called
adipocytes adipo fat kinds like a
cytokine which is like a hormone and so
um
as triglycerides enter into our fat
tissue
then leptin is produced
continuously so that flux of
fats fat tissue fat leaving and entering
the fat tissue uh will then cause
leptin be to be made proportional to
that
then that signal goes into the blood and
there's various receptors for it so one
in the brain in the brain stem
you actually have them on your pancreas
as well but then in the hypothalamus
so the brain is then detecting how much
fat is circulating ah you've lost a
little bit of weight
less fat storage less leptin release
be hungry get that fat stores back up
and you have neurons in the brain in the
hypothalamus and these and a lot of the
hypothalamic centers
will connect so you have these discrete
groups of cells that communicate with
one another that then affect things like
motivation temperature
uh even sleep
and so
there's a balance of different cell
types within an area called the rq
nucleus and depending on the signals
that are present will then
initiate this cascading effects that
will affect hunger that'll affect energy
expenditure all to try to keep your fat
levels in a
constant level now it doesn't have to be
the exact same level but within a range
now why do we then get fatter it's
thought that this homeostat this fat
homeostat is much better at defending
weight loss than weight gain makes sense
evolutionarily it was probably much more
of a concern
and there's also some thinking that
those neurons actually get damaged by
our environment our internal environment
from the types of foods that we eat and
challenges to
them from even things like poor sleep
so
nutrient inadequacies things like that
all these things can affect the health
of that tissue and it's one of the
reasons why i am favorable towards a
ketogenic diet because
beta-hydroxybutyrate
is one of the ketones and it can cause
those those tissues within the brain to
actually start to remodel and regenerate
and so somebody that has diet induced
obesity
they they have a very hard time losing
weight because even if they lose weight
their body wants to get back to that set
point
and if you look at people that are on a
ketogenic diet for a lot of them they
just start eating to satiety they eat
normally and yet they the weight comes
off naturally
now there's no guarantee that that
weight will stay off but i think you put
yourself in a much better position you
know if you lose weight on
other ways not all other ways but other
ways
if you look at somebody's physiology
once they're 50 pounds lighter for a lot
of people
it looks like their body's desperately
trying to get back up in weight their
brain will stay
active seeking food so if you do fmri
and there's food on the table they will
stay seeking even out even if they're
full right everything is engineered
all the different processes are
engineered to get you back up to that
weight what are some of those processes
that's so interesting like
so i i've had a lot of these symptoms um
so i used to be 60 pounds heavier i lost
that and i did it so stupidly you can't
imagine i did it in a rabbit starvation
diet and just insane amounts of cardio
so my calories were probably between
1200 and 1500 a day
as much as i could make it just pure
protein as possible i was inflamed it
was crazy my joints hurt my knees my
wrists my elbows and moves gnarly yeah
but unfortunately i wasn't thinking hey
listen to your body i was just thinking
you're getting leaner you're getting
leaner you're getting leaner but you
want to talk about seeking food at all
times like all i could think about was
when my next meal was but i never
thought of that as like anything other
than well your calories are crazy low
but what are the mechanisms that like
trap people because there are some
people who will swear that they can't no
matter what they can't lose weight yeah
and i've always if i'm honest i've
always really discounted the well it
makes me hungrier yeah
so interestingly
a ketogenic diet i'm very interested in
the mechanisms by which it might be
working and and there the ketone beta
hydroxybutyrate might actually be
turning on genes that help to reset
those tissues that are controlling body
fat effectively lowering your set point
to a place that's healthier that's a
possibility the other diet that can do
that is very low energy diets that
actually have very low energy people's
starvation low calories low calorie yeah
because you don't have to actually
be on a ketogenic diet to produce
ketones if you're in a state of fasting
or in hypocaloric intake then you're
going to produce ketones too so give me
the order in which the body burns
calories and and include alcohol as
the fourth macro which some people will
say yes
so
preferentially the body will burn
glucose
and that is thought because the brain is
a
very very glucose hungry it is only four
percent of our body weight and yet it
consumes 25 percent of the calories we
eat
it's a very metabo metabolically active
tissue do macros always go in an order
so here's what i heard this could be
total uh number one that if
there's alcohol in the system it will be
metabolized first yeah followed by
glucose it depends yeah so actually it
depends on your relative relative status
what
type of macros have you been eating over
the last couple of weeks and then what
enzymes have been generated in response
to that exposure okay so it's not like
there's some set it's always going to
burn them in this order see most studies
are always looking at what is under this
normal condition which is our standard
diet
it's not looking at under all conditions
and under things like fasting or what
might be evolutionarily more regular in
terms of like you know not having
breakfast until maybe noon
we have what's called metabolic
flexibility which is thought to be
something that is a good state to try to
achieve which means that you can readily
burn different types of fuel sources so
you know it's it's extraordinarily
complex
people give simple explanations for it
but
you know this is actually one of the
biggest public health needs in our world
because the amount of
comorbidities that associate with
obesity
it will bankrupt our society you know
you think of weight you think of food
but
it's very possible that even things like
light might be having a a very large
input here and like like sunlight even
right we're talking about that so if fat
is a regulated tissue
and we are living fully clothed
um i wouldn't say that there's any
silver bullet but there's a lot of
different inputs and so i think overall
one sort of perspective of mine is to
try to live more naturally but in a way
that is actually going to work within
the modern world one thing you said that
i found so interesting is all right fats
are regulated tissue it is um creating
all these hormones it's responding to
the environment it actually has light
sensitivity which still freaks me out i
know and hey by the way boys and girls
you're staying inside all day you're
clothed up when you go outside guess
what signal you're giving your body it's
winter time guess what the body does in
winter it stores more fat yeah
i wanted to literally stop my research
at that point strip and run outside just
to like shred up a little bit yeah of
course it's not going to work quite like
that yeah so you've got fat as a gland
as a regulated tissue
um
do i understand it correctly to say that
it's breaking something as you get obese
you're more likely to get more obese and
there's something that breaks that
because like when you look at people
their set point is riding with them as
they're getting heavier and heavier
which is already terrifying and then
it's also secreting things that make you
more hungry that delay your
where you're still searching for food
longer
one is all of that true like did i just
explain that accurately yes but we're
missing a very important part to the
model which is that
it's not the only thing that explains
our food-seeking behavior
we also will eat food because it tastes
good right
independent of our hunger right we know
that where for instance
somebody you know you eat a full meal
and you're out and you're full
but your appetite is renewed when the
dessert cart is brought over and you're
like oh i could eat that yeah let's get
four of those
that is another driver of
food intake and we live in an
environment that is really designed for
over consumption
so it's very easy
to overeat in our world because the
palatability of food
is one that will then promote overeating
and it the design of food processed
foods it also will make you feel less
full per calorie so there's a delay
before you even feel fullness all right
we got to talk about that because you
showed a visual in one of your talks it
was so powerful and i've been in this a
long time but for some reason that
visual really hit me but when you showed
the raspberry tart which is like a
little raspberry pie it looks so
innocent and delicious and then you
showed the equivalent amount of calories
in bowls of raspberries was like seven
or eight bowls of raspberries it was
crazy that just like that actually is a
lot of work from barbara rolls
and her book volumetrics which is it is
stunning when we think about that how we
condense
calories into modern food products and
that's what i want to talk about when
people say processed food what they're
talking about is making it
hyperpalatable so i want to overeat
anyway yeah and then secondarily it it
has a lot of calories per
physical volume yes
so our central nervous system
preferences are designed to detect and
prefer caloric density
so it is different than eating the the
tart versus the raspberries right we
have now the ability to design food
to make us want to seek it it's a very
disadvantaged environment but the good
news is that eating raspberries
is also perfectly satisfying but the
more of that highly palatable
calorically dense food that you eat the
more that it'll drive food seeking
behavior
so there is a behavioral element to this
how it messes with your neural circuitry
what's going on mechanistically though
so is it is it through that mechanism
that it's um it triggers the release of
ghrelin instead of leptin like there's
so many different molecules that are at
play
metabolically you're right ghrelin is
released from what are called auxintic
cells within the gut
and it's very low after a meal and it'll
rise and as it's rising between your
meals it makes you hungry it's the only
gut derived peptide that actually
promotes feeding versus fullness uh
leptin is this what's called a tonic
signal it's sort of operating in the
background we call it a fullness signal
it's not quite it's actually setting the
tone
of how full you'll even be from a meal
so if you have low leptin you'll
naturally be less sensitive to the
fullness signals of a meal so satiety
and long-term fat regulation will work
together now independent of that you
have this brain circuitry that's going
on that can think of it almost like
addiction to a rewarding signal
the more exposure you get to it
that will then drive
seeking food-seeking behavior so you're
not really hungry and yet you're craving
a lot of people experience this in the
afternoon you're bored and you're like i
just want to eat something
right we know it in our lives it we we
can detect it instantaneously the easy
example is when you bring something that
is very correctly dense at the end of a
meal and you're full but you now want to
eat more it is not the homeostat that is
evaluating calories and fullness that's
saying oh you should eat more it is
pleasure
and the pleasure that derives from
caloric density well now let's really
freak people out yeah talk to me about
the impact on um
willpower may be a cheesy way to say it
but decision making if i slept poorly
yes what we see is that not only do
hormones change in response to getting
inadequate sleep
but our brain changes too so there's
something called the neuro competitive
model decision making which means that
if you look at that thing that tastes
delicious
this reward part of your brain will
light up first it'll it'll respond to it
before the executive control
self-control area kicks in to says yeah
you might love how that tastes
but it's not good for you
right so you can see
that competition taking place it happens
all the time that
process of looking at the donut that you
love but ordinarily don't want to eat
then that is
biased towards
eat this now and it ends up creating a
behavior we call effort discounting you
then are much less likely to work at
this thing that ordinarily you totally
say i care about this so i'm going to
make an effort to just not have donuts
in my life and you're like hey you know
eff it
was like tomorrow i'll just have it now
and that can actually translate to like
whether it's going to the gym or the
food that you eat
and people live in that in that state
where i i care 95 of the day i'm
thinking about eating well and in that
moment of hunger and potentially
compared with sleep loss you make a
decision that you're then disappointed
in yourself in and you've talked pretty
powerfully about like how much time do
you have to lose a night before you
start to see some of this declination
yeah
what i found is that reliably
people that miss out an hour or two of
sleep have impairments in vigilance as
you'd imagine so they're less
objectively alert the next day and they
feel sleepier so subjective alertness is
impaired too
and interestingly independently so i'll
tell you about the study because it's
quite cool i had people come in and what
i cared about was what they ate so we
created a baseline and they had by the
way eight different choices that range
from like clearly unhealthy
gummy bears to you know ostensibly
healthy right so things like
you know just cut apple slices or
something
and
what's another criticism i've had of
previous research is that the decisions
of the helpfulness of the food were made
by the investigators but everybody has
their own opinion about food
right if you think there's four
different types of decisions there's i
like it and it's healthy easy
right i don't like it and it's not
healthy easy
the two in the middle are the most
interesting
it's really healthy and i don't really
like it which is sort of characteristic
of health choices that we have to make
sometimes
and the most interesting one is i love
it and it's totally not healthy
right how do people respond to food that
they recognize is or they think this
isn't good for me but i love this
and what we saw
is that when people were subjectively
sleepy
they were much more likely to eat foods
that they rated as high like low health
so they were defecting from their own
personal health standards you could say
and now just to compound things you've
got all right you miss an hour or two on
sleep and now the sudden you're leaning
towards the things that you have high
like low health yeah but also losing
sleep makes you look at a blood level
like a pre-diabetic
and so you get this double whammy walk
us through that like what's going on
metabolically um when you don't get
enough sleep
yes so that is still being investigated
but it was one of the very first things
that was discovered in response to sleep
law so they did sleep sleep deprivation
studies found that healthy young
subjects ended up
basically looking diabetic after either
one night of total sleep deprivation or
a couple nights of partial sleep
restriction where you're not getting as
much sleep as your body wants
what's going on there so then that
stimulated some more investigation into
that now maybe that is because of
altered circadian timing it was hard to
parse that because we know
melatonin a darkness hormone
will actually cause insulin resistance
you want it because over the course of
the night you don't want insulin taking
blood glucose out of the bloodstream and
storing it because then you'd go
hypoglycemic and you'd wake up
so rather the body
it's a it's a this beautiful dance
when darkness falls melatonin is
released melatonin travels to the
pancreas and it prevents insulin from
being released and you keep blood
glucose levels stable at the across the
night
so
i think when some people that are waking
up in the morning they're looking
diabetic they might still have high
levels of melatonin at night from the
night we also see that our fat tissue
simply becomes
less sensitive to the effects of insulin
and so it's just not reading the signal
of insulin and helping it to store
glucose as well and so therefore
blood glucose levels elevate and then
you know whether or not that is
pathogenic like does that cause diabetes
well you can then look at
epidemiological research and shows that
people that chronically get less sleep
are much more likely to develop diabetes
so you have to look at acutely what's a
mechanism and then epidemiologically
what happens when people generally do
this and then you have to just try to
figure out what's going on in between
but
clearly there's an issue going on there
and there's no part of the body that
goes untouched when we don't sleep get
the sleep that we need the only
difference between excitement and fear
is what your brain says and the problem
is if you have a habit of worrying
guess what you're going to tell yourself
is going on
that you're that you're like freaking
out that you're not excited that
something must be wrong oh gosh why
would you say something's wrong because
you got a habit of saying that all the
time