Ep502 - Shawn Stevenson | Sleep Smarter
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Matthew, bringing you this week's episode with author and podcaster, Sean Stevenson. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. Every episode is taken from a video that can be seen at youtube.com slash talks at Google.

When it comes to health, there is often one criminally overlooked element: sleep. Good sleep helps you to lose weight, stave off disease, stay productive and improve virtually every function of your mind and body. That's what Shawn Stevenson learnt when a degenerative bone disease crushed his dream of becoming a professional athlete. Like many of us, he gave up on his health and his body until he decided there must be a better way.

Through better sleep and optimized nutrition, Stevenson not only healed his body, but also achieved fitness and business goals he never thought possible. In Sleep Smarter, Stevenson shares easy tips and tricks to discover the best sleep and best health of your life.

With his 14-day sleep makeover, you'll learn how to create the ideal sleep sanctuary, how to hack sunlight to regulate your circadian rhythms, which clinically proven sleep nutrients and supplements you need, and stress reduction exercises and fitness tips to keep you mentally and physically sharp. Sean Stevenson is a best-selling author and creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the number one health podcast in the world on iTunes.

With a university background in biology and kinesiology, Sean is the founder of the Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, providing wellness services for both individuals and organizations. Originally published in December of 2016, here is Sean Stephenson, Sleep Smarter. Thank you. Hi everybody. Okay, so yeah, here's some cool stuff that I did here. My team just made this slide for me and said I had to put it in, so I put it in. Well,

So my mission today is to give you things that are very tangible and actionable.

And so I'm going to take you through some very specific points. And we're going to learn today walk away things you're going to be able to leave here with is how to improve your sleep to reduce body fat and improve your performance. I'm sorry, your appearance. What simple exercise you can do to instantly improve your sleep quality. Why you need to sleep more and exercise less to get the best fitness results. How to feel more energized and refreshed on less hours of sleep. Why poor sleep quality depresses brain function and leads to poor performance.

what mineral deficiency can cause severe sleep problems and how to fix it, how to calm your mind so that you can fall asleep faster, and numerous power tips to help you to improve your sleep quality immediately.

Now, I'm not oblivious to the fact that sleep is a boring topic. When I went to my publisher initially, so my publisher is Rodeo, who's responsible for Men's Health Magazine, Women's Health Magazine. And they're like, you'd be great with a diet book, fitness book. And I was like, this is super important to talk about this.

And it's not a sexy topic, but I really feel that I made it more sexy and coupled with Arianna Huffington, her book came out right after mine. And so it was kind of creating this whole sleep revolution thing going on. So some of this information, hopefully you've heard about because I've been talking about this for about five years and it's like a trickle down thing when information gets out there on the internet. You never know exactly where it's coming from. So some of it probably came from me, but

You're gonna learn some new stuff as well. So what I like to do is to connect on a very visceral level. So Google probably wanted me here to help you to be more productive. You probably don't care much about that and you care about looking good. So who here doesn't want to look good? So that's what I thought. So what we're gonna do is connect on a visceral level and talk about how your sleep impacts your body composition and your physical appearance.

So today more than ever, it's difficult. There's a lot of barriers to being fit. There's a lot of misinformation, but one of the biggest missing pieces to this whole equation of having the body and health that we want is sleep. And there's two important studies that I wanna share with you guys. So number one, this was recently studied, I mean published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. They took individuals, they put them on the same diet, same exercise program,

One part of the study, they're sleep deprived. So they're getting five and a half hours of sleep. The other part of the study, they're getting eight and a half hours of sleep or eight plus hours of sleep. At the end of the study, they found that the sleep deprived group lost far less weight and far less body fat. Nothing else different in their life.

A more important study, this was done at the University of Chicago. Shout out to, I've shared this study all over the place, but I like to, I'm here in Chicago, so it's cool. They took individuals and they put them on a calorie-restricted diet. And I went to a traditional university, and I was taught that if you want to help a patient to lose weight, you have them to expend more energy than they take in. So basically, exercise more, eat less, all right? So they went through that normal modality, put them on a calorie-restricted diet. One phase of the study, they

have them on this particular diet, but they sleep-deprive them. All right, so again, five and a half hours of sleep. And this is gonna be shocking, five and a half hours of sleep. Another phase of the study, same diet, eight and a half hours of sleep. Everything's tracked. At the end of the study, they found that the individuals, when they were getting more sleep, they actually lost 55% more body fat. 55% more body fat simply from sleeping more, okay? You can't get this kind of number from CrossFit, all right? And CrossFit is awesome.

You can't get this kind of result unless you're literally beating yourself to the ground every day, all right? Just by sleeping more, and again, this is kind of counterculture because in our world today, in our mindset, we can't really get anything unless we hustle our face off.

And we can get it with an exercise program because you really beat yourself down. You're doing something proactive so I get a result. Same thing with diet. We try a new diet. We can be meticulous in that, beat ourselves up about it, celebrate. But when it comes to sleep, it's very abnormal and kind of counterintuitive because you don't do anything.

And you get all these results. So how is that even possible? And this is really what I pride myself on and in my clinic for many years is helping people to understand the deeper connection to this. So first and foremost, this is huge. 55% more body fat loss simply by sleeping more. And I'm going to teach you today it's not about sleeping more. If you're sleeping more, you're going to have a tendency to get better sleep. But that's not necessarily the case. It's really about sleeping smarter, getting higher quality sleep. And you can actually sleep less

and feel way better than a person who gets nine hours of sleep. So why does this work? How does this impact our fat loss? Number one, human growth hormone. And I don't know, Sammy Sosa, HGH, rest in peace, his career. All right, so HGH, human growth hormone. This hormone is very, very powerful and you produce the most

The greatest amount of your HGH production and secretion happens during the first part of your sleep. This happens during anabolic deep sleep. So the more time you can spend in this anabolic state, the more human growth hormone you're going to produce. So a couple things about human growth hormone and how this impacts fat loss. So number one, this is a growth hormone. So it helps you to build more lean muscle tissue.

All right, lean and muscle is kind of the same word though when people say that. So lean muscle tissue. Second, it's protective, it's muscle protective. So all the muscle you're working on in the gym, it's very easy, muscle is expensive for your body to carry around so it's kind of trying to get rid of it and fighting against you because it burns a lot more calories. So it's protective for your muscle tissue. Third thing, and one of the big reasons that athletes would take this is that it gives you a lot more energy.

It's also known as the youth hormone. Kids have a lot more human growth hormone, thus they have a lot more energy and they're always running around. While the parents are just, if you go to the park for example and you see the kids running around, the parents are just sitting there on the bench. Get down, Billy. So human growth hormone, this is huge. You can't get this from a supplement. You can't get this from squats. Squats are awesome, deadlifts are awesome, bench press is awesome. You can produce more human growth hormone by doing those things.

but not nearly as much as just getting some sleep. So that's number one. This is why that 55% number happens. Two, cortisol. So cortisol has become this bad guy today, and it's just not like that. Cortisol is actually misunderstood. What's a good comparison? Sammy Sosa, maybe. No, that's not a good comparison. So cortisol is actually something critically important to your health and your well-being.

First and foremost, it's one of the things that just kind of helps you to get up and get moving. It gives you this energy to do things. If you're exercising, for example, you're going to be producing more cortisol. Cortisol is responsible for actually helping to build your thyroid hormone. Your thyroid is literally the metabolic center of your entire body. So it's like the control center of your metabolism. So cortisol is important. It's just if it's produced at the wrong time and in the wrong amount is when it can become a problem.

All right, so here's why this is an issue. Sleep deprivation immediately has an elevated correlation with elevated cortisol. Okay, sleep deprivation immediately has a correlation with elevated cortisol.

So just if you're up till, you know, two, three o'clock in the morning doing the laptop lap dance, your cortisol is going to be elevated. It's just the nature of the beast. Okay. So cortisol is not a bad guy. Here's why this is a problem. Cortisol is an opposite of human growth hormone in that it

Breaks down your muscle tissue. Okay. It has this interesting process called gluconeogenesis Which essentially means Genesis is created glucose as sugar so you can break your muscle tissue your proteins and turn them into glucose which then elevates your insulin which then it's kind of like a Key to open up your cell and store more fat. All right, thus Sort of turning your muscle into fat which biochemically doesn't work directly like that But this is how this is the trigger is cortisol melatonin

When the world does have to do with fat loss. This is fascinating.

We're at Google. You guys are nerds too, and I dig that. I'm a super nerd, so I'm looking at medical journals. So in the Journal of Pineal Research, which there's a journal for everything, by the way. Like there's a toe journal. Melatonin was found to actually have a huge impact on fat loss. Crazy enough, this glorified sleep hormone. So melatonin was found to increase your body's something called brown adipose tissue or BAT.

Okay, so you can call it like bat fat. All right, so brown adipose tissue Brown adipose tissue functions a lot like muscle in that it burns white adipose tissue or white white adipose tissue or wet fat okay, so

By increasing your body's ratio of brown adipose tissue You're effectively increasing your metabolic rate. All right, and melatonin has been found to directly increase your body's Level of brown adipose tissue, which is really really fascinating But if you're not getting adequate sleep You're not producing the adequate amounts of melatonin and also honoring a day and night like night cycle Which we'll talk about in just a moment two more. I'll share with you really quickly leptin

I first learned about leptin from Dr. Oz and his co-author Dr. Michael Rosen, who is a friend of mine. So leptin is your body's satiety hormone.

Stanford University discovered that just one night of sleep deprivation, one night of poor sleep quality leads to a dramatic suppression of your body's leptin. So your satiety hormone that keeps you from just crushing a bag of chips or eating a whole pint of ice cream when you're sitting there watching Game of Thrones or whatever it is.

Leptin is that satiety hormone that keeps you from doing that stuff. All right So we get into this battle of our willpower versus our biology and so leptin is key here All right. So the other on the other side, it's ghrelin. Okay, I refer to as the ghrelin gremlin and ghrelin is your body's hunger hormone so there's another study that I came across that found that just one night of course sleep quality leads to a 15% increase automatically in your body's ghrelin levels and

So there was also a correlation with individuals who have a poor night's sleep about eating about 200 to 250 more calories the next day. All right, because your body your brain is trying to get more energy to keep you up because you're tired So I hope this is creating more of an understanding with some of these hormones and how this connects with fat loss and sleep and why this is so important a little bit more of a visceral connection All right, and on that note

I do want to talk about the productivity. I do want to talk about the brain health because this is really what I'm passionate about. So a lot of people are showing up at work like this and it's like, don't talk to me until I have my coffee. All right. And so what's going on here? Well, first and foremost,

So this is UC Berkeley, and they did some brain imaging to actually see what's going on in the brain where sleep deprived. As you can see on the right side of you guys, there's increased activity in the amygdala, which is more of the primitive reptilian brain. And this part. So what's theorized that we basically have three brains that have evolved on top of each other, the amygdala, the limbic brain, and then the more evolved prefrontal cortex. And so the amygdala is like lit up.

Just 24 hours of sleep deprivation, this part of your brain is like on fire. So much activity going on. And coupled with, on the left side here, decreased activity in the frontal and insular cortex. So this is a more evolved human brain. This is the part of your brain responsible for decision making, for social control, for distinguishing between right and wrong. That part of your brain starts to go cold. There's a lot less activity there. And you put those two things together and we've got a recipe for some problems.

And the big thing here in this equation is glucose. So glucose is your brain's main fuel source. And what they also discovered is that there's a 6% decrease in glucose reaching your brain when you're sleep deprived. All right. But now all of that's not even equal. There's 14% of that is from your prefrontal cortex. Again, the part of your brain responsible for your willpower, decision-making, distinguishing between right and wrong. So here's the issue is that when your brain starts to starve, this is

This is basically an evolutionary problem. This is something, this is survival mechanisms going to kick in because even though we're at Google and we've got like cool clothes and we've got, you know, people have iPhones here? Is that Google phones? I don't know. I don't know the politics. We've got fancy equipment and tech. Our design is very primitive still. So

a couple thousand years ago if there was a lack of glucose reach in your brain this could mean death this could be your inability to procure your food to find shelter to protect your tribe so your every part of your body every single cell in your body is going to compel you to get that glucose back to your brain all right immediately as soon as you can so if you've ever had a cookie in your life

If you've ever had tortilla chips, if you've ever had ice cream, your brain knows it can get a quick source of glucose from those foods. All right, so this is why you're going to be compelled to eat those type of things late at night. Tell me if I'm wrong. Tell me if I'm wrong. Have you ever been up at one o'clock in the morning watching Game of Thrones or the House of Cards, whatever you're into, and you're just like, you know what? I want a salad right now. Have you ever done that? It doesn't happen.

You go get the little snacky foods because again, you're tired. Your brain is going to compel you to eat that stuff. So many people are failing and struggling in their diet with their nutrition because they're tired. And I call it "tungry," tired and hungry. So there's this hangry thing. So look for that coming soon. So what happens is when we're sleep deprived, our brain, we get an amygdala hijack basically. So this more primitive part of your brain that's only concerned about survival of self kicks in.

And this is why, and I've also, I did an entire show on this talking about sleep and relationships and how sleep deprivation impacts your intimate relationships. And it's crazy, crazy. So basically a more primitive, angry, selfish version of yourself shows up.

And I think I see some nodding going on. When people have arguments late at night, they tend to be like the worst arguments and stuff doesn't get resolved. And so there was a study that found that couples, if just one of the people in the couple, I'm sorry, one of the individuals in the couple got a poor night of sleep the night before, there's a radically increased incident, just one of them, radically increased incidents of arguing the next day and for that argument to not be resolved.

all right because that higher order part of your brain isn't isn't on all right the more compassionate rational version of yourself all right and oftentimes you look back on the argument like you know a month later or whatever you literally have no idea what you're arguing about because it's something so stupid but that amygdala doesn't care it just wants to have a problem all right and it wants to eat cookies so to avoid going to the dark side we need to make sure we're getting adequate sleep

So there's a study that I cited in Sleep Smarter that discovered, and I just couldn't believe this. And so I actually went and looked at the study in depth and looked at all the numbers and it was crazy. So they found that college students who are, you know, who describe themselves as poor sleepers who get less than six hours of sleep per night, performed as poorly on tests as individuals who were binge drinkers and using marijuana on a consistent basis. All right. And they were more likely to drop out of school

and to, I'm sorry, to drop out of classes and to drop out of college as well. There's this huge correlation just like blew my mind. There's this new term now, I don't know if you've heard of it, it's called cyber loafing.

And so in a follow-up study, what they did was they monitored the individual's sleep the night before. So the college students, they monitored their sleep the night before. And every hour of sleep that they lost correlated with a 20% greater increase of cyber loafing the next day. This is basically when you're supposed to be like doing your work and you're just like, I'll just check Instagram for a minute. And it's like 30 minutes later and you get sucked into the internet black hole.

Or if it's not Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever you're into, that's cyber loafing. And it's so much easier for us to just go and just open up that app and not think about it when we're sleep deprived. So here's a big thing with performance is memory. And what's so shocking about this and about the importance of sleep in your memory is the fact that your brain, well,

I don't know if you guys remember from school the lymphatic system, right? You've got the cardiovascular system. Then you've got the lymphatic system. It looks very similar, but you have four times more lymph than you have blood. And your lymphatic system is basically like your cellular waste management system. All right. So it's very, very important. The issue is that for your brain, there's the blood brain barrier. So your lymphatic system doesn't connect.

directly like you would think. All right? So the brain, what's recently, this is just in the last 10 years it's been discovered, has its own system for getting rid of metabolic waste. And your brain is doing like a million processes every second. So there's a lot of metabolic waste and a lot of dead cells and a lot of stuff to get cleaned up.

And now Alzheimer's has been found to be heavily correlated with an inability of your brain to detoxify itself. So it's just building up all of this waste that it can't remove, right? What's responsible for that waste removal is called your glymphatic system, right? Which is run by your glial cells. This is a special shout out to these,

These cells that run the system. So what's so fascinating is that during sleep your glymphatic system is ten times more active Than during the day, right? So your brain is always trying to clean itself But it's ten times more active when you go to sleep To get rid of all of the stuff that it's building up to make room for new cells. Also, they've been found that there's a 60% decrease in your brain cell size so your brain cells literally shrink and

when you go to sleep to make more room for detoxification that's how important it is this is evolutionary advantage here all right so if you're not sleeping your brain isn't detoxifying itself properly and you're getting closer to an early date with memory loss dementia alzheimer's all right this is the opposite of a productive brain so

This is particularly important to me because working in my clinic, I've worked with a lot of individuals who've had their lives just fall apart because a family member forgetting who they are. But in our day-to-day lives, this has some very tangible applications because I don't know if anybody's seen The Hangover before. Yeah, everybody. So with alcohol consumption, and I'm not anti-alcohol by any means,

But what's so fascinating is like, but when you drink alcohol, there's this interesting process that happens. It's called a REM rebound effect. So what I teach in Sleep Smarter is how to drink alcohol, but still be able to get good sleep that night, because this is where the whole concept of a hangover comes into play.

is the next day you don't feel well, it's because your sleep is so heavily disrupted. And also your memories can be disrupted, okay? Because of this REM rebound effect. So in essence, if you're drinking alcohol close to your bedtime and what's happening is your REM sleep, which is, and I just want to give you guys a really important takeaway here. So it's during REM sleep, you guys probably, well, just in case if you haven't heard this before. So sleep is really, it's weird.

It's weird, all right? It's very, very weird. You're like pretending to be dead. It's very strange. How we're sleeping, what that really equates to being is a change in your brain waves, okay? That's really what it is, all right? Beta, theta, delta. It's a change in your brain waves. This is how scientists are able to monitor somebody's sleep and see what's going on is fluctuations in this. So right now we're all in beta, all right? We're all in a beta, this waking state.

But what happens with these different stages? So I mentioned earlier about human growth hormone. Most of that production happens during Delta sleep. That's that deep anabolic stage three and four sleep. All right, that's non REM sleep REM sleep or rapid eye movement sleep and the name rapid eye movement is because your eyes are moving which is super creepy, but did you do that?

REM sleep is when you're dreaming, primarily is when you're dreaming. And this is also when this very fascinating process called memory processing happens. So this is the stuff you're learning right now in this moment gets converted into your short-term memory, becomes more solid, and then of course can move to your long-term memory when you get sleep. All right, so this is why sometimes some people in here have had that experience where they go out, they drink a lot, the next day they don't remember what happened. I'm not saying any names.

But it has happened before. It's because your REM sleep is heavily disturbed via the alcohol. So if we're going to maximize our memory potential, we've got to learn to just adjust and streamline some of the things that we're going to do on a daily basis, whether it's consuming alcohol or even something like caffeine. I'm a caffeine fan. I'm a fan of caffeine, big time.

But it's just doing it in an intelligent way. So I want to share with you guys a strategy with caffeine Okay, so caffeine has a half-life of about eight hours depending on your metabolism So that means after eight hours, just say you drink a basic cup of coffee. It's about 200 milligrams So after eight hours 100 milligrams is still active in your system It's half of that and then after eight hours and half of that is still active in your system so there's one study that I cited in the book that found that

Literally taking caffeine they had the individuals take caffeine right before bed three hours before bed or six hours before bed and even six hours before bed Led to lead them losing one full hour of sleep via sleep monitor Okay, their subjective thing they wrote down in a journal They thought they slept for it just say eight hours But they actually lost a full hour of sleep because of what caffeine was doing with their bodies a very powerful nervous system stimulant and

So what we want to do is give yourself a caffeine curfew. All right. If you can, make sure to get that in the earlier part of the day. I recommend by noon. It's not that caffeine is bad. It's just the way that we utilize it. The other day I was out at a restaurant and I never really noticed this before. It was dinner. It was with my wife. And it was like, I don't know. We were about to leave. It's like nine o'clock. And then the waiter came around. He's like, would you like some coffee? I was like, people do that.

like i didn't even i never thought about it before but a lot of people do we just don't think about it right and then the next day we're in that kind of we get into that vicious circle to where the next day you need caffeine to get you going again so that's number one um and i break down the book how caffeine actually works with adenosine and all that stuff and it's very similar to alcohol so and number two is to cycle it so use caffeine

In in different stints. Okay, so I give some strategies on doing that caffeine effectively is detoxify from your system It takes about 72 hours Alright, so if you can maybe be on for four days give yourself three days off Then you actually feel it again because that first time when you have coffee like the first time ever it's like it's something special I used like this exists

But then over time you don't get that feeling anymore. You know, wouldn't you like to have that kind of magical when we first met kind of thing with coffee? You can do that by cycling it. And it's really that simple. Just your body because it builds up a resistance to it. All right. Your body, your receptor sites down regulate. So let's get into some more power tips here. All right. So one of the things that everybody's probably heard about now is this issue with blue light.

And again, I've been talking about this for five years. So, but I'm going to show you something a little bit deeper that you probably haven't heard before. So everybody that does have an iPhone and then that's okay, right? It's not like, okay. All right. So you've got the new iOS update and there's a tool on here called Night Shift, right? Built into the phones now. Okay.

And this effectively pulls out the most troublesome spectrum of light from your screen automatically based on the time of day in your particular area. All right. Apple's not going to do this for no reason. All right. This is a multibillion dollar company. Everything has a purpose. Personally, just a little conspiracy theory I'm going to throw out here. I think it's really because like the McDonald's lawsuits, you know, where there's like people start suing them like you made me fat, even though you ate it. But it's your fault.

And because of all of these issues coming out about how sleep deprivation is linked to cancer, is linked to heart disease, is linked to diabetes. And it's like your device is destroying my sleep, right? So they're being proactive about this stuff because they know that it's a serious issue. And on that note, before I get to these sleep tips, I want to share with you, because I saw this a lot in my clinic, a lot of cancer, a lot of cancer, all types, breast cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer.

And what's so fascinating, the World Health Organization has come out and said that shift work or overnight shift is a class 2A carcinogen. Okay? Working overnight is a cancer-causing agent. That sounds totally ridiculous. Why is that? Well, being up at night, you're suppressing your melatonin. And melatonin, we already heard about it's a sleep hormone. We already heard about its relationship to fat loss. But it's our most powerful, quite possibly our most powerful endogenous anti-cancer hormone that we produce.

And if you're suppressing that, you're losing a lot of this defense for your body. So it's a pretty serious issue. But Harvard researchers recently confirmed that, yes, blue light does suppress your melatonin. And here's the correlation that they found. For every hour of use of your device at night, not during the day, it doesn't affect your cortisol or melatonin, according to research. But at night, every hour of use leads to 30 hours of suppressed melatonin.

Okay, every hour of use, 30 minutes of suppressed melatonin. So this brings up the situation where you can physiologically be passed out. You can just go to sleep from exhaustion, but you're not actually getting optimal sleep cycles because your melatonin is not being produced properly. All right, so you're not producing as much human growth hormone. You're not producing as much of these anabolic recovery hormones and enzymes

You're just passed out from exhaustion. You're not getting actually high quality sleep. That's what I'm teaching is how to get great sleep when you are asleep. So they found that blue light, yes, super suppressive, but they found that all light isn't created equal in how it impacts your body. So blue light is twice as suppressive to your melatonin and disruptors to your sleep cycle than green light. They found that red light was negligible in how it impacts your melatonin. So red light basically had no impact.

And if you look at evolutionary biology, again, thousands of years ago, if we did have light at night, what color would it be? It'd be reddish orange from fire, right? So we still have that same hard wiring. So you can hack this, all right? And that's what I recommend. Night shift, if you have the iPhone, use it. Super easy, just push a button. You don't have to think about it. If you have Android, for people who have Androids.

Twilight is an app that you can download and use. I've done a lot of research on this stuff. Some of those for the Android are still kind of sketchy, they haven't figured it all out yet, but Twilight's pretty solid. For your computers, I'm always curious to see this. Who uses Flux? It's amazing!

I'm just going to say you're welcome in advance, all right? So just go to Google. It's so cool I get to say that. All right, so go to Google. Type in f.lux, all right?

And there's this free app, it's called Flux. I've been using it for about three years. I absolutely love it. Before my book, before getting out and really sharing this with the world, I was using this app and I absolutely love it. So this does it for your laptop and your desktop automatically based on your time zone. It knows what to do. It'll pull the most troublesome spectrum of blue light from your screen. And as you can see from this picture, when you're sitting there in the dark, you're seeing like this magical world of colors.

So it's like, what's the big deal with the blue light? It's the strongest light and it's most similar to sunlight. So it tells your brain that it's daytime. Blue light equals elevated cortisol, period, automatically at night.

That's what happens in cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship when cortisol is elevated melatonin is suppressed and vice versa All right, so use flux It's super easy to install just like a couple clicks and then if you need to look at a design or something like that You can just disable it and turn it right back on. All right, I before I even knew about this impact with sleep I was recommending it to tech, you know people who work in the tech field that would come into my clinic that have migraines and

Just from staring at the computer all day. It would help them to get rid of migraines. It was amazing. Okay, just let you bask in this. Okay, so that's one.

Another hack is blue light blocking glasses. All right, so what about the ambient light? What if you're watching a movie or something like that? And you heard it here first. I know it's going to happen on TV as well. They're going to make this on televisions where they can pull out the blue light. But until that point, you can wear some blue light blocking glasses in the evening. And so there's some really ugly ones, which you can

She can get on Amazon for like five bucks. I've got a whole collection, by the way. So for like the first year, this was like four years ago, and I'm wearing these like big construction glasses. And my wife, she still liked me apparently, but I don't know why. It looked like I would just build a birdhouse or something. When people come over, it's just super weird and awkward. I've got some really cool ones now. They're called Swannies. But you guys can check that information out later. But the big key here is...

Giving yourself a screen curfew. This is like after this after this I promise It's just gonna be all super low-hanging fruit easy stuff to apply. This is the hard one Alright, this is like the rip the band-aid off. We're like at a a meeting all of a sudden Okay, we're addicted all of us are addicted you're addicted and it's okay. Okay, you're addicted. It's okay So what's going on here? Well, there's this powerful compound our body produces called dopamine and

And what scientists have discovered is that it's all about seeking. All right. And it drives us to seek. And it's part of our evolutionary design. We wouldn't have evolved as humans if we didn't have dopamine because it makes us look for things. The issue is that the Internet is perfect for that because there's infinite amount of things to seek and look for.

But you'd go crazy if you just look and look and look and you never find anything. So every time you find what you're looking for, you get a little hit from your opioid system, like a slow drip of morphine. Again, the internet's perfect for this because Instagram, seek, find, seek, find, seek, find, seek, find. You get hooked super quick. Like I'll never use Instagram. Next thing you know, you're like scrolling all day. So it's difficult to tell your brain, okay,

I know I need to get off my device to you know wind down for my day It's very difficult to do that when your brain is addicted So if you if you don't hear what I'm saying and you try to do this tonight and get off your device an hour before bed You're gonna get the internet jitters. All right, you're gonna be like tweaking. You just I just want to look at one post just one post All right. I don't want that to happen to you So what we have to do is first understand that you're addicted first step is awareness. I

The second step is you have to fill it with something of greater or equal value. Okay, so I know this is going to sound crazy, but you might want to actually, instead of being on your device, talk to a human, like an actual person. Okay, face to face. All right. If there's anybody married in here, there's like the main people who don't know what I'm talking about. So talk to your spouse, talk to your kids, hang out, play a game. What happened to games? Taboo. Pictionary.

Do something fun. You can't just sit there idly and wait for the time to pass. Fill it with something good. Sex is another option. There's a whole chapter on this. When you have an orgasm, you release a cocktail of chemicals, oxytocin, prolactin, vasopressin, all of these things clinically proven to help you to sleep better. It's why it's called sleeping together. You're welcome. All right?

Give yourself a sleep curfew. I recommend just a minimum of 30 minutes. Okay, you can actually work on your goals for the next day. Do some journaling, read a physical book. Fill that time with something that you enjoy and you're going to sleep better immediately. Okay.

Low hanging fruits now, super power tips here. All right, this is huge. This is my favorite, I can't say that. It's one of my favorite chapters in the book. So this was Fix Your Gut to Fix Your Sleep. And we talk about the relationship between sleep and your gut health, all right? You might've heard some of this stuff out there in the interwebs before, but not this one, all right? Crazy thing, melatonin, when I was taught this in a university setting, it's produced by your pineal gland. There's 400 times more melatonin in your gut

than your brain. Okay, so this is where the whole show is actually happening. It's in your belly. Okay, so we have to take care of that environment and researchers at Caltech found out that there are certain bacteria that communicate with these the cells that produce these hormones.

Okay, so if that bacteria cascade is off automatically we've got a huge issue with our body's production of melatonin Okay, so we want to do number one We have to take care of our gut environment by making sure we'll get we're taking care of the friendly flora And that's a whole like we could talk a whole talk just about that

One of the other things we need to do is to feed them the right way. So we need prebiotics, not just probiotics. We need probiotic foods first, not just supplements. And then prebiotics so they can actually have something to eat and keep them in power. Third thing is we need to eat good sleep nutrients. All right. And there's a whole list of good sleep nutrients, clinically proven, all of them in Sleep Smarter. I'll share a couple with you. One, super low-hanging fruit, potassium. All right.

Potassium, this was in the journal Sleep. It was discovered that individuals that were deficient in potassium were more likely to have interrupted sleep. So this is an inability to stay asleep once you fall asleep. Directly linked to a potassium deficiency. So what can we do about this? What's some good sources of potassium? Banana. Chiquita is like brilliant marketing. Like it's got us. Bananas are not that great source of potassium. All right. Avocado. Who said that? What's your name? Yes.

We're best friends now. Okay. So avocados, way better source of potassium than bananas. And you're not dealing with the hybridized super sugar bomb that you're eating with a banana. Okay. Little fun fact side note is that bananas are actually incredibly hybridized. Real bananas have a lot of seeds in them.

But ours are bred to be, like you see them tiny little teeny little seedless little duds that are in the banana. And actually our conventional bananas, even if they're organic, they cannot reproduce in nature on their own. They have to have human intervention now. All right. Sugar bomb. All right. So potassium is one. There's so many I could share with you. But this is the biggest one, the biggest deficiency that I mentioned at the very beginning is magnesium. All right. Magnesium is responsible for over 300 biochemical processes in the body.

So that means there's 300 things your body cannot do or can't do properly if you're deficient in this and the real kicker here Is that around 90% 80 plus percent of our population is deficient chronically deficient in magnesium All right. Magnesium is really known as this kind of anti-stress mineral So by you getting your magnesium levels optimized you're going to be able to start sleeping better immediately and so here's the issue is that if

It's an anti-stress mineral so it gets zapped from your system very quickly even in the more just literally driving into work You can start to siphon your magnesium if you're stressed. Okay, so this is something we need a consistent Application of I'm food first in my clinic. All right been this way since the beginning I do recommend supplementation for this one

There's some good supplements out there, but the issue is that oral supplementation, there's a great one called Calm, Magnesium Calm. You probably see it at Whole Foods and stuff like that. The issue is that if you take too much oral magnesium, it pulls more water to your bowels. So you can call what we call clinically disaster pants. Okay? So...

Diarrhea, guys. Diarrhea can happen. So we want to use a topical application. So magnesium spray. So I use something called Ease Magnesium. E-A-S-E. I've been using it for

a little more than three years every night I travel with it. It's absolutely incredible. I get more emails about that product than anything else I've ever recommended. It's really incredible. So magnesium is really powerful by optimizing your magnesium levels. It's going to help you sleep better at night. Epsom salt is one of those things a lot of people know about. It's a magnesium sulfate. It's a form of magnesium.

So we wanna get three to five servings of these good sleep nutrients in, so the foods that have these different nutrients. And there's a whole list, again, I'd like to share with you guys all of them, but I wanna do a quick Q and A as well here. So stress, just really quickly, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. Okay, so your adrenals are producing this cortisol, but the problem starts upstream.

With your hypothalamus is your master gland that's reading your environment. It's the interface of your endocrine system and your nervous system Okay, so this part of your brain the hypothalamus is known as this master gland and what it does is operates based on your perception of reality Okay your perception of reality

So something might not actually be stressful, but we can perceive it as stressful and it can cause us problems. It can cause us to short out. If you've ever had, I don't know, like you're walking in the park and then like you see a stick and you think it's a snake, you know, it scares you, but it's just a stick or any kind of weird stuff like that. Like we can perceive the environment wrong and cause us to have more stress. So we have to work on our perception, but also basic perception.

strategies that we need to employ every single day and this is why I love talking here at Google because you guys are at the forefront of this stuff some practices to help to keep stress in check

So this is a normal cortisol rhythm. So your cortisol is supposed to be elevated in the morning between 6 and 8 a.m. and then gradually decline and bottom out in the evening. Clinically, what I would see is people that we call clinically tired and wired. It's where their cortisol was too low in the morning, thus very difficult for them to peel themselves out of the bed. And at night, they're just wired. They're awake. Okay. So how can we reset this?

So here's three ways, and this has to do with stress. So cortisol is that stress hormone. Number one, exercise. If you exercise, time your exercise the right way, you can actually improve your sleep quality. So Appalachian State University did a study. They had exercisers train at three different times at 7:00 AM in the morning, 1:00 PM in the afternoon, and 7:00 PM at night. They found the morning exercisers spent more time in the most anabolic deepest stages of sleep.

They tended to sleep more, they had more efficient sleep cycles, and they had a 25% greater drop in their blood pressure at night, which is a correlation of the parasympathetic rest and digest nervous system. All that to say, we need to get some morning exercise in because it resets your cortisol rhythm. That's how it works. Who here works out in the afternoon? Cool. I did an experiment and I worked out in the afternoon at like four or five o'clock for a year.

And I still did five to 10 minutes of exercise in the morning. It did not impact my gains because I was very concerned about my gains from training in the afternoon. My testosterone went up, strength numbers went up, reaction time went up, everything improved. So for those who are really inclined and like care about their physical health and their performance, this morning exercise isn't going to impact that.

Okay, so if you're already a morning exerciser, that's awesome. But this is again, it's a part of a strategy. You can exercise in the morning, but you're like jamming down Ben and Jerry's, you know, watching Daredevil at night. It's kind of counterproductive.

All right, but if you're getting this piece right, so what I recommend is at least five to 10 minutes of exercise in the morning. All right, clinically proven to work, just five to 10 minutes. What does that look like? Even four minutes. Does anybody know what Tabata is? Yeah, okay. So Tabata, four minutes of exercise. Awesome, super hard. Okay, it's 20 seconds of activity, 20 seconds of rest, done back to back for four minutes.

Sounds like whatever, but it'll kick your butt. All right, so you could do bodyweight exercises. You can do mini trampoline a rebounder I have one in my office. I use that a lot of the time NASA said this is the best form of exercise for humans. There's some literally rocket scientists. I

Okay? Rebounding is pretty good. You can do a power yoga session. Just do something to get your cortisol moving in the right direction. Exercise is one way to reset that stress rhythm. Number two, smart sunlight. It's a little bit of an issue.

For us folks up here in Chicago, certain times of the year getting sunlight. So you need to take advantage of this as much as you can. So one study that I cited in the book found that individuals who got sunlight between the hours of 6 a.m. and 8 a.m., just 10 minutes, had this interesting thing happen where their cortisol dropped later in the evening. Because sunlight on your skin, sunlight exposure through your optical receptors increases your cortisol.

Again, it's not a bad thing. It helps to reset your cortisol rhythm so you're less stressed in the evening by getting more sunlight. All right, and I've got strategies on how to do this in the book as well. Last thing is meditation, okay? Do you guys have like meditation stuff here? Like what? Can you tell me about it? There are some classes that they lead. I think it's called G-medicine.

- G-Paws. - G-Paws, that's like a rapper name. I like that. So, but Google is at the forefront of this stuff and it's as far as workplace integration with meditation. So I'm a scientist. So I wanna know if something actually works. So in the American, sorry, the American Association of Sleep Medicine cited this, I'm sorry, I cited this in the book. This was, it blew my mind.

20 minutes of meditation in the morning for this group of insomniacs, all right, for eight weeks. Essentially, all of them were no longer considered clinically chronic sleep deprived, all right, or aka insomniacs. How? So what you're doing is you're manipulating your brainwaves when you meditate, okay? So some advanced meditators can actually get into Delta, right?

all right it's like dalai lama level whatever i'm not talking about that it's very difficult but you can get yourself from beta to alpha or even theta okay and you're starting to simulate what's going on in your brain during sleep and getting more into that recovery anabolic supportive to your memory all that kind of stuff by doing meditation so what they found in this study that i cited was uh improvement in sleep onset so he fell asleep faster uh decrease in uh interrupted sleep

So that's wake after sleep onset overall increase in sleep. I'm sorry sleep increase overall And also they found that there were all of the individuals in the study who had clinical depression They all had improvement in their symptoms as well. Okay, so five to ten minutes of meditation in the morning Okay, it doesn't have to be anything like you don't have to sit cross-legged in the closet. I

You know and find a cave or whatever this is practical. I call it brain training Okay, you can throw on a an app, you know headspace or something like that or guided meditation Take advantage of this because it works and this is something that can help you to manipulate Quiet your mind in the evening because you're able to manipulate your brainwaves. All right, so with that said I

Last thing, Tai Chi and Qi Gong. I really recommend these for really busy-minded individuals can employ this. And these are both clinically proven to work. And I've cited different studies in Sleep Smarter as well. Shocking, shocking benefits from Qi Gong. Increasing melatonin metabolites. So your body literally increases, it literally produces more melatonin from doing these practices. Super powerful stuff.

That's Superman. All right? So take advantage of these strategies. All right? There's some very practical things here to implement in your life. And also,

At some point, too, consider ripping the Band-Aid off and giving yourself that screen curfew because I think that can have the biggest impact on your sleep quality immediately. But all these other things put together in a cohesive strategy can be very, very powerful. There's a 14-day sleep makeover in Sleep Smarter as well. And I appreciate you guys so much for having me out. And we can do Q&A as well. And I appreciate it. Thank you.

So we have time for five minutes of QA. So I think we can get about two questions in. Come up to one of each of the mics and just ask away. I can ask one.

So I think there was a point in which you were going to go over how to avoid hangovers before going to sleep. Is there any methodology that you would suggest? Okay, yes. So one of the first things is if you can give yourself a little bit more of a curfew. So drinking alcohol a little bit earlier in the evening.

Because your body eliminates alcohol pretty quickly thus you peeing so much All right, if you've ever noticed you pee a lot more when you drink alcohol So if you can give yourself a little bit of curfew, maybe go to happy hour instead of like all night type thing. I

Kind of like diet fun, I guess, as far as drinking. And that's one strategy. Another strategy is just to drink. Help your body with that detoxification process. Have a pitcher of water on your table and drink a lot of water as well. It's going to help you to eliminate the alcohol quicker.

Thanks so much for doing this. This was really incredible. The question I had was, in thinking about, say you're able to reset a little bit to improve the quality of your sleep, and then you have to travel, or you have to pull an all-nighter for work, or whatever the reason things get upset, are there any strategies you'd recommend for resetting or coming back to that good quality of sleep? That's such a great question, because it happens to all of us. And all of this stuff is really, it's progress, not perfection,

All right, we're going to have stuff that comes up, especially if you have kids. I have three kids and they're like professional curveball throwers. Like you think you're getting one pitch and they just like trick you and mess your stuff up. But this is actually really simple. So a lot of people like the next day, what should I do after poor night the night before?

The first thing that I found to be most helpful, so for example, me changing time zones, speaking on the West Coast and the East Coast, is getting up and doing some exercise to reset my cortisol rhythm. And also, it's really as simple as just, we have this thing, this concept in culture now, it's called sleep debt, and your body's very resilient in paying back a sleep debt from a night or two of poor sleep.

It's just when it becomes chronic is that it's the issue. All right. So to get back on track as quickly as possible is really the solution. You know, just do this stuff right the next day, get to bed on time, all that kind of good stuff. It's really as simple as that. But for me, definitely like if you travel, your sleep's off, even if you're tired, get up and do five to 10 minutes of exercise to reset that cortisol rhythm so it gets back on track. And it's really simple as that. Thanks. Thanks.

Kind of already answered this question a little bit, but I was just wondering if you are in a situation where you only have three or four hours of sleep, whether it be you have a kid crying or you're traveling, are there any foods or supplements you'd recommend when you know for sure that you're only going to get like three or four hours of sleep to help you get into that deep sleep right away? Yeah, great question. Big key here is, especially in a city environment, is make sure you have blackout curtains because

Make sure your room is as dark as possible because it's not just your eyes that pick up light So mask is cool, but your skin has photoreceptors. That's how you can actually your skin can change color from sunlight So your skin has photoreceptors and there's a study at Cornell that was done in Cornell and they took this individual and they had him to sleep in an otherwise dark room all right the subject and

So the room is dark and they put a fiber optic cable with a light about the size of a quarter behind his knee. That's the only light in the room covered up right behind his knee. And that was enough to disrupt his sleep cycle.

Just that little light behind his knee. It's crazy But if you understand humans we have not we've evolved being with a very specific light and dark cycle and your body doesn't really know how to handle if there's this external artificial light so blackout curtains super important and you can get go to like Tarjay get some you know go to and no Amazon or whatever just order some but blackout curtains if it's not a

Moonlight, okay, it's artificial light. So if you don't have an issue with like your neighbor's porch light, there's street lights outside, it's not as important. But that's one thing I would definitely do is make sure that I'm sleeping in a blacked out room so you can produce adequate, I mean you're gonna produce a lot of melatonin when you're sleeping in a dark room. Another thing is the magnesium would be super important for me because your body's gonna have that elevated cortisol, magnesium's gonna get depleted very quickly. So I'd use topical magnesium

and just everything else, stack conditions in your favor to do all the other stuff right. Because, you know, like I have three kids, so I've been there, but it's just doing as many of the right things that you can and not beat yourself up about it so you don't get too neurotic. All right. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you so much, Sean. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening. To discover more amazing content, you can always find us online at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.