Change Your Brain Every Day - Sleep The REAL Enhancement for Better Health

Episode Date: March 8, 2017

If you're having a hard time sleeping, have sleep apnea or snore, then this episode is for you. Today, we're going to talk about how you can enhance your sleep to get you back on track to a better health.

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amon.

Okay. Welcome back, everybody. The Brain Warriors Way podcast. We're so excited that you have tuned in with us. Tana and I are here with Shawn Stevenson, bestselling author of Sleep Smarter, creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the number one health podcast on iTunes with millions of listener downloads each year. We're so excited to have Sean with us. We are talking about sleep. We talked about how important sleep is and what are the things that disrupt sleep. We're going to finish this series with ways to enhance your sleep.

And we talked about shift workers, and I was actually feeling a little depressed at the end of it because it has now been classified as a carcinogen. That's awful. And, you know, as a nurse, you did shift work. Well, this was a big problem. And I wanted to,

since we're in the solution section now, Sean, I wanted to just touch on this really quickly because there are people out there as somebody who did this for a long time. I know at least part of the culture that goes along with shift work. And a lot of people do it because it's the best time that they can do it. That way, they can be with their kids during the day, which means they're not sleeping. A lot of people do it for financial reasons. As you said, they'll work double shifts as nurses. And a lot of people do it because they actually like night shift and sleep better during the day. They're kind of vampire-ish.

So in any case, what I noticed was knowing that is really important. But what we found was you mentioned something about sleeping for long periods and trying to rearrange the schedules. And that's what a lot of night nurses do, not to the degree that you're talking about, because we don't have that option. But what they would do is they would schedule their three days on at the end of a week, three days on at the beginning of a week. So they've got six days they're not sleeping during the night, and then they would have eight days off. And it was a little bit better than doing the one-on-one-off, one-on-one-off. So I like that. The other thing is that I noticed we had an opportunity to sort of take a nap, but there was nowhere to take a nap. So if we created those

things, so I wanted to just kind of touch on that. But what about people who actually like, because I actually noticed that most of them were overweight and not healthy because they don't sleep much during the day. What about, like, how do we sort of address that for the people who really like working at night? And how do we address that? And then we have to do, because we only have about 10 minutes, we have to do all the ways to enhance sleep for everybody, but let's start with this.

Okay, perfect. So as we talked about in the first episode was the impact that it has on fat loss. And I had a great sample size to work with working at a university for so many years of working with a lot of nurses and a lot of pre-med students and seeing that their before and after you know of being before they started clinicals and then after and the impact that it had on their bodies and so what i would recommend is this for people who that is your lot in life and you are passionate about working overnight that is what you are are passionate about and striving to do is we have to set up a normal natural cycle as much as possible, even though it's abnormal. All right. So what that would entail is number one, and this

is one of the big sleep tips for everybody is to sleep in a dark room. All right. Now, Cornell University did a study and they had the person sleep in an otherwise dark room. They put a light the size of a quarter behind their knee, and that was enough to disrupt their sleep cycle. Just that tiny little light, because your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light and send information to your brain that, hey, it might be some kind of a daytime, maybe the sun's coming up and it can throw off your sleep rhythm. So this is specifically for people, if we're not talking about shift work, if you live in a suburban area or a city environment where you've got artificial lights coming in, not natural moonlight,

right? If you're just, you're not in a place where there's street lights or neighbor's porch light beaming into your house, you're fine. Humans have existed with moonlight for a long time. It's the artificial light. For those working the shift work. And so for people in our environment where they are experiencing that artificial light, get some blackout curtains. They're not very expensive. They're super popular now. And just get those set up in your house. Well, and I wear a sleep mask. I find that that can be helpful. That's helpful, but your skin as well picks up that light. So for people who are working the night shift and you've got to get your room black, like as dark as possible so that that sunlight is not beaming in because your body loves sunlight and it helps to set your sleep cycle. So that can actually, it's a good transition

to one of the specific tips for everybody. And that is to get more sunlight and the sun actually, crazy as this is going to sound, it increases your body's production of cortisol. Now that might sound a little bit bad, but cortisol is not a bad guy. It's just when it's produced at the wrong time and the wrong amounts that it can cause problems. And also sunlight helps your body to produce more serotonin. And serotonin is a precursor for melatonin, right? So it's just this cycle. It kind of like, it's the hype man. Sunlight helps to get the hype man out for the real show at night when you are getting that good, high quality sleep. And so I actually cited a study in Sleep

Smart, and this was published in the journal Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience. It found that exposure to sunlight significantly decreases cortisol levels later in the day than when compared to being exposed to dim light during the day. So that good, strong sun exposure helps to set your body up for good sleep at night. And how many people spend most of their days inside of a building, inside of their cars, and they're not getting- And so we're all deficient in vitamin D. Like 80% of the population has suboptimal levels. I know one thing that we do and that some people

might be able to do is we will often go for a lot of walking meetings. So you do a meeting on your phone, but you walk, you know, so you're outside and it's really helpful. Perfect. I want to give some power tips really quickly, because this is what we focus on here is you just said it. Do your meetings, go for a walk, do it outside if at all possible. If you can, like set a timer on your phone to get away from the cubicle dungeon and go outside, maybe have your lunch outside. Also, there are for those individuals who feel like, you know, maybe they live in an environment where it's very difficult to get outside. You can utilize things like light boxes, which are clinically proven to be effective for things like seasonal affective disorder. There are even earbuds that emit this light that is found to be as effective. I don't know if you know about this, Dr. Amen. I learned

about this from Ben Greenfield and he introduced me to the team that makes these. And they've got studies now finding that just putting this bright light into your ears helps to get your body to produce those normal daytime hormones, which again, sets you up for great sleep at night. I read that. That is so interesting. All right. We only have about four minutes. So I'm going to say something and you only say like a sentence back, cooler room. Cooler room, that's thermal regulation. The cooler, the better. What you want to do is aim for between 68 and 62 degrees is what's clinically proven

to be effective. Completely dark. You already said that. Noise-free. Actually, people who live in urban areas have a higher incidence of dementia and it may be the noise. Yeah. What we can do there, number one, if you can, move. Number two, you can use devices that produce a little bit of white noise, earplugs, things like that, basic stuff, but that one's tough. Yeah. Gadgets. So we talked about gadgets before. The next one is.

But we don't have a solution for those. We have a solution, which is blue light. We have somewhat of a solution. Well, and turn them off before you go to bed. Don't I mean, so many people I know in bed reading a scary novel at night. Oh, wow. I think fiction is great because it turns off that analytical part of your brain, but scaring yourself, that feeling of being scared is a production of stress hormones. Right. So don't read Dean Kuhn's romance novels. I always tell people, no, go, go to the old Testament, read Leviticus, Deuteronomy. It'll put you right to sleep. Naps.

What about people who take naps? Ooh, this is juicy. There's one sentence here. So first and foremost, I'll give two quick things. If you feel like you are, like you cannot make it through the day without a nap, chances are your sleep quality at night is in question. And we need to focus on that.

But sometimes a good nap is a good nap. But we're forced, there's a hormonal shift that happens when you go to sleep. You just have to be mindful of that and make sure that you're, you keep your nap short. Scents. So what scents are good for sleep? Oh, this is so good. So there's research showing that jasmine, lavender specifically, even utilizing their essential oils or even having houseplants can actually be beneficial. NASA used certain houseplants to help to create a better environment for oxygen production by the plant and pulling out carbon monoxide in your room so that you can have a better quality of air when you're sleeping. Supplements. Supplements. So I like to start natural first, as close as we can get to things that people have been using for thousands of years. So this would be basic things like chamomile tea, kava kava. Valerian is a little bit stronger of a sedative. I like it. I'm sorry. I like it. I like valerian tea. Yeah. Valerian is like right on point for people. And

it's been used again. It has at least hundreds of years of use in culture. And then we get into the more synthetic things like the 5-HTP, like tryptophan, and even melatonin is also on the table in spot treatments. Yeah. We also like magnesium. We think it's just amazing. I think it's the most effective. Sean Stevenson, author of Sleep Smarter, our friend, creator of the Model Health Show. How can people connect with you and become part of your community?

Because I think brain warriors will actually fall in love with you and you could help support them on their journey to be healthy and happy. Perfect. Well, thank you so much. People can find me where they found this podcast, any podcast platform you're listening to this on. It's called The Model Health Show.

So it's The Model Health Show. And I'm very honored to say, as you mentioned, we're often featured as the number one health podcast in the US. And it's just really, what we do is we focus on creating masterclasses each episode on whatever the particular subject matter might be. Maybe it's fat loss, maybe it's insulin resistance, maybe it's, we did an amazing show with you. And that was such a great experience talking about all the things to create a healthy brain and a happy life. And people can also check me out online at themodelhealthshow.com where we've got videos of the episodes. I do some pretty epic articles and you can find Sleep Smarter there as well in anywhere that you purchase books. Great. Thank you so much. What a joy. We'll

have you back on again and I'll look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you, my friend. Thank you so much, Daniel. All right, everybody, stay tuned. We have some amazing shows coming up for you. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing

to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the

Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.