Change Your Brain Every Day - Top Sleep Doctor: What’s Destroying Your Brain Every Night + Easy Remedies

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

Can’t sleep? Anyone who does shift work, travels across time zones, or simply can’t get the deep rest you want needs to listen to this! If you want a sharper mind, stronger memory, better mood—and even a younger-looking brain—it starts with getting your ZZZs. In this episode, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen sit down with world-renowned sleep psychiatrist Dr. Shane Creado to reveal the surprising science of how sleep impacts every part of your brain and body. Discover why even one lost hour can raise your risk of heart disease, dementia, and depression, and how alcohol, anxiety, and irregular bedtimes secretly sabotage your brain health. Dr. Creado shares his proven strategies for better rest—used by Olympic athletes, CEOs, and patients at Amen Clinics—to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and wake up truly restored. You’ll learn: ·      Why “just one bad night” can age your brain by years ·      The #1 mistake sabotaging your deep sleep ·      Why you need to know your sleep type ·      The sleep robbers stealing your rest ·      Natural, drug-free ways to beat insomnia and jet lag ·      The truth about the 20-minute “power nap” ·      How to train your brain to rest, recover, and repair overnight

Kids who are getting inadequate sleep, the risk of obesity down the line for a kid who's been sleep deprived is 89%. People think eight hours is great for a kid, but they need closer to nine to 12 hours, adults. Obesity rates, 55% with sleep issues. Sleep apnea, increase dementia rates, Alzheimer is 45%.

Irregular sleep timings increase risk for myocognitive impairment by 83%. Irregular sleep times. So meaning you don't go to bed at the same time every night, even if you get eight hours every night. Yes, yes. In fact, sleep regularities, one of the key metrics when it comes to overall cardiovascular health and brain health.

Dr. Shane Creado is a sleep performance psychiatrist and mental optimization expert who helps high achievers from elite athletes to top executives unlock peak brain power through better sleep. So nightbears occur in your dream sleep. Night terrors occur in deep sleep. One of the most common factors that's leading to night's terrors is inadequate sleep time. Every day you are making your brain better for Or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn how you can change your brain for the better every day. There are days when I need to be at my best, whether it's back-to-back clinic sessions,

long writing days, or just keeping up with life. That's when I take peak energy from Brain MD. It gives me clean, steady energy without jitters or crashes. And I'm not the only one who loves it. It just won a 2025 next year award beating over 500 other supplements. If you want real energy that lasts, check it out at BrainMD.com and use the code, Podcast 20 for 20% off. So I am so excited about our guests today. Dr. Shane Creado, MD, is a globally recognized

sleep performance psychiatrist and mental optimization expert who helps high achievers from elite athletes to top executives unlock peak brain power through better sleep. He's a double board certified psychiatrist and sleep medicine physician. Dr. Creado blends cutting edge neuroscience with elite performance strategies to transform sleep from a nightly necessity into a competitive advantage. I love that. He's the author of the best-selling book, Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes. And Dr. Criado has worked with world-class organizations, including the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, NBA Players Association, PGA Tour Europe, and the Australian Football League. He's also a prominent clinician at the Amin Clinics in Chicago.

Absolutely love that. He's one of our top docs, where he integrates neuroimaging and functional psychiatry to treat sleep disorders, burnout, depression, and performance anxiety. His work has been featured in leading medical journals, national podcasts, and global health conferences. He also serves on the board of International Society for Sports Psychiatry, where he chairs the Sleep and Performance Committee. So welcome to the podcast, Dr. Creado. Thank you for the warm introduction, and it's an amazing pleasure to be here with you both. Always. And so, Dr. Creado, and I share many special patients and when they're having trouble with their sleep, I text Shane, and I'm like, I need help with this one. Or whenever we're traveling. So if you want to

keep your brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors. And here at Eamon Clinics, and people listen to the podcast, you know, we talk about bright minds. B is for blood flow, or is retirement and aging, S is for sleep. Because if you don't sleep well, you're not going to think well, and your brain won't be healthy. So let's start by how did you get interested in sleep? As you rightly said, it affects every one of the bright minds risk factors. And doing psychiatry, I realized that our patients were inadequately treated when it came to sleep. Every major psychiatric illness or diagnosis has a sleep component. And people were being given Ambien and Trasidone, benzodiazepines that are addictive can really lead to brain damage

in the long term. And I thought we were not doing a good enough job for our patients. We've taken the Hippocratic oath that sounded like a hypocritical oath. And so I decided to do a further specialization in sleep medicine. And even then I found there were deficiency. in the existing paradigm. And that's when we started working together and building integrative models for sleep problems and not just inadequate amount of sleep, but disrupted sleep quality,

sleep fragmentation, irregular sleep timings. And those have a huge, huge impact on overall brain health, longevity, and functioning. So that's been a call to action for all of us, and it's exciting and joy to work with you on these on these new paradigms so i want to push on this idea because i really hadn't put it together that if you don't sleep all of the 11 risk factors are troubled so i often say that if you're overweight well automatically you have 10 of the 11 just because you're overweight but if you

don't sleep you have lower blood flow in your brain your brain looks older than you are it's in increase in inflammation. If you don't sleep, if you don't sleep, it turns off 700 health-promoting genes. If you don't sleep, obviously, you're more likely to have a head injury. If you don't sleep, you're more likely to store toxins because when you sleep, the brain cleans and washes itself. If you don't sleep, you're more likely to have a mental health issue, especially depression. or ADD, one of my grandchildren was taking his device to bed

and he'd like stay up playing games until three in the morning and the teacher thought he had ADD. It ruins your immunity. It messes with your hormones. You're more likely to be overweight if you're not sleeping. Wow. So that's like a huge thing for me. But it's really easy to say we need to sleep more, and I think it's obvious that, you know,

that's probably true and it helps everything. But there are so many things that affects sleep. And I know as women, we're always complaining about sleep. Because as soon as you have a baby, you never sleep the same again. When you go into menopause, you never sleep again. When you have a thyroid problem, you never sleep. I mean, there are so many things. And then there are those of us, you know, that had to do shift work and work at night or we travel a lot.

There are just so many things that make it difficult. And it feels like, well, that's not fair. Right? So what do you do? Yeah. Well, you know, you're right. Absolutely right. Women have twice the rate of anxiety and twice the rate of insomnia as men do because anxiety is danger mode. Survival mode and sleeping is the most vulnerable thing we can do. And as you rightly said, yeah, overweight, obesity, kids who are getting inadequate sleep, people think eight hours is great for a kid, but they need closer to 9 to 12 hours. The risk of obesity down the line for a kid

has been sleep deprived is 89%. Adults, obesity rates, 55% with sleep issues. Cognitive decline. Insomnia, increased risk for dementia by 49%. Increased vascular dementia rates, 89%. Sleep apnea, increased dementia rates, Alzheimer is 45%. Irregular sleep timings, increased risk for mild cognitive impairment by 83%. Wait, say that again.

Yeah. Irregular sleep. times. So meaning you don't go to bed at the same time every night, even if you get eight hours every night. Yes. Yes. In fact, sleep regularity is one of the key metrics when it comes to overall cardiovascular health and brain health. And that's why when you lose an hour of sleep even with daylight savings time, the next day the prevalence of heart disease, heart attacks goes up over 20%. But the same applies when you get an additional hour of sleep in the fall. There's a reduction in over 20% of heart attacks. So these are profound.

How much sleep should we actually be getting? So you said for children, they need more. And you have to tell your kids, when you sleep, growth hormone actually works much more effectively. So you're likely to be taller if you go to bed and go to sleep. 100% right. So each one needs different amounts of sleep. Kids, the older you get, the less amount of sleep you need.

Typically, an adult may need seven and a half hours of sleep. I think about sleep in terms of sleep cycles of 19 minutes each. My athletes perform at very high levels and train very hard each day. We need closer to 10 and a half or 12 hours of sleep in a train. He needs less than I do, I know. You need like an hour, hour and a half less than me. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes patients come to us and say, well, and they're high functioning, very successful.

Everyone says I need eight hours of sleep, doc. I'm only getting six hours of sleep. Well, maybe they're in the 1% of the population, which are called short sleep. sleepers where there's no detrimental impact in their overall health. But if anyone's listening to this and says, I'm fine with six hours of sleep, are you in the 1%? How do you know? Have we seen your brain? Have we seen how much it's aging with our spec imaging? So it's always a risk. It's timing, quality, and quantity. And what does your brain do when you sleep? Different things in different stages of sleep. So there's light sleep that's around 50 to 60%.

of your overall sleep. And in light sleep, you're processing memories and stuff like that. And you have dream sleep, which is super important for emotional processing, for emotional regulation, for creativity. And your memories get taken from your hippocampus, the temporal lobes, to your cortex. So that helps you with that memory consolidation there. And rehearsal for the next day as well. The temporal lobes are active in your dream sleep, same areas are active for working memory. So what you're doing during the day and anticipating the next day, those areas are going to be active in your dream sleep. And deep sleep is critical for removing stress hormones, replenishing your supplies of neurotransmitters, healing bones and muscles, reducing inflammation,

and flushing autotoxins to the glymphatic system that was only discovered in 2012, really, which is the main cleansing. Right. Isn't that crazy? It's been so short ago. Deep sleep is the same as REM sleep? No. Dream sleep is REM sleep. Deep sleep is non-REM sleep.

So basically your brain is slower brain waves in deep sleep. So it's deeper, it's more restrative, kind of like recharging your brain, if you will. And when that happens, your brain cells actually reduce. use in size and that allows more, you know, replenishing and flushing and the CSF fluid moves more and you can get all those toxins out as well. So replenishing, recharging, getting the toxins out, essentially cleansing your brain in deep sleep. So that's where the brainwashing happens. Yes. Why do we dream? Your brain is preparing yourself. Your dreams basically reflect upon things you've done in the past, the past day, which you anticipate in the next day, and literally those

areas help with associative memory. Your prefrontal cortex reduces an activity, and the associative centers, like the sides of your brain, the temporal lobes get more active. So what are you doing? The prefrontal cortex is reducing. The amygdala is more active, but your stress hormone level is coming down, so you're not getting into panic mode, but you're training for adversity the next day. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And more studies have shown. that when people have a nightmare, maybe once or twice a week, actually more prepared, quicker responding to threats. See?

And emergency situations. Whereas if you have frequent nightmares, more than three nights a week, that are sabotaging your sleep quality, it's obviously understandably detrimental. So for the longest time, I only had, like, negative, I couldn't, well, I don't remember if I was having good dreams. Yeah. But I had so many bad dreams.

So it just was me preparing. And I would do something bad in her. her dream. And then I would be in trouble. And I'm like, but I didn't do anything, but you're going to, but you might. What about night terrors? Night terrors typically occur in children. So maybe explain what they are. Yes. And then talk about what. are different from nightmares. So nightmares occur in your dream sleep. Night terrors occur in deep sleep or non-REM sleep.

So typically you might have a kid that's waking up. Usually in the first half of the night, that's when you have more deep sleep typically, screaming in terror. And the parents are, oh, my God, what happened? The kid doesn't remember what happened. Because in night terrors in deep sleep, you're not going to recall what was happening

when you get out of that state. One of the most common factors that's leading to night's terrors or what we call under a category of parisomnias and deep sleep is inadequate sleep time. So one of the main things to help with night terrors is allowing a kid adequate sleep. If they're getting eight hours, maybe their brain needs nine or ten hours.

That's the first thing to remember. Is there a psychological component to that or is that a biological problem? It's a combination. The reason why people get night terrors is deep sleep, you're waking up out of the deep sleep directly into a wakeful state that's leading to that transition. So your deep sleep is not locked in or consolidated.

It's fragmented or disrupted. If you're woken up suddenly in a startle response, in deep sleep, your subconscious mind is feeling safe. It's relaxed. And then something happens to trigger this danger mode response, a cortisol spike, and that can lead to a bad reaction. So it is a combination of things. And if we lock in your deep sleep by winding down before bed, allowing sufficient

sleep, and reducing things like stimulants, a quiet, nice environment, like I like to call a bedroom, your cave, right, calm, peaceful, cool, cool. dark 100% lower heart rate key aspect of getting more deep sleep when you're doing that you're locking it in much better and your brain is recharge much better so then it's not it's less likely to have that those intrusions or wakeful episodes between deep sleep so really interesting um why for women after you have a baby do you never sleep again it's like every little noise you hear it's like magnified yes everything changes And I don't, like, before I had a baby, I didn't, I don't remember ever being like that.

And suddenly it was like never again. Of course. And you wake up all night and you're checking and you're checking your phone even when they're older and it's just, it never changes. It never goes back. So is that a disclaimer? Beware having kids or? Well, I don't know about for dads, but for moms, it's like never the same again.

Yeah, no, dads, it doesn't bother us at all. No, you sleep like crazy. Except when you hit me and go, get up. Get up. You're getting up. It's your turn. It's true, actually. within the first six months of giving birth,

they found that the telomeres, the end caps of your DNA that shorten as we age, they age within the first six months by three to seven years. What? For young moms, new moms. So we need protocols. I always say, you know,

they go for baby visits, they go for wellness checks. What wellness checks is the mother dealing with or going through? Oh, and they need it. And they need it. They need ways to, optimize your sleep and of course you're going to have sleep disruptions of course you're going to be more anxious it's a maternal instinct that's kicking in right let you worry about everything

you are worried about everything as a good mother you will worry about all those things it's not like human beings are baby giraffes that pop out and start to bubble along and start walking right human babies are vulnerable right for a long time yeah once that mama bear thing kicks in it like never shuts off you know one thing that helped me we should do another podcast on this having big actually decreases my anxiety. We were talking about this before we started. No, I sleep better. So somehow I feel safer in the house.

And I don't know what that is. But we should talk about that another time. But I don't wake up as much. Yes. So when one of our kids was young, if she took a nap. Yeah. And you woke her up.

She would yell at her. Monster. She's like. Sweet when she went to sleep. Monster when she woke up. if you gave her something to eat she was fine and she was like herself what's that is that like low bludger when she wakes up is and what's really interesting is people who are depressed they often have um this circadian rhythm abnormality where they're awful in the morning or after they take a nap

but as the day goes on they begin to feel more like themselves what's that about yes so when you are waking up out of sleep in a hurry in a surprise what's happening is in the late half of the night as your melatonin is going down to zero your stress hormone levels cortisol are rising typically between four and six a m the cortisol is peaking so while the awakening hormone is rising your meltonin is dropping down to zero. But cortisol can peak higher and earlier in those who are dealing with anxiety and with REM or dream sleep fragmentation. Now, maybe you've eaten eight hours before the time that you woke up, ideally maybe 10 hours or so. But for some folks, what's happening is your blood sugar levels are decreasing during the course of the night.

It's like a mini starvation phase while you're asleep. And while that's happening, your body says, wait a minute, there's low blood sugar. What do I do? Oh, I know. I'll, you know, chisel away some glycogen from the muscles and the liver. What do I need to do that? I need the cortisol to do that. Oh. Right. So. I wonder if that's why I have high cortisol. Stress hormone levels increased to get the glycogen out to provide some more glucose to you. So now if you're pairing a busy, worried brain with higher body temperatures and in REM sleep, you're burning as many calories as when you're awake, higher body. temperature, more irregular heartbeat, and then your cortisol is peaking and your blood sugar

levels are dipping. All those things factor in along with the high body temperature to wake you up or cause disrupted REM sleep. And that's going to sabotage your sleep quality and your daily functioning. So you'll wake up in a state of, you remember when I said the amygdala activity increases, but the cortisol and the adrenaline drop, that's not going to be dropping. So now you're waking up in a state of anxiety. And that is why we oftentimes train our brains to be more anxious and wake up, rushing to the phone, rushing to our emails, what do I need to do today? What's my calendar look like? And that's actually fueling the cortisol spike early in the morning. So I still have high cortisol, but I do notice that everything got a little better once I

started training my sleep and doing all the things that we've talked about. And I stopped waking up to an alarm all the time. Like all of a sudden, I didn't, it wasn't as extreme. So there's something about that alarm, that jolting and getting up out of bed when you're not quite ready to get up. And I don't need an alarm as much now because I know how much sleep I need. And I'll sort of wake up naturally if I go to bed at a certain time. Yeah. So it's very interesting. You're doing a great job with that. I'll set the alarm, but I almost always wake up right before the alarm. Yeah. That's good. And people can wake up even drowsy or irritable, frustrated if they're waking up out of a deeper stage in sleep.

So people take a nap and they say, sometimes I feel super refreshed. Other times I'm feeling miserable and lethargic and it sucks. What do I do? Well, a 20 to 30 minute nap is ideal because you're waking up at a lighter stage of sleep. But if you're sleeping 45 minutes an hour, you might be waking up out of stage two. Deep sleep. That's going to make you more irritable. So that's why the 20 minute power nap helps.

That's right. Did you know that physical and emotional pain run on the same circuits in the brain? and they fuel each other to keep you in pain. In my new book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain, I'll show you how to break free from what I call the doom loop and step into a healing loop that can transform your life. Less pain, more joy, it's absolutely possible. Pre-order my new book now and receive special bonus gifts

at Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain, Change Your Pain, Book.com. For people who are watching or listening, Dr. Kriato has a course called Overcoming Insomnia at Aman University, and he has also developed a sleep quiz because what we discovered here at Aman clinics is ADD is not one thing. Depression is not one thing. Insomnia and people who have sleep problems, it's not one thing. So you need to know your type of sleep problems. And you can go to brainmd.com sleep hyphen quiz to learn about your issues. But let's talk about sleep robbers. What are the things that people do consistently that rob them of their?

sleep and many of them they think they're helping their sleep like alcohol and marijuana which really do not help them sleep it's like feel better now well it affects the quality of your sleep too right yes well and talk about low blood sugar alcohol will drop your blood sugar it will it will do that and alcohol is a cns depressants it calms the nervous system down initially but it gets off your brain receptors very quickly and then it'll cause a mild withdrawal in your brain in the middle of the night that wakes you up in the middle of the night. Alcohol and marijuana ages the brain dramatically. And alcohol is a diuretic, so you're going to have to pee. Then you'll be more dehydrated, which drives your stress hormone levels up. And then overall, it's a really bad way

of trying to get good, you're not going to get good sleep. You'll get a little more sleep, but you'll wake up feeling miserable. So you get fragmented sleep. Right. And how about with marijuana? Because It's just rampant now, and it's like, this is what I use to go to sleep. And now they're having edibles and gummies where the THC component is actually pretty high. Yes. You know, I was interested in a podcast with Tucker Carlson, and we talked all about marijuana. And Girl Scout cookies, one of the edibles, is like 50% THC. Girl Scout cookies.

It's called Girl Scout cookies. Wow. It's an evil ruler strategy. Absolutely. Yeah. But we see that all the time at Amen Clinics. People are using marijuana, edibles, or smoking it before bed because they think it helps them.

Yeah, but it's damaging the brain. We see on the brain scans all the time. But the good news is there are better strategies for this, way better strategies. like the sleep quiz we developed and the sleep supplements that involve groups of supplements and therapeutic doses, melatonin-free, that cater to the main three saboteers for sleep. One is the busy brain. One is the anxious kinds of folks who worry, worry, worry. And those are the rest of the sleepers.

You don't get that, you know, tossing, turning is always a part for the course for them. Okay, so hold on. You said melatonin-free. I'm due my cocktail, but I'm not melatonin-free. Do I need to be melatonin? I only take a small amount of melatonin, but do I have to be melatonin-free? Don't freak me out. Well, you know, meltonin has its place when it comes to basically being as effective as switching the lights off.

It's the darkness hormone. You switch the lights off, melatonin rises. Right. Now, if you need a small amount of melatonin to help nudge your brain into sleepiness, then that's fine. When I'm talking about a small amount, I mean like 1.25 milligrams or 2 milligrams, and where you're getting it from as well matters, because there's a lot of supplements out there. They've done testing. The claim is a supplement is 3 milligrams of melatonin.

It could be between 0 and 30 milligrams. So they're not regulated. Exactly. Okay. So be very careful where you're getting it. Remember, it's only supposed to nudge your brain into sleepiness. It's not supposed to knock you out. It's not supposed to help you stay asleep either.

There's only one condition in sleep medicine where we use much higher dose. is a melatonin, 5, 10, 15 milligrams. And that's in folks who act out their dreams. Oh. Rem behavior disorder. That's one condition will go much higher with the melatonin. But there's way better strategies, depending on what kind of sleeper you are, and a sleep type you have, and the main thing that's sabotaging your sleep.

So if it's a busy brain, there's ways to calm it down, the supplements to calm it down. As a cognitive shuffling, we discussed a little earlier. meditation, yoga nidra, physiological sighing, all those things are profoundly beneficial for calming the busy brain down. So people often use marijuana or alcohol because they don't know any better. And they don't know that while they're getting enough sleep,

they're damaging their brain. Or people start using Ambien or are prescribed to them by doctors who don't know that Ambien may affect your sleep quality. And another study published this year. Plus, I took it once and made me cry. Like the next day I would cry. I'm like, why? I don't want to take something that's going to make me cry for no reason.

That's a good point. It might refer to what's called disinhibition in neuroscience. Yeah. And Ambien can actually reduce the drainage of those toxins in the glimphatic system by around 30%. We don't want to do that to our brains. Right. We want quality sleep. So one thing, we travel a lot.

And so getting like jet lag is a big deal. And when you travel a lot, you have to figure out how to not be constantly affected by that. So you've really helped me with the jet lag. So, in fact, it irritates everybody because when we go on a trip even to Europe, I typically don't feel a lot of jet lag when I get there. Coming home, I still have to figure it out. And I've only figured out how to do it like sort of one way. So I'll be a little bit sleepy, like off for a day or so when I get back. But it's amazing because you can actually help with people who travel a lot with some hygiene to help train their brains not to feel that jet lag when they get to where they're going. That's right.

And I love that you guys have always been on top of it. And you always text me, say, Shane, okay, these are our schedules and our timings and these personalized protocols that you develop, calming the brain down, regulating your rhythm, looking at the time difference and the duration if you travel, the type of travel, strategic napping, light delivery, light blocking, grounding mats, a whole bunch of tools used in a very specific way can reduce your jet lag significantly. So my athletes, high performers, frequent flyers, they don't have jet lag anymore. And it's a super bar. Yeah. So if they're a shift worker, so Tanna was a shift worker. I never could adjust. And I did, I consulted with the NBA for a year with NBA referees.

And they're very much like shift workers because they work late at night. And then it's hard to go to sleep. And then they have to take the first flight out, which is often six or seven o'clock in the morning. So they're not sleeping. Well, what can shift workers do to help counteract the negative impact of shift work on the brain? This is an important point because it goes not just when it comes to shift workers, think about warehouse employees, think about truck drivers, think about the airline industry. Absolutely. And our first responders, our amazing first responders who are on the first line to protect our communities.

and that's where their brain is impacted. The most shift work has been designated a probable carcinogen by the WHO years ago. Well, and not just the staying up all night. So I was an ICU nurse. I was trauma ICU and neurosurgical ICU. And I'm like, I'm going to kill someone if I'm not awake.

So I have to stay awake. So therefore, I'm going to drink two pots of coffee and eat a bunch of M&Ms all night. So that was my routine to stay. I had to stay awake. There was no, I couldn't afford to not be sharp. So I didn't have skills back. then. And that's what I did. But then all of a sudden, one day I woke up while I was heading

towards a center divider. And for me, I never could adjust. You know, I also had the thought, oh, maybe I should have a glass of wine at 7 o'clock in the morning when I get home so I can sleep. And when I started having thoughts like that, I'm like, okay, I have to figure something else out. Yeah. Not only is it bad for people's brains, but for the patients that are entrusted. Right. And trusting us with their lives, there are studies that have shown that if you have an overnighter versus someone who's at a 16-hour shift, which is too long anyway, 300% more medical errors. Five times as many diagnostic errors, you're diagnosing the wrong thing.

Five times more likely to do that. Needle sick injury is caught by over 60%. And these numbers have direct implications for health, not just your health, not just first responders, not just medical doctors or nurses, but everyone else that entrust them with their care. Yeah. And there are some people that I worked with that absolutely. were nocturnal preferred nights, slept fine during the day.

Yeah. But they were few and far between. Yeah. And look, we're all tempted to start using copious amounts of caffeine and coffee in our overnight shift. I never went into that trend even during my psychiatric. Well, we were blasted right as psychiatric interns and residents. Well, when I was an intern, I sleep deprived all the time.

But not when I was on psychiatry. Yeah, I watched two residents pass out on the floor. Yeah, I worried I was going to kill somebody. From being up all night for like 24 hours at a time. Right, but being a psychiatric residence is like way better than being a surgery resident. But yeah, sleep deprivation. It is such a pervasive problem. Okay, so we talked about sleep robbers.

What are sleep enhancers? And you talked about it. So the cave person, it's dark, it's cool, and it's quiet. And I've got my earplugs and I've got my eye mask and I've got my sleep cocktail. Yes. And then you said routine. Yes. That we should go to bed about the same time every night.

And what about scary movies before bed? Do you like scary movies? No, I don't like scary movies. But we've gotten into Dexter. Yeah, someone got us, like, I thought it was going to be terrible, but it's actually very funny. So it's actually not that scary. It's funny.

Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. What can help consolidate your sleep is a fixed wake-up time every single morning and getting some sunlight on your face because then it locks in your circadian rhythm really nicely. Additionally, winding down before bed because, you know, you can't predict exactly when your brain is going to feel sleepy. but when you have a routine like an hour before bedtime, consider it your mini vacation, dim the lights, do your to-do list,

process the stuff that we've been flooded with all day, and then allows your brain to get relaxed more. Temperature is important. You need it around the data shows between 65 and 66 Fahrenheit. Some people like it lower. Lower temperatures. See, it's supposed to be like 64. So be happy I keep it at 69.

It's hard to keep it at 69. I need like a robe. not a robe, but like a parka at night at my house. But it's so irritating. So one of the things I do is every night I do what went well. And I do it like extend it. It's like what went well. You woke up next to Tana.

And, you know, we had our decaf coffee together. We went our walk. I go hour by hour. just looking for what I liked about the day. So he doesn't understand, like, I need, my brain is very busy and it needs time to unwind before bed. So I'm always talking about, like, I need my time to unwind. I can't just get ready for bed after we've been busy.

And he literally can sit down, sit on the bed, and he's out. Like, it's just the most irritating. No, it's just like, and he's gone. I mean, I can't wake him up. There's no, there can be a fire in the house. And I'm like, I don't even know. I would do. I bet you have a dog.

Well, the dog is not going to drag you out of the house. Like, what? I'm my dog. So, for me, it takes time. We should let Shane answer this. Right? It does take time for you because each one's brain is different. Some people have busier brains and others.

But I like what you're doing with looking at a gratitude exercise or as you've once, once told me, the nightly treasure hunt that you do, because that allows your brain to get into a frame of positive thinking of gratitude. attitude, peace, so high frequency versus the lower frequency state of chaos and worry and anxiety. And when it happens, you're going to sleep with a lower sympathetic drive or the fight-and-flight response is lowered. Your parasympathetic is improved and you're more likely to get that super important deep sleep. And then your dreams will be likely to be better because you're priming your dreams to be

happier. Well, we're running out of time. And I feel like we can just keep going on. so much. And we are grateful, Shane Creado. Dr. Creado works in our Chicago clinics, Amen Clinic, Chicago. He's also the author of Peak Sleep Performance for athletes. You can take his course, which is just spectacular. It's fantastic. At Amon University, so go to amenuniversity.com, overcoming insomnia. And he's created a brand new sleep quiz to know your sleep type.

And you can go to BrainMD.com sleep-hyphen quiz and learn all about it. We are so grateful that you continue to listen to the podcast. And we want you to leave us a comment, question, review, subscribe. We have way more coming up. for you. So, and I came up with an idea for you. You need to do a specific sleep program for new moms and menopausal women. Done. I'm also going to work on something for shift workers and first responders with Daniel. So I'd love to do that. Your brain is your most valuable asset. It controls everything from your focus and memory to your mood and energy. That's why I created

BrainMD to give you science-backed supplements that support your brain so you can feel and perform your best every day. If you haven't tried them yet, go to BrainMD.com and use the code podcast 20 for 20% off because when your brain works better, you work better. Okay, so you already know I take this whole like cocktail. of things, and it really works well for me. But if I had to pick one sleep supplement, because I know that you're working on sleep supplements right now for brain MD, you've come up with this new line. What's your favorite? And what are your or favorites? So if you have a busy brain, I like quite my mind's sleep, but it has therapeutic doses of factors that dial it down.

Okay. Stress relief sleep helps with those who have busy brains worry, worry, worry all the time and it gets stuck in certain thought cycles. So your brain is kind of blocked from processing, the stuff that you've experienced during the day. And deep comfort sleep is my favorite combination for those folks who have restless sleep, just unrefreshed in the daytime. These are powerful combinations, and these all tend to have magnesium in them. So magnesium has become one of my favorite sleep supplements of all time. It's been shown to improve your deep sleep, that restrative sleep that you need. Also dials the intensity of your emotional thermostat down helps with muscle relaxation too.

So glycinate is great for the nervous system and muscle relaxation, 3 and 8 can cross the bloodbain barrier and calm the nervous system down. Awesome. Thank you so much.