The Dr. Hyman Show - Can’t Fall or Stay Asleep? Your Sleep Questions Answered

Episode Date: April 18, 2026

Sleep is one of the most important and most overlooked drivers of your health. If you’re struggling to fall asleep, waking up at 2–4am, or getting a full night’s sleep but still feeling exhauste...d, your body is trying to tell you something. Poor sleep isn’t just about habits, it’s a signal that key systems like your nervous system, blood sugar, hormones, or circadian rhythm are out of sync. In this episode, we break down what’s actually disrupting your sleep and how to fix it at the root. Here’s what you’ll understand: • Why sleep issues are rarely just one problem and how stress, blood sugar, and circadian rhythm all interact • The real reasons you can’t fall asleep, wake up in the middle of the night, or feel tired despite 7–8 hours • What actually helps (and what doesn’t)—from magnesium and melatonin to nervous system regulation • The 5 core pillars of better sleep and the highest-impact changes you can start tonight Sleep isn’t something you force, it’s something that happens when your body feels safe, balanced, and supported. When you address the root causes, better sleep becomes not just possible but predictable. Visit ⁠functionhealth.com for 160+ lab tests at just $365 a year. Have a question you’d love answered on Office Hours? Submit it here   (0:00) Sleep Quality vs. Duration and Introduction (1:06) Common Causes of Poor Sleep (6:53) Addressing Common Sleep Questions (10:43) Evening Routines and Sleep Timing (12:37) Metabolic, Hormonal, and Hidden Sleep Issues (17:43) Recommendations for Deeper Sleep and Repair (19:33) Supplements and Strategies for Better Sleep (22:22) Key Takeaways and Quick Wins (26:13) Conclusion, Listener Engagement, and Closing Remarks

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 You're doing what you're supposed to do. You're in bed for 70 hours. And yet, you wake up feeling on refreshed, foggy like you get to go right back to sleep. Now, in most cases, it's not about how long you're sleeping. It's about the quality of that sleep. Welcome to office hours. This is our dedicated one-on-one space to go deeper, get clear, and explore what truly moves the needle for your health. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman.
Starting point is 00:00:33 And each week, we're going to pull back the curtain and share the insights, the research, the lessons that don't always make it into our conversations with guests. Because at the end of the day, you are the CEO. of your own health. And for many of you, your family's health, too. And you might not feel it all the time, but you have far more power in agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. This episode is brought to you by Function Health, empowering you to live 100 healthy years with over 160 lab tests for just $365 a year and use the code mark 2026 to get $50 off your membership. Sleep is one of the most important foundations of your health. And honestly, one of the most frustrating
Starting point is 00:01:13 Now, if you struggle to fall asleep, if you struggle to stay at sleep, if you wake up feeling exhausted, I promise you you you're not alone. And I want to know, but despite what social media tells you, poor sleep isn't just caused by one bad habit or one missing supplement. It's the result of a few biological systems that are out of sync. So in today's office hours, we're going to slow things down. We're going to answer the most common questions about sleep, what's actually going on in your body and what helps in your life. Now, this isn't about perfect sleep routines. it's about understanding your sleep patterns and giving your body what it needs to rest and to repair. Now, here's why sleep breaks down.
Starting point is 00:01:50 This is the big picture. Sleep problems really come from a few things. First is circadian rhythm destruction. Now, your body runs on this internal clock that's guided by light, by darkness, by consistent timing, which is really hard, particularly for me because I travel over the place. And when that clock is off because of late nights, because of screens, because of irregular schedules, or not getting morning light, your sleep becomes hard. to initiate and it also becomes harder to sustain it through the night. The next thing that
Starting point is 00:02:16 often occurs that screws up sleep is your nervous system being overactive. If your body's stuck in this stress response, if you're always on, right, if you've got high cortisol, high adrenaline, your body doesn't think it's safe to power down, right? Because your body's in stress. You're chasing a running from a tiger, right? Or you're fighting or fleeing. Now, you might feel exhausted, but your brain stays alert. And that's why so many people feel tired all day and wired at night. We call that tired and wired. I have felt that, I promise you, it's awful. The next thing that often screws up sleep is your blood sugar being unstable. Now, blood sugar instability is a common overlook cause. Now, if your blood sugar drops overnight, guess what happens?
Starting point is 00:02:59 It's a life-fitting emergency, and your body releases stress hormones. And that brings your blood sugar back up, which is fine, except your cortisol is high and your body's like, oh, danger, or it's wake up time because in the morning your cortisol goes up naturally. And that often occurs between two and four in the morning and then mind races, you're really alert. And this is true for people often have high insulin. They eat big meals. They kind of have a big spike in their blood sugar, their insulin spikes, and it crashes. And then you often get this. I had a guy who would have night sweats because as a patient and obviously it wasn't going through menopause and you'd have cancer or TB, which are the other causes. And it was because he had hypoglycemia in the middle
Starting point is 00:03:39 of the night and that causes night sweats and their life-threatening nervosy. The next big thing that screws up sleep are hormone imbalances. Now, these play a big role in your sleep quality. And there's a lot of hormones that revolve cortisol, as we just mentioned, the stress hormone, melatonin, which we know affects sleep. And it's important for sleep initiation, progesterone estrogen, sex hormones, And we know a lot of women through menopause often have sleep disruption and thyroid. It can often, if it's too high, it can make you not sleep if it's too low, it can make you sleep too much or actually paradoxly cause insomnia. So all these hormones are like this incredible, beautiful symphony of molecules that should
Starting point is 00:04:18 be in balance. When they're out of balance, they screw you up. And they all influence when you feel sleepy, how deeply you sleep, how rested you feel in the morning. And in these shift, right? They shift during pari menopause. menopause, chronic stress, all these things can disrupt sleep. The next big category of things that disrupts sleep are actually two during categories.
Starting point is 00:04:38 One is inflammation and the other is nutrient depletion. The inflammation is a big factor because almost all brain dysfunction, whether it's depression or autism or Alzheimer's or schizophrenia or anxiety, whatever you want to call a brain dysfunction, is usually linked in some way or another or caused by, inflammation and that includes sleep disruption. So that's a big one. And there's a lot of causes for it. And often people don't realize what they are. They can be toxins and allergens and infections and the microbiome changes and inflammatory diet and stress. I mean, there's a whole list of things that
Starting point is 00:05:17 cause inflammation. The other thing is nutrient depletion. That's the big one. And a lot of people are nutritionally efficient. In fact, at function where we test everybody for a lot of nutrients that your doctor usually does not test for like omega-3 fats and B vitamins, homocysteine, methylac acid, B-12, folate, vitamin D, and many others, we find that almost 70% of our population, which is generally health-seeking people, 70% have a nutritional deficiency at the level that the RDA considers a nutritional deficiency disease.
Starting point is 00:05:53 Not what's optimal, but just what's enough to get. scurvy or ricketts. So we're talking a massive amount of nutritional deficiency or insufficiency in the population. It's probably over 90%. So when you have low levels of nutrients like magnesium, and over 45% are low in magnesium. And we do test that. Iron affects sleep. If your iron is low, then we check your ferretton level, which is really important. Again, your doctor usually never checks this. It's on function panel. And your ferretton level is less than 45, even though the normal code normal is 16, you're going to have sleep issues. It's one of the big hidden cause of insomnia, and a lot of the population has iron deficiency up to half, especially children and many others.
Starting point is 00:06:35 B vitamins, also a big role in sleep and omega-3s. All these affect your nervous system and your brain and affect your ability to sleep. So really important to focus on these things. Now, sleep isn't something you force. It's something that happens when the body feels supported and safe. And that's the key here. All right, so let's get to it. One of the most common sleep questions. Number one, why can't I fall asleep even when I'm tired? And I trust me, I've experienced this, so I get it. Here's the thing. You get really tired.
Starting point is 00:07:05 You're exhausted all day. You finally get into bed. Instead of just passing out and drifting off, your mind turns off. Or maybe it just never turned off. Thoughts raise. Your body feels tired. Your brain went shut down. And what's usually happening here is that your body is physically tired.
Starting point is 00:07:19 But your nervous system is still in the on mode, right? You can't turn your brain on. your anxiety, your stress response is automatic. And the thing about our society is that almost everything going on, whether it's our jobs, our relationships, our diet, obviously, which causes tremendous amount of stress in our system. Our inflammatory high-sugar processed diet literally raises cortisol. Even if you're meditating all day long and you eat that,
Starting point is 00:07:48 you're going to have high cortisol. All the stresses in the world, you know, wars and traumas and I mean, just, the news that makes me stress. So pretty much everything going on is automatically making your nervous system on hijack. And it takes deliberate effort to turn on your relaxation system. It's not something that happens automatically. It's an active process. I do it every morning. I do breath work. I do meditation. It's work. I mean, it's relaxing, but it's work. It's not just going to happen automatically. Whereas stress, you don't have to do anything. It's just there. So what happens when you have high stress levels. Well, cortisol is a stress hormone. That goes up at night. Normally,
Starting point is 00:08:28 cortisol should go down at night. Your body has a basically a bifasic rhythm where it's up in the morning and down at night, except when you're screwed up and then it goes up at night and down in the morning and you're all messed up. So cortisol is basically not functioning right. But when you have chronic stress, when you're having regular schedules, when you're not having bedtime early enough, when you're staying up really late, or if your blood sugar swings because you're eating lots of carbs and sugar, it can screw up that whole rhythm,
Starting point is 00:08:57 and that makes cortisol go up when you're trying to go down, right? When you're trying to go to bed, it goes up. So what happens? Well, your nervous system gets stuck in the on mode. When your nervous system is overactive, you know, because your day is packed with stimulation, with stress, with constant mental inputs, your body doesn't automatically know how to sort of shift down at night.
Starting point is 00:09:16 Even though you're tired, your system doesn't really feel safe to let go, even though you might think you are. So learning how to regulate your nervous system and manage your stress response is a really important part of just being alive and a human that we naturally did, you know, living in the woods, watching the sunset, the sunrises, and not having constant chronic stress. There's a book by a great scientist I love Robert Sapolsky called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Essentially the idea is that I actually was in Africa a couple years ago. And I literally saw this. You see a lion chasing a bunch of zebras.
Starting point is 00:09:47 They go crazy. They're running as fast they can. their hearts are racing, they're going to die, they're scared as hell. And then the lion catches one of the zebras. And then it's literally laying there dead, and then the lion's eating the zebra. And all the other zebras are just hanging around the lion while it's eating the zebra. They know it's not their turn. So they're just relaxed.
Starting point is 00:10:06 So it's an acute stress. Their stress hormones go up. They discharge them, they run, and then they're fine. We don't do that. We just stay in chronic stress mode. The other big thing is blue light and mental stimulants. Right. So blue light mental stimulation are also playing a big role. Now when you on screens, when you have bright lights, when you're going with work emails at night, we're having an intense conversation with your partner or spouse, that can really cause trouble. That can suppress melatonin. And it basically signals the brain this all daytime. Because when you raise cortisol, that's daytime. And when you have all this mental stimulation and when you have blue light, it's daytime. So there's actually a great book I read called Lights Out years ago, just talking about the initial light bulb being. And when you have all this mental stimulation and when you have blue light, it's daytime. So there's actually a great book I read called Lights Out Years Go, just talking about the initial light bulb, the cause of the rise of chronic disease, including heart disease, diabetes, and many other things
Starting point is 00:10:54 because of how it affects our nervous system and our hormones and so forth. Everything it's really common that causes trouble is not going to bed at the same time and not waking at the same time. It's one of the most important things, and I'm really crappy at this, but it's one of the most important things if your sleep's not good to get your sleep right. If you have inconsistent sleep timing, it matters more than most people really know. So going to bed and wake you up at different times, especially on weekends, makes your whole interdural clock keeps used in heart of rain, your body recognize when it's time to sleep. So given all that, what actually helps you sleep better? Well, going to bed and waking up at the same time every day.
Starting point is 00:11:30 10 and 6 are good, 9 at 5, 11 and 7, whatever works for you is really important. Next is getting morning sunlight. You've heard this before, but I can't over-emphasize the importance of getting at least 15 minutes of morning sunlight, even if there's clouds out, within half an hour to an hour, up. You're in the North Pole and there's no light. They have, you know, full spectrum light boxes you can use. But aside from that, unless you live in Sweden or Norway or somewhere in Greenland, you know, probably you can get mornings on light. Downshift at night. Do breath work, do stretching, yoga, take a hot bath. My favorite is Epsom salt bath, lavender oil, which has magnesium and lavender actually lowers cortisol. They've studied this. Johnson & John's has a baby bath with lavender in it
Starting point is 00:12:17 because it works, or just cortisol, comes to maybe take magnesium at night, magnesium glycinate, or 3-8, these are great forms of magnesium to take at night. So if you're tired and wired, your body's broken, it's just dysregulated. So when you focus on calming your nervous system and supporting your natural rhythms, then falling asleep is going to get a lot, lot easier. Second big question is, why do wake up at 2 at 4 in the morning, like between 2 and 4 in the morning, and why can't I fall back asleep? Well, this was by far the most common sleep question that you all submitted.
Starting point is 00:12:47 for a good reason. Waking up between two and four in the morning, often with a racing mind or a sudden cess of being alert, is incredibly common. And the important thing to understand is this. Most of the time, it's not insomnia. It's your body sending a signal, and what are those things? Well, the causes for this are blood sugar drops.
Starting point is 00:13:03 We talked about that, but blood sugar drives a lot of wakefulness in the middle of night because if your blood sugar drops, if your dinner's too low in protein or fat, and you had sugar alcohol in the evening and your blood sugar dips, and then what happens, your insulin goes up, and your cortisol goes up and you're off to the races. Then you've got hypoglycemia and you get stress hormones going up. And basically your blood shirt becomes normal, but you're awake.
Starting point is 00:13:29 The second is cortisol spikes. Now cortisol naturally starts to rise early in the morning to wake you up, but chronic stress can push that rise earlier than it should right in the middle of the night. Instead of being at six in the morning, it's a two to four in the morning. Alcohol, another big one. It helps you maybe fall asleep, but it screws up your sleep architecture. I have an aura ring and I know that when I, you know, drink and I don't actually anymore, I don't remember the last time I had a drink, I always see even a little bit actually screws up
Starting point is 00:13:55 my sleep. So it's not worth it. So small amounts of alcohol, fragment sleep, and they trigger this early morning waking as soon as the alcohol goes down to your system, then stress hormones kind of bounce up and you get, you know, wake in the middle of the night. The next is hormone shifts, perimenopause, menopause. Now, for many women, these hormone shifts, especially during paramedopause and menopause are a big contributor to waking up in the middle of the night. It can be just waking up. It can be hot flashes. These hormones affect blood sugar. They affect your temperature control. They affect cortisol. All those can disrupt your sleep in those early morning hours. So what helps fix all that? Well, a good dinner with protein and fat, not a carb-rich
Starting point is 00:14:34 dinner. I mean, it can't have carbs, but you can't just have carbs alone and you don't want to be eating tons of sugar at night. Late night, sugar or alcohol, also bad news. even any alcohol, you want to give yourself probably at least four hours before bed. Magnesium can help as well, as we mentioned, and those stress responses that we talked about, how do you deal with your stress load throughout your life? Look at your life as a whole, where can you cut out things that are stressful, where can you introduce things that are helping you relax, not just bedtime habits, but just throughout your life. The key takeaway is this.
Starting point is 00:15:07 If you wake up in the middle of night, it's often metabolic or hormonal, not a personal failure or simply insomnia. When you address these underlying signals, your body's sending, then your sleep starts to repair itself. All right. The next question we get is, why do I sleep seven or eight hours, but I still wake up feeling exhausted? It's a really common and kind of a confusing sleep question. You're doing what you're supposed to do. You're in bed for seven eight hours. And yet, you wake up feeling on refreshed, foggy like you can go right back to sleep. Now, in most cases, it's not about how long you're sleeping. It's about the quality of that sleep. One of the major causes of not feeling refreshed in the morning is not getting enough deep sleep. or REM sleep. Now, these stages are when your brain and your body repair, when they regulate hormones,
Starting point is 00:15:48 when they consolidate memory, when they clear up inflammation. It's an amazing system that your brain has to heal and repair, but if you're not having quality sleep, it's not doing it. If your sleep is fragmented or shallow, you can get plenty of time in bed and you don't feel restored. The next thing that can cause poor quality sleep is inflammation. Now, chronic inflammation is driven by stress, by poor diet, which is what most of us eat in America, are gut problems, poor microbiome health, infections, toxins, all these things can drive inflammation. And they can interfere with sleep architecture and they make sleep less restorative. I know when I had mercury poisoning in my 30s, I could not sleep at all. And I needed drugs. It was terrible. And I knew that it was the mercury
Starting point is 00:16:33 once I figured it out. But it was kind of scary. And so toxins and all these things can drive inflammation of the brain that really interrupts sleep. The next thing is hidden sleep issues that you might not have, especially if you live alone, which is sleep apnea, which means you don't breathe at night for short periods of time. Your sleep is interrupted by periods of non-breathing. When you just hold your breath, snoring, you don't breathe for a bit, you've seen people like this. And these are really common. It can be caused by nasal congestion allergies, by mouth breathing, sleep apnea. These all affect your oxygen delivery and they can fragment sleep. even if you don't think you're waking up at night, your sleep's scrappy.
Starting point is 00:17:12 And then, of course, there's nutritional deficiencies, hormonal issues, things like iron, B12, thyroid issues. They can cause persistent fatigue, and it just might be a clue that there's something wrong that you need to track. And that's why we have function and function health and you go to Function Health.com, and it's now only a dollar a day, $365 a year to get a full panel. It looks at all these things that we're talking about, including iron, ferretin, B12, thyroid and many, many other factors, magnesium, all that affect your sleep.
Starting point is 00:17:40 And these can make you feel exhausted no matter how many hours of sleep you get. So what helps fix this? Well, track your sleep trends, not just one night, so you see what's happening. If you're a nasal breather, you've got nasal congestion, sinus issues, allergies, it could be your diet, food sensitivities, environmental allergies, mold, check it out. Check your labs. You know, always good to get a baseline. Alcohol.
Starting point is 00:18:00 If you're really not feeling rest of the morning, just cut out of alcohol for a while and see how you do. The key takeaway is this. If you're sleeping enough hours, but you're still waking up exhausted, your body's asking for deep repair, not more time in bed. When you focus on sleep quality and your underlying health, then your energy often starts to come back. Many cancers aren't caught early enough, and our healthcare system is built for reactivity. You feel something, you go in, you get tested, but so much could be developing quietly before symptoms even show up. And that's exactly why I'm so excited about what's now available through function, scans. One scan that can look for signs of hundreds of potential conditions across up to 14 organs, including early signs of cancer,
Starting point is 00:18:43 before you might even feel a thing. Now, this is about finding what could otherwise go unnoticed while there's still time to do something about it. Combined with functions 160 lab tests, this is a powerful way to check your health, your labs, your scan, your data. Because the goal was never to live longer in a hospital. It's to live well for 100 healthy years. You can now add scans to your function membership for an additional cost by visiting functionhealth.com slash scans to learn more about it and get started. That's F-U-N-C-T-I-O-N-Halth.com slash scans to learn more today. And if you're one of the first 1,000 people this week, use the code Mark 2026 for a $50 credit toward your $365 a year membership.
Starting point is 00:19:27 That's functionhealth.com slash mark and use the code mark 2026 today. Next big question I got was what supplements actually help with sleep. Now supplements can be helpful, but only when they're used in the right context. They work best to support, not as a substitute for healthy sleep habits and circadian rhythms. That's why they're called supplements, not replacements. Okay. Now here's the most helpful ones. Magnesium.
Starting point is 00:19:56 Probably about 45% of the population is low in magnesium. So what causes to be low? We don't need magnesium rich foods like greens and beans, nuts and seeds. We do a lot of things that cause us to lose magnesium, alcohol, sugar, stress, caffeine, all that causes us to deplete magnesium. It's one of the most consistently helpful nutrients for sleep. and you can use forms like magnesium glycinate or threonate helps relax the nervous system, acquies your brain at night.
Starting point is 00:20:27 The next is elthenein. Now, that comes from green tea, and that's why there's tea ceremonies and green tea can be relaxing. Does that caffeine, but this is without the caffeine. So alfianine is a great option, especially if your mind races at night. It helps for a calm, relaxed state. It doesn't cause you be too sedated, but it makes you calm. The next one is glycine. Most people have ever heard of it, but it's an amino acid, and it can really help.
Starting point is 00:20:50 support sleep quality can help lower your core body temperature, promote steeper sleep, more restorative sleep for some people. It's a great hack. The low dose of melatonin and short term only. I don't recommend melatonin regularly, but it can be helpful in certain situations. And dose in duration of matter, low dose, even half a milligram, can be used short term and can help reset your circadian rhythm, especially if you're traveling, like I just flew to South Africa.
Starting point is 00:21:12 So I did one dose of melatonin last night to help reset my circadian rhythm jet lag. So if you're traveling or you have a scheduled disruption, it can help. And more is not necessarily better and not really for a long-term solution. All right. What should you avoid? As I mentioned, melatonin is good in low doses, not high doses. So high doses taking over a long time can really disrupt your body's natural production and it can lead to groggyness, vivid dreams, and rebound sleep issues. So you don't want to stay away from doing that. And then, you know, random stacking supplements without a plan. So you can take lots of sleep supplements. You can be taking everything on the market. And it may not help.
Starting point is 00:21:47 So we want to work with someone if you're really struggling to find out the cause and then not just supplements as a pile on to fix it off. So here's the takeaway. Supplements support sleep, but they don't replace the foundations of sleep hygiene. And if the basals aren't in place like light exposure in the morning, avoiding blue light at night, regulating stress response, balancing with blood sugar, having a cool environment in your bedroom, having dark blackout shades, having low noise or noise can. or earplugs, all those things really make a difference. No supplements are going to fix the problem if you don't address those things. But if you use them thoughtfully, then the right supplements help make sleep easier and more restored. One of the quick takeaways is that good sleep actually requires.
Starting point is 00:22:33 Well, I want to kind of go over the basics here. Here's a big idea. Sleep isn't about being perfect. It's about a few key systems that work together, and small, consistent habits matter more than a bunch of hacks. Great sleep starts the minute you wake up, not when your head hits the pillow. So what are the five pillars of good sleep? Number one, light exposure.
Starting point is 00:22:55 Morning sunlight helps reset your circadian rhythm. That means getting outside. The infant's cloudy, without sunglasses, without contacts, and letting those sun rays hit your retina and work on your brain to properly regulate your hormones through your pineal gland. And then at night, low light exposure. Now, that sometimes means changing your light bulbs in your house. Candlelight's cool.
Starting point is 00:23:21 I like that. There's a lot of ways to do this, but make sure you can deal with this bright evening light, which is not good. It makes your body thing can still daytime. The next key takeaway here is stabilize your blood sugar. And this is true for everything and every disease, period. If you know my work, you know all about this. You're running about it for 30 years.
Starting point is 00:23:41 Bounce your blood sugar. That means lots of protein, fat, and fiber. fiber, low refined starches, low sugar. I'm not a no guy, I'm a low guy. And especially at night, at dinner, don't eat a ton of starch and sugar without properly balancing with fat and protein and obviously don't eat a lot of refined starch and sugars. So also don't eat sugar before bed and don't drink at night. Also, don't have late night sugar and alcohol, bad news. The third big idea here is to learn how to regulate your nervous system. Stress happens, relaxation doesn't, Your sleep happens when your body feels safe.
Starting point is 00:24:16 So learning how to regulate your stress response for how today matters. And it can be simple. It can be a simple breath practice in the morning, meditation, some gentle yoga stretching. It can be meditation later at night or what Andrew Huberman calls a non-sleep deep rest or often it's called yoga nidra,
Starting point is 00:24:35 which is essentially an ancient practice to do a body scan and reset your nervous system. Whatever works for you, I take a hot bath, have some salt, lavender oil, get a massage, get your feet rubbed if you're lucky enough. Whatever it is, learn how to downregulate your nervous system at night. The fourth big idea is get your hormones in balance. Cortisol, melatonin, progesterone, estrogen, thyroid, these all affect sleep. And if they're out of whack, you need to know. Functionhealth.com is a great way to check all these. And if they're out of whack,
Starting point is 00:25:04 there's some simple things you can do to fix them. If you need to see a doctor, sometimes you need to get hormone replacement or thyroid, that's fine. And if your hormones are really messed up, you really need to get those fixed. And the fifth big idea is be consistent. Don't be perfect, right? Try to sleep and wake at the same time every day. You know, consistency is one of the biggest sleep hacks there is. So try your best. I try to get in bed at 10. I wake up at 637. Really important. If I can do it, that's my favorite way to live life. And of course, sometimes I'll stay out at night. I'm going to a wedding this weekend. I'll be partying, but not on a regular basis. So what's the quick return on investment here?
Starting point is 00:25:44 What are the quick wins? If you do nothing else, start here. Good morning, sunlight, and then half an hour, an hour waking up, eat protein dinner to make sure your bloodshirt doesn't crash, reduce alcohol, even small amounts, and try to consistently sleep in the same sleep window, including weekends. And use magnesium because that's the easiest, best sleep hack. Now, just remember, sleep is not a luxury.
Starting point is 00:26:07 It's a biological requirement. if you're struggling with sleep, it doesn't mean you're broken. It means your body needs some help. So get curious. Don't be frustrated. Small changes done consistently. You can really transform how you rest, how you feel, how you recover. And I'd love to hear from you. What's sleep questions do you want to answer next? What's been the hardest things for you about sleep? Office hours is our space to get clear to ask better questions, take control of our health together. You're in the seal of your own health and better sleep changes everything. Thanks for joining me for office hours. I love to love diving into these topics with you. Remember, you are the CEO of your own health. And every
Starting point is 00:26:47 choice you make can move you closer to healing and vitality. I want to keep these episodes as relevant and useful as possible. So tell me, what do you want to explore next? What questions are you wrestling with? What breakthroughs are you chasing? Share your ideas in the comments on social media or through the link in the show notes. I'm listening. Until next time, keep taking charge, keep asking questions and keep showing up for your health. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out.
Starting point is 00:27:25 I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest's opinions.
Starting point is 00:27:51 Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the ultra-wellness center at ultra-wellnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient.
Starting point is 00:28:21 It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed health care practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.