The Resilient Mind - Sleep Smarter: Hacks for Restorative Rest - Shawn Stevenson

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Shawn Stevenson is a bestselling author, dynamic speaker, and the creator and host of The Model Health Show, one of the world’s top health and wellness podcasts. With a passion for uncovering the most effective, science-backed health strategies, Shawn delivers engaging “masterclass” episodes each week, covering topics from nutrition and fitness to sleep optimization and mental resilience.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode was created in partnership with Tom Bilyeu. Subscribe to Tom Bilyeu’s channel for more inspiring speeches:https://www.youtube.com/c/TomBilyeu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Sleep Smarter, Hacks for Rest, with Sean Stevenson. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. You know, this is, make sure that this is incredibly important. At track practice, I'm coming around the curve onto the straightaway, and I broke my hip. And there was no trauma involved. Nobody hit me.

I didn't fall. It just broke because. you know cut two a few years later I finally get diagnosed with this degenerative bone disease and at the time being 16 years old you know you have the hormones of like a Greek god you know so you know you get the kind of standard of care you know take these insides stay off the leg you'll get better and I did but nobody stopped to ask a question how can a young man break his hip just from running and once I finally got this diagnosis it was it felt good to know what the issue was but also it kind of

set my world into a tailspin. Yeah, so this is cut two, so this was 20 years old when I finally get the diagnosis, and I'm in college at the time. And I went from like a chronic kind of nuisance of a pain to chronic debilitating pain over the course of a few weeks. And this is important for it, and I always like to share this whenever I can, my very first physician, you know, he put my MRI up for me to see, and he told me that I had a spine of an 80-year-old man.

You know, I had two ruptured discs, and my vertebrae were deteriorating. And so when he says this to me, I'm immediately like, okay, so what do we do? Like, let's fix it, you know? And he's like, you know, I'm sorry, son, there's nothing you can do about this. And what happened, and I know you've heard about this several times, the placebo effect is something where you get a positive injunction from somebody who's an authority figure. And you proceed to have certain symptoms happen or changes in your physiology. And a lot of people don't realize this, but placebos are actually 33% effective.

That's the power of the mind. But what he did for me was something called a nocebo effect. This is giving somebody a negative injunction that something bad is going to happen. And your physiology begins to change from that. And so I spent the next two and a half years in a lot of pain, a lot of drugs, prescribed and over the counter. And just laying on my floor, you know, because not only was this painful, but it was embarrassing. You know, I went from kind of being one of the cool guys to, like, I'm walking around campus with a back brace and just, you know, really, kind of losing myself.

I saw different doctors. I went through the whole gamut of why me? Why did this happen to me? Why won't somebody help me? And really playing this victim role. And it wasn't until I actually decided to get well that everything changed. And most people never do that.

With their bodies, with their health, with their relationships, it's mostly like I'll see what will happen, wishful thinking, I'll give this a try. But when you really decide something, you're cutting away the possibility of anything else, but that thing. And I'm a big student of lexicon,

and the word decision is from the Latin day, meaning from, and chidear, which means the cut. So when you make a real decision about something, you cut away the possibility of anything else but that thing. And so I decided no matter what I'm going to get well. And it wasn't like, you know,

the clouds parted and like the sunshine and everything was okay. I'm a very analytical person as well. And so I put a plan together. I decided and now it's time to do something. You know, number one, put a plan together. and that plant entailed three specific things. I changed the way I was eating,

which giving my body the actual raw materials that it needed to regenerate me was important. And I was on what I called the tough diet at the time, which is typical university food. So I'm no joke, I'm eating pizza daily. My vitamin C's coming from Sunny D. And so it's no wonder I was made out of terrible stuff, you know. And so I asked this really important question,

which you mentioned, okay, if my spine is deteriorating, If my bones are deteriorating, what is it actually made of? And that set me down this incredible path of discovery because what we hear in common culture is if you want strong, healthy bones, drink milk. And come to find out, calcium is one of the least important things. And even getting it from your diet, it doesn't exactly work in your body the way that we're marketed to because it's marketing. And so I found out the things like silica, magnesium, sulfur-bearing amino acids, all these

things are in some cases even more important. So I start to get all those nutrients in my body through food primarily once I really got it like food is gonna yeah especially I'm from the Midwest and so like there was like a wild oats market. Whole Foods just opened and so I think it's really important the environment you know when I had some friends they would take me to the stores and then you know that gradually got me into like not just the supplement aisle and so I just began to flood my body with all these important nutrients and also hydration. Your disc in between the vertebrae and your spine and you would think like if I want these to be more hydrated I need to drink more water but it doesn't work like

that your disc get hydrated through a process called remote diffusion and so literally it's like the last place in your body that gets nutrients and hydration and so you needed to really super hydrate yourself make sure your body has an abundance like an overflow of nutrients to make sure they get to the right place so that was number one was nutrition number two was movement And so exercise is really about two main things. Number one is assimilation. And I came across some research that showed that when you actually are doing walking

while taking on specific supplements for your bones, your bone density goes even higher, right? Because that walking helps your body to assimilate. Number two is elimination, you know, elimination of toxins. Because your lymphatic system, which, especially when you're getting healthier, your body is trading out a lot of stuff. And there's a lot of dead cells. There's a lot of metabolic waste products.

And so how do you get that stuff out of your system? You have to move because your lymphatic system doesn't have a pump like your cardiovascular system does. And you actually have four times more lymph than you do blood. And so that movement was so important in healing. And here's the problem is that oftentimes when you have an injury or an issue like this, we're told not to do anything. That's often the worst thing you can do because things will start to atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it.

And so I just started to, of course, if anybody's dealing with like an acute problem right now, like take a day or two off, but I encourage people to do what you can in an intelligent way. And so for me, I could barely walk properly. And so I started off on a stationary bike, progressed to treadmill, I started jogging a little bit. Eventually I picked up the weights again. And, you know, just to jump really quickly to the end of the story, I'd lost 28 pounds in the next six weeks. And the pain I've been experiencing for two and a half years. was gone. But the third and most important part, now I know, was the rest in recovery.

It seems like I was resting a lot by not doing anything, but it really wasn't. It was a lot of suffering. And my greatest struggle was at night going to bed because the pain was so bad it would wake me up. And so I was on various medications. And I basically got to drug myself to not wake up. And so it was like a pseudo-sleep. And it would take several hours before I really felt like I was awake. And the things that I was doing during the day, changing my lifestyle, showed up for me on the pillow. Because what I really wanted to promote for people is this understanding that if you're not sleeping well, you're not healing well.

And this is where your body releases the vast majority of human growth hormone, of these various anabolic hormones, reparative enzymes. So when my sleep got improved, I got better so fast. And so I shifted all my coursework over to biology and kinesiology. and eventually open a clinical practice. And oftentimes I would get those people who they were told there's nothing you can do. You have type 2 diabetes, blood sugars 400 without metformin. There's nothing you can do about it.

And consistently seeing these folks be able to naturally regulate their blood sugar, oftentimes get off their medications, insulin, things like that. Because where there's a will, there's 10,000 ways. But it's also understanding that, first of all, just acknowledging that it is possible. I think it's really valuable to understand the benefit of rock bottom. You know, like for me, after getting those, the words from the other doctors that, you know, there's nothing, you know, the same diagnosis, I had a choice to make. I'm either going to buy into this and continue to live as a victim or I'm going to do something about it.

At least try, you know. But for me, it's beyond try. Like, it's the decision, right? And so how I got to that place really was, you know, I had nothing to lose at that point, you know. I can continue as things are and continuing their suffering. And I think it was just a matter of like realizing that, I think this is really important. Even though there are other people in our lives that might care for us, they don't walk in our shoes. You know, so when the physician would tell me that, you know, there's nothing that I could do, I knew, like, it hit me.

Like, they're not laying at home thinking about me. I'm thinking about them and why they can't help me. I have to really take responsibility for myself. And it's just basic logic, you know? If somebody's saying they can't help you, believe them, you know? And so I made the decision, like, if I'm going to get better, I need to do it. You know, I need to take action. It doesn't mean I'm not going to have great people to support me along the way.

But, you know, as Jim Rohn says, no one can do your push-ups for you. You know, so I really had to take action. And it became, you know, and also I want to share this is that if you really want something you should make a study of it you know especially if you don't necessarily have a blueprint for a successful relationship make it a study if you're not doing well with your finances make it a study and how what does that look like for you I generally go right to the medical journals you know I dig through there and another quote from Einstein is that you know if you can't

explain it simply you don't know it well enough and so I really strive to make sense of these things that can be incredibly complex but for no reason it wasn't until I really honored my own voice and my gift in helping these things to really make sense for people. And so I'll dig around in that data and that's the first thing I'll do. And then I'll look for some anecdotal and evidence as well, you know, people telling stories about it. But here's something else I do.

I also, and this is the scary part, I also look at the problems with stuff. I also look at the things that are against what I might be believing. Most people don't want to do that. Like we believe this particular supplement is going to work and it's the best thing. you know, since sliced bread, and then there's these other things to say, hey, wait a minute, this might not be the case. You have to have the courage to look at this too and come to and a truly well-evolved thought construct. You know, and we all have that opportunity, but we tend to just want to believe what we believe and look for things to affirm that.

You know, and you've got to be careful with studies that do the same thing, and who's funding the study as well. So I really get to that level most of the time in my research. You know, that initial environment was really a laser foundation. Well, before the age of about seven, we're in like a theta brainwave state where a lot of things kind of get deeper into our psyche and our subconscious, our programming. And so it's really important, especially for parents, you know, and people who are just that can be involved in kids' lives to really understand how impressionable they are. And so I really got a great formatting, kind of formatting disk from my grandmother who really kind of needs. instilled this greatness, she instilled the value of education. I love learning, like I love the process of learning.

And so I really picked up early on that you don't want to just learn stuff, you want to become good at learning. And when I shifted my residency, you know, going from this very protected, safe, loving atmosphere, you know, I'm in an environment where, you know, there's a lot of abuse, you know, physical abuse towards myself and my two younger siblings, you know, abuse with my mother and stepfather in the fight, you know, physical fighting. You know, holidays were not like they are now, like get-togethers and family fun. We know the holiday is going to be, police are going to show up, you know.

That environment also taught me something really, really valuable, which is, you know, even though things aren't going well, even though we're short on money, there's always a way to figure it out. matter how bad things look, we're going to be okay. So that really was a powerful seed and combined that with the sense of greatness, the sense of the value of education, the sense of there's always a way to figure something out, really helped that moment of insight to take place of that decision, that moment of decision. And this is the first time I've articulated this, but that's really how those two things come together. You know, I don't want to cut corners. I want to, you know,

integrity is a big word for me and I wanted to take righteous action you know this was this is all bigger than us you know the impact that you're making the legacy that you're leaving you know is so powerful and we're part of like a big change that that's happening with our culture overall you know and I knew that this particular topic is and me being a nutritionist like I was all like food matters food first food is the most important thing but in my practice and seeing people coming in that you know we've got these folks over here you know 80% of the time are able to reverse type 2 diabetes heart disease get off their licentapril's and all this different stuff and then we've got this category of people who just like literally sometimes would ironically kind of keep me up at night like

what is wrong like i'm doing all these things right are they lying to me and it it wasn't until I started to ask people about their sleep, that it just like, it changed everything. And this was about six years ago. And so then, and here's the key, I can't just tell people they need to sleep more. You know this. Like, people don't want to change that much. Like, we want change, but we want to be a little bit, right? And so I found clinically proven strategies that are super easy to implement, almost things

that can happen on automatic to help them improve their sleep quality. And once we did that, it's like the floodgates would open for people. You know, we've been struggling for sometimes, you know, 15, 20 years with their weight, finally the weight comes off, you know, and seeing people struggling with heart disease or high cholesterol, you know, the so-called bad cholesterol, and seeing those numbers finally get regulated once we got their sleep optimized. And I knew that this was incredibly important part of the conversation that was left out. And as we'll talk about, I know now that our society, sleep quality is more important than our diet and exercise combined.

What it does for our health and also literally our physical appearance. Fascinating stuff, how much more fat you lose when you get optimal sleep. It's insane. Number one, what's so interesting is that you were doing something exceptionally right as far as what the research shows with improving your sleep, which is you are going to bed kind of consistently a little bit earlier than other folks might. And so what we call this is this anabolic window or what we call money time sleep. And this is generally between the hours of 10 and 2

because it's more lined up with their natural melatonin secretion. So if you go to sleep during those times, you actually spend more time in the deepest, most anabolic stages of sleep, and you tend to produce more human growth hormone than other folks. So you were already winning with that. This is why you have a tendency to feel better,

even if you're getting less sleep, because this isn't called sleep more, right? is sleep smarter. And there are many people who sleep eight to nine hours and they wake up feeling like straight up, you know, hot garbage, you know what I'm saying? And they're just wondering why. It's because it's the quality of sleep.

And when I say quality of sleep, what does that mean? Let's break that down. So your sleep is regulated by changes in your brain waves. It's really fascinating stuff. And we still don't know really what sleep is. Trying to define sleep is like trying to define, you know, and Forrest Gump is like life like a box of chocolates, sleep is like pretending to be dead. We don't really know, right? But

we do know the changes that happen in the brain. We cycle from kind of a normal waking state with gamma, beta. We're probably in beta right now. We move to alpha, theta, deltas where the deep, anabolic dreamlessly takes place. And we need all of them. And there's a certain percentage we spend in each that helps to rejuvenate our mind and bodies. And if you optimize certain things, you'll do it more efficiently. One of those gear-shunders, you'll do it more efficiently. One of those gear shifts, like if you think about your body like this kind of manual transmission is melatonin. Like people hear about melatonin is their sleep hormone. It just helps your body to efficiently go through your sleep cycles. And if your melatonin is suppressed by various things,

you know, I'll share a couple, then you're not going through those efficiently and you can wake up feeling like a pinata after the party the next day, even though you're spending all this time on the mattress. So that's number one. Number two, there's this interesting process called thermoregulation. There's a natural drop in your core body temperature at night to help facilitate sleep for all of us, if things are running properly. But what was fascinating and I shared a study about this is that they tested insomniacs and every one in this particular clinical study all had too high body temperature at night. It would not go down. And so what they did was they fit them with these thermosuits, right, that lowers their skin temperature,

not even their core temperature, just one degree, and virtually eliminated all their symptoms of insomnia. Whoa. Ambien can't do that, all right? And it's as simple as paying attention to how your body temperature influences your sleep. And so with your body temperature changing like that, it's kind of feeling more of an insulation. As a result of having more sleep, there's a ton of different things that could be correlated there.

So I'm not going to say that the sleep is a causative factor, but it's really interesting how your body does change in accordance of sleep. There's a natural rise in your core body temperature as a day goes. I'm sorry, as the night goes on, that helps to kind of wake you up. So what I did want to share, though, when I said that kind of bold statement in the beginning, when we're talking about how sleep influences your body composition, I think everybody needs to know this. This study really blew my mind, and this was done to the University of Chicago. And they took people, and they put them on a calorie-restricted diet, kind of typical stuff, again,

I'm taught in college, to see the impact on weight loss when they're sleep-deprived. are getting enough sleep. All right? So they put the people on this particular diet, monitor everything. One phase of the study, they're getting eight and a half hours of sleep. All right? And then they track all their metrics.

Another phase of the study. Same exact diet. Same exercise. They don't change anything else, but now they sleep deprive them. And they take away three hours of sleep. So now they're getting five and a half hours of sleep versus eight and a half hours of sleep. At the end of the study,

they found that when individuals were well rested, they burned 55% more body fat, just by getting more sleep. And so the question is, how does this happen? Melatonin, when I talked about this a little bit earlier, it's not just that it's involved in sleep, it's also involved in fat loss. And this study, it was done in the journal Pineal Research,

found that melatonin production helps to increase your body's mobilization of something called brown adipose tissue. This is a type of fat that burns fat. The reason that it's brown is that it has more mitochondria. So it's very energy dense, right? These mitochondria, just for people who, I'm sure people have heard of this, but it's like these energy power plants in yourselves that are creating the energy currency of your body, like how you experience energy, the energy exchange, something called ATP. And so when you are producing adequate melatonin, you're producing and mobilizing adequate amounts of brown adipose tissue, which just puts you in a metabolically advantaged state.

But if you're not getting the melatonin production, which you've got to meet two requirements, number one, you need a biological night. So that means it could actually be during the day, but it's a consistent cycle of when it gets produced. But the other requirement needs to be met that you need darkness. Your body produces melatonin exclusively in darkness. And so that's one. Also, how do they get that body fat change, HGH production, which we talked about too? Human growth hormone is muscle sparing. It's a big driver of energy.

It's also known as a youth hormone. Kids have an insane amount of HGH being produced. This is why they have so much energy. We have a pretty sharp decline in our production right around 18 to 20. But my argument is that around 18 to 20, we generally in our culture, like we leave the house, who might go to college, that kind of thing, and we no longer have structure. We no longer have rules. And we're not going to produce as much HGH.

Third thing really quickly is, and this all has to do with the diet and the food choices, is Leptin. And I know people have talked about Leptin before. about leptin before, but leptin is your body's kind of glorifies satiety hormone. And so when you're producing adequate amounts of leptin, you feel more in control, right? You feel more satiated. But when leptin kind of falls off the map or you have leptin resistance can take place, then we're going to have some pretty big issues with you regulating your cravings and your appetite. And so Stanford University researchers

found that just one night of sleep deprivation radically suppresses your leptin. And now I hope folks can start to pay attention whenever you might not get the best sleep how your cravings change the next day you're gonna have a tendency to want to number one eat more number two to want to eat more kind of the starchy crunchy salty sugary type things and I remember my wife who's actually here when we had our son and I she's never seen me eat this food I was sitting there like waiting for the baby to come I was eating chocolate cover raises I'm just like and I didn't even realize I was doing it you know it's like three o'clock in the morning you know And so that's another thing.

And last one I'll share, and there's so many that create that change in your body composition. But this one is incredibly important is cortisol. Cortisol has been drug through the mud recently. You know, it's getting blamed for everything. But it's not really a bad guy. It's just misunderstood. Cortisol is incredibly important. For example, cortisol is important for your thyroid to work, right?

And that's kind of like the metabolism regulator of your body. But here's the thing. just one night of sleep deprivation radically increases your cortisol and suppresses melatonin actually as well but this rising cortisol has a really powerful ability to start to break down your muscle tissue which your muscles your body's kind of fat-burning machinery and so it can convert your muscle tissue into glucose it's a process called gluconeogenesis as a kind of fight or flight response because your physiology doesn't know why you're not sleeping you know it must be some danger about, you know. And so understanding those major hormones and there's many others,

you start to see the picture that gets painted with just how much your sleep quality impacts your physical appearance. You know, I like to start with the low-hanging fruit first. And something really, really fascinating is just simply changing or embracing the time of day that you exercise can improve your sleep quality. And so Appalachian State University did a really cool study and they wanted to see what time of day exercising at various times of day how does it impact your sleep quality and so they had the study participants to exercise exclusively at 7 a.m. and another phase exclusively at 1 p.m. in the afternoon another phase exclusively at 7 p.m. in the evening they compiled all the data and at the end of the study they found that morning exercisers spend more time in the deepest most anabolic stages of sleep so they're

producing more human growth hormone they have more efficient sleep cycles what we've been talking about, they also tend to sleep longer, and this is the one that kind of can get glanced past, on average, they had about a 25% greater drop in blood pressure at night. So what's up with that? That's correlated with a deactivation of your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system, right? So you're actually able to shift gears, get to that parasympathetic rest and digest, calming down by getting some exercise in in the morning. And so how do we employ this, though? That's the question because some people is just like, you know, I can't exercise in the morning. And there's also people who exercise in the morning who might have terrible sleep.

And it's because this is not like the magic bullet. This is a thing that's stacking your condition. If you're doing this and then messing up the one I'm going to talk about next, you're probably not going to have the best sleep. So here's how to employ this, just five minutes. And I tested this. Each morning I do this five minutes of exercise. You know, it might be just jumping on a rebounder, you know, a little mini trampoline for five minutes. go for a quick power walk, do some Tabata, which is just four minutes and a little mobility work.

I guess most people don't know what Tabata is. High intensity of interval training, basically. It's 20 seconds of exercise, followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated over and over again for four minutes. And in his clinical studies, this was found to outperform, you know, traditional cardio, like the kind of moderate intensity, 45 minutes of exercise in four minutes. Wow. The change in your cardiovascular benefits, body composition, and also change in your mitochondria as well. This is why it works. It does something called a cortisol reset. We talked about cortisol, but again, it's a good thing if it's in the right time and the right amounts.

Clinically, I would call these people tired and wire that would come in and looking at the hormone panels, and the cortisol would be really low in the morning and high at night. Thus, they have sleep problems. So you naturally, if your cortisol is on a natural... hormone rhythm it would be elevated at its peak in the morning right around 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and then gradually decline as the day goes. Does that have to do with what time you wake up? Sort of. I mean the cortisol will kind of tend to nudge you out of sleep But also will tend to notice that as the day is that your sleep goes on it becomes lighter and lighter anyways, right?

This is when you tend to remember your dreams like the at the end of the sleep and so getting this little boost like helping your body to propel and get your cortisol via exercise helps to reset that rhythm and get you back on track. So that's why it works. So that's number one. Low-hanging fruit. Just get in five minutes of exercise. Start in the morning no matter what. Just five minutes is all you need. It's going to help to create this snowball effect of good things for you. You know, five minutes. If this is the time you do go to the gym and do your full workout, so be it all good. But everybody who's not already doing that, just get that five minutes in. The second one, and this one is more of the tough love,

And it's the most difficult, but this is the most important one in our culture today. And this has to do with our tech, all right? So Harvard researchers have confirmed that blue light exposure from our favorite devices, you know, iPads, iPhones, iPhones, androids, tablets, televisions. They do, in fact, suppress your melatonin substantially. Because your body essentially thinks the sun's out? Is that the problem? So we have photoreceptors that are always trying to gauge what time it is, right?

Because our bodies are wired up to be in sync with nature. But only recently, like literally just the past few decades have we been able to manipulate and basically create a second daytime. So your body just, it doesn't really know how to figure it out. And so the blue and white spectrum specifically are the ones that are more similar to daylight. And so what it's doing is, and so here's what the research is found. Basically, every hour you're on your device at night suppresses melatonin for about 30 minutes. Right.

So if you're on your, you know, you watch a movie, a three-hour movie, for example, your melatonin is going to be suppressed. Even if you go to bed right after, you're not producing adequate melatonin for about an hour and a half. And so, again, you can be unconscious from sheer physical exhaustion, but you're not going to go through your sleep cycles efficiently. And so just be mindful of that. What I encourage people to do is to give yourself a screen curfew just 30 minutes.

All right? I don't want to make this complicated. Just 30 minutes. But here's the rub. We are addicted to our devices. straight up, we just need to be honest, I am, we all are, you know. Basically it's because of this dopamine loop, right? Dopamine is so powerful, so interesting. Dopamine is one of the things I truly feel has helped to create our civilization as it is because it drives us to seek, right? Dopamine

drives us to seek and to grow and to find, to discover. The internet is perfect for manipulating this because every time you look for something you find something especially social media you seek find seek fine you produce the dopamine it drives you to look but why do you keep going is every time you find something you get a little bit of a hit from your opioid system it's like this slow drip i have morphine and so it starts to like feel really good and to the point where you might be doing your work and like you've got a deadline and you just you know like i'll check instagram real quick before you know it's like 30 minutes later you fall into the internet black hole you're cold. It just like it just pulls you in. So be aware of that. I'm not saying again our connection

with tech is just going to grow. So I'm not bashing that. It's just be aware of it. And that when you try to abide by this principle, which will really, really help your sleep quality to give yourself a screen curfew, you can't just sit there and twiddle your thumbs because you'll get what I call the internet jitters. You'll start getting like a little bit of a withdrawal effect. Like, let me just check one, just one post. What we have to do is this, you have to replace it with something of greater or equal value. It's really that simple. Hopefully, it's what I encourage people to do.

This is an opportunity to connect, right? Connect with your significant other, your kids, the people like physical, like have a real conversation with somebody, right? I know it sounds crazy, but it really works. It's really, really good. And also, this is a great opportunity if you, you know, if you're in a relationship or not, whatever you're into, you could, you know, utilize and I have a chapter. on this as well, intimate time because there's a big connection between sex and sleep.

And there's also a big connection between sleep and sex and how it impacts your sex life. And so when we have an orgasm, for example, we produce a chemical, I'm sorry, cocktail of chemicals, including oxytocin, noraphenephrin, prolactin. And oxytocin, for example, has been found clinically to basically combat the effects of cortisol. Hopefully sex is more interesting than Instagram, but I don't know. It depends on how you're doing it. And so that's what I want people to do, a screen curfew and or use these hacks. Utilize some blue light blockers.

And so for your desktops, laptops, things like that, you can get an app called Flux that pulls out the most troublesome sleep-sucking spectrum of light from your screen. It basically cools your screen off. And it's a simple app. You set it and forget. It's totally free. Just go to Dr. Google, type in F.LU. and a couple clicks and it's on your device.

I've been using it for maybe five or six years. I love it. And for your telephone, you know, your cell phone, we've got on the iPhones built in now is Night Shift with Androids. The best one out there from my research is one called Twilight. So there's options for everybody. Then what about the ambient light at night or if you're watching a movie? Again, I don't want to get, don't get too neurotic about it.

But if this is a problem for you and you're not sleeping as well as you could be, or your results, your body composition not changing, you're not getting that blood pressure down, you're not having that focus you need through the day, then you might wanna address this. But another little hack is to get some blue light blocking glasses. The first ones I had was straight up like, I just built the bird house.

But now there's some really cool stylish ones that you could rock. As a matter of fact, you'll create a neural association when you put the glasses on and you'll start to get sleepy. You know, it's nuts. And that is another thing right there is to create an evening ritual. Right? Your brain is always looking for patterns.

A lot of successful people, especially listening to the things that you're putting out there, have a success ritual in the morning. But a great morning starts the night before, you know, a truly great morning. And so a couple of quick things people can do is the thermal regulation piece, turn down your thermostat. Now, this one's, again, this is going to hit a pressure point for some people. But according to research, between 62 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal. for sleep. And so for some people that's going to sound a little bit frosty, but lowering the

thermostat a little bit can have incredible benefit for your sleep. But this doesn't mean you can't use your covers and put on some warm socks, that kind of thing. So cooling off this thermostat, making sure that your bedroom, ideally, I call it a sleep sanctuary. And so when you walk into your bedroom at night,

if your brain has a neuroassociation, when I go into my bedroom, I'm watching television, I'm working, channels are going to fire because of the myelin getting laid down over the years of you doing that behavior or even months it can get laid down and so you might have the intention of going to bed but if your TV's in there your brain is going to be firing expecting to watch television and parts of your brain are going to be waking up in a way and so I encourage people to get the tech out of your room have your sleep have your bedroom be a sleep sanctuary you know or some place

that's just for the the double S which is sleep and sex here's also a really interesting reason why There's an Italian study done. They found that couples who have a television in their bedroom have 50% less sex. Really? Yeah. That's interesting. And this is a little bit more middle age, little past middle age, the people in the study.

And I know some people are like, that's not true. I have sex all the time. You probably do it in a snowstorm. It doesn't matter where you are. Like you're a human rabbit. It doesn't matter. But for other people, it's like a distraction, right? It's a distraction.

And it can also, you know, create all of those kind of chemical soup issues that we've been talking about with elevating cortisol and those kind of things. So ideally get your television out of the room, the other tech. And last thing with the sleep environment I'll share, when I talked about melatonia, need those two conditions, biological night, and you also need a dark environment. And so if you're in an environment where you're maybe in a suburban or city environment where there's like neighbors porch lights coming in, there's LEDs outside, cars coming up and down the street, as crazy as this side, you're maybe in a suburb.

sounds, that small amount of light, what we're now dubbing light pollution, can have a significant impact on your sleep quality. And here's why we know this. Cornell University, I think, did the best study on this. And they took a test subject and had them sleep in an otherwise dark room. And they took a light, a fiber optic cable, and a light the size of a quarter, and put it behind their knee. And that was enough to disrupt their sleep cycle.

Because your skin also has photoreceptors that is sending information to your brain, your nervous system, your internal organs to try to tell your body what time it is, it's trying to figure it out. You know, so we want to get rid of that artificial light exposure. Now, does this mean moonlight and stars? No, humans have evolved with those things, and they're luxe, like I actually put a lux chart in the book. It's so small compared to even the weakest fluorescent bulbs. And so get yourself some blackout curtains.

If that external light is an issue, internal light, you know, your alarm clocks and, you know, light, you know, lamps, you know, some people still are sleeping with their lights on, things like that. Be mindful of that and also what you can do is just change the bulb color. You know, if you still have issues with the dark, which some adults do and that's okay, you can change the bulb color.

And I actually had some NASA scientists or people that work with them to send me some different bulbs because folks in space, they don't have that biological clock. And so they would experience all these different health challenges. They had to try to figure it out and knew that it was an issue with their sleep. And so they start to give them different bulbs for different. different times of day in a way, you know, even though they're in outer space. So it's really cool what you can do with these little hacks. But bottom line is you want to have a dark cycle so you can produce melatonin.

And, you know, those are just a few. Those are just a few of the different things people can do. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes. Download the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes.