The School of Greatness - 696 Sleep Smartly with Shawn Stevenson

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

YOUR BODY IS WIRED TO WORK WITH NATURE. Sleep is so important. So why do we do so many things that keep us from getting the sleep we need? If we want to optimize our performance and our life, we have to think about sleep. Humans used to sleep when it was dark. Now so many of us do the “laptop lapdance” at night, keeping our bodies awake with unnatural light. We can change our schedule and environment to get a deeper rest at night. To help you understand more on the topic I wanted to bring you this clip from a conversation I had with the King of Sleep: Shawn Stevenson. Shawn’s health podcast- The Model Health Show- has millions of listener downloads a year. He’s a bestselling author, has been featured on many major media outlets, and is an in-demand keynote speaker. He’s the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance which helps people and companies with health services worldwide. Like Shawn says in the episode, “We are infinite beings.” We have the power to have a great night’s sleep. Learn how to change your habits to change your sleep in Episode 696. In This Episode You Will Learn: Why laptops can hinder sleep (0:54) The biology of light and sleep (1:44) The difference between going to sleep and passing out (2:47) The best time to work out for good sleep (3:38)

This is 5-Minute Friday! This is Sean Stevenson, and he is a best-selling author and creator of The Model Health Show, which is one of the top nutrition and fitness podcasts on iTunes. With a background in biology and kinesiology, Sean went on to be the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, which is a successful company that provides wellness services for both individuals and organizations worldwide. He's also a dynamic keynote speaker who's spoken with TEDx, universities, and numerous organizations with outstanding reviews.

And he is the king of sleep. He's the king of mastering your sleep to optimize your health your performance your mind your body for the best experience people will notice this when they tend to get to bed a little bit earlier they're just like wow i slept really great right you know i see your face you're like yeah when that happens but it rarely happens that's the kind of money time window but but it's not, again, it's not about being perfect. If this doesn't fit your lifestyle, stack the other conditions, do the other things. The timing does matter because your body's wired up to work with nature. And only recently can we basically manufacture a second daytime.

Our genes are expecting a night cycle for us to get cozy, to get sleep, but we can throw on the, do the laptop lap dance all night long today you know watch youtube videos and netflix yes be on our social media but our genes are not different from our ancestors even you know 100 years ago let alone thousands i hear that so we can evolve through this stuff you know like some x-men stuff but it's going to take a little bit of time your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light and even the littlest amount of light yeah there was a study i put in the book that the room was otherwise pitch black but they put just a tiny light behind somebody's knee no and it was enough yes it was enough to take them out of their normal stage of

sleep it's crazy right it's crazy, because again, we evolved in darkness and it's not all light, it's unnatural light. Like moonlight, if you look at the Lux and I put a Lux chart in the book, it's not even a problem, but that unnatural light. And so your skin has photoreceptors that pick up information and basically send it to your brain to secrete more daytime hormones, namely cortisol, All right. So your neighbor's porch light, you know, street lights outside, that kind of stuff, this unnatural light, it's been dubbed light pollution now. So getting your room pitch black and keep that stuff out of your room, but also the internal light too. So if you've got an ugly alarm clock staring at you, you know,

that kind of stuff, you might want to consider, you know, getting a dimmer shut off or, you know, throwing a blanket over it or something like that. I think a lot of people know that a good workout can help you sleep. However, there's a difference between going to sleep and passing out, you know, as we've mentioned. So a lot of people, you know, I just, I talk with Rich Roll and if he doesn't do one of his, you know, he's like running for days, you know, if he doesn't do one of his workouts, like he says, his sleep isn't isn't the same. It's because of his cortisol rhythm, which he's changed. But that's a whole nother story.

Bottom line is there's a difference. Number one, between going to sleep and passing out. And here's how to do this the right way. So this study done with Appalachian State University, they broke exercise up into three groups. Group A exercise at 7 a.m. in the morning. Group B, 1 p.m. Group C, 7 p.m. at night. Group A spent up to 75% more time in deep anabolic sleep.

Early in the morning. So early in the morning, if you can get a workout in. This doesn't mean it has to be the time you hit the gym. You can work out in the afternoon. But that initial morning activity is important because going back to our evolutionary biology, it encourages that normal cortisol spike. So getting up and taking a walk. Yeah, you can do a power walk. You can do a four-minute Tabata session, do some body weight stuff, or you can do your full workout.

Air squats. Yes. Yoga, stretching, whatever it may be. You're helping to encourage that normal cortisol. First thing in the morning. Yeah. First hour or something. Yeah, exactly.

Interesting. And then what about the full workout? What about if you're like, okay, I'm going to do my hour workout today. When should that optimal time be? If you want to do it in the morning, perfect. If it is in the, and there wasn't much benefit to the afternoon as far as sleep is concerned, but in the evening there was some benefit, but it has to be the early evening. All right.

So if I do work out in the evening, it's okay. If it's the early evening. It's like six, seven. You need about four hours. all right because i do work out in the evening it's okay if it's the early evening so six seven you need about four hours so if your planned bedtime is 11 you need about four hours for your cortisol to get normalized and your core body temperature to come back down which we talked about how important that is yeah because i'll work out and then i'll take a cold shower but i'm still sweating an hour later yeah a cold shower is a great great help though to help to lower your body your core body temperature it's still, the burn is just like a big guy.

You're still sweating. So that makes sense. Okay, so four hours after the workout you should take before you go to sleep. Right. And some people are hitting their jujitsu class at 8 p.m. and then trying to get to sleep at 10. That's not optimal. Yeah, it's not.

But it is good. You still get benefit if you go up until 7 o'clock or four hours before. It's okay. Just try and time it different. A lot of times that we get in issues with this is because we tell ourselves there's not another option. We're infinite beings that have plenty of different ways that we can change things.