The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 34. Sleep - Hacks, Supplements, and Routines for Better Sleep | Ultimate Human Short with Gary Brecka

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey guys, this is Gary Brekka, and today we're going to talk about sleep. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I am your host, Gary Brekka, human biologist, where we go down the road, everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And of all of the requests that I've gotten through my social media channels, this is probably the number one request, and that is sleep. Why is it so important? How do I get more of it? Well, we know the people that sleep just six and a half to seven and a half hours a night actually tend to live the longest. And the average person falls asleep in 10 to 15

Starting point is 00:00:45 minutes. If it only takes you five minutes or less, you are likely sleep deprived. You know, an average person wakes up between two and six times a night. This is perfectly normal. And we spend about 25 years of our life sleeping. 11 days is actually the longest recorded period in history that anyone has ever lived without sleep. You can live longer without food than you can without sleep. In 2004, more than 35 million Americans were on sleeping pill prescriptions. These were filled in the U.S. alone, and that number was double from the previous year, the last time that we have statistics. The introduction of things like blue light emitted by screens, which reduces the production of melatonin, which also controls our sleep-wake cycle and our

Starting point is 00:01:30 circadian rhythm, makes it difficult for a lot of Americans to fall asleep and wake up the next morning. Blue light reduces the amount of time you spend in the rapid eye movements area of sleep, which is needed for cognitive functioning. So here's my suggestion. First, let's make your bedroom a sanctuary. Clear the clutter and invest in a comfortable bedding if you want to spend time in your bedroom. While you're getting ready for bed, keep the lights dim to reduce the effect of light on your melatonin. Bedtime teas, warm baths, stretching, breathing, journaling have all been proven to be very effective sleep routine hacks if they're done consistently. And the trick here is to be consistent. Remember, most of us have an exercise routine. We have a morning routine. We have a journaling routine. We have a routine when we get to our office and get into

Starting point is 00:02:14 the cycle of our day, but we rarely have a sleep routine. A breathwork technique called box breathing, which is a four-second inhale followed by a four-second hold followed by a four-second exhale followed by a four-second hold, has actually been proven to put people into a relaxed state. It's been nicknamed the natural Xanax. Routine is the father of good sleep. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to set up a healthy sleep protocol. I'm going to ask you guys to try this for the next five to seven days. And we're going to see by comments back from you how many of you are actually having positive impacts on your sleep. So first, we're going to try to go to bed within a half hour of the same time each night. Remember, circadian cycles are set by consistency.

Starting point is 00:03:01 Sleep aids are things like magnesium, theanine, and melatonin. These are things I'm a huge fan of. I am not a fan of tranquilizing ourselves to sleep, but I am a fan of using metabolites, things that the body recognizes that we can actually use to help support healthy cycles of sleep. So many experts and studies have suggested that magnesium may help with relaxation by interacting with certain neurotransmitters, decreasing cortisol levels, which is a waking hormone, and increasing melatonin. So there's a very interesting sleep rule that I've stumbled upon, and I use this in my own daily life. I don't know who the original author of was of this sleep rule, but I'd like to find out so I can properly give them credit. If you've heard of this rule, this is what we're going to apply over the next

Starting point is 00:03:44 five to seven days, and you're gonna respond back to me and tell me how well this has had a positive impact on your sleep. The sleep rule is called 10-3-2-1-0. 10-3-2-1-0. So here's how it works. Maybe you wanna take out a pencil or a pen

Starting point is 00:04:01 and write this down. 10 hours before bed, no more caffeine. Three hours before bed, no food or alcohol. I will tell you that digestion robs us of good circadian sleep. Remember, we have to decide where we want the blood and the oxygen in our body to be. You can either have it here in your head

Starting point is 00:04:20 or you can have it down here deep in your gut. As soon as we fill the 30-foot long intestinal tract with food, we divert a lot of valuable oxygen and a lot of valuable blood to the gut. Remember, when we go into a deep sleep, our respiratory rate begins to drop. As our respiratory rate drops, the amount of oxygen we're bringing into the bloodstream drops. As the amount of oxygen coming into the bloodstream drops, the brain does not allow the body to get into a deep theta or delta state of sleep. In fact, the brain, which is concerned about survival, although we'd like to think it's very sophisticated, it's in some cases kind of not. It's really concerned about saving your life, will not let you get into a deep sleep if you don't have the oxidative state to sustain deep sleep.

Starting point is 00:05:04 This is why I'm not a big fan of tranquilizing sleep medications, zolapidem, nitrate, diazepam, valium, Xanax, these things that people use on a consistent basis to drug themselves to sleep. Hey guys, if you've been watching the Ultimate Human Podcast for any length of time, you know that one thing I do not do is push products. I do not just let any advertiser into this space because I believe that the products that appear on the Ultimate Human Podcast should be things that I use every day in my life to improve my own physiology. One of them is something called the Echo Go Plus. The Echo Go Plus is a hydrogen water generator that you can take on the go. You essentially take the top off of this

Starting point is 00:05:45 bottle, you pour bottled water in this, and repeatedly it will make high part per million hydrogen water. You press this little button, you'll see these bubbles going up in the water, that's hydrogen being created in the water. There are all kinds of peer-reviewed published clinical studies on the benefits of hydrogen water including reduced inflammation better absorption of your supplements better absorption of your foods better balance of the stomach acid and it feeds an entire class of bacteria in your gut hydrogen water in my opinion is the most beneficial water that you can drink and now you can take it wherever you go You can go to echo, E-C-H-O, H2O.com. That's echo, E-C-H-O, H2O.com. Enter the code ULTIMATE10 for a discount. Echo H2O. Enter the code ULTIMATE10 for a discount.

Starting point is 00:06:38 Most of us have a very difficult time meeting our protein needs and certain protein sources like whey protein and others can be as little as 20% absorbable. This is 99% absorbable and it has all of the essential amino acids that the body needs to build lean muscle, to recover, to improve our exercise performance, and most importantly to repair after we have intense exercise. So this is called Perfect Amino by Body Health. It's, like I said, 99% absorbable. It only has two calories. Eventually, the caloric intake has virtually no caloric intake. It will not break a fast. It tastes amazing. You mix it in water. I take this literally every single morning. If you're working out in a fasted state, you have to take a full spectrum amino acid prior to your

Starting point is 00:07:26 workout to preserve your lean muscle and make sure that you're recovering properly and again it will not break your fast so the caloric impact is virtually zero you get all the full spectrum amino acids it tastes wonderful i use it every single day you can go to bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate. That's bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate and look for the perfect aminos. They actually come in capsules if you're on the go or it becomes in several flavors that they make in a powder, which I love. It's flavored with natural means of flavoring.

Starting point is 00:07:59 So there's no artificial sweeteners in here. So this is one of my absolute favorite products. Give it a try. If you're working out at all, you need a full spectrum amino acid, go to bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate. That's bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate. I love their lab tested products.

Starting point is 00:08:18 You can actually see the absorption rate for all of their products. They've got great electrolyte protein combinations. My favorite is the perfect aminos bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate and now back to the ultimate human podcast i had a podcast recently with dr kerry sarda board certified ob-gyn and regenerative medicine physician and one of the things that she pointed out about these tranquilizing types of sleep medications is that you're not really sleeping. So when your body

Starting point is 00:08:46 doesn't have the oxidative state, doesn't have the oxygen in the bloodstream to get into a deep sleep, very often what happens is the brain wakes you up in an effort to save your life and maintain healthy levels of blood oxygen. When you actually take a tranquilizing sleep medication, it blinds the brain's view of blood oxygen. So the brain can't wake you up. It actually can't try to save your life. And it allows you to get into a quote unquote sleep. And then you wake up the next day and you go, gosh, I hate taking Tylenol PM because it's still in my system. Well, that drug's not still in your system. You're feeling the effects of having suffocated for the last six hours. You're feeling the effects of severe hypoxia. And this is why it takes 20 or 30 minutes

Starting point is 00:09:26 to get the motor going, why you really don't feel awake until you've moved around for 25 or 30 minutes. You go straight to the coffee maker to try to get yourself awake. Nothing seems to work except time and breathing. And that is not the drug leaving your system. That is the oxidative state

Starting point is 00:09:41 returning in your blood to normal. So we can fix this by doing breath work before we go to bed not using tranquilizing sleep medication using known sleep support metabolites like magnesium and theanine and melatonin in low doses some people don't tolerate melatonin very well one of my favorite go-tos is a form of magnesium called magnesium threonate there are many manufacturers that sell magnesium threonate. There are many manufacturers that sell magnesium threonate. You can take it orally, you can take it in a sublingual, you can even take it in a gel pack before bed. That along with the amino acid theanine seems to work very, very well for a broad number of people with virtually no side effects.

Starting point is 00:10:19 And so if we can get into a deep circadian sleep by having healthy levels of oxygen, by not digesting our food at night, having two to three hours before we go to bed, we're already on our way to having a better oxidative state to support deep sleep. So we said 10 hours before bed, no more caffeine. Three hours before bed, no more food or alcohol. Two hours before bed, and this is a tough one for a lot of you, no more work. If you're going to work in your bedroom, put a desk in your room, do your work at the desk and your sleep in your bed. We have to make our bodies understand that the bed is where we go to rest and relax. That's where we

Starting point is 00:10:59 go to rejuvenate. We don't bring our workday into the bed with us. We can bring it into the bedroom, but we wanna keep it compartmentalized to a different area of the room. Sounds very simple, but the way that the brain works is we see different areas in our life as identifying with different things that we do throughout the day. So if we can enter our bedroom

Starting point is 00:11:20 in a dimly lit environment, park ourselves at a desk within the room or a couch on the other side of the room, finish up whatever work or whatever screen time that we need to have before we're gonna get into bed and then move over to the bed so that our body knows and our brain knows that this is where we go to rest and sleep.

Starting point is 00:11:39 So 10 hours before, no caffeine, three hours before, no food or alcohol, two hours before, no more work, two hours before no more work, and one hour before bedtime, no more screen time. Shut off the phones, the TVs, and the computer. And zero is the number of times you should hit the snooze button. Remember, just before you wake, very often, this is when we are in the deepest part of our sleep cycle. If we actually set the snooze button 20 or 30 minutes before we're supposed to get up,

Starting point is 00:12:07 because we think that waking up in stages is going to help us, it's not. That extra 15, 20, or 30 minutes of sleep that you get by hitting the snooze button multiple times when stretched out over a week or stretched out over a month adds up to hours of sleep deprived time that was unnecessary because we can set our alarms

Starting point is 00:12:28 and when our alarm goes off, we should be getting up out of bed and starting our day, not resetting the alarm to go back to sleep. A lot of you have told me that you feel drugged after you set the snooze alarm. This is because you're waking up in the deepest part of your circadian cycle of sleep so zero should be the number of times you hit the snooze button here it is again 10 3 2 1 10 hours before no

Starting point is 00:12:51 caffeine three hours before no food or alcohol two hours before no work one hour before we try to limit all of our screen time including computers the best thing you can do in bed is journal or write your thoughts down to get them out of your head and onto paper and set that paper onto your nightstand this is a good way of clearing your mind before you go to sleep my favorite tactics is to add the box breathing technique as i'm trying to fall asleep it is a four second inhale followed by a four second inhale, followed by a four second hold, followed by a four second exhale, followed by a four second hold. Continue to trace this square and focus on that square, focus on your breath until you feel yourself easing into sleep. You're 10 or 15 minutes away

Starting point is 00:13:43 from the deepest slumber of your life. This is not medical advice. It's not meant to replace a consultation with a board certified or a licensed practitioner. This is just what I do to go to sleep. And this is some of the data that I've gathered from years and years of being on the road and hacking my own sleep cycle. To your health. If you haven't had a chance to connect with me on theultimatehuman.com, head over there now and sign up for my free newsletter and all of the exclusive content.

The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 34. Sleep - Hacks, Supplements, and Routines for Better Sleep | Ultimate Human Short with Gary Brecka

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