The Ultimate Guide to Healthy Sleep
TRANSCRIPT:
- So, I'm so excited to introduce Sage. I've actually had the honor and pleasure of knowing him for many, many, many years. We are in a very similar health vortex community, and I highly recommend you guys checking Sage out after tonight. Even though we're friends, I secretly stalk him on Instagram, 'cause he's constantly giving the most empowering, epic tips and tricks on how to truly live this healthy lifestyle. He is the co-founder of Addictive Wellness, the chocolate that we sell here at Pause. It's literally one of the only chocolates I put into my body because it is sugar-free and filled with adaptogenic herbs and tonics, I mean.
- Tonic herbs.
- Yeah, tonic herbs, thank you. And that's really Sage's specialty. So not only is he the founder of this, but he really specializes in nutrition and herbology, and he gives you this amazing alternative look into the wellness space. So I'm so excited to introduce him, and he's going to give us all the life hacks to have us sleeping wonderfully so we can be better humans on the planet. So, take it away.
- Thank you so much, thank you.
- Thank you.
- Thank you to everybody for being here, and thank you to Tamara, everyone at Pause for having me. I'm super excited to talk with you guys about sleep. To give you a little quick background on me, I had the good fortune to grow up in and around the health world. My parents had a meditation center when I was a kid. They opened a wellness center when I was a teenager. So I grew up going and taking infrared saunas as a teenager, and now my parents work with Clearlight Saunas, the infrared saunas they have here. So kind of just growing up in and around this, and from my mid-teens, I just got super excited and inspired about it, thinking, like, I would see all these people coming into their wellness center who were maybe in their 50s, 60s, and dealing with this back problem or this problem or that problem, and I just got to thinking, okay, they're all working at fixing these problems once they've already happened. What if I just got into all this stuff now when I'm fresh and have nothing wrong? What would that mean in terms of my potential, what I can do with my life, how good I'll feel every day, and long-term, longevity, what can I achieve in life extension? And so the more I started doing and trying different super foods and herbs and dietary practices, the better I would feel. The better I would feel, the more stuff I would do. The more stuff I would do, the better I'd feel, the more I would wanna learn and discover new things, and eventually got into traditional herbal systems of indigenous cultures and deep into nutrition and all kinds of things, and it was just this beneficial cycle that just kept snowballing, snowballing, snowballing, eventually leading to doing consulting with hotels around the world to incorporate elixir bars into their cafes and restaurants, and then to starting Addictive Wellness, doing sugar-free raw chocolates with all these different herbs and elixirs and also bringing these individual herbal extracts, since people were asking us, where do I find this, where do I find that, and we wanted to be able to do that with the best that we were already using. So that's my background. But you didn't come here to hear about me. You came here to hear about sleep. Sleep is such an important component of health. It is really the most performance-enhancing thing you can do, period, is getting quality sleep. And before we jump too far deep into it, I wanna go a little bit into a couple technical terms that are gonna be important to understand. There's basically just two terms, and if you can remember these, it'll make everything else a lot easier to understand as we go through a lot of the science of sleep and the different stages of sleep and things like that. Now, I promise, this is not gonna get too boring. I'm trying to make it as interesting as possible, the sleep stuff. But if you do happen to fall asleep, that's okay. We're here to support sleep, so I'm not gonna make you feel guilty for falling asleep during a talk about sleep. It's okay. Whatever form you can get your sleep, you do your thing. Okay, so but the two terms I want you to try to remember are REM, R-E-M, and non-REM, which is abbreviated NREM. So these are the two basic ways of categorizing sleep stages. Now, technically, non-REM is broken up into stage one, two, three, and four, but for simplicity, we're gonna talk about REM and non-REM. REM is the part of your sleep when you are dreaming. It's normally called REM because it stands for rapid eye movement. When you dream, you're going through all this crazy stuff in you're head, you're basically having the most insane hallucinations anyone's ever had, and your eyes are darting around nonstop while you're sleeping. So they call it REM sleep. The other part is non-REM sleep, so you're not dreaming. You have stages one and two of non-REM, which are the lighter stages of sleep, and then three and four, which are the more medicinal ones. These are the deeper stages of sleep. But all stages of sleep are important. They're like food groups. You can't just have protein all day long or just have fat all day long. You need everything. You need your fiber. You need a modest amount of carbs. You need a good amount of healthy fats. You need good protein, amino acid building blocks for your cells, just like you need all these stages of sleep. So, to go a little bit back into the history of sleeping, so many people these days are looking at sleep as the enemy, something to be conquered, as if if you do enough stuff or you push hard enough or your willpower is strong enough, you can get by without sleeping as much. And this is a loosing battle, really not worth fighting. Literally every animal on the planet sleeps, every single one. So you're not gonna be the one member of the one species that managed to get away without sleep. It's not gonna work out, no matter how hard you try, right? Now, there's a lot of differences in how much animals sleep, the stages of sleep that they experience, how they sleep. If you look for example at, say, bats, they're sleeping 19 hours a day. On the other hand, you have elephants, four hours a day. Huge differentiation. Then there's differences in the amount of REM and non-REM that we see in different animals. For example, some of the more primordial animals like reptiles and insects and fish, they don't do REM sleep. It's all non-REM. So they're not dreaming, really interesting. So that crocodile, he doesn't dream. He just goes deep and that's it, very simple. On the other hand, well, actually, also, aquatic mammals, they're not doing REM sleep either, like dolphins. No REM sleep, and you might ask why. During REM sleep, your brain paralyzes your body so you can't act out your dreams, and this is important in a number of ways. So you can't move. Anyone who's ever experienced sleep paralysis knows that. Has anyone ever experienced sleep paralysis here? Where you wake up and you can't, and it's horrible, right? You can't move. Your eyes are awake. You can kind of semi-control your blinking and breathing. It's kind of an error that has happened in your nervous system when you're awake, but your brain has not unparalyzed the rest of your body. It can be freaky. Nobody's ever died from it or gotten stuck in it. I know that's what everybody, when you're in it, right, 'cause I've experienced it quite a few times, that's what you think. Like, what if I'm stuck here? It's not a fun place to be, and there's hallucinations that come with it sometimes and a lot of fear. But anyways. So, dolphins are not gonna go into REM sleep because they need to keep moving their bodies to come up and breath periodically. So they never go into REM sleep. They also do this other weird thing where they only often sleep with half of their brain at once, while the other half stays semi-awake. Now, you guys may be thinking, oh, yeah, I do that. Like when I'm in that business meeting after lunch, and they're just like droning on, I kind of do that. I sleep with half my brain and the other half is semi-there. No, it's not true. Humans can't do that, as much as you might think you can pull it off. That's another thing where you just can't get away with it. So that's dolphins, and then you look at, for example, the other great apes, something similar to us, and wonder, okay, what are they doing? Interestingly, they do have REM sleep, but not nearly as much as we do. It's a huge differentiator between us and all the other great apes, is that they get way less REM sleep than we do. They need more sleep in terms of total number of hours. They're looking more like 10 to 15 hours. But they get way less REM sleep. Why is this? Evolutionarily, they're up in the trees. They go into the trees because it's a safe place to avoid all the predators on the ground. You're not gonna have to worry about tigers and things like this when you're safely up in the trees. However, there's other dangers that come with being in trees, is that if you're asleep in a tree and you fall from 40 feet up, you're out of the gene pool. You're not passing on your genetics in the evolutionary game, that's it. So, it's dangerous to be up in a tree and in a state of paralysis, where if there was a bit of wind and the tree swayed and you were kind of tipping out of the tree, you couldn't very quickly readjust or grab onto something or something like that. So all the great apes that tried having lots of dream sleep, they died, basically, and were not able to pass on their genetics. However, things changed when Homo erectus evolved and essentially descended out of the trees onto land, and this was kind of a chicken and egg situation around the time that Homo erectus also is said to be the first to have use of fire, and fire was now the new way to protect Homo erectus from the threats that previously drove us up into trees. So now we could sleep on the ground, a lot safer. Nobody fell off the ground ever, unless you're sleeping on the edge of a cliff, which is just not smart. You're taking yourself out of the gene pool for other reasons, right? So now we're sleeping on the ground. Now we could experience much more REM sleep, and that later led to the evolution of Homo sapiens. Now, why is this significant in the story of evolution to become this spectacular species that we are now in comparison to beautiful and wonderful but somewhat simpler great apes, is that REM sleep builds cognitive intelligence, creative problem-solving, and emotional intelligence. These are cultivated and built up during REM sleep. So the less you have of this, the less you have of those. So this, there's many factors that led to the evolution of humans being so interesting, but this, there's a big hypothesis out there, and I think it's very legitimate, that this played a huge role in that. So, that is just amazing, that sleep, basically lying there doing nothing, is actually amazingly evolving you as a person. There's so much good stuff that happens while you're sleeping, and we're gonna get into that in a second. But now that we know where this thing comes from, what's creating sleep in the body? And I promise, I know you guys all want the tips and tricks. We will get there. But first, it's kind of like when somebody gets kidnapped, and they kind of wanna humanize themself to the kidnapper. I wanna humanize sleep to you guys. You have sleep you control. You can get that sleep, but I want you to know where it came from, know it has a name, it has friends. What is sleep like? So, sleep comes from two main sources. There's two main driving forces, not just one. It's kind of like nature realized, okay, if I just cause sleep, if I do only one thing to cause sleep, these guys are smart. They'll figure out a way to get around and trick it. But if I do two, they won't be able to beat both of 'em. So the two factors that are causing you to need sleep or to help you fall asleep are one, you have this substance that builds up in your brain, and it's building up, building up, building up, and it's causing, at the end of the day, what's called sleep pressure. This is not necessarily a pressure like a headache, but this is a pressure to where you get tired. The weight of sleep is growing and growing upon you. That's one. So as the day goes on, sleep pressure builds, sleep pressure, sleep pressure, sleep pressure builds. And then the other part that you may be more familiar with is the circadian rhythm. So this is where you have this part of your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a really badass name, and this is responsible for secreting melatonin at the right times. So, it responds most effectively to two factors: light and temperature. So we'll get into this a little bit later and how you can use those to your advantage, how to sleep effectively at the right times. Sleep, as far as the suprachiasmatic nucleus and melatonin, is controlled by the temperature and the light that you're being exposed to. So you have these two factors. So the sleep pressure's building, and then the circadian rhythm. It's interesting when you look at what happens when you're taking coffee or when you're having caffeine in the system, because it is blocking the receptors that the compounds that create the sleep pressure would sit in. So they are being produced all day long, and the coffee is taking up those seats. It's like a game of musical chairs. The compounds that produce the sleep pressure in your brain have nowhere to sit, so they're just building up and standing around. Caffeine has a five- to seven-hour half life. So, if you drink two cups of coffee, five to seven hours later, you still have the amount of caffeine in your system as if you had just drunk one cup of coffee. So you don't wanna drink coffee or have any kind of caffeine too late in the day because it's gonna block these receptors that create the sleep pressure. Now, when eventually you get that caffeine out of there, you have a ton of these other compounds that are gonna create this sleep pressure that just jump on you. That's why eventually, the caffeine wears off. You'll crash, and if you do an all-nighter, well, then you're really gonna be feeling it. But interesting, the next morning, it's not gonna be so bad because then in terms of the circadian rhythm, that's waking you up again. So at least you get 50% of this equation supporting you the morning after an all-nighter, right? So you're like halfway there, but then, if you wait 'til the next afternoon, evening, you are gonna be dying, because now, you have triple the sleep pressure, and the circadian rhythm is not supporting you anymore 'cause melatonin is now being secreted. So then, that's where you're in real, real trouble. But to get in a little bit more about the differences between non-REM and REM sleep, again, REM is when you're?
- [Audience Members] Dreaming.
- Dreaming, there you go, right? Then the other one, non-REM, is when you're going deeper. So, different benefits. I want you to understand why you need them both. So important. So with REM sleep, as I mentioned, it's for emotional intelligence, cognitive intelligence, creative problem-solving, and it's basically where your brain is able to take in the new information that you got during the day and integrate it with the existing information that's already there. It's kind of like doing a software update. It's taking all this new stuff and seeing, okay, how am I gonna take all these new rules, bits of information, things I've observed, integrate them with what I already know, to now be functional knowledge. It's like taking information and turning it into functional knowledge and wisdom. They have actually shown that when people are learning new languages, especially new grammatical rules, that you can teach it to 'em, and they'll intellectually get it, but they're much better at functionally using it after experiencing a REM sleep. So, this is an amazing processing time. It happens the same with kids when they're first learning language. You can kind of teach 'em some new things, but they don't really be able to use it effectively until after they've had a good amount of REM sleep. Then they've even shown this in mice and learning new information and sending 'em around mazes and things like that. So this is something that exists across species. And then we go to the non-REM sleep. This is a little bit different. This is when you have this aspect of your body, it's actually basically an organ system that was only recently discovered. It's called the glymphatic system. You may know the lymphatic system, but this is with a G, and it's referring to the glial cells, the glymphatic system, and when you're asleep, in these deeper non-REM sleep stages, it is flushing out the brain, rinsing out the brain with cerebrospinal fluid and washing out all the metabolic toxins, washing out all these compounds that are creating this sleep pressure, and leaving you with a clean, fresh, ready-to-go brain the next day. Deep sleep is also where you're destressing, and it's where you're getting, in a lot of ways, the most restored. It's where you are secreting the most growth hormone, which has the cascade effect of other hormones as well, 'cause it affects the levels of DHEA that you're gonna have. That also is gonna affect estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. So many macho guys love to say, oh I don't need sleep. I do four or five hours, I'm good. Well, something interesting that those guys should know, our president being one of them, is that if you're chronically under-sleeping like that, four or five hours, your testosterone levels as a guy are gonna be the same as a healthier person 10 years older than you. So you are drastically accelerating andropause, which is the male version of menopause, where your testosterone is just going way down. It's not good news for guys at all. Of course, for women, there's also other hormone imbalances that will stem from this. And deep sleep, so you get the hormone effect, and hormones just control so many aspects of your health. And this all becomes really interesting, because you don't experience these sleep stages in the same amount through all parts of the night. If you look at the way the sleep cycles work, in the start of the night, you spend a lot more time in the deep non-REM sleep. In the second half of the night, you're spending a lot more time in the REM sleep and a lot less time in the deep sleep. So if you are somebody who only sleeps five, six hours, you are depriving yourself of what you're gonna get in that latter part of the night where you're getting that REM sleep. Now let's look at some people who are chronically doing this, especially as teenagers because of early school start times. Getting up at five, six, 6:30 in the morning, it's a problem, because teenagers have something that changes with their circadian rhythm during the teen years where their body wants to stay up a couple hours later, and this is evolutionarily so they start to gain a little bit of independence from the family and start to kind of have an independence that builds up slowly instead of like, okay, it hits you all at once when you're 18. They've got these couple hours of the nighttime that are kind of their own time. And they wanna sleep later, obviously. The whole thing slides a little bit later. And what happens is you when we're getting them up bright and early to go to school, we are cutting off their supply of REM sleep. Again, REM is cognitive development, emotional intelligence development, taking in new information and integrating it. This is what they need most, and they've actually shown in studies where they took schools, looked at what their standardized test results were, shifted start time back to nine o'clock, and then looked at the standardized tests afterwards. Huge improvement in learning and performance. So it's amazing. The other sleep group that is very misunderstood is the elderly. We often hear people saying, oh, old people, they don't need as much sleep anymore. Now, that's not actually true. They actually need it more than anybody probably, because, especially these deep stages of sleep, this is when you're washing out the amyloid plaque out of the brain, which is a huge factor in Alzheimer's. This is the most restorative. It's the best for your immune system. And the problem is elderly people develop a problem with sleep generation. They have a hard time with the biological processes that create sleep. That doesn't mean they don't need it. If I looked at somebody who didn't have much money and said, oh, he doesn't need money just 'cause he doesn't have it, that's not a very good logical, well thought out conclusion. Maybe he just has a hard time finding a job or a hard time sticking to a work schedule. That doesn't mean he's not hungry. Or that's like looking at a starving guy like, oh, he doesn't need food. He's transcended that. No, that's not how it works. Just 'cause you can't do something doesn't mean it's not a good idea to be able to. So, those are two sleep groups that are very misunderstood. But of course, at all levels, if you're not getting between seven and nine hours of sleep, and good quality sleep, there is gonna be significant and measurable declines in your performance in so many areas, mental, physical, immune function, learning abilities, emotions. After you've not slept enough, how are you gonna be at handling a potentially confrontational or challenging emotional situation, compared to when you're well rested? We're in so many ways not the best versions of ourself if we've not slept enough. So your immune function is gonna go down long-term. That brings up cancer risk a big deal, right, because when you look at cancer, you're basically looking at how can the body control these cancer cells and make sure to get 'em out of there real quick as they start to pop up. It's when the immune system is not able to keep cancer cells at bay that it goes wild, and you get into all kinds of real serious problems. Also with Alzheimer's, all these degenerative diseases are at much higher levels of risk if you are not sleeping. And you gotta get these different sleep stages, as we mentioned. And also, when you're not sleeping, you're not, as I said, emotion processing. You're not taking information as well, you're not learning, and it goes beyond really what is just about you. Quality sleep is gonna make you a better version of you, but there's another kind of, I don't mean to get a little darker, but there's a darker side to sleep deprivation and drowsiness that is really important to keep in mind, and this is drowsy driving, huge, huge problem. And the crazy thing is, when you are sleep deprived and drowsy, when you're sleep deprived, you cannot judge clearly how sleep deprived you are and how much your performance has declined. You lose that ability. So it almost doubles up on how bad it is. It's like you're drunk, but you're so drunk, you can't tell how drunk you are, and so much so that if you have, and they've studied this by doing reaction time tests and also putting people in driving simulators. If you have either been up 19 hours, so that'd be like, okay, I got up at seven o'clock for work, and it's Friday night. Now I'm gonna stay out late and go out with friends, but I'm not gonna drink. I'm gonna be the designated driver. I'm safer, right? But I'm coming back at two or three in the morning. So if you've been up 19 hours or more, or you've only slept four hours the night before, your reaction time and driving abilities are equivalent to that of somebody who's at the legal limit of being drunk. Every 30 seconds, there is a driving accident caused in America by somebody who's drowsy. Drowsy driving, an accident every 30 seconds and causes more accidents than alcohol and drugs combined, which is just stunning. And they even tend to be worse accidents, and here's why. When you're drowsy driving and something goes wrong, right, it goes too far, you're either falling asleep, or you're doing what's called a microsleep, which is where you kind of semi fall asleep, just for a couple seconds, like your eyelids semi-close, but you lose really awareness of what's going on. So you're not having a delayed reaction of a drunk person. You're having no reaction. You're just plowing through whatever, and it's bad. So, this is something where not just you stand to benefit from you getting a good night sleep, but everybody, and I would almost go as far as to say if you're getting in an Uber or a Lyft, ask that driver, said, how many hours have you slept in the last 24 hours? 'Cause these guys are hard workers. I respect what they do, and they're trying to provide for their families. But so many of them work insane hours trying to make a living, honest living. But it's dangerous. You wouldn't get in a taxi who a guy who was at the limit of alcohol toxicity, right? And so, this is the same thing. So, what are we gonna do about all this? How are we gonna make sure that you get this epic night sleep, well rested, and get all these sleep cycles just right so you can enjoy all the performance benefits, all the cognitive benefits, of all this. So is it sleeping pills? What do you guys think? Lunesta, Ambien, is that gonna get us there?
- [Audience Members] No.
- No, and I just wanna tell you a little bit about why, 'cause this is something that so many people, it's massive in America, the amount of people who are taking sleeping pills every single night. The way that they work is they are simply sedating. They are just going directly into the cortex of the brain and acting as a pure sedative. They don't put you into a natural sleep, and you're not gonna get the natural sleep cycles. Not only that, but they're not working as good as most people think. And it's funny, because first, they only slightly outperform placebo in sleep latency, which is the amount of time it takes you to fall asleep. You can get better sleep latency over taking nothing at all, but a placebo gets you almost just as good of a benefit in terms of sleep latency and falling asleep as fast. Then during the night, people report via their subjective report afterwards that they slept well. However, when they actually put these people in sleep labs and hook electrodes up to their brains, it's not the case at all, totally different. They don't get the right sleep cycles, they have many more awakenings at night, and there's also side effects of doing things you don't remember, being too drowsy the next day, not having good information recall the next day. The problem is, they don't remember if they had poor sleep the night before 'cause they were basically unconscious, not sleeping well, but unconscious. So it doesn't actually get you these sleep cycles, and you're especially not getting deep sleep. And deep sleep, I also wanna explain there something that happens in your deep sleep that's real important is this transfer of information, short-term to long-term memory from the hippocampus to the cortex. This is so important, and also, what's happening there is pruning of information you took in during the day. Your brain, it's amazing, can actually, it goes through and makes a decision on, okay, what's important that we're gonna transfer to long-term, and what can we throw out? And they've studied this by telling people, okay, giving them a list of facts and saying, okay, here's the ones that are really important, and they're much more likely to remember those than the other ones. So you're pruning information, deciding, what am I gonna throw out and what am I gonna put into storage? Because obviously we take in so much information every day, if you try to transfer it all into long-term storage, it would be very difficult. You'd be going crazy. So you're not getting that information transfer, which is bad news. It's good now that so much more knowledge and awareness is spreading around this, and now doctors are much more inclined to recommend the new recommendation, which is called CBTI, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is actually outperforming many of these sleep drugs, which is great, that people are seeking out this alternative and it's available to them. They basically put you through a lot of the sleep practices that we're gonna talk about in a moment and sleep strategies, along with some other cognitive behavioral stuff, but it's so cool that for insomnia for patients, this is now out there. Now, another thing, getting a little bit more away from the artificial and more natural, another thing we like to rely on a lot is wine and cannabis. What do you guys think? Are these gonna do the trick when it comes to really good sleep? I know I don't wanna have to take these away from you. I feel like a jerk taking these away from you, 'cause I know you love 'em.
- [Audience Member] Together, or separate?
- Either way. They do kind of work in the same way, in a certain sense. So what happens here is that they are impairing your REM sleep. You're not getting this dream sleep, again, where we're doing emotional processing, dealing with traumas, cognitive processing, creative problem-solving. They are stopping you from getting enough of that. Similarly to the sleeping pills, they're allowing you to fall asleep faster, so improving sleep latency, that's what it's called. And you think, people subjectively think that they're getting a better night's sleep, but they're not realizing what happens when you actually put somebody in the sleep lab and look at them. You have less restful sleep and more awakenings during the night, and you're actually not getting as restful of a sleep. So those are not optimal. Now, interesting questions, what about CBD? That's everywhere these days, right, it's blowing up. Interestingly, so it's still kind of early days on the research of CBD and sleep. Sorry? You're not familiar with CBD? Oh, CBD is called cannabidiol. It's a non-psychoactive hemp/cannabis-derived substance that's a neuroprotective. It's a very good anti-inflammatory and helps with sleep actually, looking at the early stage research. And it doesn't appear to interfere with REM sleep and have the sedative effect in the way that THC does, which is great. So there's actually a tool there. So that's something. And let's talk about what others tools and strategies we can implement here. So, really, when it comes down to it, the idea sleep is something that you wanna start planning for at the beginning of the day. So, you get up at the beginning of the day, and within the first two hours, you wanna get as much light as possible. Ideally, the ultimate is if you can get like 20 to 30 minutes of bright sunlight. That sets your circadian rhythm. It tells your suprachiasmatic nucleus, okay, this is daytime. Don't be producing melatonin now. You've gotta wait, because remember, we were talking about the suprachiasmatic nucleus. It's what controls your melatonin production. Very sensitive to light. So you wanna get this great light in in the beginning of the day, and then in the morning, if you can do 20 or 30 minutes of light to moderate aerobic exercise, that will set you up really nicely, gets your blood moving, gets your heart going, tells your body, okay, this is the daytime. Time to be alive, time to be awake. We're trying to set the circadian rhythm really solidly. And then as you go, later in the day, you wanna make sure that if you're having caffeine, by two o'clock, absolute latest, you're cutting it off, 'cause remember, we said caffeine has a half life of five to seven hours and is gonna block what are called your adenosine receptors. Adenosine is a substance that is creating the sleep pressure that builds up in your brain. So you have this adenosine building up all day long, but you're blocking those receptors for the adenosine as you're having caffeine. But as soon as that caffeine's out of there, adenosine pours in. But if you've had so much caffeine late in the day, it hasn't cleared out yet, so there's nowhere for the adenosine to come in and give you that sleep pressure. Now, sleep pressure sucks if you're feeling it in the middle of the day, but you want this adenosine that makes sleep pressure in the evening, 'cause that's what's gonna put you to sleep. It's so much easier to fall asleep when you're actually tired compared to when you're totally awake. So we don't want this in the day. That's why we do so many of these things we're gonna talk about, like the exercising and getting the sunlight. But then you want this at night. So by the nighttime, you wanna have caffeine long gone so that those adenosine receptors are opened up and the adenosine can get right in there and put you to sleep. Now, also in the afternoon, some time between 12 and five is a great window to do your more intense exercise. So you do light aerobic stuff in the morning, and then afternoon is great for intense, so whether it's high intensity interval training, strength training, weightlifting, things like that, great to do in the afternoon. And then you want to make sure you're not eating dinner too late. Early dinner is good, because you don't wanna go to bed on a full stomach. There's a risk of indigestion happening, and it's gonna diminish the restfulness of your overall sleep if your body's having to devote a lot of energy to digesting. And it's interesting, because if you have slept well, this is another reason to really wanna get good sleep, if you sleep well, your metabolism becomes so much more regulated, 'cause you have these two hormones called leptin and ghrelin. And these are, they sound like little hobbit names. Leptin and ghrelin. And leptin is the hormone that makes you feel full. Ghrelin is the hormone that makes you feel hungry. They're kind of on the two sides there. You got the dark and the light side. So, leptin, when you have had a good amount of sleep, your leptin levels are great. You're not too hungry. When you got a bad amount of sleep, your leptin levels crash, and your ghrelin levels go up. So you are super hungry when you haven't slept enough, and you're gonna consume 300 to 400 more calories on average if you've slept less than six hours, and because your judgment also becomes worse when you haven't slept enough, you are, and they've shown this in studies. They've put out different food options for people who are sleep deprived and see what they actually go for compared to people who had eight hours of sleep. You have worse food, you make worse food decisions. You're more inclined to eat much sugarier, junkier food if you're sleep deprived. So that is a huge part of the weight control issue with sleep loss and sleep deprivation, as well as also in terms of diabetes. When you are sleep deprived, you're not able to as effectively clear out the glucose out of your blood. Your insulin is not working as well. So when you're sleep deprived, you're right on the path towards developing pre-diabetes and diabetes. So as you can see, there's not a single area of your health that better sleep will not improve. It does everything. It's better than the best multivitamin you'll ever encounter. So you wanna have this dinner not too late, and of course, you wanna minimize stress during the day. The less stressed you are, the easier it's gonna be to fall asleep. Come for a float, come for an infrared sauna. Do these things, do meditation and just create a life that's less stressful. But I know when you're stressed, the worst thing is hearing somebody say to you, you need to stress less. Is there anything that makes you more stressed than being stressed and somebody tells you, stop being so stressed? So I don't focus so much on telling people to stress less, but I like to give you tools on how to manage stress in terms of lifestyle practices, exercising, getting good sleep, supplements, which we'll get into in a second, and it's kind of like when you're doing things wrong, they make other things go bad. Like if you're stressed, you're not gonna sleep as well, and then you get even more stressed, 'cause you didn't sleep as well. It's just this horrible cycle. If you can jump in there with a couple tools and kind of start pushing things in the other direction and really turn that tide, you can develop more of a beneficial snowballing cycle of things. So you wanna have that dinner not too late, and then later, if you need to, you can have a small snack. One thing that's actually been shown in studies to be beneficial is having two kiwis at night within an hour of going to bed. Random, but it works. And it helps you actually maintain balanced blood glucose while you're sleeping. Kiwis nice 'cause they're minimally sugary, but they have a good amount of water in them, good amount of nutrients and fiber and things like that. And then, now let's look at what you're gonna do in terms of light. Remember, we talked about light being so important as something that's affecting the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is controlling melatonin production. Bright lights are not something that we evolved experiencing in the nighttime, right? Think back to our evolutionary cave-dwelling pasts. We had great bright sunlight during the day. That's why we wanna make sure we get that in the morning hours to signal your body, this is daytime. Then at nighttime, you are not under bright blue lights and streetlights and staring into computer screens. This is not something we evolved to deal with. So, this is really throwing you off. If you are on an iPad, they've shown this in a study, where, for an hour before going to sleep, reading on an iPad, your melatonin production will be pushed back three to four hours. So when you are exposed to bright blue light at night, it suppresses your melatonin production, because you're telling your body what? It's still...?
- [Audience Member] Daytime.
- Daytime, right? The sun's still shining. You better not produce that melatonin, 'cause I'm gonna fall asleep right here in the middle of the day. So, it's really problematic. Now, there are solutions. You can get blue-blocking glasses. You can get 'em in orange, or even a real hardcore way to do it is go for the red ones at night that block out all the blue light, really fantastic. It'll help you tremendously with your circadian rhythm. They also have now software for the computer, like you have f.lux, or the Macs have Night Shift on them, which is already built in, where it's scheduled, and your computer will start changing to more of an orange tone at night. And that's good, but it's not blocking all the blue light. Like if you're on your computer, there's still blue light coming out. So on f.lux, there is a setting you can go into called, go into Darkroom mode, and that will turn the whole thing into nothing but red and black. It's very weird looking, takes a little getting used to, but that's a great way just to do whatever business and emailing and article-reading you feel like you need to do at night and not be disrupting your circadian rhythm, or on your phone, I don't know how this works on Android, but on Apple, there is a way, naturally, they add the Night Shift mode now, which is good, but there is a way, you can go into the settings, and if you go onto Addictive Wellness, youtube.com/addictivewellness YouTube channel, we have a video tutorial there on how to do this. So you can check this out later. There is a way that you can set it up so that with just three taps of the home button, you can turn the phone into all red so it's safe to look at at night, which is huge, because technology is here to stay. I don't think I'm gonna have have much success if I had to tell you guys, stay off your devices for the last three hours before bed. Okay, but who's really gonna do it? So, I'm all about the functional tools to sort these things out, and that's a great way to do it. And why is red light okay at night? Evolutionary, think back, what kind of light did we evolve having at night?
- [Audience Member] Fire.
- Fire, there you go. So that red-orange temperature, that's acceptable. That doesn't throw us off. Interesting, if you are looking at light red, it doesn't interrupt your night vision. It doesn't dilate your pupils in the same way. So you can have, like if you need a nightlight in your house or something, 'cause remember, those are really bad for circadian rhythms, if you can get a red bulb in there, that's great, because you can still find the way to the bathroom and not kill yourself, 'cause dying is bad for like, everything. But you're not gonna be disrupting your sleep cycles, which is great. And this is also another reason why you want your bedroom to be completely dark, not have any light coming in. Have a sleep mask if you need to, but if you can get blackout curtains, it's really fantastic. And then temperature is also a big factor, right? The other thing that affects your suprachiasmatic nucleus is temperature. Your core temperature needs to drop three or four degrees for you to really get to sleep. This is amazing, and it's so natural because what changes do we experience naturally in the wild environment? Hot temperatures during the day, cold temperatures at night. It's the natural cycle of things. So when you're getting outside and exercising in the morning, getting up with a little bit of aerobic exercise in the sun, you're raising your core body temperature. It's daytime. Nighttime, you wanna cool off. So you wanna ideally have a cooler sleep environment. And so, the ideal temperature they found in studies is between 63 to 65 degrees. So you can imagine how the suprachiasmatic nucleus gets very confused when you're in a climate-controlled house that's 72 degrees all the time, 365 days a year. It's like, what's up, what's down, or what's day and what's night? It can't figure out what's going on, and combine that with the blue light at night. It's like, you are really confusing your poor body. It doesn't know what to think, right? So temperature control is really good. Now, you might think, well, then why does it make so much sense that I take a hot bath before going to bed and I fall asleep so easily, or I take a sauna, and afterwards, it's so easy to go to sleep? It's actually good to do those things, and here's why. If you're doing a hot shower, hot bath, or going in an infrared sauna for a little bit, it's fantastic, because all the blood you warm comes of the the surface of your skin. You get this vasodilation. You get all this circulation opening up. Then you go back out of this warm environment. Your blood still at the surface cools, 'cause it's much more exposed to the air at the surface rather than in your core around your organs, and cools your body faster. So anybody who's ever come out of a hot shower knows this. It's a whole lot colder than the air was when you went in. It seems like it, right? You're like, wait, you always think, it was not this cold when I got in the shower out here. It's freezing, right? 'Cause you've exposed your body, taken the cold, and so you can kind of ride that wave and allow it to cool you and fall asleep much more quickly and get those lower body temperatures. You don't wanna be shivering shaking cold at night, but you don't wanna overheat. Here in California, we notice it's much easier to sleep in the winter when it's cold than in the summer when it's like 95 degrees at 11 o'clock at night and you're just dying, no blankets and sweating all over the place. Miserable, right? It's much harder to sleep under those circumstances than on a cold winter night. You have no problems doing that, right? So, that's temperature and light. You really wanna make sure you control 'em. Now let's get into supplements. And of course, before I go there, relaxation during the day, floating is a great way to do it. Meditation in the evening is great, even meditating while you're going into sleep or doing a yoga nidra, something like we're doing here. Develop kind of a bedtime routine that involves getting rid of the blue light, that involves cooling down the temperature. Maybe you open the windows, let in some colder air in. Get this routine doing you ease into every night, and that gets your body used to, okay, this is what we do. It's the signs that sleep is coming. We're gonna start winding down. Now, going into supplements, one of my favorites is magnesium. Multiple ways you can take it. It's so great. It relaxes the body, relaxes the mind, calms the muscles. It helps your mitochondria, power plants of your cells, producing more ATP. What's ATP? This is your cells' pure energy. Why is that important for sleeping, in order for you to sleep? Well, actually, we talked a little bit earlier about the glymphatic system. It's what flushes your brain out at night. It's what comes in and does all the deep cleaning in your brain. That requires your mitochondria and this ATP to run. So the more ATP you have, the more efficiently you can wash out your brain or refreshed you're gonna be the next day. So magnesium helps with that, actually. Two of my favorite forms are magnesium glycinate, and this one is really nice because it absorbs very effectively, it doesn't cause a lot of the gastrointestinal disturbances that a lot of other magnesiums do, 'cause the last thing you wanna do is be waking up in the middle of the night having to run over to the bathroom. That is gonna disrupt your core circadian rhythm, I'll tell you what. And so, this one's really great. And then my other favorite one is a new form called magnesium l-threonate. This was actually just developed by scientists a couple years ago. It's magnesium bound to an amino acid called threonine. And the way that it works is it actually very effectively crosses your blood-brain barrier, things some other magnesium supplements don't do really at all. So you're actually raising your brain levels of magnesium. So it's very relaxing to the brain, a good for the nervous system and actually shown to reverse aging in the brain, which is spectacular. We could all use a bit of that, right? So magnesium l-threonate is the other one that's so good.
- [Audience Member] Can you spell that?
- Yeah, so magnesium, you've got it, right? And then L as in lady, dash, T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E. And by the way, we're gonna put a view of this on YouTube later with full subtitles, so if there's spelling of anything now or later or whatever, you can always check the subtitles later. Of course you can ask me now. That's really cool too. But if you miss anything, it'll be there for you later. So that's magnesium. Then also another one is l-theanine. This is an extract from green tea. It's not the stimulating caffeine part of green tea. It's the calming part. That's the cool thing about green tea. It's almost this aware calmness. But you can just take the calming part of this, l-theanine, which is very calming for the whole body, for the whole nervous system, really helps with sleep. And then I love herbs. This is where my hugest passion is at, is traditional herbal systems of indigenous cultures, especially Ayurvedic and traditional Taoist herbal systems. So I'm gonna get a little bit excited here. I'll try to keep it under control. So, my absolute favorite is reishi mushroom. This is actually the most well-studied herb in the world, shown to be very effective at improving sleep quality and quantity. You end up sleeping longer when you're taking reishi mushroom, very calming. It's not a sedative. You can take it during the day, and it'll help with stress and anxiety. It just gives you an amazing feeling of inner peace. It also does a whole host of other things in terms of the immune system and anti-inflammatory, lowering histamine, so many things, but our interest for now is how it's affecting sleep, and it's so calming. I remember the first time I ever had this. I was like, 19, 20 years old. I was going into a yoga class, and I thought I was taking something else, and I grabbed the wrong bottle. It was a new bottle, and I realized what it was shortly after taking it, and as soon as the reishi hit my tongue, it was in a tincture bottle, and as soon as it hit my tongue, this wave of calm came over my body, and almost all my muscles lengthened. I was standing next to a wall, and I kind of crashed over into the wall very gently. My mind went quiet, stopped thinking, and I could just feel my heart blossoming. It was incredible. And I walked into that yoga class like, wow. Feeling really good, and I was a little early, and I rolled out my mat. When I stood at the front, it was just like, oh, wow. This is nice, this is nice. This is real good. And it was amazing. So it's very beneficial for sleep and for anxiety and for so many of the challenges we deal with in the modern age. Also great liver support as well. And also some other Chinese herbs that are very nice, pearl powder is another one, very calming, very stabilizing, and then there's a formulation called Ginseng and Zizyphus, Z-I-Z-Y-P-H-U-S, and this is great for insomnia, really helps with insomnia and having restful, peaceful sleep. So that's a really nice one to consider. And then we can jump over into the Ayurvedic world, and some of my favorites there are ashwagandha, which is good for so many things, right? Supporting the thyroid, supporting overall hormone health, decreasing stress. Just about any body function you have going on, ashwagandha is like, there's a good chance it's gonna help you out. It's so good for balancing stress and anxiety, but at the time, it improves energy and endurance. So you can have it during the day, you can have it during the night. It's adaptogenic. It's one of the greatest adaptogens in the world, and it's so good for bringing your body into a calm, balanced, stress-free state for sleep. The other one we love to pull from Ayurveda is holy basil. This is a fantastic one for calm, for stress reduction. It just really, really chills you out, and you can experiment with these different ones. I always say no herb is perfect for everyone, so if you try one herb and it doesn't work for you, you don't need to keep forcing it and pushing it. Try and incorporate some other ones. There's lots of great options out there. Give the herb a fair chance. Give it two weeks, four weeks, something like that to start feeling something, 'cause the way these herbs work, there's kind of an immediate feeling and benefit, and then there's the long-term cumulative, building effect as it starts to really effect some changes in your body. So just kind of quick summary. When you wanna create an epic night's sleep, always be thinking about two different things that are gonna make you sleep. You have sleep pressure, which is where you want the adenosine to build up through the day and eventually make you go to sleep at night. You don't want the caffeine blocking that adenosine, and then you wanna have your circadian rhythm just right. So you wanna make that melatonin at night and not any other time. You wanna make sure you make it at night and then you're not just starting to make it at one in the morning when you've been rolling around for three hours saying, what's going on? Then you wanna get that exercise early, get more intense exercise later. Make sure you get the sun early in the day. Early dinner, don't eat too late, and then get some of these great supplements and herbs in your body that are gonna really help with the stress, help with anxiety, and incorporate other strategic techniques like infrared sauna or a hot bath or hot shower to relax you at night, and then allow your body to cool off and ride that temperature-lowering wave into a great night's sleep. And I think this is just such a wonderful thing you can do for yourself and all those around you, because the benefits of sleep, as I said, it benefits everything. There is no area of your health that is not gonna benefit from getting better sleep, whether it's your brain health, your cognitive health, your memory, your ability to creative problem solve. That's something that you really get from the REM sleep, from the dream sleep, is the creative problem-solving. Your emotional intelligence, your ability to prevent long-term disease and maintain immune health, all of this. Sleep is the greatest biohack, the great performance-enhancing substance you're ever gonna come across. So I wish you guys a wonderful night's sleep, and thank you. Do we have time for Q&A? How are we time-wise?
- [Hostess] Yeah, we have a few minutes for Q&A, and then we'll transition into our yoga nidra practice. But yeah, we have some time.
- Awesome, for anybody who, if we get cut short on Q&A, we do, on our Instagram page, which is @addictivewellness, we do it almost every day, I do about 25 minutes of Q&A stories on there in our Instagram stories, so you can always come check us out over there later if questions come up tomorrow, like something pops into your head like, what was that thing he mentioned, or what did he mean by this, or what about this here? Send us your question through the Instagram stories question box, and we'll continue to have fun endlessly on there. Go ahead.
- [Audience Member] I know you talked about the teenagers and the elderly, people that have sleep issues. What about parents of small children.
- Yeah.
- [Audience Member] Or toddlers who wake up in the middle of the night.
- Yeah.
- [Audience Member] That's my issue.
- I hear you.
- [Audience Member] And even if my child goes back to sleep, I'm still up for three hours afterwards.
- Right, so a couple of things. First and foremost, you wanna make sure the sleep you do get is of optimal quality, so you wanna implement all these, we call 'em sleep hygiene practices, in terms of eating and light and temperature so that you're not just stuck in a light sleep all the time. You're actually getting these deeper sleep cycles and more restorative, physically restorative and emotionally, mentally restorative cycles. Of course your sleep is not gonna end up being perfect. Are you turning on lights at night when you're getting up?
- [Audience Member] I do all this, I've been doing this for so long. I do all those good swaps.
- Oh, you're doing it all?
- [Audience Member] I got Spidey night vision. I don't do the lights.
- Oh, that's right, okay. I was hoping you would say you had a red light to turn on at night.
- [Audience Member] No, I just walk.
- You know where you're going. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, wonderful. You know, for kids, it can be great to do things like taking a magnesium bath or using topical magnesium like they have here to improve their relaxation and their sleep. That can be helpful as well. If they're sleeping better, you're gonna be sleeping better.
- [Audience Member] Both of us go to sleep well; it's the waking up at whatever time.
- Right, right. Well, the magnesium, it tends to relax you more throughout the entire night. So look, every situation's a little bit different, but it may give a better chance of staying asleep and sleeping through. And yeah, it's tricky. I wish I had a perfect solution. The only thing that I've got really is maximize the sleep you are getting, and try to experiment with different things in terms of maybe herbs you can take or you taking magnesium at night and things like this that don't keep you up for that window of time, or maybe some yoga nidra or meditation practices or binaural beats or things like this that you can listen to that will speed up that time of you falling back asleep, because as you said, it's rough to be caught back awake and have no idea how to sleep, yeah.
- [Audience Member] So my question's very similar, going back to sleep with no kids, but love to wake up in the middle of the night for some reason. So magnesium, and meditation are your two recommendations for going back to sleep?
- At the time. Yeah, reishi mushroom is a really nice one too.
- [Audience Member] And that's something you can take in the middle of the night?
- You could. You could have.
- [Audience Member] One by your bedside table?
- Pre-mix a little drink by your bedside table. You could have a tincture bottle, you know, various ways to go about it. If you can hold it in your mouth for 30 to 60 seconds and get that absorption through the mucosa membrane so it gets right in your system, it's gonna have the most immediate effect that way, rather than swallowing capsules. It's gonna take a while, which is not what you want in your case, right? So that's really nice as well, and then if you can avoid temptation to look at your phone and start checking texts and emails and Instagram and all these things, 'cause I know it's tempting in the middle of the night, but do something at least, right, instead of just lie there awake. And if you are not sleeping, and you're just lying in bed for a long time, it's actually shown to be beneficial, this is interesting, it's almost counterintuitive, but to get out of bed and go do other calm activities like read or whatever you can find to do that's not gonna hype you up too much until you feel tired again, and then go to sleep, because they've found that if you keep your bed psychologically as a place for only sleeping and not being awake, it breaks it off in your brain as like, okay, when I'm here, I sleep. When I'm awake, I go somewhere else. So you're more likely to be able to continue to sleep that way.
- [Audience Member] Having at times, I guess I have back and forth schedule, I try to get a nap in when I can, which is kind of like a child myself.
- No, no, no, naps are very positive.
- [Audience Member] Yeah. What would be, I guess, an optimal nap?
- Yeah, okay, absolutely, absolutely. So, a couple things. Don't feel bad about taking naps, naps are great. It's actually the more natural way to sleep when you look at ancestral cultures, and the way also that our blood sugar and awareness fluctuates during the day, it is perfectly normal to have a siesta, because your awareness will always, no matter what you're doing, no matter food-wise, it's not just, oh, I ate too big of a lunch or too many carbs. Even when you're fasting, energy levels dip in that early afternoon time window. So it's actually probably a more natural sleep cycle to do six to seven hours at night and maybe half an hour to an hour afternoon. If you have a lifestyle and job and stuff that make that work, fantastic. How to maximize it? Get somewhere dark. You wanna basically mimic that it's nighttime. Get somewhere dark, somewhere quiet. Don't feel bad about it. And then you wanna make sure you don't do it after three p.m., though, because then it's gonna be harder for you to fall asleep at night, because you may have cleared out too much of the adenosine out of your system, so you won't have enough sleep pressure at night to keep you sleeping. That's something to be aware of. If you've left it too long in the day, it's better to push through, but if you can get it at like one or two, it's great.
- So, how does it affect sleep when you wake up at the middle of the night to go to the bathroom? Let's say you have a glass of water, and it's like three a.m..
- Right, so that's where hours before going to bed, you really wanna stop drinking water. You wanna make sure you're hydrated well throughout the day so you don't have to drink before going to bed, because, of course, it's gonna be a major interruption to your sleep if you have to wake up and go to the bathroom. It's not the end of the world. It's better than lying there and being miserable. But it's sub-optimal. So if you can look at when you're drinking your water in the evening and push that back earlier and earlier to really kind of calm down your system enough to go to the bathroom before going to bed, that's gonna be a lot better. Make sure you're not taking any diuretic supplements in the evening that could cause you to be having to go to the bathroom, 'cause that is also gonna be problematic, and then light-wise, if you have a nightlight, as I said, make sure it's a red one, or just don't have any lights at all. Hopefully you can find a way.
- [Audience Member] Did you talk about, I know some people say they they don't know the number on it, but what the optimal amount of deep and REM sleep is or what percentage?
- It's about, so, ultimately, the ideal would be about 25% of your total sleep for each of those, and then the rest. So REM 25%, deep non-REM 25%, and then you get about 50%, which is light NREM. So with non-REM, you have stage one, two, three, and four. One and two are lighter, three and four are deeper. So about half your sleep is gonna be stages one and two, and then about 25% is gonna be deep.
- [Audience Member] Okay, so it's getting about 25% of both of those.
- Right, right. So that something really good to aim for. Also something good to look at, this is one I look at, your restfulness and sleep efficiency is what they call it, where, of the time you spend in bed, how much time is spent awake versus asleep, and you ideally wanna get about 90%.
- [Audience Member] So you had mentioned working out early in the morning and somewhere between 12 and five, and so, do you discourage those who like to work out around eight?
- It's sub-optimal. If it's a question of working out at eight or not working out at all ever, working out at eight is better, 'cause there's always the other benefits to working out, apart from just sleep-related things. But it is gonna rev up a lot of aspects of your biology a little bit too much for the winding down process that should really be starting around then.
- [Audience Member] Yeah, 'cause I've seen that, where some nights I'll work out, and I'm done, like completely just crashing, and other nights, like last night, I was like, just kind of walking around.
- Fired up, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, what happens in the studies is that doing intense exercise is great for your sleep, but not if you do it too late. Then it actually decreases your quality of sleep. Was there somebody over there? Oh, perfect, awesome.
- [Audience Member] I have one over here.
- Oh, one second sorry. You're next. Go ahead.
- [Audience Member] So you mentioned sleep paralysis.
- Yeah.
- [Audience Member] So what can someone do to not experience sleep paralysis?
- Okay, you asked the right person, 'cause I've dealt with so much of it. I remember I first had it when I was 16, just like freaked the crap out of me, and then I'd kind of gotten used to it. But okay, so a couple things. Keeping a steady sleep schedule, so important. If you're sleeping at random hours, and this is good for overall sleep health, is if you can maintain a regular time as much as possible of when you go to sleep and when you wake up, fantastic for developing good sleep cycles, especially for sleep paralysis. Other things, don't get too exhausted. It's much more likely to happen if you're exhausted. And then, if you sleep with a partner, one thing I found with my girlfriend, this has been an absolute godsend, is that I can control my breathing. I can't talk, but I can control my breathing and kind of blinking, right, when you're in it, and I just start breathing really loud and she knows to shake me and wake me up. It's an absolute miracle. So, that's usually helpful. But then the other thing that really took it to almost not happening at all anymore for me was neurofeedback. This is where you go in, you get electrodes hooked up to your head, and you're watching a screen, and it's measuring different brainwave patterns, and through feedback that you're getting through the screen, it's able to encourage you to have certain beneficial brainwave patterns and discourage the dysfunctional brainwave patterns. And that, for me, pretty much wiped out my sleep paralysis.
- [Audience Member] Gotcha, wow.
- [Hostess] I think we have time for one more question.
- Okay, one more, and then the rest we'll do tomorrow morning on Instagram.
- [Hostess] Yeah, they're actually really great. I highly recommend check Sage out, @addictivewellness, and he's always answering these amazing questions, and it's just this epic download of getting this really good information on a daily basis.
- Okay, last one, go for it.
- [Audience Member] So sometimes, REM sleep can run into, in the sense that you go so far into it, nightmares and night terrors in there. So do you have any tips for when that happens? My first instinct is to wake up, turn on the lights, shake it off. Is that good? Is there something better I could be doing?
- Yeah. Shake it off, cool, absolutely shake it off. Get yourself out of that state, and I'm lining up the things I wanna say because there's so many, because I've dealt with this as well. So, don't turn on the lights. That's bad news. That's really gonna throw off your melatonin activities and decrease quality of sleep going later into the night. Managing stress during the day can be very impactful for this, and night terrors come from a variety of things. In some cases, most all cases, as an adult, it's likely that it's some PTSD-related thing, whether or not you remember the trauma or not. Traumas are different for different people, and it could be some random thing that happened when you were a kid that you don't even remember, but just locked into your subconscious and something doesn't feel quite right. That's another one where I've found massive, massive benefit from neurofeedback. Hugely, hugely impactful, and I tried lots of stuff. Like all these herbs, all these supplements, all these sleep hygiene practices didn't touch really violent dreams that I was having. Neurofeedback, in five sessions, I was seeing lots of benefit. 10 sessions, they were pretty much gone, and I did a few more sessions after that to make sure they stayed away. But basically, it's training your brainwaves to not go into this loop.
- [Audience Member] The dark place.
- The scary dark place where it just spirals out of control. Different people get better from different things, and maybe yours will respond to the relaxing effects of being in a float tank or an infrared sauna, or taking reishi mushroom or different things. It's different for different people.
- [Audience Member] Yeah, I do that.
- Neurofeedback, look, it's a little bit of an investment to do it. You gotta do at least 10 sessions to cover some ground and get somewhere with it, but it is beyond powerful.
- [Audience Member] Awesome. I never knew that existed, so thank you.
- Oh, fabulous, wonderful. Glad we got something new in there. Okay, great, thank you so much, guys.