Dr. Rhonda Patrick: The Hidden Dangers of Sleep Debt & How to Fight Back | EP 833

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11So all of our repair processes are happening when we're sleeping, whether that's repairing damage to our DNA to prevent us from getting cancer-causing mutations, so they're oncogenic mutations, whether we're repairing our brain, so we're cleaning out a lot of gunk that builds up in our brain throughout the day. These are things that are like little, you know, pieces of protein fragments and aggregates and you know and so when we sleep it's like we clean that all out it's a process called the glymphatic system that gets activated and it literally squirts this lymphatic fluid throughout our brain kind of like a like a wash like a cleansing and it physically forces it out through the lymphatic system and it's very important for preventing the buildup of protein aggregates like amyloid beta which is involved in alzheimer's disease and it's why sleep is so inherently connected to neurodegenerative disease because it is a repair time, right?

1:08Lots of things going on with the brain, but also your metabolism and blood pressure. Your blood pressure resets. Everything's resetting during sleep. Digestion shuts down so that you can do all this repair stuff. So if you think about like your body as a kind of like a phone, So your body is a phone and if you don't recharge your phone at night, right? It dies. It dies. It's not going to run properly. It's going to eventually die and you won't be able to use it. So it's kind of like the same thing. You have to recharge your battery when you're sleeping and that's kind of what you do. And that includes everything from brain function to immune cell function, your immune system is also replenished, to metabolism.

1:53and this is something that I don't think a lot of people think of. Most people when they think of being sleep deprived they think of brain fog. I'm like I'm not functioning properly. I'm not thinking like you know my sharpest but I don't know that most people are thinking of type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and this is something I know I certainly wasn't thinking about it until I became a new mother and was wearing a continuous glucose monitor so that's something that you can attach to either your arm or I put it on my abdominal area and it continually measures your blood glucose levels. And of course, when you become a new parent, you're sleep deprived.

2:34You're not sleeping. Yeah, especially a mother when you're waking up nursing your child three times a night. I mean, you're getting very fragmented sleep. And I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor and it was very eye-opening what was happening to my blood glucose regulation. I mean, it was completely shot. What was happening? So my levels were looking like pre-diabetic and this is like I was still eating healthy, right? I was eating my healthy foods, my vegetables and my salmon and blueberries. Yeah, I wasn't as physically active as my usual because, you know, especially, you know, the first month after having a baby.

3:11But I'll get to some good news in a minute. But that was, you know, to me, it was just like it was so crazy to see like my fasting blood glucose levels so incredibly high without changing my diet, really. And, you know, I was still sort of physically active. I was going for walks, like, but I wasn't doing my usual like a run. I eventually started doing HIIT. But so the point here is that actually even just getting one to three hours less sleep per night for three nights in a row. I mean, think how common is it to get one hour less of sleep a night for three nights in a row? So common. So common.

3:51It happens to me all the time. All the time. And there's been studies that have looked at, well, what does happen to normal, quote unquote, healthy people that haven't been diagnosed with any sort of metabolic disease? What happens is after three nights of getting one to three hours less sleep per night is that their body isn't disposing of glucose properly, so their blood glucose levels stay elevated. On top of that, insulin, they're not making enough insulin to lower the blood glucose levels, and so you get this double whammy, almost looking like insulin resistant or pre-diabetic if you were to just look at the hard numbers.

4:27And again, this is just from not getting enough sleep for three nights in a row. And it's not even like full-on sleep restriction where you're taking away four or five hours of their sleep. It's just one to three hours less. And so it really has profound effects on metabolism. And this sort of accumulates. So there's a cumulative effect. It's called sleep debt, right? So when you're getting less and less sleep each night, it's like you build up this sleep debt. Can you pay off the sleep debt ever? So the good news is, is that believe it or not, at least with respect to the metabolic effects and also the cognitive effects, is that exercise can help negate a lot of that.

5:11And that's what I also learned with my own personal experience.

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6:11Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.