These 4 Daily Sleep Habits Can Lengthen Your Life | Shawn Stevenson EP 321

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1:12What are the five main benefits that you get if you get deep REM sleep for seven, eight hours a night consistently, no interruptions, no light exposure, all the things you talked about in your other book, Sleep Smarter, what are the five main benefits that come from that versus interrupted sleep, four hours of sleep, staying up late with the phone, having coffee late at night, all that stuff. I always like to connect to something visceral. In people, we care about how we look. Nobody's waking up like, I want to look so old today. I want to get my George Burns on. I want to be as old as possible.

1:45Or I want to feel bad today about the way that I look. They're not waking up like, I just want to look terrible and feel terrible today. In my clinical practice, I never met one person. And people might argue these things. I never met anybody who wants to be unhealthy. Every single person wants to be healthy. Now, with that said, this is where sleep really comes into the fray. Because over the years, me being a nutritionist, I really, I thought that food was everything. You know, because it was for me. It was my bridge. But there's many paths to the goal. When you're sleeping, it is the most powerful anabolic state that you can be in.

2:19You're just teeming with what we call these, quote, anti-aging hormones. You know, the release of human growth hormone, for example, that really it's also known as the youth hormone. Yeah. You know, and also in that lane of body composition and overall health and fitness, researchers at the University of Chicago did a very simple study. They brought folks in and they wanted to see what would happen with their weight loss. They put them on a calorie-restricted diet, and they wanted to see what would happen with weight loss when they were well-rested versus when they're sleep-deprived. And so they put them under both conditions.

2:46They allow folks to get eight and a half hours of sleep in one phase of the study, and they tracked all their metrics, their weight loss, et cetera. And then they sleep-deprived them for the other phase. So they just get eight and a half hours. Now they're getting five and a half hours. Tracked all their metrics. Same group. Same group on the same exact calorie-restricted diet. Same calories. Yeah, everything. But when they were sleep deprived, when they were getting enough sleep, they lost 55 % more body fat just by sleeping more. That's crazy. They actually did biopsies. So they actually took fat cells to see what would happen with their fat cells under the different conditions.

3:20And what they came to the conclusion was that your fat cells actually need sleep too. When they weren't adequately rested, their fat cells actually became more insulin resistant, which should become like, that should put up a huge red flag. because insulin resistance is one of the classic signs is carrying more belly fat. So the fat cells themselves, looking at them versus when you're well-rested versus when you're sleep-deprived, your fat cells themselves become insulin-resistant. And it's just going to lead to downstream problems with your liver, lipogenesis, the creation of new fat. The list goes on and on.

3:51Number two, the cognitive performance. I love this study. This was published in The Lancet. They took physicians and had them complete a task and tracked all their numbers. And they sleep deprived them for 24 hours, which is not abnormal in the field of medicine and had them to complete the same task, which is a simulation of different like surgical type of simulation. They made 20 percent more mistakes doing the exact same thing. And it took them 14 percent longer to do the exact same thing. All right. So and this is a big problem in our culture. Again, we mistake being busy for being effective.

4:21Number three, it parallels with cognitive performance is the health of our brain. And so researchers at UC Berkeley did brain imaging scans. And we talked about this before, but they actually looked at the sleep deprived brain, just again, 24 hours of sleep deprivation. And the part of the brain that's associated with executive function, right? So decision making, distinguishing between right and wrong, social control. So the prefrontal cortex, the more human part of our brain, that part of the brain goes cold. The activity of that part of the brain just literally as we're more and more tired just shuts down.

4:50With the lack of sleep. with the lack of sleep, coupled with more activity in the amygdala, which is very much more primitive, driven by emotion, very much concerned with survival of self. And so that part of the brain just lights up like a Christmas tree. These changes happen in the brain very quickly. And that leads into being able to manage our emotions, being able to manage our decisions. And then we'll go to number four, it's going to lean into this as well with brain function. during sleep is when your glymphatic system, which is the brain's waste management system. Cleansing it all out.

5:21It's 10 times more active when you're sleeping than when you're awake. Your brain is doing literally trillions of activities every second. And there's a lot of metabolic waste that takes place. And you have to have this cleansing system, this cleaning system, or you're going to have a buildup of things like amyloid beta plaque, for example, which that is strongly, strongly correlated with Alzheimer's disease. It's an inability of the brain to clean itself. But we're wondering again, why are these issues going up? Why is brain inflammation going up? These are the things. Are we getting enough sleep for the processes that normally just naturally want to happen?

5:56They do it on their own. Are we getting that? And number five, and one of the fun things I talked about in my first book, Sleep Smarter, was research that was done on basketball players, collegiate basketball players at Stanford. And they found that simply by increasing the amount of sleep that they were getting, not training more, not doing anything else differently. This shaved a full second off of their sprint time just by increasing their sleep. They improved, significantly improved their free throw shooting and their three point shooting just by getting more sleep. And these are things that we just kind of know that, but at the same time, are we utilizing it?

6:32So some of the greatest athletes in the world right now, sleep is a part of their training. LeBron James, it's a part of his training. Usain Bolt, same thing. It's a part of his training. Serena Williams, The list goes on and on and on.

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7:59Thank you.