Moment 168: STOP Doing THIS! It's Hurting Your Sleep!: The Fitness Scientist

0:02What is a circadian rhythm? As if you're explaining it to a 10-year-old. Yeah. So it's basically physical, mental, and behavioral changes that happen over a 24-hour cycle. Okay. So here's my read on it, and correct me if I'm wrong. There's a clock in my head. Yes. The suprachiasmatic nucleus is the master clock. Okay, which is somewhere in my body. It's in the hypothalamus. So it's in my brain. And this clock regulates every cell in my body. Cell, tissue, organ. Okay. And it releases, it controls the release of a chemical, which makes those cells, organs, every part of my body do stuff. Yeah. So it is your hypothalamus.

0:55So the suprachiasmatic nucleus, it responds to light and it responds to darkness. Okay. Okay. So that's like the most pronounced entrainment cue for this master clock. And it then tells, it sends signals to every cell tissue in your body as to what it needs to be doing in the presence of light, in the presence of darkness. And when we are viewing light at a phase of the natural light-dark cycle, that is, if I am awake when I should be sleeping or I am sleeping when I should be awake, when my body anticipates that, it causes huge amounts of stress in the system. If we do this once or twice, not a big deal.

1:37But if we're doing this chronically, okay, it has massive health consequences, you know, cancer, metabolic disease, you know, cardiovascular disease, 100 % of mental health issues, there will be some level of circadian disruption. Okay, so when this light information comes in and tells these clocks what to do, if I am going outside of my natural biological preferences, that is circadian disruption. And if you think about how many folks are walking around circadian disruption, it is mind-blowing. I mean, basically the kind of the definition that's been thrown out there is if you are awake from the hours of 10 p.m.

2:32to 4 a.m., if you're awake for two hours between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. for two days per week for 25 days of the year, you qualify as a kind of card-carrying shift worker. and you likely have significant circadian disruption. Which means that I have... You are at risk for some of the... And it's not going to happen tomorrow, but if you continue on that pattern that I just described, you are putting yourself at increased risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction. You can have trouble having children. It impacts fertility, mental health, psychiatric disorders. There's a disease or disorder that circadian disruption doesn't touch.

3:24So a way of thinking about this, so that I and everyone else can understand, is there's this master clock in our hypothalamus. Look at me. Hypothalamus. And this master clock regulates all of the other clocks throughout our entire body. And there's millions of them, basically. Yes. And the thing that the master clock is using as a signal, the clock in our brain, is light and darkness. That's its most reliable. That's the strongest, yes. That's the signal it cares about, it listens to the most. But there's other signals as well. And if that master clock, so if I'm up at 4 a.m. and I'm looking at a light at 4 a.m., that master clock is going to start firing off chemicals to all the other clocks.

4:05And then all the clocks are going to be out of sync because then when I wake up, it's light. You're confusing. I'm confusing my body and it's firing off in all kinds of different ways. So I need to form an alignment, which means basically sleeping at the right time, exposing myself to darkness at the right time, et cetera, et cetera. Your body loves regularity. And that's, and the problem is modernity is not set up for that. You know, we have access, you know, I think all the circadian research, unfortunately was done after the advent of electricity. So, so we're kind of fighting, you know, this access to constant light.

4:43And, you know, we're starting to see the, I think, deleterious effects or the negative consequences of exposure to light really after the sun goes down. We haven't adapted to blue light after dark, right? After the sun goes down, we have not adapted to blue light. Blue light being the light we get from screens. Yes. There is a study that looked at the timing of light and its impact on mood and brain circuits. And they saw that if you're viewing light between the hours of, again, this is kind of this magic window of time, 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., it actually has a pro-depressive effect. So it impacts your dopamine system, reward, motivation, right?

5:27So when we wonder, you know, oh, what is this mental health crisis? I mean, we have to look at light first. And I just don't know. And I think what's hard about the discussion and hard about this behavior is that, you know, it's really hard for people to not engage with their phones, you know, before bed. It has its own addictive properties, right? But we just have to understand that our relationship to light will directly influence the trajectory of our health. There's just no question about that. Sleep. Yeah. So conventional wisdom says it's all about how many hours you spend sleeping. We already, this has already been shown to be not true.

6:16Sleep duration is important, right? And we can put a pin in that. But sleep regularity predicts all cause mortality. And this is just recently published, actually, not by my team. But looking at, it was actually UK biobank, 60 ,000 people, 10 million sleeps, objective measure of sleep. And they found that sleep regularity predicted mortality and independent of sleep duration. So it's not to say that sleep duration doesn't matter, but that is absolutely incomplete advice. How much time you spend in bed doesn't necessarily predict how long you live. it is the degree to which you stabilize when you go to bed when you wake up that predicts mortality what's going on inside of the body when we increase the variability or that we don't have a regular sleep and a regular wake-up time what's actually going on from like a chemical physiological perspective yeah so one of the things that's suppressed is melatonin and circulating reductions in circulating melatonin have been shown to be linked to every disorder and disease in the body.

7:31Every disorder and disease in the body. When we have suppressed or reduced circulating melatonin, that is going to impact us on every level and make us more vulnerable to disease and disorders. So that is probably one of the most important thing. When we have super unstable sleep-wake time, we are going to have suppressed melatonin production, which leads to inflammation in the body. It's melatonin, I think, is one of the big players in the story. Growth hormones. Yes, yes. And typically, you know, if you're not going to sleep, if you're going to sleep late, you will not release human growth hormone as you'll get less of a bolus of release.

8:17And why does that matter? That's when all the physical restoration happens. So all the regeneration physically. So for bypassing that, That were basically all the work that we did in the gym or, you know, everything that we did during the day. We're just not going to recover from that in the same way that we would if we were getting that sleep. On that point of light, there's a school of thought that says you should look at lights when you wake up in the morning. My partner always gets up in the morning, walks out into the balcony and sits out there for 10 or 20 minutes in the morning. Oh my gosh, I love that.

8:45Yes, I love to hear that. Yeah, she's the best. It's so annoying. She gets everything right. I love it. Yeah, but for sure that you want to get light within, you know, 100 ,000 lux is pretty much what you want to get within, you know, five to 20 minutes of waking up to tell your body like it's time to go. 100 ,000 lux? Oh, lux. So just like photon energy. So pretty much if you're outside for five to 20 minutes, it sounds like your girlfriend is like nailing this protocol. you'll get all of the photon energy that you need to tell your system that it is time to be awake. Can't you just go look into a lamp or something?

9:24It will just take longer because it doesn't have the same light intensity. But if you're waking up, you know, prior to when the sun gets up, yeah, turn all the lights. You know, you want to try to mimic day as much as possible. And then once the sun does come up, it's good to get outside. And before you get in bed, you referenced that you read books versus being on an iPad or screens, et cetera. does the same philosophy and principle apply to light exposure before sleep as to food exposure before sleep oh no question right absolutely um we want to try to restrict light basically after the sun goes down we want to dim our home environment to the degree that we can um we want to try to minimize all artificial light in the lead up to bed all artificial light Yes.

10:11Yeah. You want to make it as dim as possible. So, you know, there are a lot of night, like blue light blocking glasses, the filters that you can put on your iPad and your phone, activate all of those. But again, like we don't, we want to protect our melatonin release, right? And for all the reasons I kind of have explained, when we don't have it is linked to every disease and disorder, right? So we know this. So we want to protect our melatonin release. And the only way we can release melatonin is by darkness. We need to be exposed to darkness in order for that master clock in our brain to know that it's time to go to sleep.

10:49And again, be able to tell our body, our tissues and organs and cells and our inner body what it needs to do at that moment. There's a huge group of people who listen to podcasts like this. And as they listen to these podcasts, they just feel more depressed about their situation. You know, because they believe they're trying their very best. And they're still struggling, especially as it relates to sleep. And I think I've always wondered what the message one can send to them. And also, you know, I think there is a huge component of sort of personal responsibility and choice that you speak about as well.

11:23And that I believe in as well. but what is the most compelling message for those people that do have a choice they know deep inside much of it is a lack of discipline they know they could not watch youtube they know they could put their phone away at 9 p.m they know they could not eat the cookie super late at night they know they could deep down they know they could make a different set of choices but they listen to these podcasts over and over again whenever i have the health experts on and maybe they even take notes but they just don't do it. What is the most compelling thing you can say to those people that do have a choice but continually choose a bad option to get them pushed over the fence to the positive circadian rhythm, body clock loving side?

12:11Yeah, so if people are trying to develop new habits, you have to understand how that new habit links to your values. So the things that you believe in, the things that you say you care about, right? If I know growth and impact are my two most important values, presence is another one, what do I need to do every single day to back into that so I can align my behaviors with the things I say I care about? And I think when folks are struggling, they don't really know who they want to be in the world. And they don't maybe understand exactly what it is that they value. They're fuzzy about their desires, about their values.

12:56And I think you end up, when you're fuzzy about your desires and things you value, you end up you're flinging yourself in all sorts of directions, emotionally, physically, mentally. right and and i think that's kind of the project is figure out what you care about and then align your behaviors and create outlets in your life and that frankly might mean getting rid of people you know who don't support those values and and i think we're way too lenient on our circle of friends. And in the sense of, you know, I think we keep people around in our life who don't necessarily help us become a better version of ourselves.