Fix Your Feet, Improve Your Sleep, & Transform Your Health

26:07Shawn Stevenson:Awesome. Well, I grew up as an athlete, but I had a bunch of health issues. And I was that kid, you know, I was the fastest kid in my school. And, you know. No, I don't know. You said you know. Can we edit out those blips? Like when he says, you know. I was the fastest kid, you know? No, I don't know. I was the kid that ran after the ball because I had the great endurance, but the fast kids were fast, man. I know what that's all about. You know, I used that predominantly playing football, but I also ran track. And, you know, I had aspirations, of course, going to college and that kind of thing to play football.

26:45Shawn Stevenson:And it was during track season, sophomore year, I was doing a 200 meter time trial. So again, time trial, it might be one other student with me or just at this instance, it was just me and my coach. And so I took off and it's like, you know, the 200 meters basically half the track, right? So it's going from the curve of the track into the straightaway. And as I was coming into the straightaway, my hip broke. Oh, mercy. Yeah. So I broke my iliac crest, like the tip of my hip bone broke. I didn't know it at the time. I just came up limping, right? And I thought maybe I pulled a muscle. I'd never been injured before.

27:19Shawn Stevenson:So I kept coming to practice the next two days and I just couldn't get my legs to fire correctly. And so, you know, the coach was like, you can't do this and we got to go see a doctor. And so I went to see, uh, actually he's a physical therapist. He took an x-ray and he's like, Oh, that's the problem. Your iliac crest is broken. And so as my bone was like floating off in space, basically on the scan. And I'm just like, I'm a kid, so I don't know what's going on. And he's just like, Oh, this is, you know, we'll just give you some NSAIDs, stay off the leg, you're going to heal up just fine. And that's what I went through, standard of care.

27:54Shawn Stevenson:Nobody stopped to ask, how did a kid break his hip from running? This was a huge sign of what was to come for me, which was my body was breaking down prematurely. When you think of breaking a hip, you think of somebody who's much, much older. And so it wasn't until I had about half a dozen more injuries. I literally have game film of me at my house right now, breaking away. I like ran a sweep on the football field. Right. And I get past the safety. I'm headed to the end zone. I'm five yards away from the end zone. And I fall because I like tear my hamstring, like a severe hamstring tear. Like I just kept on getting injured and I couldn't stay healthy.

28:37Shawn Stevenson:So my aspirations of playing at the next level, of course, were vanquished. And ultimately at 20 years old, I get diagnosed with degenerative disc disease. So my spine, my, my disc were degenerated severely to the point where my physician said that, and this was a great thing to tell a kid at 20. He said that I had the spine of an 80 year old. Right. And your definition of 80 is very different by the way, just to be clear, but like an unhealthy 80 year old. Right. And so that sent me and I went in because I was having sciatic pain and I didn't know why. And it wasn't from trauma. It wasn't from an impact.

29:15Shawn Stevenson:It was just from his perspective, degeneration that was, in his words, incurable. And so again, I thrown into standard of care and all the while this entire time I'm eating, not just the standard of American diet, but the extreme of it. All right. So, and this is according to JAMA, this is one of the, this is a journal of the American Medical Association, one of the longest running studies conducted on eating behavior of children. So this was starting in 1999 up till 2018. So about a 20 year study. The researchers found that in 1999, the average American child was eating somewhere around 60 % ultra processed, newly invented fake foods.

29:59Shawn Stevenson:By the end of the study, the average child was eating almost 70%. So it was right around 68 % of the average child's diet in the United States was ultra processed food. With any study, there are going to be people who are outliers, right? So not every kid is eating around 70%. I was definitely eating closer to 90 % ultra processed foods because of the environment that I lived in, living in the inner city, being on government assistance, shopping at, we were talking actually earlier in the show about off-brand foods and stuff like that. So I wasn't eating like Lucky Charms or whatever. I was eating like, you know, I don't know, wizard drops or something, or I wasn't eating like fruit loops.

30:47Shawn Stevenson:It was fruit rings. Right. So we had a lot of generic off-brand ultra processed foods, a lot of ramen noodles and boxed macaroni and cheese. And, you know, I ate a lot of like frozen pizzas and off-brand pizza rolls. Like this was my diet pretty much every day, every meal. all right and so i was making literally making my tissues out of garbage yeah all right and wondering why i'm breaking down prematurely i have arthritic conditions as a 20 year old and so one of the big principles and how i transformed my life and got into this field and it took a couple of years of suffering by the way because i went through standard of care yeah on a slew of medications and my biggest struggle during from 20 to 22 was sleeping at night huh because i I couldn't sleep for more than like a couple of hours because my pain was so bad.

31:39Shawn Stevenson:The sciatic pain. Just my leg just throbbing and just like - Oh my gosh. It's so difficult to articulate. That's so wrong for a 20-year-old. I mean - Yeah. And so I had to take medication just to try to, quote, knock me out and keep me asleep. And so, but all of that changed. And the change happened so quickly, I was afraid. I was afraid for a few months because what in just a short version of this I kept I saw different physicians to get a you know another opinion which I highly encourage people to do if they get bad news like that but they keep they kept telling me the same thing this is incurable I'm sorry this happened to you here's another medication and another medications were helping me even with the pain really and so my lot in life could have been taking stronger stronger medications, but each one of them also told me bed rest, don't do anything.

32:33Shawn Stevenson:And so now I'm completely, not only has my spine atrophied, but like everything else is. And I've gained a bunch of weight. So you had to take that advice. You basically stopped exercising and. Yeah. I wanted to be a good, a good student, you know, do the doctor's orders, but it gave me permission to stop. Right. And so, especially coming from the environment I came from, where it's so difficult it gave me permission to not fight and just to sit there on my couch play video games right you know watch tv maybe sign up for disability someday you know yeah i was getting at the time i was getting like unemployment right so you know just like i that could have been my lot in life but ultimately it was thanks to largely from my grandmother and her bugging me like always checking in on me and Just like it was annoying at the time, but she knew my potential and how special I was.

33:30Ah, wow.

33:32Shawn Stevenson:And so she was checking in on me and, you know, just one of those times after seeing a physician, I was, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I was about to take the medication to knock me out to sleep. And it's just like my question that I had habitually been asking myself of like, why won't somebody help me? Why me? Why me? Why this happened to me? I, for the first time, asked, what can I do to feel better? Like my grandmother sees all this potential in me. And she knows like there's something about me. There's something about me. and I'm just wasting away here by myself in this one bedroom apartment in Ferguson, Missouri, you know, and my mattress is on the floor.

34:18Shawn Stevenson:Just like, what am I doing? I was in college, barely hanging on. I went from like 15 credit to 12 to nine to just like barely hanging on and just realizing like she invested so much in me. The least I could do is do something. yeah and so fortunately you know there's nature and nurture in this but like i have a i'm very analytical i question things and so it wasn't just like i had this revelation to like get up and do something i was like let me put a plan together you know let me okay if they're saying my disc are degenerated what are my disc made of right so this was a fundamental question yeah and so i started to like look into that if i i need to lose weight at this point because now even though I was an athlete now just sitting and being so sedentary, it caught up with me.

35:07Shawn Stevenson:And so I'm carrying around all this excess. So just logically, like, let me take some of this excess off my spine. Right. Give it a break. Yeah. But the first thing I jumped to, to be honest, was because of marketing on the TV, I did a slim fast, right? The shake for breakfast, one for lunch and a sensible dinner. Right. I was like, that's the way to do it. Didn't really work out for him though, you know, No, no. Respectfully. Or just, it's like, it's one of those, it was suffering. It was suffering. Yeah. And I was hungry all the time. I did lose like two pounds the first week, but that went out the window quickly.

35:39Shawn Stevenson:But it's because of my search. And the search brought me to, again, what are my disc made of? And there were all these compounds that create the tissues that were needed. And I wasn't giving my body any of that stuff on this ultra processed food diet. And this is for everybody listening or watching is if you're dealing with any particular issue, if you're not providing your body the raw materials to make the tissue, the human body is incredibly resilient. It will figure some things out to help you to just, quote, survive, but you can't really thrive. And so learning about these discs, I found out how important omega-3s were for my disc.

36:19Shawn Stevenson:And I didn't hear anything about omega-3s. Not at the doctor's office. When I broke my hip, it's just like, you need to eat more calcium. Like I was guzzling milk like I was getting paid for it. Yeah. All right. Have you seen that movie, The Professional, by the way, with Leon, the professional? He's like an assassin, but he's drinking a shitload of milk for some reason. I don't know why. But anyways, probably just milk does a body good, whatever. Wasn't helping me. My bone density was incredibly low. But even for your body to assimilate calcium, you need other compounds. The body works synergistically.

36:49Shawn Stevenson:And so I needed like silica. I needed these omega-3s. I needed certain amino acids. I needed sulfur. I needed all these different things that I was not getting in my drive-through diet. And so I went from, okay, I found this out. Let me take a bunch of supplements, which was incredibly expensive on my college Ferguson income, all right, to what foods can I find these things in? And so now that directed me to eating real foods. And so that's all I ate exclusively. So I was eating real foods. And now that I'm feeling a little bit better and my lowest hanging fruit was exercise because I would have been an athlete.

37:27Shawn Stevenson:I was scared to move. So I started off on elliptical. I'm sorry, I started off on a stationary bike. And I moved to the elliptical. Then I started to tinker around with the weights. I was just moving. And also that movement exercise, one of the most overlooked aspects of exercise is it increases assimilation. So those tissues that are moving and like your your ligaments and tendons, it's creating this kind of vacuum phenomenon and pulling in nutrients, your muscles do the same thing. And so now I've got this nutrition, I've got this movement practice. Now I'm suddenly sleeping better. I'm sleeping better at night because of the things I'm doing during the day.

38:08Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. Without the meds. Without the meds. And now I got better so fast. It was, it was insane. Like six weeks to the day of making that decision, I'd lost almost 20 pounds, which is not typical. I just was a naturally thinner person. And so the weight just kind of flew off me pretty quickly, but the pain was gone. The pain that haunted me every single day of my life for over two years, it had destroyed my life, you know, my livelihood, it was gone. And so I spent those next few months in fear. Like, I'm just like, I'm, I was scared it was going to come back because it happened so fast. And my mind wasn't able to kind of recalibrate.

38:45Shawn Stevenson:But what helped me to, and this bridges everything and puts the cherry on top. What helped me to accept it was service because people at the university that I was going to, the university of Missouri, people started coming up to me and asking me like, what did you do? How did you like, I didn't just look like a person who lost weight. I looked like somebody who went from being incredibly sickly to radiantly healthy. And so people were coming up and asking me like, Hey, can you teach me? Or like, what did you do? And that was the birthing of my career because I didn't know the people, because the first person was a friend of mine's, um, that I went to high school with his, his little sister went to the university.

39:25Shawn Stevenson:And so she knew me loosely, but she came up to me. She was like, you know, what did you do? Like, she was like, can you help me? And I was like, yeah, can you come to the gym on Saturday? Like, she was like, how much should I pay you? Huh? And that's when time froze. Like what? She would pay me. Like I was going to do this for free yeah and so and this is a true story i said seven dollars because because you had your eye on some minimum wage at the nearby market minimum wage was like five dollars and 15 cents at the time and i'm from missouri okay i don't know what now it's probably what is it it's like twenty dollars or something crazy what is los angeles i don't know up it to 20 bucks or something yeah but you know like seven dollars five dollars back then though still rough seven $7 was like a nice job for a college kid.

40:10Shawn Stevenson:And so I started training people like$7 a session, you know, and I got my certification and I shifted all my coursework back to, because initially the first university that I went to, I went into the pre-med program, but I hated science. It doesn't match up. I just did it because I thought I was supposed to because of marketing and what I saw on television and coming from poverty and a family that doesn't have any examples. I was like, I should do that, but I hated it. and so i got out of that major i went into like marketing from another uh television exposure a movie called boomerang with eddie murphy oh eddie murphy yeah but it was like he was like in marketing was so fly so i did that but so this brought me all the way back to science but now i understand it now in my biology class i remember the last day of my biology class in college the teacher cried it was this big auditorium class and all the kids most of the kids were kind of looking like, this is weird.

41:06Shawn Stevenson:Like, why is she crying? And I got it. I understood because she knew that we were leaving that classroom and she was hoping that this knowledge of what she taught was going to filter its way into the rest of their lives. Wow. That's a dedicated teacher right there. But I got it because of what I went through. Yeah. Yeah. When I was learning about biology prior to that experience with her, it was very superficial. We're learning about the parts of the cell, right? The mitochondria, all these different organelles. The Krebs cycle. But it's so superficial. It doesn't really matter to me. Right. But when I understood that that mitochondria is made from my meals, when I learned that the nucleus is made from the nutrients that I eat, that everything that I'm looking at when we're studying the cell, the human cell is made from food, it lit everything else up for me.

42:00Shawn Stevenson:Like I, I'm making this. This doesn't just happen. I get to provide the raw materials to make this. So that was my connective tissue with it. And I get to determine the health of my cells. And so, you know, having that knowledge base and then healing from something that was supposed to be unhealable, it gave me this power that you can't, you can't buy. And so that power was injected into when I became a nutritionist and I was working with people every day, working as a strength conditioning coach all those years at the university to when I started a podcast, that essence is there. It's a part of the tone and the texture of what's behind my voice.

42:42Shawn Stevenson:It's like something undeniable there that's telling you nothing is impossible. You can get better. And then that translated over into the books. And as you mentioned earlier, sleep, I'm a nutritionist. It wasn't my intention, but this was missing from the conversation at the time. And we talked about this before the show, the agents I was talking to I self-published the first iteration of Sleep Smarter. They were like, no, you know, you should do a book on nutrition, you know, fitness book. It would do really well with you and your platform. Sleep books just don't do well. And I was just like, I was so adamant that I didn't choose to work with them.

43:19Shawn Stevenson:And after selling the amount of books that I did, you know, self-published, which I didn't have any like barometer of like what's good. I happened upon the person the company that end up being my agent and with the success that I'd already done on my own just by sharing this message which was by the way seeing people every day who've got their nutrition dialed in they're exercising but they we can't get their blood sugar normalized we can't get the weight off we can't get their hypertension under control when I finally started asking them about their sleep and I gave them I'm a researcher so science back to ways where they can do these small things where they don't have to turn their world upside down to improve their sleep quality now the weight's coming off now we've got their blood sugar under control now we can working with their physician get them off metformin or lisinopril with their hypertension whatever the case was just seeing these cases that would keep ironically keep me up at night like why can they not get the results everybody else is getting yeah it really just cemented like this component of sleep is so big it was impacting their nutrition it was impacting their exercise more so than I realized.

44:30Shawn Stevenson:And this is the thing too, when you're healthy, like my sleep was good now. I just didn't think about it anymore. So I didn't think about it in the context of these other people. And so in the book, I put together 21 clinically proven strategies, research to back it up. This is long before people were grabbing research and sharing it online, you know, as like a truth. And I did that. You had to go to the library probably. yeah the dewey decimal system it wasn't to that extreme but like just hanging it on the tree of science and then using common sense to affirm it 21 clinically proven strategies to improve your sleep quality after meeting my eventually my agent we got 11 offers as i shared with you for that book and it became like a bidding war because the book was such a powerful force and it was already proven to be effective.

45:21Shawn Stevenson:And from there, now it's translated into, it's either 26 or 27 different countries, different languages. These are all separate foreign book deals. It was the first sleep wellness book to become an international bestseller. And it was not my intention. I didn't know that that was going to happen. My intention was to give people this tool set and this awareness to heal themselves. And it came through that medium. And so I'm very grateful that it came through me and that I was a part of it. And now it's like, especially in the health spaces, it's so common knowledge about sleep wellness and people are doing all these different things.

45:56Shawn Stevenson:But I helped to popularize and bring forth the ideas of blue light blocking glasses and screen time and all this stuff back over 12 years ago now. And so I'm so grateful that the conversation has changed, but we're still messed up. Yeah. I was just going to ask you like 12 years ago, come on. I mean, the information has been out there. What are the main ways that we're still falling behind? Yeah. It's really, the technology is not slowing down, obviously. And that's really the biggest deterrent right now. And by the way, I had two herniated discs. They retracted on their own and I gained back the value.

46:36Shawn Stevenson:They retracted back into alignment. Yeah, L4, L5S1, both herniated. You were just getting nourished by your exercise and by your diet. Yeah, and so you could see on the MRI prior to this, they were like black because they were so degenerated. But so to have that volume where the light is shining through them. But that was nine months later after choosing to get well, by the way. So I don't know when, how quickly I got well. And I was scared to go get an MRI because I didn't want to get bad news. Yeah, right. But my physician, the final physician that I had dealing with that issue, he was just like, literally just holding his chin, like, whatever you're doing, keep doing it.

47:16Shawn Stevenson:I haven't seen results like this before. Dang, he should put your x-rays up at a medical presentation. Like, look at this dude, nine months later. I told him, though. I told him what I did, but it was just like pseudoscience to him at the time. He was like, oh, I changed the way I was eating and exercise, whatever. but here's now today we have huge meta-analyses showing that the vast majority of disc herniations and bulges heal to some degree on their own and some complete remission complete heal healing of the disc yeah and so but this is not true for everybody there's different situations different states and different things that need to be done for everybody but yeah the vast majority of the time something can be done your body is very adept at healing itself and then to circle back to our current situation with sleep, you know, um, the biggest thing that I've seen, like, it's just more and more addictive.

48:07Shawn Stevenson:You know, we've got brilliant engineers who are designing things to keep us just checking, you know, the just checks, picking up our phone constantly, or, you know, we're living at the golden age of television. So much good stuff. Streaming entertainment with your next episode will play in seven seconds, six seconds, five I try to jump up because I know I'll watch the next episode. But if I can turn that TV off in seven seconds, maybe I'll have a chance of going to sleep. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. The world's the smartest guys and the highest paid workforce on the planet is Silicon Valley software engineer.

48:40And they're ripping. Yeah. Or Hollywood here making great content. Yeah. And we've never had a time where we can work 24-7, you know, that we've got.

48:50Shawn Stevenson:Again, isn't that amazing? We've never been able to before. You can't even step away from work. Right. Because it's right there in your phone for so many of us. Right. So I've got work calling me everywhere, basically, you know, like I could do get to some emails or I could, you know, I got a Slack message coming in, whatever the case might be. You might be out trying to hang out with your family. But, you know, this is that 24-7 access that we didn't evolve. This is new. This is new. And our brains have not caught up remotely with how to handle this because we have hundreds of thousands of years being a certain way.

49:23Shawn Stevenson:to like 40 years, 30 years of this complete immersion into technology. This is the most challenging time to sleep of all times of two and a half million years of evolution. For sure. So what do we do? This is the thing. Give me a few of those 21 tips before we go. The solution with the technology piece is very simple, as most solutions are. It's very simple. but we've got to replace that evening habit of being on our screens with something of equal or greater value. Okay. So you can't just tell yourself, okay. And by the way, we've got research from Harvard, for example, showing that being on that device with the blue light, it's not just the blue light, by the way.

50:09Shawn Stevenson:Okay. Just that stimulation of light is throwing off your circadian clock. It suppresses melatonin. Every hour you're on your device at night, suppresses melatonin for about 30 minutes. All right. So even - Hour, 30 minutes. Hour, 30 minutes. Yeah. So even if you go to bed and you're exhausted, you're not going to go through your sleep cycles efficiently because melatonin is all wonky. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So we want to give ourselves a little bit of a screen curfew. And I encourage people just even 30 minutes because most people, they're on their device literally to the last moment. You know, many people like they look at their, they're just like literally looking at their phone like i really should get some sleep and they put it down all right so 30 minutes start with 30 minutes if you want to be a rock star 90 minutes nice is is incredible and of course you can add the blue light glasses in between and you know uh there's a modes for you know our computer screens there's flux yeah you know night shift is built into the phones now and i know these companies they know they're messing people's sleep up so they're trying to be proactive and you know it's like pr campaign to say hey look at our little you know we're protecting your sleep we're looking out for you yeah by now so have having those things are cool but you got to give yourself a screen curfew because it's still stimulation right outside of just the light inputs and so replace it with something of equal or greater value okay so our phones are incredibly valuable to us all the so many good things to look at all right basketball and high jumping and jokes and yeah friends uh interactions yeah connection yeah there's butts everywhere fitness if you if you're a fitness influencer you might not even be looking for the butts yeah but if you're just following a few fitness influencers it's going to start feeding you some butts yeah you maybe you could push not interested okay you don't want the butts flying at you, but there's so much stimulation coming at us from our phone, infinite stuff.

52:08Shawn Stevenson:Now, what can be of equal or greater value than that? It's tough. This is going to be individual. All right. It's paying attention to yourself and what you value. And so if you want to think back to like when we were kids, many of us had a bedtime ritual, right? We had our routines for going to bed, right? Many high performing people have morning routines, right? That we self kind of impose on ourselves. But truly my grandmother, for example, she had a certain nighttime routine, which included maybe a bath, maybe, you know, reading a book, saying prayers together, whatever the case might be, but give yourself an evening routine that nourishes you.

52:50Shawn Stevenson:There's a difference between relaxation and restoration, right? Relaxation is kicking back and watching severance, all right? Or Game of Thrones or whatever the case might be. Restoration is getting away from all the stimulation, getting high quality sleep. Right. You're still getting stimulated with an enjoyable show, even though you're relaxing. Yeah. Big difference. Your brain is firing like a mother in certain ways. And so what does that evening routine look like for you? Do you love reading books? Or do you love reading romance novels or Harry Potter or you know ideally in this there's some data on this as well that fiction is actually a little bit better for supporting sleep right versus like current events or things that could you know that kind of like personal development some stuff can be helpful though you know spirituality those kind of things it can be helpful but sometimes you you get you might be thinking too much about like ideas and implementation and all this stuff yeah so fiction is really great for supporting sleep Here's a cool thing.

53:53Shawn Stevenson:Now, do you want to stare at your phone or a Kindle or something like that? No. Physical books are still out here. They still exist. All right, so you can use a physical book. We still got some for sale, you and I. So go out there and get that book. Or audio books. We're living at the golden age of audio books as well. And you don't got to stare at a screen to listen to an audio book. You close your eyes. Yeah. Right? And so there's also podcasts. But again, I'd be mindful of what you're listening to trying to wind down. Should we like lower our voices if someone's trying to fall asleep right now?

54:25We can take the last few. Yeah, and just talk a little slower. That's great advice, Sean. Good night. Thank you very much. Sometimes you might even fall asleep listening to a podcast. That would be great. You know what? I love how you've characterized this whole conversation in a very positive manner rather than trashing social media and trashing our phones. and we really good at that now we can all tell us how bad it is but like they're they're very valuable to us you mentioned that and so it's all about you know weighing those priorities and finding something of greater payoff and i was just thinking about this when you said it like maybe the best payoff for me is how i feel the next morning so if i can delay my gratification because i love watching the next netflix episode in the series as much as anyone else but when i'm good, when I'm not good, I'm staying up and I'm ruining my next morning because I'm very sensitive to, we were talking about that.

55:19Like, I need a lot of sleep, man. I always have. But like, if you can look at it in a bigger picture perspective, or now we're talking about kids too, what's more valuable than streaming entertainment? How about quality home family time, where you get a little chatting in with those teenagers that aren't likely to talk that much, that's vastly more valuable than your shows. But like, we really have to be hugely disciplined and committed to put these things into the mix. Even your switch from phone to reading, it's a big deal because we're out of habit. And sometimes I like to just veg out rather than work my eyes hard, which have been working all day.

55:59But you do get that payoff really quickly over time. I mean, Your story is like the greatest payoff of all time of anyone to turn their entire life around. Starting with getting better sleep, that probably helped those discs, you know, get that nutrition that you were feeding them.

56:15Shawn Stevenson:Absolutely. If you're not sleeping, you're not healing. That's where the magic really happens. You know, just to lean into that point again, even bringing up family, like playing board games or whatever the case might be, is another thing that could be more valuable. but you just mentioned the thing that for me personally is really a powerful force for not being on my screen which is I value feeling good better than I do the next episode that's for me personally for other people it might no judgment if you guys disagree yeah yeah so for my wife is like it's a it's a big deal if I'm like you want to watch another I know and I also know that you know if she's happy you know but which is could leads to another thing of maybe personal time with your significant other might be more valuable than the phone, right?

56:59So talking with them,

57:00Shawn Stevenson:seeing them, listening to the sound of their voice, you know, maybe investing into some other potential things that hopefully is more exciting than your phone, you know? Oh, I tell my wife, I go, you have a standing appointment for massage at 9.30 PM upstairs. But if you're going to, if you cancel, like I can't take late customers, like, you know, it's like an incentive. She sleeps less than me, which is really interesting. And when we have more time to talk maybe we'll do a whole nother show on this but like she can easily stay up later than me so i try to put in these things like i'm toast i gotta go to bed right now and boy it's it's a constant like temptation of many different options which are all enticing you know yep and even you know with that physical touch intimacy these things help to relax that sympathetic fight or flight helped it.

57:52Right. And the TV might not. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Especially what were your

57:57Shawn Stevenson:shows? If you're watching Vin Diesel before bed, like, you know, like you're going to be ready to, you know, but you know, with that being said on, in Sleep Smarter, and I didn't do this on purpose on page 69 is the big O and how sleep is related. A reader told me this. I had no idea how sleep and sex are so intimately connected as well. And so having that intimacy and whether or not there's an orgasm involved, like we release a cocktail of chemicals that help to relax the nervous system, prolactin and oxytocin, all this stuff. But you can get a lot of that oxytocin in particular. And this is one of the hormones that's been identified to kind of counteract the effects of cortisol.

58:41Shawn Stevenson:And cortisol isn't a bad guy, but for many people, cortisol is high at night. chronic overproduction of cortisol. And the other hand - We call them tired or wired clinically, where their cortisol is too low in the morning, too high at night. And again, the stimulation from our devices isn't helping. And so just a hug, being close to somebody that you love, that you trust, dramatically increases your production of oxytocin. And so again, these are just a couple of practical things. A warm bath at night as well helps to raise that the skin temperature but then you your body actually goes lower than normal afterwards after it cools down yeah i think people i appreciate you maybe elaborate a little bit because people don't understand that like you need to have that lower body temperature to fall asleep right yeah so how does how does it happen when you get a warm bath or a jacuzzi which is one of my favorite things to do before bed then what happens yeah so and this isn't necessarily to fall asleep, but to have more restful sleep, you know, to go through your sleep cycles more efficiently.

59:44Shawn Stevenson:We evolved, no matter where you are on the planet, pretty much where humans have been hanging out at, the temperature is cooler at night than it is during the day. Name somewhere where it's not. Yeah. Okay. But we have this perfectly climate controlled environment in our homes. So it might be, it might not be true. You're right. Right. And so we crank up the heat at night. when it's called thermal regulation. And so your body is always, we don't have a perfect like 98.6 degrees, whatever. Your body, your temperature changes significantly throughout the day. All right, depending on the time of day, what you're doing.

1:00:21Shawn Stevenson:If you're exercising, your temperature is probably gonna be a little bit higher and that's okay. Now we have a natural drop in our body temperature in the evening to facilitate. It's basically, it's not necessarily causing, but it comes along with an activation of all kinds of restorative hormones, enzymes, neurotransmitters. Your body's going into a more relaxed state to facilitate higher quality sleep at night when your core body temperature drops. Now, if your body has to fight against the environment because it's too hot, we all know what it's like to get shitty sleep because it's too hot in the environment.

1:00:59Shawn Stevenson:And I got a memory that's popping up. My mom didn't turn on the air can i live inst louis oh that's hot steamy man yeah summer times so it's not just hot it's humid yeah all right yeah so if it's 95 the quote you know heat it feels like heat index could be 110 oh sure yeah and it doesn't go in here in la it doesn't hold on the air doesn't hold on to the heat at night so it's cooler yeah in missouri the nighttime hugs it holds on to that sleep and throws it into your window all right and so she wouldn't turn on the ac and i our room was upstairs all right and so heat rises as well so it would be bacon in there all right and so i remember like literally spraying myself with water before bed having a fan in the window spraying myself with water and being but bucket naked and having like the sheet around my you know around my special parts uh just in case my little brother comes in or something i don't want to i don't want him to feel inferior you know whatever um but anyways so just trying to find a way to cool myself off just enough to fall asleep.

1:02:04Shawn Stevenson:Right. But it's just like tossing and turning when you're hot. And so with climate control that many of us have access to, or just opening your windows, right. If you can in a safe way. But if you can drop the temperature on the thermostat at night, or just have less, you don't have to have the big comforter, you know, maybe something a little bit thinner. Now there's all these different contraptions that help to cool down on your mattress, you know, mattress pads and things like that. There's so many ways to cool yourself off that it might be an investment initially, maybe a couple hundred dollars for something like this.

1:02:38Shawn Stevenson:If you don't have like AC, California, SoCal, even my guy over here, he didn't have air conditioning for years, right? He just moved to a new place. And you know, like it's just a thing, but again, it's cooler in the environment. You can open the windows at night and get a little bit cooler and fans and things like that. So yeah, getting your body a little bit cooler. I got tons of studies on this and why it's effective in Sleep Smarter. So go get the book Sleep Smarter, people. Way more in there. And I think your advice came into two major categories. One of them is like the artificial light and digital stimulation.

1:03:12And then the other one is the things that we have in our environment. And I'm sure we can go on and on with getting it really dark and not having the mental stimulation and the clutter. Anything you talked about, getting down to that parasympathetic state is the essence of restoration. And we're not good at that when we flick off the TV and then try to hit the pillow. Right.

1:03:32Shawn Stevenson:As my friend, Kelly Starrett, Dr. Kelly Starrett says, we're very good at going zero to a hundred, but we're not very good at going a hundred to zero. And so one of the biggest stamps of approval and like that does my heart so good is when I found out before I even met Kelly Starrett, I was a fan from afar, student from afar, is that they had copies of Sleep Smarter at their gym for years. And of course, people would sometimes not bring them back. And so they kept buying them before we even met. And it's just, again, it was just, there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, right?

1:04:07Shawn Stevenson:So there's that great sentiment. And it just came at that time. Now, even some of the things we talked about, many people have probably heard before, but this wasn't a part of the health conversation. Some of these things are very practical, very commonsensical. But if we're in a culture that is basically programming us to have poor sleep. We're inundated. We're immersed in a culture. Yeah, nobody cares, man. Yeah. So you got to be able to put up some defense for yourself and create a healthy micro environment for yourself, micro culture that supports good sleep, that supports high performance and good function and doing the fitness things that we want to do and have all these things in a synergistic way to where it's just your lifestyle and it just feels good.

1:04:49Shawn Stevenson:Thank you so much for tuning into to this very special episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. If you did, you already know what to do. Share it out with the people that you care about. We've got some amazing, amazing guests in store for you that are gonna blow your mind. We've also got some powerful masterclasses that you're truly going to love. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode.

1:05:23Shawn Stevenson:And if you got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much. And take care. I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.