The Shocking Connection Between Vitamin D & Sleep - With Dr. Stasha Gominak

26:39Shawn Stevenson:This is a fantastic gift to give to your friends and family as well. And again, they've also got prescription lenses available as well. So everybody's invited to the Bond Charge party. Head over there, check them out. And now back to the show. This is so profound. So profound.

26:57Dr. Stasha Gominak:It is profound.

26:58Shawn Stevenson:First of all, thank you for clarifying the point of because we tend to oversimplify things and we put in this little pithy box. It's a vitamin. It's your vitamin D. And you already affirmed it is far more than this pithy vitamin. This is a steroid hormone that is found basically everywhere you look in the body. and in particular when it comes to the brainstem and this kind of circadian timing system and that's what your work and you know you published a couple of papers on this and this is how we got connected it's one of our initial conversations and really breaking down like how is it working because when i think of vitamin d i think of daytime i think of being awake and up and active So how on earth can this so-called vitamin, vitamin D, actually improve my sleep at night?

27:50Shawn Stevenson:How does that work?

27:52Dr. Stasha Gominak:Yeah. Great question. I'm going to add a scientific term that you're going to have to put a little explanatory spelling on the bottom. It took a long time, but ultimately the final outcome is vitamin D, when it hits those receptors that we've talked about in the brainstem, makes choline acetyltransferase, which is the final enzyme that makes a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. when i found that out i was uh kind of confused because i'm a neurologist for me acetylcholine is something i'm familiar with and as i read this comment that d is linked to making acetylcholine i thought well that's weird i don't even remember what acetylcholine does in the in the brain like i know it's related to alzheimer's disease but and i started to think about it more and i thought you know, I'm actually learning what the neurotransmitters do by the drugs we give.

28:53Dr. Stasha Gominak:So when I give a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, that means it extends the life of serotonin and the patient gets more satisfied or happy if I give dopamine to the Parkinson's patients. And what that led me to is there are no drugs for acetylcholine. But acetylcholine, I type that in as a search point. And what the Google says is acetylcholine is what runs our ability to focus and be alert during the day. And it allows us to drop into the deeper phases of sleep and get paralyzed correctly at night. Now, that is mind-boggling because medicine and I approach asleep and awake as two different things.

29:44Dr. Stasha Gominak:But in fact, there are two centers that are cholinergic, and that's the term used for acetylcholine. Cholinergic centers, one is in the base of the frontal lobes, and it is what directs our attention. And that is ruling your brain during the day. If you have the right neurochemistry, it's firing at a certain rate and it's allowing you to concentrate, be distracted and come right back. At night, that center changes its firing rate. And instead, another center that is and the brainstem begins to run your sleep. That is a totally different way to think about this. This is much more complex. This means the brain has to know how to use acetylcholine based on the moment of the hour of the day.

30:43Dr. Stasha Gominak:And that is the sort of thing that you see once you start using things. And the weird part of this whole story is vitamin D makes the enzyme. But it turns out as I'm giving vitamin D for two years, learning about it, that enzyme is then asking for the two pieces that it's going to join together. And those are choline that does indeed come from the diet. And the second one is coenzyme A. And that coenzyme A, in order to have it in your body, the main piece that makes that coenzyme is B5, pantothenic acid, it is a B vitamin and it is my belief that it is only made by the microbiome, the normal microbiome.

31:32Dr. Stasha Gominak:So what happened to my patients was I gave D for two years, they got better, then they got worse again and so did I. And it turns out D by itself is not enough to get the normal human microbiome to come back. And it's not until 2020 that there was a first article, I had assumed that D was a major player in as a cofactor to have a normal human microbiome because our loss of the normal microbiome happened concomitantly with all those other diseases I told you about. IBS started to be reported in the middle 80s. The weird part in my patients was they got better in their sleep, but there were a couple things that didn't get better.

32:15Dr. Stasha Gominak:And this is two years worth and, you know, like a thousand patients. One, they slept better for a while, but then it got worse again, despite having a good D level, blood level still. But they also didn't lose the IBS. Their belly symptoms didn't get better and they didn't lose weight. They still, if they were overweight before, they still are. They're exercising more. They have more energy. They feel like they just spontaneously start working out at the gym. So those pieces were still bouncing around. And then there were certain things that happened to my patients. This is why I have a website, not because of D, but because my patients started to fail at the two-year mark, and so did I.

32:56Dr. Stasha Gominak:And they failed in painful ways. They not only started to have the same sleep problems they did before, but they would come in and say, you know, my hands hurt, my knees hurt, my internist sent me to the rheumatologist. They're telling me I have the rheumatoid arthritis and I want to know because you're doing this weird stuff with D could this have anything to do with vitamin D and I had no answer the fact that it's coming two years into it is really important because nobody's going to connect it but I did because I've got so many people that have different diseases they're all neurology patients but they have different things.

33:39Dr. Stasha Gominak:They're different age groups, but they're all coming back with these painful complaints. And at that point, we discover something else by accident. You want to hear about it?

33:51Shawn Stevenson:Absolutely.

33:52Dr. Stasha Gominak:Okay. So this is also by accident. So there are several serendipitous accidents that happen. And again, I want to say I was desperate. My patients are desperate. I'm desperate. No one's writing about what's happening. I can't find any references and vitamin D being used consistently for sleep, let alone for pain in the body. So a patient brings me a book and she brought it to me. It was a book that was written in the 1990s by a lay person who's writing about the use of pantothenic acid for people. Yes, for people who have rheumatoid arthritis. She has rheumatoid arthritis. She gets much better when she takes pantothenic acid.

34:33Dr. Stasha Gominak:She gives it to a bunch of other people. She's writing it, and the book is called The Pain-Free Promise of Panathenic Acid. The woman brings me this book, and I think, oh my God, one more person who's bringing me crystals and essential oils, and now a book about more vitamins. I don't know about vitamins. I'm going there kicking and screaming, okay, because I'm still an MD. But I read the book, and the book has references from the 1950s. Now, I'm reading other things about panathenic acid, which all say there is no such thing as panathenic acid deficiency because it's in every food. All of the major textbooks, all of the articles that are written at that time, this was about 2012.

35:18Dr. Stasha Gominak:But those references from the 1950s have a set of experiments that were really creepy because they were a bunch, They were done in convicts at the Iowa State Prison in a lab that was next door. They tube-fed convicts a pantothenic acid-deficient diet. It wasn't even taken from real food. And in two weeks, they became unable to sleep, belly complaints, burning in their hands and feet, and a funny gait. The reason why this is so important is I had two women who have been my patients for four or five years already. They both have headaches and they've just come in and told me they had burning in their hands and feet.

36:01Dr. Stasha Gominak:They have nothing to do with each other. The only thing they share in common is they've been on vitamin D for two years. They also are on B12. Burning in the hands and feet is very uncommon, at least in my practice. So burning in the feet, when the person has signs of diabetes, the internist keeps them and they say it's from the diabetes. That's the pat answer that everybody gets. But burning in the hands and feet when they're already on B12 and they have no diabetes, that's a little bit weird. And the timing of them getting this within one month of each other also suggests to me, again, I'm looking through this lens of sleep.

36:44Dr. Stasha Gominak:When they're sleeping better. They aren't just lying there like a lump, unconscious. They're making repairs. It's not that I want them to be unconscious. I want them to be able to get into specific phases where they make repairs. All of those repairs are related to the basic building blocks of every biochemical pathway, which means all the B vitamins, all the vitamins, all the minerals, all the basic ingredients that we use to make cellular repair. And my feeling was I have forced these people into a B vitamin deficiency state. What? How could that happen? Their diets haven't changed. Okay. My patients were more educated about their diets than I was.

37:31Dr. Stasha Gominak:I don't really care about diets. Okay. Do paleo. That's fine. They've already done all these diets. Their sleep wasn't better with the diets. That's why we went down this path. So now I'm thinking these people, two women, same complaint, very unusual. I've been doing neuropathy for 30 years now. That's only walked in the door once during the whole time I've been practicing and they're already on B12. So I don't know what to do. So these 1950s articles burning in the hands and feet link to B5. Oh yeah, let's go. So I go down to the vitamin store and I'm looking at the B complex. The B5 is in 400 milligram tablets.

38:10Dr. Stasha Gominak:That's the only strength that comes in. And I think, oh, I'm about to step into this morass of other vitamins and their doses because it turns out with vitamin D, the dosing is so screwed up in the literature. So I get the 400 milligrams of panathenic acid. My particular complaint, and I always use this because it's funny and because it's weird, is I have this weird butt pain. Like my buttocks hurt when I sit down. And I've never had that before. I'm running three times a week still. It doesn't hurt when I run. It only hurts when I sit down. But what is that from? And I have restless legs. My restless legs is well controlled, but that is my sleep disorder, why one of the things that makes me very committed to this.

38:59Dr. Stasha Gominak:So I'm taking the panathenic acid and then I go and I think, you know, the only thing I remember from medical school is if you give one B vitamin, you should give all of them. So I walk over to the B complex and I realized that it's a total mess. This particular store had like 18 rows of B complexes of different kinds and they all have different things. But I stumbled upon B100, which is a specific set of doses. So my problem is I'm not giving my patients vitamins. I am suggesting that they get certain things. And if I want them to actually pay attention to the dose, I have to be very specific about it.

39:38Dr. Stasha Gominak:And this B100 is all eight Bs, 100 milligrams of thiamin, 100 of riboflavin. It determines that they will have 100 milligrams or 100 micrograms depending on which vitamin you're talking about and i grab that at the same time and i start giving this out as a recommendation but i'm taking it myself so for the four days that i actually give those recommendations to everyone who i've measured their b12 level and their d and i have their sleep study and they're starting to complain of pain of various kinds i give them that recommendation but by friday i realized that my restless legs has started in the morning this last four or five days.

40:21Dr. Stasha Gominak:Something about this vitamin, and now I'm on 500 milligrams of it, is making my restless legs happen all day long. I haven't noticed my sleep is different, but it usually means that I'm drowsier during the day because this restless legs happens in drowsiness. So I stopped the 400 milligrams of pantothenic acid. I go on the B100 and I think, oh my goodness, all my patients are going to come back and yell at me again. And, and I, I think there's nobody really to go to because there's, it doesn't exist. Okay. Well, it's existing in my patients. I go to this B100 for one day. The next day I have no butt pain.

41:00Dr. Stasha Gominak:So one, too much of B5 caused my restless legs to go out of control immediately. And my pain went away in a day. Both of those things are things I would never report to anyone because it's too weird and everybody's already thinking I'm a weirdo. But my patients start to straggle back in over a three-month time and most of them bring the 400 milligram bottle and say, this stuff nearly killed me. It made me so agitated. I couldn't sleep at all. I only took it for two days. The two people that didn't say that were the ones with the burning in their hands and feet. They did great on that bigger dose.

41:41Dr. Stasha Gominak:And some of the patients yelled at me and fired me. And I really couldn't blame them. I mean, it was this, this is completely opposite what the woman said in the book. The reason why that woman, my patient brought me the book was the gal who's giving this out, who gets so inspired, she writes a book about it, says not only does their pain go away, but their sleep gets better. That's why my patient brought it to me, not about rheumatoid arthritis, but the sleep. She knew I was a maniac about sleep. So, uh-oh, this is a dose dependent effect. Some of the patients don't fire me. They say, look, I did that 400 milligrams for a couple of days, but I was so agitated and I couldn't sleep at all.

42:26But then I stopped it and I just took the B100.

42:30Dr. Stasha Gominak:And you know what? My pain went away in like one day. And I said, that's what happened to me. What do you think is going on? This is the weirdest thing. One, this is acting like a drug. We are taught that vitamins can't hurt you. That is wrong. It can really hurt you. Two, it's sitting on the shelf at 400 milligrams. I just gave a series of only 40 people because that was all I saw in that four day span. I gave 40 people this and they had the opposite reaction. Immediately, they said, oh, I got agitated within an hour. And here are 30 people telling me things in the same phrase, same phrasing.

43:09Dr. Stasha Gominak:And you can't ignore that. You can't say, oh, pantothenic acid deficiency doesn't exist because it's in every food. Obviously, it is not in any food. Otherwise, I'd eat three avocados and I wouldn't be able to sleep. Okay. So something is badly wrong with the literature. The second piece is what's different about my patients? Because this woman claims that she's given this out to all these people with rheumatoid arthritis. And by now I'm reading the literature and there's a whole bunch of literature in the 1960s, 1970s of giving pantothenic acid to people with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, autoimmune disease, because pantothenic acid becomes coenzyme A.

43:49Dr. Stasha Gominak:Coenzyme A is necessary to make cortisol. So in the very early studies of autoimmune diseases, anything that acted like cortisol, we didn't know why their cortisol would be low, but we're giving prednisone. We know that really helps them. They did clinical trials using panothenic acid, but they used it by itself. Remember how you said we put this in these little boxes? We tend to simplify. Medicine has done that with the vitamins. The weirdest question of all is, why do we have eight Bs? Like, why is there A? And then eight things called B and C. I swear it took me five years of dealing with this to finally go, wait, why do we have eight Bs?

44:30Dr. Stasha Gominak:These are eight chemicals, okay? The first little piece of dogma I was given in medical school, if you give one B, you should give all of them, suggests that somebody knew in the past that these eight chemicals actually came from bacteria. And when you get into the history of them a little bit more deeply, what you find is the naming and the discovery of the bees was done using a yeast bacterial mixture that was stolen from Mrs. Pasteur's liquid she was going to make bread with. And they put a little auger in that and they poured it into a Petri dish. And since then, there's a yeast extract in the basis of wet all the little petri dishes where they study bacteria these eight chemicals were first reported as bacterial growth factors if you just say that sentence within the context of where you and i live now where we're constantly thinking about which bacteria is in my nose now which is in my mouth which isn't that means they somebody in the past knew that these eight chemicals were being secreted by a group of bacteria.

45:42Dr. Stasha Gominak:So at the same time I'm reading about bacteria, because I know that the GI tract wasn't right. And I'm suspicious that the reason why I was able to force them into a B deficiency state was not because of their diet, but because they had IBS symptoms. And even the people who didn't have IBS did not have a normal microbiome. That means I've asked for a bigger production of bees from the microbiome, but it's not able to keep up. That means I have to find a way, either I have to figure out what the dose should be of these eight. Nobody knows that. The bacteria that live in my belly when it's normal are the only organisms on the planet who really know how much of each of these you should have, what ratio over what time span in your GI tract.

46:38So I think, I bet that they want this B100.

46:43Dr. Stasha Gominak:You know, if I think of it as a Petri dish instead of as my GI tract, in order to bring back the right foursome of phyla, so I'm reading other articles that are saying they're for phyla. There's one article actually before the article I published in 2016 that works this out that says the reason why there are four phyla is that every single one makes a B and needs a B. So this is a symbiotic foursome of phyla that make eight chemicals. In fact, they make hundreds of chemicals that our body needs. We're just not naming each one of those metabolites yet as other vitamins. There's going to be a list of 200 things that are vital parts of the human body that have been lost when you lost your microbiome, whether it's at birth or 20 years ago.

47:37Dr. Stasha Gominak:So looking at it in that context, and the good thing was the GI doctors are doing all this stuff that I would never have been able to convince my patients of, but my patients are willing to listen to me babble on about, okay, you're taking this B100. Here's the piece I want you to pay attention to. Remember all that pain you had and your sleep was lousy. Okay, you've been on this B100 for about three weeks now. Your D is perfect. We're giving D and B50 or B100 into your belly. We're making this B vitamin soup. This is going to encourage all the normal guys to come back and become the dominant species.

48:17Dr. Stasha Gominak:But when that happens, they're going to make what they're supposed to make. They are going to make all of these eight chemicals in the right amounts. And then you're taking my pill and they're doing their job and you have double the dose. And remember what happened when we took too much of that B5? Your sleeplessness returns and your pain returns. So I said, look, I don't know how long it's going to take or if I'm right here, but I'm suspecting that that's going to bring back the normal microbiome. And if these two things, your sleep interruption and your pain come back, you have to stop that B100.

48:59Dr. Stasha Gominak:And it took three months. But consistently, that's through most of the people that I was dealing with. I personally, of course, didn't listen to my own advice. And at four months, I'm getting up in the morning very stiff, feeling old. and one of my patients says to me you know you told me to take this b100 and i took that but i felt really stiff in the morning and i said you did you feel old and she said yeah i would like have to loosen up in the morning and i broke the pill in half and i'm taking b50 and i feel great so then i say that's what i feel like in the morning and i stop it a month late.

49:42Dr. Stasha Gominak:So because of those events, I have a website that is dedicated to when you take D, you must bring back your microbiome. If you do not, in your future, two, three, four years later, and this right now is two, three, four years later from COVID, when we started D, really bad things will happen to you because it'll force you into a B vitamin deficiency state that none of the primary practitioners are used to calling that. It is a thiamine deficiency that makes your feet swell and your feet burn. It is B5 deficiency. They're complex, multiple Bs together. And I think I'll stop there and let you ask me this.

50:28Shawn Stevenson:This is so good. Can you give us a, again, I know it's difficult because there's so many different types of people in different situations, but just some overarching principles when it comes to, okay, we want to make sure that your D levels are good, but what else should you be considering? So we've got vitamin D, you mentioned the bears earlier and the B vitamins. So if we're looking at vitamin D supplementation, should we also be utilizing B vitamins?

50:59Dr. Stasha Gominak:Because this is pretty complicated, I have a website that's dedicated to giving you a path to follow where I just say, okay, shut up and do this. Okay. This, this, and this. So I have a workbook that takes you through it. But the final summary is one, as you get a D level, that's better for sleep, then you must give a large dose B complex that has all eight. And you must do that for long enough that your microbiome comes back. The hardest part of this is what you're using to decide whether or not you need these Bs is what your body says to you. That is not what medicine has been doing. I was used to having the little piece of paper with the labs.

51:46Dr. Stasha Gominak:It turns out these, the most of the levels for most to the vitamins are not helpful based on my own clinical experience with myself and my patients. So you have to listen to how your body tells you that you need it or you don't. And then you stop the supplement when your microbiome is producing the right amount. And then you have to have a concept that's even a little bit more difficult, which is that has not brought back all of your deficiencies. If your microbiome was not able to help you absorb iron correctly, and day one, after you stopped the three months of B50, let's say, your microbiome is an organ of your body that is now reconstituted.

52:34Dr. Stasha Gominak:It's equivalent to saying my liver fell out, okay? 10 years ago, my liver fell out, and I've been struggling ever since, okay? Your microbiome was back, but you still have somewhere between a year and several years of needing supplemental amounts of these things you're deficient in so a multivitamin of small doses of bees is in the background for a period of time and then believe it or not once you start to sleep a lot better you will actually make more repairs and then your body will ask for more of these bees And one of the biggest confusing aspects of this for me was, I personally believe the idea that why would the body ever need more than whatever the microbiome makes?

53:23Dr. Stasha Gominak:Why would we ever need to supplement? But it turns out, those of us who've been running around on this planet with the wrong microbiome for the last 25 years, or the last two years, develop deficiencies that the body has worked around. But to get to the place you want to be at your peak performance, you still have to provide the supplements once the helpers, the bacteria, are there doing their job. And then eventually, you will not need the supplements. And the B5 part of it, B5 is one of the key chemicals to the autonomic nervous system. So all the stuff that we've been talking about that have to do with heart rate variability, heart rate, sleep.

54:09Dr. Stasha Gominak:How can we measure what level of sympathetic versus parasympathetic tone is connected directly to this B5? The stuff I told you about the people going with insomnia, this is the weirdest thing I've ever seen, but you will still at six months later, eight months later, if you try to take five milligrams of B5, you may not be able to sleep because your body has now gotten to the homeostatic place for B5 production. And it's meeting the need that your brain has. These are concepts that most people are not talking about. The abnormalities and the destruction has been described. But instead of using the idea that, oh, we ran out of the juice that runs the parasympathetic, we're upping the juice supply by meditating, by breath work, by all the things that everybody talks about on your show.

55:09Dr. Stasha Gominak:They're all valuable. But if you ran out of the basic building blocks to make the juice, the meditation is not going to continue to work. You're going to run out like the CPAP did, like my sleeping pills.

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58:14Dr. Stasha Gominak:Now

58:14Shawn Stevenson:back to the show. Yeah. So essentially we're human again, life finds a way. And so we're finding these things to kind of bandaid and to help us to keep going, which I think our bodies, our cells are still crying out for normalcy. And when we say normalcy, it's completely different from the lifestyles that we're living today, which is the average person is spending 90 % of their time indoors. And so we're not getting all these natural inputs. And, you know, and obviously you know this, but our circadian timing system, that primary input is light and dark cycles, controlling what all of our cells are doing.

58:50Shawn Stevenson:And you mentioned the gene expression, right? And it's impacting all of these genes. And what happens when we cut ourselves off from this? I'm so grateful you brought up the point of, you know, like, why would we be taking something from outside when our bodies would be naturally producing it? Our microbiome would naturally produce these things. Well, our microbiomes are dramatically different. If even just comparing to hunter-gatherer tribes that are around today. And so what we want to do and what your program does is helping us to really improve our sleep from the inside out, truly, right? By targeting the microbiome and of course, being mindful of these inputs with vitamin D.

59:35Shawn Stevenson:But we want to get our microbiome, everything online and healthy because these B vitamins, and we've known this for years, when we're taking a supplement versus our bacteria creating them for us and us for us, our bodies know what to do, but we've got to get everything back in balance.

59:54Dr. Stasha Gominak:I'd like to make one point that I don't see talked about. And that is, we have a microbiome in every part of our body. And we have very specific species that grow in our mouth, in our nose, in our ears. The GI tract has its own set of microbiome in the mouth, esophagus, the stomach, in the small intestine. and it changes every few feet so that there is a different group in the third foot of the small intestine because bile is starting to come in. One of the things that's ignored is the fact that the reason why everybody talks about the colon and who's living in your colon is because the poop samples are easy to give.

1:00:39Dr. Stasha Gominak:Getting a sample from the mid-portion of the small intestine, extremely difficult they are able to do that but it's not very simple also it's important to realize i'm going to give this as an example we talked about this earlier there are certain bacteria in the colon that make alcohol ethanol and that ethanol is used by the enterocytes that live on the lining it's giving the food it's using alcohol in the enterocyte that lines your intestinal contents. The actual behavior of each part of the intestine is very unique and the microbiome that fits that part of the intestine is unique also. Now that means that when I give a supplement of B5, certain things happen at the top of the jejunum, the very beginning of the small intestine.

1:01:32Dr. Stasha Gominak:We know that that's where most of the Bs are absorbed and the effect of the B5 was in a half an hour. It's in a half an hour. That means it gets absorbed, it goes in your blood, it goes into your brain and makes you agitated or calm depending on if you got the dose right. But there's another very fascinating thing which just came out which is there are certain bacteria in the colon that make a messenger that goes to the enterocyte, the lining cell, and hits a free fatty acid receptor. that free fatty acid receptor then sends a message to the liver that talks to the glp1 receiver it means it is in one of the natural ways that your brain is told that you're you're hungry for meat and fat or you're hungry for carbohydrates and sugar the messenger that's being made by that bacteria is b5 and that b5 goes to a different receptor it goes to a different receptor that has a totally different effect.

1:02:35Dr. Stasha Gominak:That means the level of complexity of not only these, what we call vitamins, we were thinking of them as, oh, I take a vitamin and I get better. No, it's much more complicated than that. You take a vitamin and you actually change what's being fed your bacteria. That means the bacterial population in your GI tract will change with every supplement you give it. It will have a trickle-down effect to the different species. And there may be some guy down there making something that made your sleep better or worse that had nothing to do exactly with the... We're looking at these biochemical pathways in such a simplistic way, and we're separating out, oh, all these things are published in the bacteria, in the microbiology literature, and we're making it different than what's happening in my brain.

1:03:24Dr. Stasha Gominak:It's a lot more complicated than that. The final message is every single person needs to have the room and to be instructed to pay attention to what happens to them. That's the key. And to be curious and to be courageous enough to say, that wasn't right for me at this point. When my biochemistry changes, it might be different for me. Amazing.

1:03:51Shawn Stevenson:Amazing. So I know you can't give a sweeping recommendation when it comes to vitamin D, but are there some things for us to consider? Would this be something where we're prioritizing sun exposure when we can get it? Would this be focusing on a good vitamin D supplement, D3, of course, a combination of both? What do you recommend just in general? And I know it's difficult, but just in general.

1:04:18Dr. Stasha Gominak:In general, my recommendation is that you be outside more. None of these different forms of energy, some of which are visible and some are not, none of these wavelengths ever come by themselves. Our biology is really linked to a rainbow of wavelengths. That is really important. That means when we biohack, there's always a downside. taking the vitamins is perhaps all we can do but i really think prevention of this is more is actually more powerful than treatment so being outside more even sitting outside if you're not exercising outside being you don't have to be even in direct sunlight you have to be in direct sunlight touching your skin to make vitamin d but you get many many benefits from being outdoors even if it's on a patio where everything is open.

1:05:13Dr. Stasha Gominak:And that's, I think, now well supported by things that medicine has ignored for a long time. So the recommendation is that. Now, the second recommendation is if you have decided that you want to supplement with D, you need to learn more. You need to get educated. And the most important part is you need to be doing D levels. We in the United States are actually very unusual within the globe because I work all around the world, we can get vitamin D levels that are accurate, done by a specific technique, and we can order them ourselves for a relatively reasonable price. And we can do that every month.

1:05:52Dr. Stasha Gominak:Our doctors are currently being told that they should not do D levels, that they should not recommend D, and they should not do D levels. That is a tragedy because medicine really needs to learn about this. And the only way they're going to learn is by doing what I did. Give them the D and then check their levels. So learn a little bit more about it. If you want to get serious about getting yourself back to a place where you can do all sorts of things that you should have been able to do your whole life, but went away 10 years ago, if you have autoimmune disease that you're trying to reverse, I got to see things in my patients that I did not think were reversible.

1:06:32Dr. Stasha Gominak:We basically believe that autoimmune disease is just going to continue. And I was able over years, and there's another piece to this, which is if you think about sleep and what we have to do, and even if you are able to sleep for eight hours, the number of things that the brain has to do, I personally believe that all repairs must be supervised. When you're making repairs, you're opening up pathways that could lead to making two cells when you really don't want two cells or 20 cells or 2 ,000 cells. That means a brain is actively engaged in supervising every single repair we make. You have to be respectful of the time that takes.

1:07:19Dr. Stasha Gominak:That means it happens very slowly. And one of the basic things that I had to learn was when something that's bugging us goes away, we forget we ever had it. And we think about whatever's bugging us now. That means the pivotal part of doing something that takes a year and a half is writing down every week what you're doing and you're dedicating yourself to noticing that I only had three headaches last month. because as soon as they're gone, you're like, well, how come my toe still hurts? Okay. And I really think we're designed to be that way. And that means it takes a bit of attention. I also think that my program is a tiny little sliver of the pie.

1:08:06Dr. Stasha Gominak:Okay. You have people talking about nitric oxide, other people talking about vascular growth, other people talking about hyperbaric oxygen. They're all pointing in the same direction. That means you should keep trying stuff. The key is to try to get your sleep as good as you can. My sleep still isn't perfect. And the odd part about that is the only way you can become a sleep coach is if you have a sleep disorder yourself. Because otherwise, anybody who sleeps normally is like, what are you babbling about? Who cares about that? That's stupid. Just go lie down. You have to have a sleep disorder yourself to really understand what it's like.

1:08:51Yeah.

1:08:52Shawn Stevenson:Thank you for that. Yes. Yes. So, and this is the Right Sleep Program, by the way, and we'll have the links for everybody in the show notes. And of course, go to drgomenak.com and you can find the Right Sleep course there as well. So So that's D-R-G-O-M-I-N-A-K.com. And also you have a fantastic YouTube channel. Can you tell people about that?

1:09:16Dr. Stasha Gominak:Yeah, I have all these interviews put together there, but I also have things that we've called sleep chats, which are little tiny videos that are just about one particular topic, okay? Does sleep have anything to do with carpal tunnel? I have a carpal tunnel. And does sleep have anything to do with burning in the feet? and does sleep have anything to do with my acid reflux okay so i have a lot of brief videos and i also will as part of my we will be switching over to a membership instead of just a single workbook but we will be able soon to be able to get a worksheet which i'm sorry a workbook which will give you your journey, but I'll also have many other teaching videos that will help you learn how to use this correctly.

1:10:08Dr. Stasha Gominak:And also Q &As. And those Q &As are really about encouraging you to explore other things, iron, sulfur, magnesium, things that you talk about on your podcast that sometimes will make a big difference in sleep also. Right.

1:10:26Shawn Stevenson:And that's the thing, you know, Thank you for saying that because it's different seasons as well. You know, like we could have something that works fantastic for us for a certain stint, but to have more tools in our tool belt. And but most importantly, to have that introspection, right, just to be able to pay attention to what's going on with ourselves. You know that we're massively distracted today more than ever, which is, again, contributing to the problem. But, you know, having you to be able to walk people through the process is very special. So thank you for making that available. So again, drgomenac.com, the Right Sleep Program.

1:11:01Shawn Stevenson:You can find it there. And we'll put the link for everybody in the show note and your YouTube channel as well. And thank you again, because, you know, just being able to ask these questions and to have us to direct ourselves to ourselves to start to pay attention to these things. But most importantly, to know that if you're here and your heart is still beating and you are curious, you can figure some things out. Things can get better. And that's the overarching message that I picked up from just spending time with you and spending time with your work. And we need to, you know, stop being so just complacent in our thinking and putting things in these pithy little boxes.

1:11:42Shawn Stevenson:We're so dynamic and beautiful and complex. And there are certain principles that at some point you're going to have to pay attention to. And vitamin D, this conversation is so much bigger. Call it a vitamin is disrespect at this point.

1:12:00Dr. Stasha Gominak:You know, I think I completely agree with you. That's so well said. Yeah.

1:12:04Shawn Stevenson:Well, I appreciate you so much for coming to hang out with us and making the trip. He made the trip to come in and be here today. So I appreciate you. My pleasure. Thank you, Sean. You're doing a great job. Thank you. I appreciate that so much. The one and only Stasha Gomenak. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this and have something to think about when it comes to improving your sleep quality. This is about syncing up that circadian timing system. Now, of course, we have the 24-hour solar day, but we have the 365 seasonal changes, monthly changes, weekly changes, hormone changes that would naturally be happening in alignment with all the durnal and nocturnal patterns of life here on the planet.

1:12:52Shawn Stevenson:And this is where we get into this conundrum with the vitamin D deficiency causing issues with our sleep. And it's not just about here, we take all these vitamin D supplements and it's just going to solve everything. It might make things significantly better initially, but it's also coupled with, as Dr. Goldman's research has indicated making sure that we have a healthy microbiome. And ideally, we want to get to a place where we're getting adequate sun exposure, having a healthy microbiome, and getting plenty of time outdoors just so that our bodies can stay synced up. The symptom of poor sleep is a symptom.

1:13:34Shawn Stevenson:You know, part of her research has really illuminated the fact that, you know, sleep is something that our bodies just do. In one of her studies, she states that sleep is completely involuntary. Most humans fall asleep at about the same time every night and at the same time as other humans around them. Quote, normal humans transition into and out of the same phases of sleep at about the same time as the other humans around them. And waking at the end of sleep is also involuntary and occurs at about the same time for most humans. Now, these observations imply that sleep is not induced by a buildup of a substance like adenosine, for example, that make us feel sleepy, but it is a carefully orchestrated, time-locked event that happens in all humans at about the same time.

1:14:28Shawn Stevenson:So we're not just synced up with all of nature, we're synced up with each other and we are a part of nature. And so for us to be so discombobulated and disconnected from this natural rhythm, again, it's a symptom that there's a deeper issue here with us being connected to life. And so I'm grateful that she also pointed us to introspection, to paying attention to how we feel, not just based on getting a test done and maybe our vitamin D levels are low or they're adequate or whatever the case might be and bringing the conversation, the B vitamin family as well, but paying attention to how our bodies feel and seeing like analyzing what did I do the day before?

1:15:14Shawn Stevenson:Or, you know, what were the conditions of my sleep? How long did I sleep? What's going on in my life right now that might have made my sleep a little bit better or made it a little bit worse? You know, just having a little bit of introspection and paying attention to these small things because that's how we evolved. All right, today we've got all these gadgets, contraptions, all right, it sounds super old school. Go-go gadget, you know, wristwatch, you know, to try to tell us that we got a good night's sleep. But we know if we got a good night's sleep. And what we do during the day really does show up for us when we lay our heads down on the pillow.

1:15:53Shawn Stevenson:And so again, I just wanted to add this additional layer of insight when it comes to this sleep epidemic that our society's experiencing and just a call to action to get more sun exposure, more time outdoors. We already know that this is important. It's just another reason so that our bodies can do these things naturally. But this does not negate the value of a supplement, in particular, supplementing with vitamin D. I wanted to share one other quick study with you on this vitamin D note. Before I met Dr. Gomenak, I came across this study. This was published in the Journal of Biological Rhythms, determining that vitamin D is able to modulate the expression of and synchronize genes involved in our circadian rhythm.

1:16:39All right, this is well-established, but what are we doing about it?

1:16:44Shawn Stevenson:All right, we're getting all the fancy pants, you know, the curtains and the mattresses and all this. That's awesome stacking conditions. But if we're not giving our bodies the ability to make the things that make our sleep, we're going to continue to struggle. And so again, pay attention to this vitamin D equation, really focus on gut health. We've got amazing episodes from the world's foremost experts in gut health and the microbiome. So just educate yourself, be proud of yourself, be patient with yourself, and just keep taking one step at a time. That's what it's all about. We got some epic masterclasses and world leading experts coming your way very, very soon.

1:17:25Shawn Stevenson:So make sure to stay tuned. Take care. Have an amazing day. And I'll talk with you soon.