Unlock the Power of Sleep: 3 BRAIN HACKS to Transform Your Neurological System

0:00Sleep is the fundamental layer of mental and physical health. If there's one thing that we should all be doing is working toward sleeping long enough and deeply enough. There are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep, but the primary one is a... Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

0:41Welcome to this special masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in.

0:59Until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough, 80 % of the nights of your life, you are functioning suboptimally. And what's the biggest risk then if we're not getting enough sleep? Okay, so there are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep. Deficits in learning, deficits in the immune system, reduction in testosterone and estrogen in both men and women. So disruption of hormones, disruption of gut microbiome, increased cancer risk. There are a bunch of things. The severity of those things depends on a lot of other things too. Prior health, other health conditions, context, age, occupation.

1:38If you're not getting enough sleep and you're a high-rise construction worker, it's different than if you're an office worker. So we need to sleep enough. Now, what's enough sleep? This is an interesting question. enough sleep has been argued it's six hours other people it's seven hours other people it's eight hours it's basically waking up without an alarm clock and feeling rested insomnia is actually a medical term nowadays and insomnia is essentially diagnosed as falling asleep during the middle of the day due to lack of sleep at night time but many people who are having trouble sleeping at night are not falling asleep during the middle of the day.

2:21They're dealing with grogginess or crankiness or other effects of having fragmented sleep. What are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep? Is it rumination? Is it traumas that you're holding onto? Is it arguments? Is it self-doubt or insecurities? Is it you nap too much? Is it the foods you ate too late? Like, what would you say are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep? All of the above. But the primary one is a failure to turn off your thoughts. Okay. And I think that might provide a good anchor point for us to talk about some protocols. Really, an excellent night's sleep begins in the morning.

3:06I talked about this on the previous episode, so I won't go into detail, but everyone should get as much bright light in their eyes, ideally from sunlight, first thing in the morning, 10 to 30 minutes outside, depending on how bright it is. Eyeglasses or contact lenses are fine. Don't wear sunglasses if you can do it safely. If you wake up before the sun rises, turn on bright lights, then go outside once the sun rises. If you have no access to sunlight, use a daytime simulator or similar like a ring light and get that light in your eyes. So that's all of that in a compact form. Caffeine, you can inhibit falling asleep with caffeine.

3:41You have to figure out when your threshold is for me, I can drink caffeine up until about three, even four o 'clock in the afternoon and sleep like a baby. And still sleep well. Yes. And Matt Walker, our good friend Matt Walker, would say that my sleep isn't as good as it would be had I cut caffeine out earlier. By like 11 or 12 a.m. Right. And I want to acknowledge, you know, Matt is the Michael Jordan of sleep science. And so I'm not going to. You're the LeBron James. Well, no, no. And thank you for the compliment. But no, I'm not. I know a lot of the science and the protocols, but that's Matt's wheelhouse.

4:17And so if he says something, it's true. And if I say something and our opinions conflict, it's likely to be something that the data are still emerging or in that case, default to Matt being correct. Because I just out of due respect for his expertise. So caffeine, you know, for some people, they can have a two o 'clock espresso, 2 p.m. espresso. So some people, it's 4 p.m. Some people can drink caffeine at 8 p.m. and fall asleep. But there I would say it's problematic because you're disrupting the architecture of sleep and the brain waves associated with sleep, the chemicals and so forth. So get that morning light, cut your caffeine off at the time that allows you to fall asleep.

4:59That morning light also sets the timer on your melatonin rhythm. So you have this gland in your brain called the pineal gland. That pineal is the source of melatonin. Melatonin makes you sleepy, but it does not keep you asleep. Okay. Melatonin starts to rise in the late evening and continues into the night and then eventually tapers off. This is naturally occurring melatonin release, not supplemented melatonin release. The fastest way to slam melatonin to the pavement and eliminate it in your system is to look at bright light for, I hate to tell you this, even a few seconds. So... You mean at night?

5:36At night is typically when melatonin rises. it's when it's released in the bloodstream and when it has this effect of making us sleepy it does a number of other things you want more melatonin at night is right right you do and if you wake up in the middle of the night or it's eight o 'clock and you decide you want to go to bed at nine or it's nine o 'clock you want to go to bed at 10 you go into the bathroom and you flip on the bright lights your melatonin levels just got crushed down so having lights on is a the worst thing you can do yes and it doesn't matter if it's blue light red light purple light green light bright lights inhibit melatonin very acutely and therefore you want to avoid exposure to bright lights at night if your goal is to be asleep so the simple rule that governs all this stuff is when you want to be alert get bright light in your eyes ideally from sunlight so that's true in the morning and throughout the day and when you want to be sleepy or sleep avoid bright light in your eyes now many home environments don't allow you to have zero lights and that's not actually necessary.

6:34You can just dim the lights in the evening. Ideally, you also avoid overhead lights because the neurons in the eye that trigger this melatonin suppression and so forth, they reside in an area of the eye that views upper visual space. So you could have desk lamps and just dim those down. If you're going to work on a screen, dim it way down. Will blue blockers help? Yes. But if the light is bright enough, you're still going to inhibit melatonin release. So how bad is watching TV at night? If the TV isn't too bright and - If it's farther away. Farther away. It's not like when you're - Yeah. And maybe you wear blue blockers.

7:11Yeah. And or, I mean, some people take this to the extreme. They wear sunglasses. I think that's a little extreme. Now, candlelight and moonlight, surprisingly, doesn't seem to block melatonin. Now, maybe a really bright moonlit night full moon can, you know, the lunacy associated with the full moon might actually be due to a suppression of melatonin and an increase in alertness. So those are the things as it relates to light. Then there's this issue of people who have trouble staying asleep. So they can fall asleep fine, but they wake up at two or three in the morning. I happen to do this. If I go to bed around 1030, I tend to wake up around three and I use the restroom.

7:51Yeah. I tend to drink a lot of fluids and I have to use the restroom. This was true at every age. This is not just some aging related thing. That's fine. I just keep the lights dim and use the bathroom and then you go back to sleep. Fall back to sleep. Very normal, very healthy. One of the best things I ever did for my sleep was to keep my phone out of the room so that when I wake up at 3 in the morning, I just didn't start scrolling the newspapers is typically what I'm reading online. Gotcha. And then you're just waking up your brain, not just by the light but by the content. You're activating it again as opposed to going back to sleep.

8:23Exactly. And sometimes there's a comment and they're like, why is it? You know, your thinking is not very good in the middle of the night. The other thing is you want to keep the room cool. So in order to fall asleep, your body has to undergo a drop in temperature of one to three degrees. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this. One is keeping the room cool. The other is to, and that's ideal actually, because you can put a hand or a foot out. We actually lose a lot of our heat through what's called our glabrous skin. So the palms of our hands, the bottoms of the feet. I always put my feet out of the sheets.

8:54Just let them feel the cool air. That's right. And that's a great way to cool off your core body temperature. You're probably doing that unconsciously in your sleep as well. If the room were too warm, the only way for you to cool off would be for you to put your hand in a bucket of cold water. And generally, people don't have that accessible. And then you're going to go pee if you're doing that too. Right. Exactly. And then, of course, there are all these products nowadays of things that cool the bed. I'm supposed to try one of these soon. I haven't tried one yet. I tend to just keep the room cool.

9:23Cool, yeah. and what do you keep it out i keep it around 67 65 uh that's a little cooler than what i do i put it at about 67 68 okay um but i tend to wake up hot in the middle of the night like throw the comforter off um and go put some cold water on my face wow um so don't obsess over waking up too much and if you do try and stay away from screens or if um you know some people will read a book dim light again yeah uh and then falling back asleep some people are waking up at two or three because they are going to bed too late their melatonin has run out so imagine that you're that you're naturally somebody who should go to bed early around nine but we all have this ability to push forward and stay awake if we have to much easier to stay awake than to force yourself to go to sleep.

10:15It's very hard to force yourself to go to sleep. So let's say your system, you start releasing melatonin around 9 PM, but you stay up until 11. Then you get into bed, you fall asleep around 1130. And at three in the morning, you suddenly wake up. Well, that's because your melatonin tapered off and there's a wakefulness that's occurring. And so ideally you would start going to bed earlier. Now there's a lot of discussion out there about so-called chronotypes. So night owls, morning people, people that follow a more typical schedule typical would be going to sleep somewhere between 10 30 and 11 30 waking up somewhere between 6 30 and 8 then there are the people that like to go to bed at 2 a.m sleep till 10 and then there are people that like to go to bed at 8 and wake up at 4 huge variation out there it tends to change across the lifetime yeah your season of life for years that's right and adolescents and teenagers tend to stay up later and want to sleep in and there's actually some evidence that they can learn better if they are allowed to to use that schedule but most schools won't adhere to that schedule you gotta wake up at six and go to school at eight or whatever yeah once you enter adult life you're generally somebody who's gonna have to learn how to go to bed early and wake up early or at least wake up early now naps you should feel comfortable the data say naps you should feel comfortable napping for 90 minutes or less at any point throughout the day as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep.

11:38So some people, like me, I love naps, but it doesn't interfere with my nighttime sleep. It doesn't. Does not. So you can take a 60-minute nap. Generally, 20 to 45 minutes. And then you fully fall asleep, or you're kind of like awake and just resting? I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime. In like a minute? I can fall asleep at a gun range, yeah. What? Can you sleep sitting up too like this? Oh, yeah. Plain anywhere. That's a gift. It is, although it could reflect that I'm pushing my system a little too hard. Oh. But it is useful at times. Incredible, man. It is useful. So you can fall asleep right on a plane or?

12:16Anywhere. Leaning against a subway station and anywhere. If I need sleep, I'm going down. That's incredible. Yeah. So the other thing is that during sleep, a number of things happen. And we can talk about slow-wave sleep and REM sleep. But one of the most important physiological functions of sleep is to clear out some of the cellular debris that accumulates throughout the day. The cellular debris creates cognitive deficits. It actually may be related to the aggregation of proteins and things that relate to dementia and Alzheimer's. It's the so-called glymphatic system. The lymphatic system is a system of moving through immune cells and clearing out of debris from the body.

12:57The glymphatic system is a kind of a equivalent system that exists in the brain that involves so-called glial cells, which are support cells, but also do many things actively. They're not just doing support. The glymphatic system is like a washout of the brain's debris. And that system seems to function best when feet are slightly elevated above the brain. There's some interesting data from University of South Carolina coming out now that show that if you can get your ankles elevated a little bit higher than your chin, that's great. When you're sleeping? While you're sleeping. What's it do for you?

13:33It increases the glymphatic clearance. And there's some data that it can improve function of the brain. The studies that are happening now that I'm aware of, I'm in touch with that group, are mainly geared towards people that have had head injuries. So concussion and TBI of various kinds. But they also are seeing interesting effects in typical folks that don't have any traumatic brain injury. So I put a pillow underneath my ankles when I fall asleep to get a little bit of that elevation. And then during the day, if ever you can't get a nap or you are going to get a nap, put your ankles up on the couch and lie down on the floor.

14:08That itself can get some of the clearance of the glymphatic system. And that helps you sleep better or it helps you just clean out the system? It helps your brain function better when you wake up from sleep. Interesting. That's what the data are starting to show. That's cool. You know, some of the things I described, like the light viewing, is baked into the neuroscience literature. Hundreds of papers. Yes. Published papers. Some of the things like the glymphatic system is kind of cutting edge. It's on the way. But because the safety margins of raising your ankles are so large, I mean, there's nothing dangerous about that.

14:38Sure. How long do you need to do it for to get the benefits? Oh, I think these are immediate benefits. Two minutes or 10 minutes? You're doing this the whole night that you're asleep. Your ankles are elevated. If you wake up and you happen to kick the pillow out, it's not the end of the world. But the idea is that you don't want to be sleeping with your head above your ankles either. There is some evidence that when people travel on planes and they're sleeping in chairs, that that's not equivalent to the kind of sleep they'd get when they're lying flat. Interesting. Independent of all the other things that are happening.

15:05And we know this because there are great sleep labs at Stanford School of Medicine, at UPenn, back east and elsewhere, where people actually go into a clinic and sleep either upright or at different angles. And they track it. And they're looking at all this at the level of data. Okay, so here's one for you. What's the best position to sleep? On your back, on your side, on your stomach? Ah, great question. And it really, truly depends. And it probably depends on how hot you run. So I tend to run really warm. A lot of the cooling of the body occurs from the palms and bottoms of the feet. but also from the upper back and scapulae because we accumulate what's called brown fat there.

15:46It's not the blubbery fat that's under the skin. It's like a furnace. Actually, you can increase the density of brown fat by going into cold water repeatedly for one to three minutes, several times each week. It means your furnace actually burns hotter. It allows you to be in cold temperatures more comfortably. Some really beautiful data just published on this. So I don't like to sleep on my back because I start heating up. Start sweating. That's right. So I tend to sleep on my side. I sleep in that, what is that? It's like soldier position. But then again, there are some people that have shoulder issues and then they can't do that.

16:18I'm relatively flexible through my shoulders, not super flexible. So I can do that. It really depends. Now, of course, if you're sleeping on your stomach, how do you elevate your ankles? You know, it starts becoming a little bit, you know, we are not just science experiments. And so you have to assume that you're not going to get everything exactly right. But keeping the room cool, keeping the cool being under a warm enough blanket, but then extending a hand or an ankle out so that you could cool off during the middle of the night, that's going to be good. Keep the room dark, although complete pitch black doesn't seem to be as good as having a little bit of light somewhere in the room.

16:55But you don't want a bright blue light or red light anywhere in the room that's going to wake you up. Some people like me have very thin eyelids, exceedingly thin eyelids. Some people have very thick eyelids. So some people are more bothered by a light in the room than others. It really varies. So you have to just tune things to your particular environment. I'm curious about the neuroscience before you go to sleep. How do we set our minds up to, you were saying before about a lot of people, it's hard for them to sleep because they can't shut their mind off. Right. Is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally?

17:30and then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling like clear-minded and without this brain fog where we have more motivation, where we have more, you know, energy and excitement towards the next day and then doing that in a pattern every night. Is there any science around that? Is it like listening to a hypnosis? That could be very helpful. Which will help you clean out whatever's going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day but also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it. You know, is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep better?

18:03What have you found there in the neuroscience? Dr. Yeah, so glad you asked this question. There's some really interesting data from a guy named Chuck Charles Zeissler, who is at Harvard Med, sent beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades, and a really fantastic physician and researcher. They observed something interesting, which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime, there's a spike in alertness, planning, and almost anxiety that all people undergo. And it's a normal, healthy pattern. The idea, and it's a just-so story because we don't really know, I nor Chuck Zeisler nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase, as we say, but we assume this came about because prior to going to sleep, we need to shore up everything for safety.

18:52We need to lock things down, make sure everything is in its place because we are very vulnerable in sleep. Nowadays, this might manifest as you need to go to bed at 10.30 because you have to get up at six, et cetera. And then right around 8.30 or nine, you start finding yourself running around doing various things. Many people worry about that and they think, oh, I'm really stressed because I actually need to go to sleep and here I am wide awake. It tends to subside very quickly. So just the knowledge that that's a normal, healthy spike in alertness and activity, I think can help a number of people.

19:25I want to make sure I mention that. The other thing is preparing the mind, as you said, turning thoughts off. Turning thoughts off is a skill. We've talked before, gosh, almost a year or more now, ago, about Yoga Nidra. Yes. Which is, there are many, many Yoga Nidra scripts available on YouTube, free of cost. The ones I particularly like are the ones by Kamini Desai, K-A-M-I-N-I-D-E-S-A-I, Kamini Desai. I just really like her voice. I don't know Kamini, never met her. These are free scripts. They're Yoga Nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes. They involve some breathing, some meditation type stuff.

20:06But they teach you to turn your thoughts off, which is really wonderful. Because a lot of people, they just get stuck in this rumination. Now, is there an ideal protocol prior to sleep? It depends because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there. So I wouldn't say don't work or do work. You know, you do want to avoid strong stimuli before sleep. So do you really want to watch, you know, politically charged or violent movie right before sleep? Well, that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence. Some people aren't triggered, other people are.

20:48But that aside, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full because that can inhibit your sleep. So for most people, that's going to be finishing your last bite of food about two hours before bedtime. We used to think that aging was a one-way street. You couldn't do anything about it. We now know from studying twins that 80 % of your health in old age is up to you, how you live your life. Right. Your community, your positivity, your thinking, your food, the sleep you have, like all those things, right? Yeah. And the reason that they work, we discovered, is because they turn on the longevity genes.

21:28That's the breakthrough. Okay. So now we're artificially tweaking these longevity genes genetically or with supplements or hopefully medicine soon. Gotcha. you but you can do it in more natural organic ways is what i'm hearing well right now that's what we've got and even if you just do the five obvious things things like skip meals and don't smoke and exercise that'll get you an extra 14 years on average really it's that big that's not even using high tech that's just there's no technology just like living a good life right so what are the main things to turning on the longevity that anyone can do without technology without money, you know, science.

22:06Yeah. Well, okay. So first of all, don't smoke. Yeah. That'll damage your DNA. That'll accelerate the aging process. Does that include like e-cigarettes and all these other vaping? Does that also include that? Well, I'm a big advocate for putting nothing artificial in your body, including vaping. Yeah. My mother died from lung cancer, so I'm pretty militant about it. Wow. I don't think vaping is as bad in terms of the number of chemicals getting into your body. Yeah. But we've seen recently it's probably not healthy anyway. Yeah. Okay. So no smoking. That's one. That's one. Next one is don't eat so much.

22:45Eat less often. So not malnutrition, of course. You don't want to get too thin. But this three meals a day plus snacks is ridiculous. It's been my life. You look great. I need to get rid of that. Yeah. Well, you're also working it out. But someone like me who's not an athlete, the most exercise I do during the day typically is typing. Three meals a day is too much. Actually, one meal is enough for someone like me. Wow. Yeah, I'm now 50. So my metabolism is way down. You look like you're 37. Oh, thanks. That's great, man. You might need glasses. I thought you're like 100 and you're level 37. You probably reversed the aging.

23:21Well, I'm glad I don't look 80 because that would really be bad for my message. Okay, so we got no smoking. eating less. Yeah. Next one would be the obvious, high intensity interval training. Lose your breath once in a while. Lose your breath? What do you mean? Just by like working out like - Yeah, become hypoxic. Tell your body that you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger or something like that. The reason all of this stuff works in terms of the diet and exercise, it's not that your blood flows more or that being hungry is just healthy for the body. It's actually that your longevity genes get turned on by these things.

24:00And why does that happen? Why does it happen in humans, in mice, even in yeast cells for bread and beer? The reason is that the body senses adversity and says, crap, we got to fight back. We might die next week without food. And we're running away from tigers and lions. That's what this survival network, this longevity gene. So it turns it on when it feels like it's in survival mode. That's it. We want to be in survival mode. And we spend our whole lives trying to reduce our adversity. Right. Being comfortable. Right. Don't be hungry. Don't be puffed. Don't walk. You know, valet your car. Right.

24:41Roll your suitcase. Don't carry it, for goodness sakes. We've done the worst. No wonder we're getting sicker and sicker. We're in a world of convenience. Right. And it's the worst thing we could do for our bodies in terms of longevity. So those three things. The other two, let's see, what else is there? Oh, the type of food you eat is important. There's a big debate, of course. They say like plant-based is going to extend the telomeres, right? If you're eating leafy greens, that's what I've heard. Right. Well, among other things, it's also going to have a couple of really important types of molecules.

25:17One are the monounsaturated fats, fatty acids. You get that from olive oil and avocados. those are great. And we've just learned that that's a really important trigger for a certain longevity. Olive oil. Yeah. I think when I had Gundry on, he was like, I drink a cup of olive oil a day or something like teaspoons of olive oil. He's just eating it. He's like, I'm trying to get as much in as I can, putting it on everything. Yeah. Well, let's get back to that because there's a new discovery as of a week ago that says we think we understand how that works. But in olive oil, there's also what are called the other important component of a plant-based diet are polyphenols, which are the molecules that plants make when they're under adversity, when they're stressed.