234. How To Improve Your Sleep With These Sleep Hygiene Tips

0:00The sleep choices you're making right now will determine your brain's health in your 70s and your 80s. Today, we're talking about something that affects every single person listening, sleep. Sleep is so fundamental to life that it's built into every creature with a nervous system. So why is it that modern humans are the only species that are voluntarily cutting sleep short?

0:19Gary Brecka:The obsession with productivity in our culture tells us that sleeping less means getting more done. Just disrupted sleep reduces attention span capacity by 30%. That's nearly a third of your ability to focus gone after just one night. You're not going to have a perfect night's sleep every single night. Life happens. Even if you can't control exactly how much sleep you get every night, controlling when you sleep has massive benefits. This goes all the way down to what you're sleeping on. When I realized that we spend a third of our life asleep on our mattress, I started to understand just how much it actually matters.

0:52Gary Brecka:And that's why I'm launching the ultimate snooze mattress. It's completely free of harmful petroleum, foams, glues, and chemical fire barriers. 100 % GOTS certified organic cotton and wool from New Zealand as a fire barrier. This is a much safer, healthier, and more natural way to satisfy the federal regulations than using chemical fire retardants. Let's get to sleep.

1:26You spend an entire one-third of your life asleep on a mattress, but one in three people around the world are not getting enough of it, and a lot of people treat sleep deprivation like a badge of honor. Sleep is so fundamental to life that it's built into every creature with a nervous system. So why is it that modern humans are the only species that are voluntarily cutting sleep short, and what is it actually costing us? I'm a biohacker and human biologist Gary Brecka, and you're listening to the Ultimate Human podcast, where we dig into the real science behind longevity and disease prevention.

1:58Today, we're talking about something that affects every single person listening, sleep. But this isn't going to be another episode telling you that sleep is important. You already know that. Instead, I'm going to show you what happens to your body when you don't get enough sleep, how fast those changes happen. Researchers at Harvard Medical School wanted to answer a simple question. What happens to your body's ability to process sugar when you don't sleep eight hours? They brought in healthy young men into a clinical research center, and these were guys with no health problems, normal weight, no history of diabetes in any of their families.

2:29The researchers restricted the participants' sleep to just five hours per night for one week, just seven nights of sleep deprivation for five hours. They controlled everything else, the same food, same activity levels, even the same environment. The only variable that changed was sleep. At the end of that week, they measured insulin sensitivity using two different tests. After just one week of sleep restriction, insulin sensitivity dropped by 20%. Now remember, insulin sensitivity is a good thing that keeps the blood sugar level stable. When insulin sensitivity drops, more glucose stays in the bloodstream, raising your blood sugar levels.

3:06They also measured free fatty acids in the blood. These are fats that circulate in your bloodstream and can directly cause insulin resistance. After sleep restriction, free fatty acid levels increased by up to 30%. When they looked at who developed these changes the fastest, they found that it didn't matter if you were fit, young, or had perfect health markers going in. Sleep restriction created pre-diabetic metabolic conditions in everyone within just one week. Think about what this means. We're not talking about months or even years of bad sleep. We're talking about the kind of week that millions of people have regularly.

3:41Late nights working, early mornings at the gym, trying to maximize productivity, and cutting into sleep. And in that One week, your body starts displaying the metabolic markers of someone heading towards diabetes, even if you've been careful with what you eat. This is such solid proof of what we know that's already true. You can't supplement or exercise your way around poor sleep. Let's talk about the effects poor sleep has on your brain. In recent years, research has pointed to the existence of a waste clearance system in the brain called the glymphatic system. I talk about this all the time.

4:11We have a lymphatic system in the body to eliminate waste. We have a glymphatic system in the brain. It gets its name from a combination of glial cells, which control the flow of fluid in the brain called the lymphatic system that moves lymph fluid throughout the body to clear waste. Here's how it works. During sleep, the spaces between your brain cells actually expand by about 20%, and cerebrospinal fluid flushes through these spaces, washing away all the waste that builds up. By waste, we don't mean stool or urine, we mean cellular waste. One of the most important things it clears out is a protein called beta amyloid.

4:45This is the exact same protein that

4:47Gary Brecka:forms the plaques found in Alzheimer's disease. It should come as no surprise that when you don't get enough sleep, you won't clear this waste out as well as you should. In fact, researchers have shown that just one night of sleep deprivation increases beta amyloid levels in the brain. One night. And now that they have demonstrated the biological mechanism, the evidence is becoming more and more concrete that poor sleep habits over time are a cause of these chronic diseases later in life. Now let's talk about one of the biggest, longest, and most important sleep studies ever conducted. This was published in the high-impact journal Nature in 2021, and it followed nearly 8 ,000 people for 25 years.

5:26Gary Brecka:That is a ton of data collected on tracking real people's real sleep patterns and then their health outcomes. These researchers wanted to find out if how much you sleep earlier in life can predict whether you'll develop dementia later. They measured sleep duration at age 50 and then again at age 60 and again at age 70. They tracked who developed dementia over the following decades. Here's what they found. People who consistently slept six hours or less per night during their 50s had a 30 % higher risk of developing dementia compared to those who slept at least seven hours. And this wasn't explained by depression, cardiovascular disease, or other health factors.

6:02It was entirely attributed to sleep. This study is super important because they also track people who change their sleep duration over time. People who went from normal sleep hours, let's say seven hours, to short sleep, six hours or less, also showed even higher risk for dementia. This shows us that these chronic diseases aren't just attributed to having bad genes. Cutting your sleep short in midlife

6:25Gary Brecka:directly increased your risk decades later. Think about the timeline here. The sleep choices you're making right now will determine your brain's health in your 70s and your 80s. I know it may seem hard to think about the effects decades from now, but we can even bring these effects into the present. Research on college students shows that even young, healthy brains are immediately impacted by sleep disruption. I'm sure everyone listening remembers staying up late, studying the night before a test in high school or college, and then just not doing as well in the test as you had hoped. Research shows that this is a real thing.

6:57Gary Brecka:Students with poor sleep quality showed 15 % lower performance on memory tests compared to those who slept well. But attention takes an even bigger hit. Just one night of fragmented sleep, not even total sleep deprivation, just disrupted sleep, reduces attention span capacity by 30%. That's nearly a third of your ability to focus, gone after just one night. Here's where we run into a problem. Modern life has hijacked almost every factor that supports quality sleep. We've got artificial light flooding our homes until late at night, disrupting the natural circadian signals that tell our bodies it's time to wind down.

7:31Gary Brecka:We've got screens emitting blue light directly into our eyes right before bed, suppressing melatonin production. We've got caffeine consumption extending later and later into the day. We've got work emails and stress following us into the bedroom. And we've got cultural narrative that treats sleep like a luxury rather than a necessity. The obsession with productivity in our culture tells us that sleeping less means getting more done. Sleep when you're dead, right? But the research shows the exact opposite is true. It's not surprising at all that sleep restriction makes you less productive, not more.

8:03Gary Brecka:Plus, as we age, sleep naturally becomes more fragmented and less deep. The very restorative stages of sleep that we need most decline with age. So just when we need high quality sleep the most to protect us against cognitive decline, our bodies start getting worse at achieving it. Most people think sleep is purely about achieving a certain number of hours. But here's what the actual research shows. Consistency matters as much as duration. The Nature study that I mentioned earlier found that irregular sleep patterns, going to bed and waking up at different times each day, were associated with worse outcomes, even when total sleep time was adequate.

8:39Gary Brecka:Your body thrives on routine. Your circadian rhythm is designed to anticipate when sleep is coming and prepare your physiology accordingly. The people who live the longest and maintain the best cognitive function aren't sleeping nine or 10 hours every night. They're sleeping seven to eight hours on a consistent schedule. That means the same bedtime and the same wake time, even on weekends. So rather than me giving you a long list of sleep hygiene tips that you've heard thousands of times, let's focus on four things that actually move the needle. Lock in your sleep schedule first. Before you worry about supplements, establish a consistent bedtime and wake time.

9:15This is the foundation everything else is built on. Even if you can't control exactly how much sleep you get every night, controlling when you sleep has massive benefits.

9:24Gary Brecka:The second thing you should do is build your environment the right way. While most people hear this and think about eliminating bright light and cooling the room at night, this goes all the way down to what you're sleeping on. When I realized that we spend a third of our life asleep on our mattress, I started to understand just how much it actually matters. This is such an overlooked area right now, and that's why I'm launching the Ultimate Snooze mattress. It's completely free of harmful petroleum, foams, glues, and chemical fire barriers. These outgas all night while you're sleeping. Many mattresses on the market right now, about 98%, use chemical fire retardants to meet federal regulations.

10:03Gary Brecka:Some chemicals used are chlorinated tris and antimony trioxide, which have been directly linked to hormonal and neurological issues and might even be carcinogenic. While basic materials must be listed by law on the label, companies are not required to disclose specific chemical additives, flame retardants, volatile organic compound levels, or the adhesive glues that they're using, leaving consumers in the dark about what they're actually sleeping on. Now think about it. As you lay on that mattress and it compresses, that outgassing is going right into your lungs. Furniture, mattresses included, go through something called off-gassing, where many of the harmful chemicals are released right into the air.

10:41Gary Brecka:You might recognize this as that new mattress smell, but what you're actually smelling are these VOCs being released into the air. This can drag on for months, even years with some of these mattresses. The actual memory foams are the worst. This is dangerous since many of these VOCs are known carcinogens and they're used as adhesives or solvents in the manufacturing process. The good news is that you can have a better, more organic sleeping environment with a mattress that uses 100 % GOTS certified organic cotton and wool from New Zealand as a fire barrier. This is a much safer, healthier, and more natural way to satisfy the federal regulations than using chemical fire retardants.

11:20Gary Brecka:Combine this with a cool, dark room, and you have the perfect environment for a perfect night's sleep. You know, so many times we get questions coming into our VIP group about asthma in children or respiratory issues or skin conditions, and people eliminate everything from their homes, but they don't think about the mattress they're sleeping on. Remember, guys, a third of your life is going to be spent on your mattress. Don't spend it breathing these fine retardants. The third thing to do is to get bright light exposure in the morning. This is one of the most powerful circadian regulators. Within an hour of waking, getting outside to expose yourself to bright light and allowing light to enter right into your eyes.

11:58Gary Brecka:This helps set your internal clock and makes it easier to fall asleep at night. And there is lots of evidence to support this. Lastly, create a wind down routine. Your body needs time to transition from wakefulness to sleep. An hour before bed, start dimming your lights, put away screens, and do something relaxing. This signals to your body that sleep is approaching. If you wanna go deeper on sleep optimization, and I mean really dial it in, I want you to know about something I built for our VIP community. It's called Becoming the Ultimate Human. It's a 10-month course, and I dive deep into every aspect of how to get the perfect habits of the ultimate human that's inside of every single one of you.

12:38Gary Brecka:I dedicated an entire month exclusively to perfecting your sleep with protocols, troubleshooting, the science behind sleep architecture, everything you need to master this. VIPs get full access to this course for free. Plus they get monthly live Q and A's with me, where you can ask me anything about what you're learning and how to apply it to your specific situation. Click the link in the show notes. If you're serious about optimizing your health based on real data, not trends, this is where you belong. You're not going to have a perfect night's sleep every single night. Life happens. Sometimes you'll have a late night.

13:10Gary Brecka:Sometimes stress will keep you up. That's normal. And your body can handle occasional poor sleep. What your body can't handle is chronic, consistent, poor sleep. Those studies we talked about today weren't one bad night or even one bad week. They were about patterns. So if you miss sleep one night, don't panic. Just get back to your normal schedule the next night. Consistency beats perfection every single time. The research is crystal clear. Sleep is not optional. It's not something you can hack your way around with supplements or willpower. Your body needs it to clear waste from your brain, regulate your metabolism, and consolidate memories.

13:45Gary Brecka:The choices you make about sleep today are determining your health next week and decades from now. You don't need to be perfect, but you do need to be consistent. Let's get to sleep. And that's just science.