Simple Fixes For A Good Night's Rest - Shawn Stevenson (4K)

Andrew Huberman mentioned in an interview that I did with him recently that the potential mental health epidemic that we're seeing at the moment could be downstream of poor circadian rhythm, uh, dysregulated sleep, disrupted sleep. How much truth do you think is in that?

Ooh. Circadian medicine is really top tier science right now. We're synced up with the 24-hour solar day. All of our hormone production, our neurotransmitters, we're synced up with what the universe is doing. And the funny thing is humans can kind of hide out from that, that interface, but our, our genes are really expecting us to be in constant communication with what's happening outside. And humans are really interesting, we can create our own habitats. We're kinda like big hairless beavers, or many of us are hairless. Um, but even when we're creating, it's still nature, because we're a part of nature, but we can e- essentially hide out and create a 24-hour day artificially. And so our circadian timing system is getting really screwed up. So absolutely I agree with him, and here's the rub, right now in the United States estimated about 115 million Americans are regularly sleep-deprived, to boot.

Out of 330?

Yeah, so it's a sizable amount, and we're talking about on a regular basis, like essentially daily. And my big thing is always looking for what is the connective tissue, why should people really care about this? And I, I always like to tie it to metabolic health and how we look, right? And a really fascinating study was done, and this was actually published by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and they looked at people's biometrics and used CT scans to look at their belly fat for five years, tracking a group of people. And they found that people who were sleep-deprived gained over twice as much belly fat in that five-year period. And sleep-deprived in this particular study was less than six hours a night. All right? So kind of there's something about six as being that sweet spot, and by the way, there is no cookie-cutter amount of sleep. That's one of those things that, you know, we just kind of drink eight glasses of eight-ounce water a day, like it's very superficial. Is that the same for Shaq and for Simone Biles? It's gonna be different, and the same thing holds true with sleep. It's not just the number of hours, it's the quality of those hours. It's a lot like the calorie conversation, you know, yes, calories matter but the quality of those calories definitely matter. And I've been a big proponent in pushing into popular culture this term epicaloric controller recently, which we can circle back to and talk about. But in particular with sleep, I wanna share one other piece too because especially right now in this energy equation and how important this is and some of your friends and colleagues as well like doc- Dr. Gabrielle Aline, really good friend of mine, we're looking at how important testosterone is not just for maintaining our muscle mass and our energy but for longevity, and this is critical for men and women, and it's finally really shifting gears to be all-encompassing of humanity how impo- how important testosterone is. Now listen to this. This was published in 2011 in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, top tier medical journal here in the United States, and they tracked young men, average age about 24, all right? And they brought them into the lab and they put them in this awards study. So they sleep-deprived them for just one week, all right? So they basically got five hours of sleep for one week. That one-week period their testosterone dropped 15%, all right? Now that might not sound like a lot, but suddenly that's as if they're 10 to 15 years older as far as their testosterone production is concerned. This is the power of sleep. Testosterone is right next to HGH, our most sleep duration dependent hormone, it's kind of like you're a human Tesla jacking into your charging station at night and filling up the testosterone. There are things we can get little spikes during the day, but a- basically when we get up, testosterone is just going down, and when we go to sleep, it starts rising again.