
December 18, 2018
The Genius Life – Shawn Stevenson on How to Optimize Sleep for Fat Loss
Check out The Genius Life Episode Page and Show Notes
Key Takeaways
- “Your sleep quality is potentially a bigger influence on your overall health, your physical appearance, and your biomarkers than your nutrition and exercise”
- Being underslept, handicaps our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of another person
- Aim to optimize your sleep cycles (like how much REM and deep sleep you’re getting), rather than your total quantity of sleep
- Good things you can do to improve your sleep quality:
- Get some sun exposure early in the day (even 5-10 minutes is good enough) -“A great night of sleep starts the moment you wake up in the morning”
- Get some exercise early on in the day (a jog, yoga, a power walk – anything to get your body moving)
- A normal cortisol rhythm is as follows – it peaks in the morning, and drops in the evening
- Cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship – if cortisol is elevated, it can suppress melatonin
- Sun exposure increases cortisol levels – raised cortisol levels in the morning, lower cortisol levels at night
Intro
- Shawn Stevenson (T: @ShawnModel and IG:@shawnmodel) is the author of Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to A Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success
- Check out his website
- He hosts The Model Health Show
- Check out the Podcast Notes from Shawn’s appearance on The James Altucher Show
An Introduction To Better Sleep
- “Your sleep quality is potentially a bigger influence on your overall health, your physical appearance, and your biomarkers than your nutrition and exercise”
- One of the best things you can do to help lose weight? – Get a full 8 hours rest every night
- “If you’re not sleeping, you’re not healing”
The Dangers of Sleep Deprivation
- Take note of when you tend to get into disagreements with your significant other
- Chances are, it’s when you’re tired and/or hungry
- Most arguments, tend to happen when people are tired/irritable at the end of the day
- After 24 hours of no sleep, there is heightened brain activity in the amygdala, and reduced activity in the prefrontal corex
- The prefrontal cortex is responsible for decision making, distinguishing between right/wrong, and social control
- This causes your ability to put yourself in other peoples’ shoes, to drop – you have a hard time seeing things from another’s point of view
- “Being underslept handicaps our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of another person” – Max
- Maybe this has caused the lack of empathy we see across the world
- What also happens when you’re sleep deprived?
- Stress hormones (like cortisol) get elevated
- One side effect of high cortisol levels? – Gluconeogenesis
- This is when your body takes muscle tissue, and converts it to glucose
- One side effect of high cortisol levels? – Gluconeogenesis
- There’s a reduction (~6%) in glucose reaching the brain
- Stress hormones (like cortisol) get elevated
Shift Work
- One study showed that nurses doing shift work (working overnight) have a 30% increased risk of developing breast cancer
- All is takes, is 2-3 days a week of working overnights for this risk to develop
- “If your number one priority is your health, then working shift work, is going to be working against you”
Melatonin
- Melatonin helps to regulate your circadian clock
- It’s a hormone that tells the body it’s time to sleep
- But it’s not just associated with sleep
- Melatonin is also a powerful hormone associated with fat loss, anti-cancer pathways, regulating your immune system, and white blood cell activity
- You have 400x more melatonin stored in your gut (in your enteric nervous system), than you do in your brain
- Melatonin increases the mobilization and activity of brown adipose tissue (BAT)
- The reason it’s brown? – It’s very dense in mitochondria
- This kind of fat, burns fat, and melatonin increases it
- Around 5,000 genes are influenced by melatonin
- We only have 25k-30k genes
- Your body makes melatonin naturally, but it might be a good idea to supplement to beat jet lag, or to reset your body’s clock after a waking up late
Other Beneficial Things That Happen While We Sleep
- Our glymphatic system ramps up
- This is the body’s garbage man, if you will – it clears away metabolic waste
How much sleep do we really need?
- Think about sleep on an evolutionary level
- Going to sleep for 7-8 hours leaves us so vulnerable to attack
- If sleep was something that wasn’t needed, we would have developed the ability to function without it
- Brain Waves
- During our normal waking state, our brain emits beta waves (sometimes gamma)
- When we sleep, our brain waves transition into alpha, then theta, then delta
- The deepest sleep is associated with delta waves
- You want to be spending a sufficient amount of time in each of those stages – each of those stages is correlated with different hormone and neurotransmitter activity
- Everybody is different – we don’t all need the same amount of sleep
- Things that influence our sleep requirements – Our stress levels, if we exercise, if we’re learning new material
- Aim to optimize your sleep cycles (like how much REM and deep sleep you’re getting), rather than your total quantity of sleep
REM Sleep
- Alcohol lowers the amount of REM sleep you get
- During REM sleep, memory processing takes place
- This is when our experiences get converted into short term memories
What are some things we can do to boost the quality of our sleep?
- Get some sun exposure early in the day (from 8-10am, even 5-10 minutes is good)
- “A great night of sleep starts the moment you wake up in the morning”
- Sun exposure increases cortisol levels
- Cortisol helps jump start our body, in addition to being a stress hormone
- Raised cortisol levels in the morning, lower cortisol levels at night – this is good
- Cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship – if cortisol is elevated, it can suppress melatonin
- Sun exposure increases serotonin production
- Serotonin is a precursor for melatonin
- One study showed that office workers who have no access to windows, sleep about an hour less each night
- Even on a cloudy day, you can get enough light to anchor your body’s circadian rhythm, and help your sleep
- Check out the Human Charger – these are light emitting ear buds
- Aubrey Marcus talked about them in these Podcast Notes
- Get some exercise early on in the day – even 5 minutes is enough (a jog, yoga, a power walk – anything to get your body moving)
- Morning exercisers have been found to get more deep sleep, have more efficient sleep cycles, sleep longer, and have a higher drop in blood pressure at night
- This drop in blood pressure, is correlated with relaxation
- Exercise raises cortisol
- A normal cortisol rhythm is as follows – it peaks in the morning, and drops in the evening
- Morning exercisers have been found to get more deep sleep, have more efficient sleep cycles, sleep longer, and have a higher drop in blood pressure at night
Good Nutrients for Sleep
- Vitamin C
- Low vitamin C levels, increase the chance that you’ll wake up throughout the night
- Good sources of vitamin C
- Strawberries, sweet peppers, kiwis, citrus fruits
- Superfoods which are very high in vitamin C) -camu camu berry, acerola cherry
- A good rule – get real sources of Vitamin C first, then supplement if you need to
- Magnesium
- 60% of the population is chronically deficient in magnesium
- Magnesium is responsible for over 325 biochemical processes
- Your body cannot perform them efficiently without magnesium
- Magnesium is like an anti-stress/relaxation mineral, associated with many of the parasympathetic nervous system processes
- Today, humans are exposed to more stress than ever before – it’s more mental stress/anxiety
- Good food sources of magnesium
- Anything that’s green (kale, spinach)
- Or you can supplement
- Topical magnesium is good – it’s absorbed really well through the skin
- This is why they say float tanks, are good for increasing magnesium levels
- Or you can take it orally – Max (the host) supplements with magnesium glycinate
- Topical magnesium is good – it’s absorbed really well through the skin
Calories
- “To measure the energy of food is so complicated. It cannot be boiled down to a calorie.”
- A calorie is a general description of the amount of energy in the food
- But food is so much more – it’s the macronutrient count, the micronutrient count, and how your body will process it
- 300 calories of broccoli is NOT equal to 300 calories of cookies
- The cookies will have a much different effect on your hormones and metabolism than the broccoli
- Your pancreas (which regulates insulin production) will do something completely different, depending on which you eat
- Insulin’s job, is to shuttle glucose (blood sugar) into our cells
- Our blood sugar/glucose levels will go up much higher when we eat the cookies compared to the broccoli
- “Food isn’t just food. Calories are not just calories.”
What does it mean to Shawn, to live like a genius?
- It’s all about incremental grow
- Be 1% better every day