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
  • There’s a reduction (~6%) in glucose reaching the brain

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

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

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