Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Sleep Smarter, Hacks for Restorative Rest, with Sean Stevenson. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy.
You know, this is, make sure that this is incredibly important. At track practice, I'm coming around the curve onto the straightaway, and I broke my hip. And there was no trauma involved. Nobody hit me. I didn't fall. It just broke because, you know, cut two a few years later, I finally get diagnosed with this degenerative bone disease.
And at the time, being 16 years old, you have the hormones of a Greek god. So you get the kind of standard of care. Take these insides, stay off the leg, you'll get better. And I did, but nobody stopped to ask the question, how can a young man break his hip just from running? And once I finally got this diagnosis, it felt good to know what the issue was, but also it kind of set my world into a tailspin.
Yeah, so this is cut to, so this was 20 years old when I finally get the diagnosis. And I'm in college at the time. And, you know, I went from like a chronic kind of nuisance of a pain to chronic debilitating pain over the course of a few weeks. And this is important for, and I always like to share this whenever I can, my very first physician, you know, he put my MRI up for me to see and he told me that I had a spine of an 80 year old man. You know, I had two ruptured discs and my vertebrae were deteriorating.
And so when he says this to me, I'm immediately like, OK, so what do we do? Let's fix it. And he's like, I'm sorry, son, there's nothing you can do about this.
And what happened, and I know you've heard about this several times, the placebo effect is something where you get a positive injunction from somebody who's an authority figure. And you proceed to have certain symptoms happen, or changes in your physiology. And a lot of people don't realize this, but placebos are actually 33% effective. That's the power of the mind. But what he did for me was something called a no-sibo effect. This is giving somebody a negative injunction that something bad is going to happen, and your physiology begins to change from that.
And so I spent the next two and a half years in a lot of pain, a lot of drugs, prescribed in Over the County and just laying on my floor. Because not only was this painful, but it was embarrassing. I went from being one of the cool guys to like, I'm walking around campus with a back brace and just really kind of losing myself.
I saw different doctors. I went through the whole gamut of why me, why did this happen to me, why won't somebody help me, and really playing this victim role. And it wasn't until I actually decided to get well that everything changed. And most people never do that. With their bodies, with their health, with their relationships, it's mostly like I'll see what'll happen. Wishful thinking, I'll give this a try.
But when you really decide something, you're cutting away the possibility of anything else but that thing. And I'm a big student of lexicon. And the word decision is from the Latin day, meaning from, and chai deer, which means the cut. So when you make a real decision about something, you cut away the possibility of anything else but that thing.
And so I decided no matter what I'm going to get well. And it wasn't like the clouds parted and the sun shined and everything was okay. I'm a very analytical person as well. And so I put a plan together. I decided and now it's time to do something. Number one, put a plan together and that plan until three specific things.
I changed the way I was eating, which giving my body the actual raw materials that it needed to regenerate me was important. And I was on what I called the tough diet at the time, which is typical university food. So I have no joke. I'm eating pizza daily. My vitamin C is coming from Sunny D. And so it's no wonder I was made out of like, I was made out of terrible stuff, you know? And so I asked this really important question, which you mentioned, okay, if my spine is deteriorating, if my bones are deteriorating, what is it actually made of?
And that set me down this incredible path of discovery because what we hear in common culture is, you know, if you want strong, healthy bones, drink milk and come to find out calcium is one of the least important things. And even getting it from your diet, it doesn't exactly work in your body the way that we're marketed to because it's marketing.
And so I found out that things like silica, magnesium, sulfur-bearing amino acids, all these things are in some cases even more important. So I start to get all those nutrients in my body through food, primarily once I really got it, like food is gonna... Yeah. Especially, I'm from the Midwest.
And so like there was like a wild oats market. Whole foods just opened. And so I think it's really important the environment. You know when I had some friends they would take me to the stores and then you know that gradually got me into like not just a supplement aisle. And so I just began to flood my body with all these important nutrients and also hydration. Your disc in between the vertebrae and your spine and you would think like
If I want these to be more hydrated, I need to drink more water. But it doesn't work like that. Your discs get hydrated through a process called remote diffusion. And so literally, it's like the last place in your body that gets nutrients and hydration. And so you needed to really super hydrate yourself. Make sure your body has an abundance, like an overflow of nutrients, to make sure they get to the right place. So that was number one was nutrition. Number two was movement.
And so exercise is really about two main things. Number one is assimilation. And I came across some research that showed that when you actually are doing walking while taking on specific supplements for your bones, your bone density goes even higher, because that walking helps your body to assimilate. Number two is elimination, elimination of toxins.
Because your lymphatic system, which especially when you're getting healthier, your body is trading out a lot of stuff. And there's a lot of dead cells. There's a lot of metabolic waste products. And so how do you get that stuff out of your system? You have to move because your lymphatic system doesn't have a pump like your cardiovascular system does. And you actually have four times more lymph than you do blood.
And so that movement was so important in healing. And here's the problem is that oftentimes when you have an injury or an issue like this, we're told not to do anything. That's often the worst thing you can do because things will start to atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. And so I just started to... And of course, if anybody's dealing with an acute problem right now, take a day or two off, but I encourage people to do what you can in an intelligent way.
And so for me, I could barely walk properly. And so I started off on a stationary bike, progressed to treadmill. I started jogging a little bit, eventually I picked up the weights again. And just to jump really quickly to the end of the story, I'd lost 28 pounds in the next six weeks. And the paint I've been experiencing for two and a half years was gone.
But the third and most important part now I know was the rest and recovery. It seems like I was resting a lot by not doing anything, but it really wasn't. It was a lot of suffering and my greatest struggle was at night going to bed because the pain was so bad it would wake me up. And so I was on various medications and I basically got to drug myself to not wake up. And so it was like a pseudo sleep and it would take several hours before I really felt like I was awake.
And the things that I was doing during the day, changing my lifestyle, showed up for me on the pillow. Because what I really wanted to promote for people is this understanding that if you're not sleeping well, you're not healing well.
And this is where your body releases the vast majority of human growth hormone of these various anabolic hormones, reparative enzymes. So when my sleep got improved, I got better so fast. And so I shifted all my coursework over to biology and kinesiology and eventually opened a clinical practice. And oftentimes, I would get those people who they were told there's nothing you can do.
You have type 2 diabetes, blood sugars, 400 without metformin. There's nothing you can do about it. And consistently seeing these folks be able to naturally regulate their blood sugar, oftentimes get off their medications, insulin, things like that. Because where there's a will, there's 10,000 ways. But it's also understanding that, first of all, just acknowledging that it is possible. I think it's really valuable to understand the benefit of rock bottom. Like for me, after getting those
the words from the other doctors that there's nothing, the same diagnosis. I had a choice to make. I'm either gonna buy into this and continue to live as a victim, or I'm gonna do something about it, at least try. But for me, it's beyond try, it's the decision. And so how I got to that place really was, I had nothing to lose at that point. I can continue as things are and continue in this suffering. And I think it was just a matter of realizing that,
I think this is really important. Even though there are other people in our lives that might care for us, they don't walk in our shoes. So when the physician would tell me that there's nothing that I could do, it hit me like they're not laying at home thinking about me. I'm thinking about them and why they can't help me.
I have to really take responsibility for myself. And it's just basic logic. If somebody's saying they can't help you, believe them. And so I made the decision, if I'm going to get better, I need to do it. I need to take action. It doesn't mean I'm not going to have great people to support me along the way. But as Jim Rohn says, no one can do your push-ups for you. So I really had to take action. And also, I want to share this is that if you really want something, you should make a study of it.
You know, especially if you don't necessarily have a blueprint for a successful relationship, make it a study. If you're not doing well with your finances, make it a study. And what does that look like for you? I generally go right to the medical journals. You know, I dig through there. And another quote from Einstein is that,
You know, if you can't explain it simply, you don't know it well enough. And so I really strive to make sense of these things that can be incredibly complex, but for no reason. It wasn't until I really honored my own voice and my gift in helping these things to really make sense for people. And so I'll dig around in that data. And that's the first thing I'll do. And then I'll look for some anecdotal and evidence as well. You know, people telling stories about it. But here's something else I do. I also, and this is the scary part, I also look at the
problems with stuff. I also look at the things that are against what I might be believing. Most people don't want to do that. We believe this particular supplement is going to work and it's the best thing since sliced bread. And then there's these other things that say, hey, wait a minute, this might not be the case. You have to have the courage to look at this too and come to a truly well-evolved thought construct. We all have that opportunity, but we tend to just want to believe what we believe and look for things to affirm that.
You've got to be careful with studies that do the same thing, and who's funding the study as well. So I really get to that level most of the time in my research. That initial environment was really a laser foundation. Before the age of about seven, we're in a theta brainwave state where a lot of things kind of get deeper into our psyche and our subconscious, our programming.
And so it's really important, especially for parents, you know, and people who are just that can be involved in kids' lives to really understand how impressionable they are. And so I really got a great formatting, kind of formatting this for my grandmother, who really kind of instilled this greatness. She instilled the value of education. I love learning. Like I love the process of learning. And so I really picked up early on that you don't want to just learn stuff. You want to become good at learning.
When I shifted my residency, you know, going from this very protected, safe, loving atmosphere, you know, I'm in an environment where, you know, there's a lot of abuse, you know, physical abuse towards myself and my two younger siblings, you know, abuse with my mother and stepfather and the fight, you know, physical fighting. You know, holidays are not like they are now, like get together, it's in family fun. We know the holiday is going to be policing going to show up, you know.
That environment also taught me something really valuable, which is even though things aren't going well, even though we're short on money, there's always a way to figure it out. No matter how bad things look, we're going to be okay. So that really was a powerful seed and combined that with the sense of greatness, the sense of the value of education, the sense of there's always a way to figure something out.
really helped that moment of insight to take place of that decision, that moment of decision. And this is the first time I've articulated this, but that's really how those two things come together. You know, I don't want to cut corners. I wanted, you know, it's, integrity is a big word for me. And I wanted to take righteous action. You know, this was, this is all bigger than us. You know, the impact that you're making, the legacy that you're leaving, you know, is so powerful.
And we're part of like a big change that's happening with our culture overall, you know? And I knew that this particular topic is, and me being a nutritionist, like I was all like food matters, food first, food is the most important thing, but in my practice and seeing people coming in that
You know, we've got these folks over here, you know, 80% of the time are able to reverse type 2 diabetes, heart disease, get off their less centipriils and all this different stuff. And then we've got this category of people who just like literally sometimes would ironically kind of keep me up at night. Like, what is wrong? Like, I'm doing all these things right. Are they lying to me? And it wasn't until I started to ask people about their sleep that it just like changed everything. And this was about six years ago. And so,
Then, and here's the key, I can't just tell people they need to sleep more. You know this, like, people don't want to change that much. Like, we want change, but we want to be little bit, right? And so, I found clinically proven strategies that are super easy to implement, almost things that can happen on automatic.
to help them improve their sleep quality, right? And once we did that, it's like the floodgates would open for people. You know, they've been struggling for sometimes, you know, 15, 20 years with their weight, finally the weight comes off, you know? And seeing people struggling with heart disease or high cholesterol, you know, the so-called bad cholesterol, and seeing those numbers finally get regulated once we got their sleep optimized.
And I knew that this was an incredibly important part of the conversation that was left out. And as we'll talk about, I know now that our sleep quality is more important than our diet and exercise combined. But what it does for our health, and also literally our physical appearance, fascinating stuff, how much more fat you lose when you get optimal sleep. It's insane.
Number one, what's so interesting is that you were doing something exceptionally right as far as with the research shows with improving your sleep, which is you were going to bed kind of consistently a little bit earlier than other folks might. And so what we call this is this anabolic window or what we call money time sleep.
And this is generally between the hours of 10 and two because it's more lined up with their natural melatonin secretion. So if you go to sleep during those times, you actually spend more time in the deepest, most anabolic stages of sleep and you tend to produce more human growth hormone than other folks. So you were already winning with that. This is why you have a tendency to feel better even if you're getting less sleep because this isn't called sleep more, right? It's sleep smarter. And there are many people who sleep eight to nine hours and they wake up feeling like,
straight up, you know, hot garbage, you know what I'm saying? And they're just wondering why. It's because it's the quality of sleep. And when I say quality of sleep, what does that mean? Let's break that down. So your sleep is regulated by changes in your brainwaves. It's really fascinating stuff. And we still don't know really what sleep is. Trying to define sleep is like trying to define, you know, when force comes like life is like a box of chocolate, sleep is like pretending to be dead. We don't really know.
Right? But we do know the changes that happen in the brain. We cycle from kind of a normal waking state with gamma, beta. We're probably in beta right now. We move to alpha, theta, deltas where the deep anabolic dreamless sleep takes place. And we need all of them. And there's a certain percentage we spend in each that helps to rejuvenate our mind and bodies. And if you optimize certain things, you'll do it more efficiently. One of those gear shifts
Like if you think about your body like this kind of manual transmission is melatonin. Like people hear about melatonin is a sleep hormone. It just helps your body to efficiently go through your sleep cycles. And if your melatonin is suppressed by various things, you know, I'll share a couple, then you're not going through those efficiently and you can wake up feeling like a piñata after the party the next day, even though you're spending all this time on the mattress. So that's number one. Number two, there's this interesting process called thermal regulation. There's a natural drop in your core body temperature at night.
to help facilitate sleep for all of us if things were running properly. But what was fascinating, and I shared a study about this, is that they tested Insomniacs, and everyone in this particular clinical study all had too high body temperature at night. It would not go down. And so what they did was they fit them with these thermosuits.
Right? That lowers their skin temperature, not even their core temperature, just one degree, and virtually eliminated all their symptoms of insomnia. Whoa. Ambient can't do that, alright? And it's as simple as paying attention to how your body temperature influences your sleep. And so with your body temperature changing like that, it's kind of feeling more of an insulation.
As a result of having more sleep, there's a ton of different things that could be correlated there. So I'm not going to say that the sleep is a causative factor, but it's really interesting how your body does change in accordance to sleep. There's a natural rise in your core body temperature as the night goes on that helps to kind of wake you up. So what I did want to share though, when I said that kind of bold statement in the beginning, when we're talking about how sleep influences your body composition, I think everybody needs to know this.
There was a study really blew my mind. And this was done at the University of Chicago. And they took people and they put them on a calorie restricted diet, kind of typical stuff, again, I'm taught in college, to see the impact on weight loss when they're asleep deprived or getting enough sleep. So they put the people on this particular diet, monitor everything,
One phase of study, they're getting eight and a half hours of sleep. Then they track all their metrics. Another phase of the study, same exact diet, same exercise. They don't change anything else, but now they sleep to pry them and they take away three hours of sleep. So now they're getting five and a half hours of sleep versus eight and a half hours of sleep.
At the end of the study, they found that when individuals were well rested, they burned 55% more body fat just by getting more sleep. And so the question is, how does this happen? Melatonin, when I talked about this a little bit earlier, it's not just that it's involved in sleep, it's also involved in fat loss.
In this study, it was done in the journal Pineal Research, found that melatonin production helps to increase your body's mobilization of something called brown adipose tissue. This is a type of fat that burns fat. The reason that it's brown is that it has more mitochondria. So it's very energy dense. These mitochondria, just for people who, I'm sure people have heard of this, but it's like these energy power plants in your cells that are creating the energy currency of your body, like how you experience energy. The energy exchange, something called ATP.
And so when you are producing adequate melatonin, you're producing and mobilizing adequate amounts of brown adipose tissue, which just puts you in a metabolically advantaged state. But if you're not getting the melatonin production, which you've got to meet two requirements, number one, you need a biological night. So that means this could actually be during the day, but it's a consistent cycle of when it gets produced.
But the other requirement needs to be met that you need darkness. Your body produces melatonin exclusively in darkness. And so that's one. Also, how do they get that body fat change, HGH production, which we talked about too. Human growth hormone is muscle sparing.
And it's a big driver of energy. It's also known as a youth hormone. Kids have an insane amount of HGH being produced. This is why they have so much energy. We have a pretty sharp decline in our production right around 18 to 20. But my argument is that around 18 to 20, we generally, in our culture, like we leave the house, we might go to college, that kind of thing. And we no longer have structure, we no longer have rules. And we're not going to produce as much HGH.
Third thing really quickly is, and this is all has to do with the diet and the food choices is leptin. And I know people have talked about leptin before, but leptin is your body's glorified satiety hormone. And so when you're producing adequate amounts of leptin, you feel more in control. You feel more satiated. But when leptin falls off the map or you have leptin, resistance can take place.
Then we're going to have some pretty big issues with you regulating your cravings and your appetite. And so Stanford University researchers found that just one night of sleep deprivation radically suppresses your leptin. And now I hope folks can start to pay attention. Whenever you might not get the best sleep, how your cravings change the next day. You're going to have a tendency to want to number one, eat more. Number two, you want to eat more kind of the starchy, crunchy, salty, sugary type things.
And I remember my wife, who's actually here, when we had our son, and she's never seen me eat this food. I was sitting there waiting for the baby to come. I was eating chocolate-covered raisins. I was just like, and I didn't even realize I was doing it. It was like three o'clock in the morning. And so that's another thing. And last one I'll share, and there's so many that create that change in your body composition.
But this one is incredibly important. It's cortisol. Cortisol has been drug through the mud recently. It's been blamed for everything. But it's not really a bad guy. It's just misunderstood. Cortisol is incredibly important. For example, cortisol is important for your thyroid to work. And that's kind of like the metabolism regulator of your body. But here's the thing. Just one night of sleep deprivation.
radically increases your cortisol and suppresses melatonin actually as well. But this rise in cortisol has a really powerful ability to start to break down your muscle tissue, which muscles your body's kind of fat burning machinery. And so it can convert your muscle tissue into glucose. It's a process called gluconeogenesis.
as a kind of fight or flight response because your physiology doesn't know why you're not sleeping. It must be some danger about. And so understanding those major hormones and there's many others, you start to see the picture that gets painted with just how much your sleep quality impacts your physical appearance.
You know, I like to start with the low hanging fruit first. And something really, really fascinating is just simply changing or embracing the time of day that you exercise can improve your sleep quality. And so Appalachian State University did a really cool study and they wanted to see what time of day, exercising various times a day, how does it impact your sleep quality?
And so they had the study participants to exercise exclusively at 7 a.m. and another phase exclusively at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, another phase exclusively at 7 p.m. in the evening. They compiled all the data. And at the end of the study, they found that morning exercisers spend more time in the deepest, most anabolic stage of sleep. So they're producing more human growth hormone. They have more efficient sleep cycles, what we've been talking about. They also tend to sleep longer. And this is the one that kind of can get glanced past.
On average, they had about a 25% greater drop in blood pressure at night. So what's up with that? That's correlated with a deactivation of your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system. So you're actually able to shift gears, get to that parasympathetic rest and digest, calming down by getting some exercise in in the morning. And so how do we employ this though? That's the question. Because some people is just like, I can't exercise in the morning. And there's also people who exercise in the morning who might have terrible sleep.
And it's because this is not like the magic bullet. This is a thing to stack in your condition. If you're doing this and then messing up the one I'm going to talk about next, you're probably not going to have the best sleep. So here's how to employ this, just five minutes. And I tested this. Each morning, I do this five minutes of exercise. Might be just jumping on a rebounder, a little mini trampoline for five minutes, go for a quick power walk, do some tabata, which is just four minutes, and a little mobility work.
And I guess most people don't know what Tabata is. It's a high intensity interval training basically. It's 20 seconds of exercise, followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated over and over again for four minutes.
And in his clinical studies, this was found to outperform traditional cardio, like the kind of moderate intensity, 45 minutes of exercise in four minutes. Wow. The change in your cardiovascular benefits, body composition, and also change your mitochondria as well. This is why it works. It does something called a cortisol reset. We talked about cortisol, but again, it's a good thing if it's in the right time and the right amount.
Clinically, I would call these people tired and wired. They would come in and look at the hormone panels. And the cortisol would be really low in the morning and high at night. Thus, they have sleep problems. So you naturally, if your cortisol is on a natural hormone rhythm, it would be elevated at its peak in the morning, right around 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and then gradually decline as the day goes on. Does that have to do with what time you wake up?
Sort of. I mean, the cortisol will kind of tend to nudge you out of sleep, but also will tend to notice that as your sleep goes on, it becomes lighter and lighter anyways. This is when you tend to remember your dreams at the end of the sleep. And so getting this little boost, like helping your body to propel and get your cortisol up via exercise helps to reset that rhythm and get you back on track. So that's why it works.
So that's number one. Low hanging fruit. Just get in five minutes of exercise. Start in the morning. No matter what, just five minutes, that's all you need. It's going to help to create this snowball effect of good things for you. You know, five minutes. If this is the time you do go to the gym and do your full workout, so be it all good. But everybody who's not already doing that, just get that five minutes in.
The second one, and this one is more of the tough love, and the most difficult, but this is the most important one in our culture today, and it has to do with our tech. So Harvard researchers have confirmed that blue light exposure from our favorite devices, you know, iPads or iPhones,
Androids, tablets, televisions, they do in fact suppress your melatonin substantially. Because your body essentially thinks the sun's out? Is that the problem? So we have photoreceptors that are always trying to gauge what time it is, right? Because our bodies are wired up to be in sync with nature. But only recently, like literally just the past few decades have we been able to manipulate and basically create a second daytime.
So your body doesn't really know how to figure it out. And so the blue and white spectrums specifically are the ones that are more similar to daylight. And so what it's doing is, and so here's what the researchers found, basically every hour you're on your device at night, suppresses melatonin for about 30 minutes. So if you're on your, you watch a movie, a three hour movie, for example, your melatonin is gonna be suppressed. Even if you go to bed right after, you're not producing adequate melatonin for about an hour and a half.
And so again, you can be unconscious from sheer physical exhaustion, but you're not going to go through your sleep cycles efficiently. And so just be mindful of that. What I encourage people to do is to give yourself a screen curfew just 30 minutes. All right, I don't want to make this complicated just 30 minutes. But here's the rub.
We are addicted to our devices. Straight up, we just need to be, I am, we all are. Basically, it's because of this dopamine loop. Dopamine is so powerful, so interesting. Dopamine is one of the things I truly feel has helped to create our civilization as it is, because it drives us
to seek, right? Dopamine drives us to seek and to grow and to find, to discover. The internet is perfect for manipulating this because every time you look for something you find something, especially social media, you seek, find, seek, find, and produce the dopamine that drives you to look. But why do you keep going is every time you find something you get a little bit of a hit from your opioid system.
It's like this slow drip of morphine. And so it starts to feel really good. And to the point where you might be doing your work and you've got a deadline, and you're just like, I'll check Instagram real quick. Before you know, it's like 30 minutes later, you fall into the internet black hole, just like it just pulls you in. So be aware of that. I'm not saying again, our connection with tech is just going to grow. So I'm not bashing that. It's just be aware of it.
And that when you try to abide by this principle, which will really, really help your sleep quality to give yourself a screen curfew, you can't just sit there and twiddle your thumbs because you'll get what I call the internet jitters, right? You'll start getting like a little bit of a withdrawal effect. Like, let me just check one. It's one post. What we have to do is this, you have to replace it with something of greater or equal value. It's really that simple.
Hopefully, it's what I encourage people to do. This is an opportunity to connect. Connect with your significant other, your kids. The people have a real conversation with somebody. I know it sounds crazy, but it really works. It's really, really good.
And also, this is a great opportunity if you're in a relationship or not, whatever you're into. You could utilize, and I have a chapter on this as well, intimate time because there's a big connection between sex and sleep. And there's also a big connection between sleep and sex and how it impacts your sex life.
And so when we have an orgasm, for example, we produce a cocktail of chemicals, including oxytocin, norepinephrine, prolactin, and oxytocin, for example, has been found clinically to basically combat the effects of cortisol.
And hopefully sex is more interesting than Instagram, but you know, I don't know. It depends on how you're doing it. And so that's what I want people to do, a screen curfew and or use these hacks, utilize some blue light blockers. And so for your desktops, laptops, things like that, you can get an app called Flux that pulls out the most troublesome sleep sucking spectrum of light from your screen. It basically cools your screen off.
And it's a simple app. You set it and forget it. It's totally free. Just go to Dr. Google, type in F.L.U.X. And a couple clicks and it's on your device. I've been using it for maybe five or six years. I love it. And for your telephone, your cell phone, we've got on the iPhone's built in now is Night Shift with Androids, the best one out there from my research is one called Twilight. So there's options for everybody. Then what about the ambient light at night? Or if you're watching the movie,
Again, I don't want to get, don't get too neurotic about it, but if this is a problem for you and you're not sleeping as well as you could be, or your results, your body composition not changing, you're not getting that blood pressure down, you're not having that focus you need through the day, then you might want to address this.
Another little hack is to get some blue-like blocking glasses. The first ones I had was straight up like, I just built a birdhouse. But now there's some really cool, stylish ones that you could rocket. As a matter of fact, you'll create a neural association. When you put the glasses on, and you'll start to get sleepy. It's nuts. And that is another thing right there, is to create an evening ritual. Your brain is always looking for patterns. A lot of successful people, especially listening to the things that you're putting out there, have a success ritual in the morning.
But a great morning starts the night before, you know, a truly great morning. And so a couple of quick things people can do is the thermal regulation piece turn down your thermostat. All right. Now this one's, again, this is going to hit a pressure point for some people, but according to the research between 62 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal for sleep. And so for some people it's going to sound a little bit frosty, but lowering the thermostat a little bit can
have incredible benefit for your sleep. But this doesn't mean you can't use your covers and put on some warm socks, that kind of thing. So cooling off the thermostat, making sure that your bedroom, ideally, I call it a sleep sanctuary. And so when you walk into your bedroom at night, if your brain has a neuro association, when I go into my bedroom, I'm watching television, I'm working, those channels are gonna fire because of the myelin getting laid down over the years of you doing that behavior, or even months, it can get laid down.
And so you might have the intention of going to bed, but if your TV's in there, your brain is gonna be firing, expecting to watch television, parts of your brain are gonna be waking up in a way.
I encourage people to get the tech out of your room, have your bedroom be a sleep sanctuary, you know, or some place that's just for the double S, which is sleep and sex. Here's also a really interesting reason why. There's an Italian study done. They found that couples who have a television in their bedroom have 50% less sex. Really? Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. And you know, this is a little bit more middle-aged, little past middle-aged than people in the study.
And I know some people are like, it's not true. I have sex all the time. You probably do it in a snowstorm. It doesn't matter where you are. Like, you're a human rabbit. It doesn't matter. But for other people, it's like a distraction, right? It's a distraction. And it can also create all of those kind of chemical soup issues that we've been talking about with elevating cortisol and those kind of things. So ideally, get your television out of the room. The other tech
And last thing with the sleep environment I'll share, when I talked about melatonin needles to two conditions, biological night. And you also need a dark environment. And so if you're in an environment where you're maybe in a suburban or city environment where there's like neighbors, porch lights coming in, there's LEDs outside, cars coming up and down the street.
As crazy as this sounds, that small amount of light, where we're now dubbing light pollution, can have a significant impact on your sleep quality. And here's why we know this. Cornell University, I think, did the best study on this. And they took a test subject and had them sleep in an otherwise dark room. And they took a light, a fiber optic cable, and a light that sounds of a quarter, and put it behind their knee. And that was enough to disrupt their sleep cycle.
Because your skin also has photoreceptors that is sending information to your brain, your nervous system, your internal organs, to try to tell your body what time it is, is trying to figure it out. So we want to get rid of that artificial light exposure. Now, does this mean moonlight and stars? No, humans have evolved with those things. And they're luxe, like I actually put a luxe chart in the book. It's so small compared to even the weakest fluorescent bulbs. And so get yourself some blackout curtains if that external light is an issue.
internal light, your alarm clocks and light lamps. Some people still are sleeping with their lights on and things like that. Be mindful of that. And also what you can do is just change the bulb color. If you still have issues with the dark, which some adults do, and that's okay.
You can change the bulb color. And I actually had some NASA scientists or people that work with them to send me some different bulbs because folks in space, they don't have that biological clock. And so they would experience all these different health challenges. They had to try to figure it out. They knew that it was an issue with their sleep. And so they start to give them different bulbs for different times of day in a way, even though they're in outer space.
So it's really cool what you can do with these little hacks. But bottom line is you want to have a dark cycle so you can produce melatonin. And those are just a few of the different things people can do. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes. Download the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes.