← The Dr. Josh Axe Show
The Dr. Josh Axe Show
Why SLEEP is Medicine: My 4 Tips to Improve Energy
00:56:57
You can’t supplement your way out of sleep deprivation—and most people are trying. If you’re waking up at 3 AM, wired but tired at night, or dragging through the day, your body is signaling a deeper problem. Today, you’ll learn how to fix your sleep at the root and unlock real energy, clarity, and recovery.
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Dr. Josh Axe
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- [01:15]
Dr. Josh Axe
So I'll never forget when somebody called into my health radio show nearly 20 years ago and said, Dr. Axe, I'm tired all the time. I have no energy and I can't figure out why. And I went through some of the main questions I always ask people, and I said, okay, what are you eating on a daily basis? And actually, their diet was fantastic. They were eating a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables, a lot of organic meats, some healthy fats. And so I thought, okay, well, that sounds pretty good. I asked them what supplements they were taking. They listed off everything from drinking chamomile tea before bed to doing ashwagandha during the week as well. And I thought, well, you're doing great there. I asked them, what's your exercise program like? And they said, I am exercising five days a week. I'm doing weight training, I'm doing a little bit of cardio, I'm walking. And I thought, wow, this sounds perfect. Why is this person's energy in the tank? And so finally I asked the question, how's your sleep? And here's what they said, Dr. Reichs, it's not great. I get about four to five hours of sleep per night. Now, here's what I want to tell all of you. You cannot supplement your way out of sleep deprivation, okay? You cannot eat enough broccoli. You cannot eat enough grass fed beef. You cannot do enough coconut oil or apple cider vinegar to fix poor sleep, it's absolutely crucial. So this caller calling into my radio show, I said, listen, you have to get quality sleep if you are going to be healthy. And even though you can do everything else correct, if your sleep isn't good, your health won't be good. And by the end of this episode, you're going to understand why sleep is the most powerful form of medicine. And you're going to see how poor sleep habits disrupt your fat loss, your hormones and your longevity. And you'll walk away knowing how to program your sleep using light timing, food and powerful daily habits. Welcome to the Dr. Josh a show.
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- [04:15]
Dr. Josh Axe
So it's important to know what sleep is actually for. Sleep is not shutdown mode. Sleep is active repair mode. It's when your body heals. And during sleep, your body performs its deepest levels of repair and restoration. In fact, it's when your cells start to heal and repair. And it's why sleep is literally medicine. During sleep, the brain enters a powerful restorative state. In fact, there's a name for this. It's called the glymphatic system, okay? And this system activates, clearing metabolic waste from the brain. And if this doesn't happen, you can't think clearly, okay? Your memory becomes fuzzy, you get brain fog. Your emotional centers stabilize, so your mood regulation improves and inflammation decreases throughout the entire body. The brain literally cleanses and rewires itself every single night. And every organ in your body does this. In fact, if we go and start studying the eastern forms of medic, like Chinese medicine, Ayurveda and the ancient forms of medicine, they knew that your body had an internal clock. And at different times of night, different organ systems go through more restoration. For instance, from the time of around 11pm to 3am, that's the time when your liver and gallbladder most cleanses and clears itself, okay. Versus around 3am to 7am that's when your lungs and colon and your digestive system do the most cleansing. And if you're not getting deep, restful sleep, sleep during those hours, it's going to affect you in a negative way. You know, one thing that I've seen many times over the years is patients will wake up the same time at night. One of the most common times is around that 2am, 3am, 3:30am time period. And around 3am that's when your body shifts from liver into lung and colon clearance. And if you're waking up around that 3am marker, typically there's something that's happened in the past, or it could be recent, it could be many years ago that you're still living with today that's bothering you. So there's emotional trauma that can get stored in your organs that then acts like a toxin. It is a toxin to your organs and that impacts your sleep. So there are so many things that can negatively impact your sleep. And we'll go through today, on today's episode, the exact temperature you want to sleep at the level of darkness. We'll talk about when to start winding down the different types of lights. We'll talk about different activities and habits that you can do right before you get in bed that will lower your resting heart rate, that will allow you to get better sleep at night. We'll talk through the supplements and we'll talk through the foods and everything you need to do to optimize your sleep. Because sleep is when your body heals, it's when it recharges. It is critical for health. And did you know that according to medical studies, one of the greatest risk factors of mortality that's of you dying is poor sleep. In fact, if you get really poor sleep for, for more than one day, really even one day increases your risk. But two, three, four, five days, your risk of dying of, of a heart attack, a number of other conditions goes up dramatically. And that's why if you're not getting good sleep, you really want to prioritize it. And because it's the only way for your body to heal. And one of the issues with poor sleep is it's a full body stressor, it's stressing Every organ, every system in your body, in particular your immune system, it causes immune suppression. In fact, there's one clinical study out of California that found that sleeping less than six hours per night is associated with a four times higher risk of catching a cold compared to sleeping six, seven plus hours. It's also really connected to your metabolic health and your metabolism. In fact, fat gain and insulin resistance, even short term sleep restriction, can reduce insulin sensitivity by around 20 to 30%, pushing the body towards a pre diabetic or diabetic state. It can also increase ghrelin. This is the hunger hormone. If you're a person and you are constantly craving food, right, you want to eat the bag of chips, you want bread, you want sweets constantly, a lot of times that's sleep. Oftentimes that could be you're not getting enough sleep a night. And then in a very similar way, lower leptin levels, that's your society hormone. That's also connected to cravings. So if you are craving carbs constantly, oftentimes you're not getting enough sleep or at least not enough quality sleep. Now one meta analysis, this is where they take many studies together and pull them together. So it's not one study, multiple studies, One meta analysis found that chronic short sleep is linked to a 55% higher risk of obesity. So if you want to gain weight and be overweight, sleep less. If you want to burn fat, be fit and healthy, sleep more. Here's just a few other studies that prove the importance of sleep. Sleeping less than six hours is associated with a significantly higher risk of cognitive impairment and memory decline. Another study shows mood instability. Sleep deprived individuals show a 60% increase in emotional reactivity. And so this can be connected to also anxiousness and depression and just acting out like you wouldn't want to being emotionally unstable. This happens when you're not getting enough quality sleep. And listen, I've had plenty of patients tell me they are getting eight hours of sleep. But contrary to popular belief, not all sleep is created equal. So that's an important thing as well. One, you want to get eight hours, but also you want to make sure you're getting the right type of sleep. You want to make sure you're getting plenty of REM sleep. And then the most important type of sleep is your deep sleep. That's the non REM sleep. You really want to be loading up on the deep sleep because that's when your organs are doing the deepest level of restoration and repair. And I also want to mention this just because you're in bed Eight hours. Let's say for instance, you get in bed at 11 and you wake up at 7. That doesn't mean you're asleep the whole time. I mean there's probably at least 30 minutes in there for some of you, an hour or two hours where you're not fully asleep. And so just because you're in bed eight hours, that doesn't mean that you are asleep that long. Now it's important to look at sleep cycles, okay? So we tend to have around a 90 minute clock where our body kind of goes through different sleep cycles. And in the earlier part of the night, that's when you should be getting your deepest level of sleep and restoration. Okay? And so your body should be going from this kind of light sleep into REM sleep and then into semi deep and then into very deep sleep. And when you're in that very deep sleep, this is what your liver needs, this is what your gallbladder needs, this is what your adrenal glands need in order to fully recharge the batteries. And as the night goes on, that deep sleep will get to be a little less and you'll tend to then get more in the dream state, which is REM sleep. And that's actually when a big part of your brain can recharge and heal and sort of work through and process emotions and memories and you can start to heal in that way. So it's critically important that not only that you get around 8 hours of sleep or at minimum 7 hours of sleep at night, but that in addition you're getting at least one hour. Now the ideal is closer to 90 minutes to two hours of deep sleep and 90 minutes to two hours of REM sleep. That's the ideal for what you want every single night. And In a typical 8 hour sleep window, again your sleep cycle is 90 minutes. Each cycle moves through again, light sleep, REM sleep, deep sleep and then repeat. Now I've been calling it deep sleep. Sometimes in the medical literature they call it non REM sleep. So it's non rapid eye movement. So that's why that's what REM is, it's rapid eye movement. So when you're getting this non rapid eye movement sleep, this is again as I mentioned, where you're healing. And what happens is this is when, if you have an injury, it's most repairing, it's when tissue repair is happening, it's when growth hormones being released. So for instance, also if you want to put on muscle and you want to support testosterone production, men, this is when your body is Most hormonally, getting in that state of releasing growth hormone to repair your muscles to recover. That's important as well for women if you want to be lean and fit and healthy, very same thing. Growth hormone helps you burn body fat. It's when your immune function strengthens, your cellular recovery accelerates. This happens during the non REM sleep and again during REM sleep. This rapid eye movement, this is your neurological and emotional reset phase. During REM sleep, memory consolidation occurs. Emotional processing happens. Learning integration strengthens. Brain network reorganizes. I remember, you know, professors telling me in college, hey, make sure you get a good sleep before your test. Or maybe your parents told you that growing up. There's research on that. If you've got a big meeting or something coming up, you know, you can study the day before, but if you don't sleep that night, your brain and body have a really hard time sort of consolidating it and putting it in your memory bank so then you can recall it later. So fragmented sleep often cuts into REM disproportionately, which helps explain why many people today deal with brain fog and irritability and poor focus and emotional reactivity. And this can happen especially if you've got an infection. It could be long Covid, it could be a parasite or mold or Lyme or Epstein Barr, some sort of infection or virus that then can impact your brain and from getting into REM sleep is one of the biggest thing that's affecting. This is why you can have these brain fog symptoms. And I want to say this, even brief awakenings throughout the night that you barely remember can interfere with restoration. Now any of you that have kids have experienced this, I know Chelsea and I have experienced this, Chelsea even more than me, as we have our daughters. I've got a five year old daughter and a two year old daughter right now. They do not sleep that well. Okay? Especially our two year old. Our five year old's a lot better now. And so, you know, one of the things that happened, I can tell you from, if I get woken up a couple times at night, night from our kids, you know, I'm tired the next day. It doesn't take much to interfere with your overall sleep quality. Now there's important conversation I want to have around sleep. And it's not just sleep though, it's also around rest. One of the things that, you know, when I'm reading the Bible that I see in there is that God created us to rest, right? He created us for a Sabbath taking one day a week Whether that's Saturday or Sunday, taking that day, giving it to the Lord, giving it to your family and saying, you know what? I'm going to fully rest. I'm not going to work. God didn't even rest right he the seventh day and said, I'm not going to. I'm going to rest either. And I want you to model me. And so we have a day a week where we should just completely rest and not overwork. And you know, there's evidence that if you are going seven days a week and from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, you have something going on. Oftentimes we get to that point where we're trying to sleep at night and we can't fall asleep right? Or we're waking up at 2am and we're still tired, we're not getting the quality sleep. So remember, there's a rhythm that should be happening in your life where you're sort of waking up. And typically the moment you wake up, you're not all of a sudden kind of jumping right into something. And when you wake up in the morning, there should be a moment of calm relaxation. You should again spend some time. Again, for myself, it's prayer and reading the Bible and being grateful. There's a few minutes there, or maybe even longer than that. There's a time of maybe having warm tea or having a smoothie, going for a short walk. And then I'm diving into things, right? This is the way our body clock was meant to sort of work is sort of we wake up, we calmly wake up, we start getting into things and then we sort of ramp up. And then around 9am, boom. We're going full force, we're going hard. And then around 5pm, around dinner now we're starting to wind down again. We're spending time with family. You know, we're maybe listening and watching things to kind of entertain us and get us away from work. We're not doing it with blue light, though. We're listening to an audio book or we're maybe you're watching a show to a certain period of time, but that hour or two before bed, you start to turn it off and sort of wind down your body. So there's this natural of rhythm of sort of winding up and getting ready calmly and then diving into and working hard and then sort of cooling down there as well. It's like the way we work out. You know, I worked out this morning and before I did, I did a warmup. I got on a treadmill and I walked at an incline for a little bit. I did a little bit of stretching. I warmed my body up for about 10 to 15 minutes. Then I dove into my workout. And then I took the last five minutes to stretch and kind of do some mobility work. And then I left. That's optimal. And that's how your sleep routine should be. It's how your life routine should be. And this is also the way God designed us, is to live in tune with nature. I mean, God tells us via when the sun is coming up and when it's setting, what to do, when to wind down, when to start winding up. And so we want to listen to nature with that. Now I want to share a time where I broke this rule and I really suffered for it. You know, when I first opened my clinic in Nashville, Tennessee, I had a functional medicine clinic that predominantly did nutrition detoxification. We did chiropractic, did physical therapy. So we did a lot of holistic modalities. And I started that in around 2007. Now, when I did that, my first two years, I was working 60 to 70 hours a week. Now, listen, I believe that my motives were godly. They were altruistic. I really wanted to help save my town. I wanted to teach people about natural medicine. And I was working very hard. I was very mission and purpose driven, thinking about how the care that I was providing saved the life of my mom. And it helped so many people. I just started working with. So my first couple years of practice, I was this sort of mission driven, you know, in my late 20s, individual, working really hard. But all of a sudden I started having these digestive issues. I started having some bloating. I started having skin breakouts. I started having just some health issues, almost like autoimmune reactions in my body. And I thought, this is weird. I'm eating really healthy, mostly fruits, mostly vegetables, organic meat. I'm drinking bone broth, right? I'm doing all the right things. I'm exercising regularly. Why am I now having some of these health issues? I don't feel fully rested. And I went to see a friend of mine, somebody I just met, who practiced Chinese medicine. And he sat down with me, and one of the things he did with me is he felt my pulse and. And he said, josh, he said. He told me this. He goes, Dr. Axe, your battery is. He used his hands and he said, it should be here. And he was showing me really high up. And he goes, it's down here, it's down here. You're 30, 40%. You need to be around 70, 80%. And I said, okay. And I said, how do I do that? I'm like, I'm still getting to bed in plenty of time. I'm in bed for eight hours. And he said, you're just going too hard, you're working too much. And so what the solution I came up was this. And talking to him, I said, okay, I'm going to, once it hits dinner, I am going to not work anymore. Because what I would do is I would get home and some of you might be guilty of this. I would work, actually, I would work over lunch. I would also. So like even while I was eating lunch, I was on my computer and I would get home at night and I would eat dinner, be on my computer, and then I would be on my computer writing articles or doing things even while I had a show on in the background and while I was so called relaxing. And then I was working Saturday, so I was doing a lot. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to start taking the full week off and practicing a Sabbath. I'm going to start just when it hits dinner time, you know, let's say six o'. Clock. And after, I am not going to keep working. And then I thought, I'm also going to take at least 30 minutes of lunch, I'm going to eat, I'm going to take a walk. And I still was probably working maybe even close to 50 hours a week. But I took the 60 to 70. I cut at least, you know, 15 hours off the work week. And it was amazing. My body fully repaired, I had leaky gut went completely away, digestive system completely repaired, skin cleared, energy then back to a 10 out of 10 and I felt great. Here's the other crazy thing. I was even more successful. I was a better communicator. My articles I was writing were better, Everything improved. Because a lot of times we think, okay, if I'm just going to push, the more I do, the more successful I'll be. And a lot of times we're sort of taught this by culture. Like a lot of us get our self worth and value by what we get done in a single day. And our checklist. And this is why many of us, we literally have something scheduled from the moment we wake up, let's say it's 6am to the moment we crash and hit the bed at 11pm Especially if you're a parent, right? You've got your kids stuff, you have your work stuff, you've got, you've got stuff every moment of the day. Okay. And a lot of times this is us getting our self worth rather than from God and being a child of God and knowing we were created to both rest and love and have fun and work. That combination, we try and get it from striving and our productivity. That's not where our self worth should come from. All that being said, yeah, there's some great studies on this. There's a book written on this and it's called the Power of Full Engagement. And in this book they go through all the studies on are you more productive? Do you actually get more, have more impact if you work all day long or if you take breaks throughout the day and if you turn it off at night and they show without a shadow of the doubt, you are much more productive if you take breaks throughout the day. A lot of times the breaks were 5 minute breaks, some of them were around 40 minute breaks. Even taking a 40 minute nap or just where you sit in a chair just with your brain off for 30 minutes in the middle of the day, you become much, much more productive with downtime. And listen, you're a better parent, you're a better employee, you're a better leader, you're better at everything, including you're gonna sleep better when you get proper rest. And I've also discovered this in my own life. I am better able to fall asleep and stay asleep when I follow that rhythm as well. The biggest myth about inflammation and chronic symptoms and is that they're all separate issues. In reality, your symptoms behave more like a chain of falling dominoes. When one goes down, it triggers several more and before you know it, everything feels off. I'm currently offering a simple at home blood test that actually tests for the right things. Targeted biomarkers that reveal the very first dominoes impacting your hormones, your inflammation, your thyroid and your metabolism. Plus a full hour with one of my senior health advisors to review your results and show you exactly how the Health Institute can help you stop the chain reaction so you can finally heal. If you want to check it out and grab one before they're gone, just go to mybloodwork.com now, now I want to dive into this. Now there are two systems that control your sleep. Okay? And again, this is your ability to fall asleep. And then the other system is your ability to stay asleep. There's two biological systems. One is called your adenosine system, which is, by the way, what coffee impacts. Your adenosine system is sort of like an hourglass with a, you know, with sand falling through it. The longer you're awake, the more especially when you get to around that 14 hour mark, then 15, then 16, your body's saying, okay, whoa, you've been awake a long time. Now we need to start to produce more melatonin. Let's lower the cortisol, let's start getting into that sleep state. The other one is your circadian rhythm body clock. This is a 24 hour internal clock controlled by light. Okay? So these two systems together work to help you fall asleep at night. In the first system, again, this adenosine system is, it's sometimes called your sleep pressure or sleep hunger system. It is driven by the molecule adenosine, which builds up in the brain while you're awake. Okay? And adenosine, by the way, is a byproduct of cellular energy use, so ATP. So if you're using a lot of energy throughout the day, a lot of ATP, that starts to accumulate again like sand in an hourglass. And this is why, let's say, for instance, you went and did something extremely exhausting that day. You were more, you like, had a big test or you had this emotionally traumatic event, or you did a triathlon or a marathon or something really taxing. That's why sometimes your body will be ready an hour earlier for bed, and then you'll just crash and fall asleep. If you were physically, mentally or emotionally exerted beyond what you typically are because your body used more ATP, so now your body is saying, okay, wow, we've used up all our ATP, in fact, more than we typically do in a day. Now it's time to sleep. So that's the first system, that adenosine system. And again, it works like a biological hourglass. As levels rise, you're gonna start to experience, and here's the other symptoms you'll start to have that you'll notice, okay, this adenosine has kicked in and I've used a lot of ATP today. You'll have slower thinking, your eyelids will get heavy, you'll have reduced focus, increased sleepiness, right? You'll start to have some of those symptoms. And this growing pressure is your brain's biological signal that, hey, now you need sleep, okay? And this is a big driver of sleep there. So basically, here's the equation. The longer you stay awake, the more adenosine you create and it's a stronger drive for sleep. Now, what sleep actually does, when you fall asleep, the brain begins clearing out this adenosine, okay? So during sleep, those adenosine levels drop, metabolic waste is cleared, neural circuits reset, and you get ready for the next Morning. Now, here's where caffeine comes in. Caffeine interferes with your sleep pressure and your adenosine levels. Caffeine actually does not create energy. This is one of the biggest myths on the planet. Everybody almost that drinks caffeine thinks, hey, I'm drinking caffeine. Caffeine gives me energy. Caffeine does not create or give you energy. Instead, caffeine blocks adenosine receptors in the brain. This prevents the brain from detecting the sleep signals. So even though your body might say in the morning, hey, you're tired, you need to sleep, you've gone too hard, it's blocking that signal. You're not getting it, okay? So adenosine is still building in the background. You simply cannot feel the fatigue signals. And it's the illusion of energy because caffeine blocks adenosine receptors. So your sleepiness is temporarily masked, your alertness feels restored, and fatigue signals are suppressed. Yet you might actually be physically, mentally or emotionally exhausted. And this is why I've told patients this for years. You need to be really careful with caffeine, and you don't really want to have it every single day. Sometimes you just want a day or two a week where you can let your body tell you how tired you are, okay? And listen to your body. This is important. This is critically important. Listen to your body. If you're exhausted at 10am, you need to really think through, why am I exhausted at 10am? Do I need to get to sleep earlier? Have I been doing too many things that are emotionally and mentally taxing? Have I been avoiding things? Caffeine can act like a drug, masking tiredness and low energy. And it also can be a diuretic, sometimes clearing out excess B vitamins and potassium, a number of things from your body. So it's really important that you listen to your body and you don't use caffeine as a crutch all the time. It's important that you, again, just listen to your body and listen. I do more Matcha and green tea. My wife does a lot of coffee and we both love it. But we oftentimes will take at least a day, a week or two days a week and say, hey, we're not going to have this. We're going to let our body tell us, hey, how tired we are and then make adjustments when with that. Now, as we were talking about adenosine, there's one other thing I want to mention here, and that is the power of a nap. Now, I have a really hard time falling asleep in Fact, when I've taken naps, and I haven't done this for years, since I have kids, I don't know that I've taken a nap. But a lot of times I will maybe take 20 minutes. And typically about the 20 to 40 minute time period is the ideal amount of time for a nap to where your brain can actually clear and reset and adenosine levels sort of reengage. Now if you go over around 40 to 45 minutes, you'll notice this. Let's say you fell as actually fell asleep for an hour. You'll wake up incredibly groggy and incredibly tired. Sometimes that can, can impact your sleep at night. And so that's something to consider as well. But really taking 20 minutes, shutting your eyes, laying down and just letting just nothing in, just sort of like relaxing your head and then, and then getting up again, that can be really powerful at supporting those adenosine levels. And so your body, even though it does most of its repair at night, you can take a nap during the day and it can help reset things, including those adenosine levels. You know, I'm thinking about this. So my 2 year old right now, if she doesn't get a nap, she is incredibly difficult. That's me saying this in the, you know, the kindest way possible. I mean, we just had this, we actually just went on a trip to Park City, Utah and when we were there, I mean, you know, there's just a number of things. She had fomo, she didn't want to miss out and she didn't want to take naps. In fact, when Chelsea tried to put her down for a nap, she was just, you know, threw a fit and just said no nap. And a few times she was just so exhausted she just fell asleep anyways. But a few days she didn't take a nap. And you know, we could tell by, you know, late afternoon if she didn't take a nap. You could tell she didn't take a nap. And she was emotionally unstable. She threw a fit, she couldn't think clearly. I mean, just everything affected her more. And by the way, we're the same way. If you don't get enough sleep at night, it affects our mood, it affects our memory, it affects the way we think, it affects our brain in a big way. And we're just, we're just more cranky. So I think it's important to think about as well. Oftentimes we think about quantity, how much work and how many things can I get done in a day versus quality. If you sleep if you rest your mind, if you take that break over lunch and actually eat without being on a computer, and then you go for a short walk and you do these things, you will absolutely be more productive according to clinical studies. Now, the second system I do want to mention quickly here as well is your circadian rhythm clock. This is your second biological system that controls your sleep. And this is your body's internal master clock. And it sort of fluctuates over time, right? Where in the morning these cortisol levels should be rising and peaking, and then it should be going down in melatonin higher at night. So we also see this happening hormonally in terms of what should be happening to our body and our energy levels throughout the day. And as I talked about earlier with Chinese medicine, they looked at these circadian rhythms and our connection to the earth and when our different organ systems tend to rest and when they tend to work harder and when they're at their optimal function. And it's at different times during the day and different times at night. For instance, when you wake up in the morning, that mid morning time around 9am, that is when your stomach and your upper digestive system is the strongest. Okay. It's when your vitamin and mineral absorption of certain nutrients might be at the highest. It's when you can tend to handle more complex carbohydrates, versus in the evening, your body can process and tend to digest more fat and not as well carbohydrates. And so this is why, like in the morning, you want to do a little bit more carbs, you want to do high protein all day, you want to do more carbs in the morning, very low carb at night, a little bit more fat in the evening. Typically that's sort of even what your diet should look like. And a very similar thing, what happens at night is. And by the way, the time of the heart tends to be in the afternoon and evening. And this is when there's also deep emotional connection to family. And then when you're falling asleep early part of the night, this is liver gallbladder cleansing. The later part of the night, that's lung cleansing, and that's your colon and your digestive tract being cleansed. And so if you're missing sleep at any one of those points, different organ systems will be effective and not fully heal or be recharged. And so you get these circadian signals as well, predominantly from light. Right? The sun rises, so what happens? Cortisol rises, you feel awake and energized, right? The sun Sets, you feel sleepy, you start to get more calm. Your melatonin rises. We really need to listen to nature and it helps tune us into the way that we should be living our lives in terms of our habits and our sleep cycles and everything we need to do to be healthy. But you know, today we have all of these things that can interfere with that, especially the tech devices, right? So when you're looking at blue light, blue light is the light that you have most during the middle of the day, right? The sun's at high noon. That is when you're getting a lot of this blue light. And it's very energizing. It's also anti inflammatory. So there are some benefits of it, but too much of it can mess with our cortisol and melatonin levels. And so this is why, you know, we want to get to once the sun sets, really, that's when you want to sort of get completely away from the screens and the devices. You know, another thing that nature does, along with the light shifting from light to dark, is the temperature drops, right? The temperature typically at night drops anywhere from 10 degrees to 20 degrees. So there is a significant drop in temperature that tells your body it's time for sleep, right, to go into this hibernation mode. Your circadian rhythm also controls your body temperature cycle. So to initiate sleep, your core body temperature must drop. The ideal room temperature for sleeping is generally between 60 degrees Fahrenheit and 67 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the Cleveland Clinic, it might actually be lower than that. But let me give you an example. Your temperature of your house should probably drop about or at least 10 degrees when you're sleeping at night. So let's say you keep your home at around 70 degrees during the day. It should be dropping to around 60 degrees at night if you're living in tune with nature, right? Think about this. For up until 100 plus years ago, we didn't have air conditioning, we didn't have heat. And so when it was, you know, 70 degrees during the day, it was dropping to 50 degrees at night. We were inside with our, you know, furs and our blankets and the things to keep us warm. But it would also be about that temperature, maybe not quite as cold as outside, but close to as cold outside in our homes. And this is the way that God designed us to live. So cooler environments, according to all studies, improve sleep and overheating disrupts sleep. In fact, do you know the number one reason, according to medical studies, that people can't fall asleep at night or that wake up in the middle of the night, they get too hot at night. That is the number one reason. Now, can I share with you a pet peeve? I have something that drives me crazy. Hotel rooms. The sheets that they have and the beds that they have are like heat producing, you know, products. Their, you know, their thread count tends to be the sort of thread count where no heat can leave. And, you know, when you get higher quality materials made of things like wool and shearling and like these sort of like higher quality cotton materials, they breathe very well, right? Whether it's clothing or bed sheets or beds, that's how you know something is quality. One of the ways is it tends to breathe very well. This is why wool, this is one of the forms of clothing I wear the most, is because it's very, very breathable, very high quality. But you want that in your bed, in your bed sheets. Well, hotels follow the opposite of this. Have you ever noticed you sleep in a hotel bed and you are just burning up at night? This might not be all of you. Okay, now some of you with hypothyroidism and your body temperature stays too low. You may not fully experience this, but again, the number one reason why people can't fall asleep at night is their body is getting too hot. You want to get your bedroom very cold, about 10 degrees colder than you keep your house during the day. Are you interested in functional nutrition tips to burn fat, reduce inflammation, improve your brain and energy levels, and heal naturally? Then I want to encourage you to listen to my friend Dr. Dave Jocker's podcast, the Functional Nutrition podcast. This podcast is designed to help you with easy, actionable steps to improve your nutrition and lifestyle, understand your lab work, and address the root cause factors that may be driving up inflammation in your body. Now, I've been friends with Dr. David Jockers for 20 years, and he's truly a world expert in functional nutrition, cellular healing, and so much more. If you want to learn the best nutrition and natural healing tips, tune into the Dr. Jockers Functional Nutrition Podcast on Apple, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube and wherever. You can listen to podcasts worldwide. Now, there are other things you want to do to optimize your sleep, and I want to walk you through my top four tips to promote a better night's sleep. Okay, Number one is this. Get the right light exposure. Early daylight exposure tells your brain to suppress melatonin. So really, when you wake up, you want to get outside within one hour. Really, the earlier the better. I mean, what I try and do is wake up, you know, Brush my teeth, go downstairs, and then I will tend to immediately go on a walk. I'll do a gratitude walk, I'll get back inside, make a smoothie, read my Bible. Then the family's getting up and I'm connecting with the family. Okay? That's my typical morning. And then I tend to go to work out. Then I start my workday. But one of the first things I do is I get exposed to daylight. Outdoor light is 10 to 100 times brighter than indoor lighting, so it's best to go outside. So even though you might turn all the lights on in the house, it is not near as bright and good at starting to suppress melatonin and raise cortisol. And as outdoor light. Okay. And so you want to get it first thing in the morning. You also want to adjust light before bed, no overhead light at night. What you typically want to do if you're going to keep light on is listen, candles are actually the best. But if you're not going to do candles, you want to get lights that are more yellow than they are white or blue. Okay? Most of them. You know, historically a lot of our lights gave off more of a white yellow light. Okay. Today they're white, blue, okay. And that blue light will signal more cortisol and keep your melatonin from rising. And so a few things you can do, you can put on blue blocker glasses. This is something I do pretty much I eat dinner and my blue blockers go on. Now in addition, there are certain lights that we try and keep on in our house. And those lights, which tend to not be the can lights in the ceiling, these are lamps. When we have lamps, we tend to put a yellow bulb in those and those will give off light there. And so I've got my blue blockers on, I've got the yellow lights on and I might read a book. We, I might. Now listen, I'm going to be transparent about exactly what we do in our house. We may watch a show for an hour. So after dinner, let's say we finish dinner, we eat pretty early, okay? In fact, we kind of joke around about this. I mean, we eat dinner at like, I mean, sometimes five o', clock, to be quite honest. I mean, but typically, let's say it's 5:30. Say we finish dinner around 6:30, we may watch TV for 45 minutes, maybe an hour. So let's say we watch dinner, we watch a show till around 7:30. Okay? We're getting our girls to bed at 8:30 at the latest in bed. So we have at least an hour buffer there. And then by the time I'm going to bed, it's probably closer to around 9:00pm So I have about a 90 minute window of, of really almost no light whatsoever before I'm actually getting in bed and trying to go to sleep. That's sort of the idea of what you want. You want at least an hour. The ideal is two hours of light before bed. And so what I will do is if I'm not connecting with the kids and once we're done watching shows is I'll do an audio book or I'll read a book. Okay. That is what you want to try and do right before bed rather than watching a blue screen having lights on all over the house. You want light to be your friend and guide to get better sleep. Number two thing you want to start to do to optimize your sleep is eat the right foods. Certain foods help influence sleep. You want to support melatonin production and serotonin signaling. And there are certain nutrients like amino acids like glycine and gaba. These actually support melatonin production and getting your body better sleep. You also want to support blood sugar stability overnight. So here's a few things you can do. One thing you can do is drink bone broth before bed or collagen. Bone broth and collagen are high in the amino acid glycine. Glycine helps lower your core body temperature. It improves deep sleep quality and calms the nervous system. So one of the greatest things you can do now if you want to do something, and again, you don't want to do this right before bed, but this is like after dinner as dessert, you can do some tart cherries. Tart cherries contain melatonin and anti inflammatory polyphenols. In fact, there was a study published in the European Journal of Nutrition and they found that tart cherry juice increased sleep time and sleep efficiency while also raising melatonin levels. Number three are eat kiwis. In fact, there are clinical studies showing kiwis support serotonin production and help you get better sleep at night. So hey, if you want to do a good dessert at night, some tart cherries, some kiwis, you know, you could do a protein powder. This is a way that I satisfy my sweet tooth at night is I will do a scoop of chocolate or vanilla protein powder that's from bone broth, bone broth based or collagen based and do that with a little bit of almond milk or coconut milk or just water. And I will have that chicken and turkey, they contain tryptophan, right? We know we've seen some of the classic movies of eating turkey and people falling asleep and sort of the tryptophan there. And the way this works, by the way, tryptophan converts into serotonin, which then can convert into melatonin. So it sort of indirectly supports those sleep pathways, which is maybe why you feel sleepy after a Thanksgiving meal. Number five, fatty fish. Salmon, sardines, halibut, mackerel, Any type of fatty fish rich in omega 3 fatty acids and vitamin D. Both can positively influence sleep in the brain. And then we have nuts like almonds and pumpkin seeds. These are high in magnesium and tryptophan, which helps support melatonin production. So doing some. A little bit of almond butter. Almonds or pumpkin seed. Or pumpkin seed butter can be great for supporting melatonin levels. So ideally for dinner, you want to do high protein, high fiber, some healthy fats. And then you could also do a little bit of something like a fruit, like tart cherries or kiwi. That's gonna optimize your sleep. Here's what you don't wanna do. High sugar foods, candy, soda, desserts. I mean, food is signaling something to your body. If you are doing a lot of sugar before bed or carbohydrates, your body's thinking, okay, I'm about to do something here. I am going to go and run a marathon. This person just had 200 grams of carbohydrates. They just had a piece of cheesecake, they just had pasta. They just had half a bag of chips. They had ice cream. I'm about to exert energy. It disrupts your sleep. And then the other thing that happens, you got these blood sugar crashes that are also going to affect your sleep. Here's another big thing that affects your sleep negatively. Alcohol. It's initially sedating, but it suppresses REM sleep and increases sleep fragmentation later on during the night. So alcohol, major sleep disruptor. Another big thing is excess caffeine, coffee, energy drinks, chocolate. Now, let me say this. You could probably do like a square of dark chocolate or something that has a little bit of chocolate flavor. And that's not going to bother you much. But if you have a, let's say a half a bar of dark chocolate, the amount of caffeine in there is going to affect adenosine, which is then going to tell your body it's not tired. And that's going to interfere with melatonin production. So you got to be careful there. Now, here's another thing that will really interfere with your sleep. People don't think about doing heavy fried foods or high fat meals late at night. This is going to slow digestion, it's going to increase nighttime metabolic activity. And when your liver and gallbladder are ready to detox, they're going to have to be working. Okay? Remember 11pm to 3am so you can do fat at night. You should do some fat at night. You should do half an avocado. You should do some extra virgin olive oil. You should do a little bit of again, it could be coconut, something there, a little bit of healthy fat. But you don't want to go overboard and eat something that's high fat. Really. It's high protein, high fiber with moderate fat, low carb. That's the ideal before you go to sleep or again, specifically dinner. Now here's one other thing. You want to try and eat dinner earlier, really around, let's call it 6 o' clock and then go to bed at 9. You want about a three hour window between when you eat and when you go to sleep. What you don't want to do is eat dinner at 9:00pm and try and go to bed at 10:00pm okay? That, that is overly taxing on your digestive system. So you ideally want about a three hour window. Now I want to dive into number three here and that's supplements for sleep. Supplements absolutely can support sleep. But remember this, as I talked about with my radio show caller earlier, supplements cannot replace healthy rhythms. Okay? They can help you fall asleep, but they cannot. And they also definitely cannot replace sleep. Here are some helpful tools. My favorite, magnesium glycinate. Okay? Magnesium threonate is also beneficial and so is a multi chelated form of magnesium. That's more food based. But the most clinical studies are around magnesium glycinate because it's magnesium. We talked about glycine earlier, right? That's found in bone broth. But magnesium attached to glycine amino acid is great for sleep. You typically want to take this around 20 to 30 minutes before you go to sleep at night. Okay. And there's medical studies on this that are fantastic around it. So magnesium glycinate is typically the best along with a food based magnesium or a three and eight. Magnesium. Three and eight, those are the best for sleep. The second supplement you may want to consider is glycine. Now you could get that in a food form as drinking bone broth or you can do around 3,000 to 4,000 grams before you go to sleep at night. It supports and improves Sleep. And also if you're a person that tends to wake up around that 3am time period, glycine can help you sleep through that. There's another supplement as well that's good for this and it's called phosphatidylserine. Okay. It's phospholipids. Now phospholipids tend to be found in egg yolks. They're also found in fatty fish, especially wild caught salmon. And they're also found in caviar. So phospholipids are these really unique type of fats that have longevity properties. But one of those phospholipids, phosphatidylserine, has been shown to help keep you asleep at night. So taking around 200 to 300 milligrams as phosphatidylserine and around 3 to 4,000 milligrams of glycine, an amazing combo for helping you sleep at night. Now, another amino acid that I love that helps calm the brain activity without sedation is L. Theanine. Theanine is found in small to moderate amounts and things like Matcha green tea. This is why when you drink things like green tea, you got a little bit of an energy lift, but it also has a level of calmness with it. That's because of the theanine that's found in things like Matcha. But theanine is great around 200 milligrams before, before bed or just after dinner if you kind of feel wound up from the day and you're like, okay, I just need to kind of get out of this fight or flight state. L. Theanine is one of the absolute best things for doing that. And then there's many other things. Apigenin, which is found in chamomile tea, that can be support sleep long term. Ashwagandha and reishi mushrooms, those lower cortisol levels long term, which can help improve sleep. And so those are some of my favorites. When you're wondering what are the best things for sleep, I do want to mention there's lots of herbs out there. You know, I like lemon balm, I like chamomile, I like magnolia. Those are probably some of my favorite herbals that directly affect sleep. I'm not as big a fan of valerian because a lot of times the grogginess the next day, melatonin. There are new studies recently released on melatonin and that it may actually increase your mortality. Now let me share why that is. I don't think it's from the melatonin itself. I think it's a signal that if that people that don't sleep well tend to take more melatonin. And so the side effect is not from melatonin. The side effect is if you don't sleep well, it will take years off your life, sometimes 10 to 20 years. I mean again I mentioned this earlier, one of the greatest factors of increasing your risk of death today, probably even more than eating sugar and being hyperinsulinemia or being pre diabetic, is not getting good quality sleep. And so there's studies showing people that use a lot of melatonin have an earlier mortality. I don't know if it's from the melatonin. I think it's more likely the study is from people they're just not sleeping well at night. But overall doing high dose melatonin, your body will not produce enough melatonin on its own. It's taking an exogenous hormone. Right. It's like a form of hormone replacement therapy in a way. Melatonin when you're taking it. So it's really not the ideal. Now I do want to say when I do like melatonin, I like melatonin for jet lag. If you're doing a three hour trip across the country or you're going to from the United States to Europe. I'm trying to. The only time I've taken melatonin in the past year is when I did a trip last year to London for a speaking event and I took melatonin the first night in maybe a gram. It wasn't a very high dose. Along with some other things just to kind of get my sleep back on track and to tell my body, oh, this is your new sleep pattern. Okay. So that's when you want to take melatonin is around travel for one to two days and that's it. So again it's great for those things, but that's really the only time you want to take melatonin for most people. Now the number four tip I have to really support optimal sleep is create a wind down ritual with good sleep hygiene. Okay. You need to create boundaries around your sleep in order to properly wind down and prepare your body. You know, there is a influencer out there, by the way. I agree with some of the things he does. There are other things I don't. His name is Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson was taking his child's blood and using that for his own anti aging protocol. I don't and I don't know that he fully understands This, I don't believe that's health that was healthy for his son. Okay, so that is something I vehemently disagree with. However, this man has used himself as a laboratory and looking at what improves his longevity. And one of those areas is sleep. And one of the things that he mentioned that he noticed had a great impact on his sleep and his hrv, which is heart rate variability and his resting heart rate. He saw big improvements with this, was creating a sleep schedule and focusing on getting that resting heart rate down before bed. One of the things he used was a vagal nerve stimulator. It might have been like Neuropod or one of those brands in order to start to calm his body down. And that's what you want to do, right? You want to get in a vagal state. You have your vagus nerve, which is the nerve that signals are sent through for your parasympathetic nerve system, which offsets that sympathetic fight or flight state. So again, if you want to get quality sleep, you want to optimize getting out of your fight or flight state, getting into parasympathetic, that's known as the rest or digest state. And you can do that with things like a vagal nerve stimulator. You can do it by eating dinner earlier, stop working after dinner. We talked about those things. Dimming the lights down, not scrolling, right? This is like being on a slot machine. I mean, your hormones are on high alert. Again, we talked about reading a book, listen to an audiobook, lower the body temperature, do things that are spiritual, go deep. Prayer, reading the Bible, meditation. These things all have tremendous benefits. But create a routine with this to where, okay, we eat dinner. If you're going to watch tv, it's fine. Put on your blue blockers and then watch show for one hour and then listen to your audiobook. And then before bed, do something spiritual. And then get in those daily habits of preparing your body for sleep, good sleep habits. So remember, at a high level, we want to live in tune with nature. When you wake up in the morning, let's get that sunlight, let's get those cortisol levels up and start the morning with a sense of calmness, prayer, read your Bible, gratitude, walk, eat a good breakfast, high protein, high fiber, high antioxidants. Then dive into the day, take a break in the middle of the day, eat good food, then go for a short walk, don't work over lunch, take a nice break there. And then again after work, once you get to around 5, let's say 6pm at night. Now it's time to start to wind down, connect with family, put on those blue blockers, right? Get more of the yellow light, less of the white light. Take some of the right vitamins and supplements. Prepare your body that way. And if you do that, you're going to see great improvements in your sleep. And then your body is going to heal better, it's going to become more balanced, and you'll start living in tune with God's design. Hey, let me know in the comments which one of these you're going to implement this week. Here's the reality. You cannot build vibrant health on a foundation of sleep deprivation. Sleep is not just downtime. Sleep is medicine. I want to say thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show. Each and every week we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally, spiritually and take your health and your life to the next level. Hey, make sure to subscribe. It's the number one thing you can do to support the show. So if you're mission driven like me and you want to help people transform their health and you also want to stay educated, make sure to subscribe and also share. Subscribe. You know, there are millions of people that are being impacted by negative sleep. They don't, they don't know these tips. And so I want to say thank you, all of you, for your comments and for sharing this and I can't wait to see you on the next episode.
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