← The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
Your Brain Has A Sleep Switch (Do THIS To Turn It On) : 1380
00:16:13
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- [00:01]
Dave Asprey
What if there was something you could add to your water to make you perform better, have more energy and protect your cells from damage? Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe and the only one that can get deep inside your cells, mitochondria and even your DNA. It fuels energy production, crushes oxidative stress and supports sharper brain function. Hydrogen's a gas so you can't take it as a pill. So you either have to breathe it in or infuse it into your water. But your tap bottled or filtered water doesn't have it. That's why I use the Echo Flask. Echo Flask is a hydrogen generator that uses advanced electrolysis and a proprietary proton exchange membrane to infuse your water with pure hydrogen. No chemicals, no ph change, just therapeutic science backed hydrogen. I've noticed more energy, faster recovery, less inflammation and mental clarity that lasts all day. Go to ecowater.com dave and use code DAVE10 for 10% off your Echo Flask. You'll feel the difference in days.
- [01:04]
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- [01:20]
Dave Asprey
A switch that controls deep sleep and right now it's off. And that's why you toss internal night up at 2am and you feel exhausted even after eight hours in bed. And for years I had the same problem, like five minutes per night of deep sleep. I tried expensive supplements and sleeping pills. Nothing worked. In fact, over the last two decades I spent about two and a half million dollars reversing my age and working on solving some of our biggest problems, including sleep. And Now I sleep six and a half hours per night, but I get 90 minutes of deep sleep and 90 minutes of REM like most people don't get in eight hours. It's because I discovered a sleep switch that no doctor ever told me about. And once I learned how to flip it on, I started to sleep like a baby and I could go to sleep whenever I wanted to. I've been working on getting almost perfect sleep for the past 20 years and after 10 years of research I got it dialed in and sleep is now effortless for me. No pills, no devices and I get really good quality sleep in six and a half hours per night. And studies show that's the amount of sleep that makes you die the least. When you're so healthy and your sleep is so good that you just don't need eight hours. There's just one simple thing that flips your brain from awake to deep sleep. And it just takes a couple of minutes. The sleep industry will never tell you about this because they can't sell you anything once you know, do this for yourself. So in the next couple minutes, I'm going to show you exactly what this switch is and how to flip it on as soon as tonight. Before you can flip the switch, you need to understand that your body only enters deep sleep when your nervous system actually feels safe. If your body thinks it's under threat, it'll keep you half awake no matter how tired you are. And the biggest thing that blocks your deep sleep, it's stress. So everyone obsesses over mental stress, like racing thoughts and work pressure. What they're missing is the physical stress. The kind your body experiences silently, without your conscious mind even knowing it's happening. This physical stress keeps your muscles tense and your body in a constant state of micro corrections all night long. And you're dealing with this physical stress because of an invisible force your body needs to fight all night long. It's gravity. Gravity is silently working against you every night and interrupts your sleep at the moment you lay down. That's why you might think tossing and turning is because you can't sleep. But it's actually the reverse. All of this comes down to posture. When your posture is not aligned properly, gravity pulls everything out of balance. Instead of your body resting in a straight supported position, it becomes twisted and compressed. Your spine can shift out of its natural curve and that puts uneven pressure on the discs between your vertebra. Your airway can partially collapse, which makes it harder to breathe freely. When pressure builds up, it squishes your organs and stresses your tissues and that signals your brain that something isn't right. All of that is just low grade stress. Your nervous system feels it and your body won't fully relax even if you think your mind is. And that makes your brain microwake dozens of times per night. These are tiny arousals where your brain half wakes just enough to check for danger and then slips back into normal sleep. You don't normally remember these, but they fragment your sleep cycles and they stop you from reaching the deep restorative stages that you need to feel refreshed. To put it simply, your sleeping position sets the stage for either deep recovery or for hidden stress. And when you align your body in a neutral position, gravity finally works with you instead of against you. And your spine decompresses your nervous system calms, and your breathing becomes effortless. And the worst offender is stomach sleeping. It forces your neck into a sharp twist, it jams your lower back and your jaw, and it puts downward pressure on your organs. This keeps your fight or flight system lightly active all night and back sleeping, if you do it poorly, can also cause problems. If you prop your head up too high, your airway narrows and snoring gets worse. And if you don't support your legs, your lower spine can arch uncomfortably. And that's why so many people sleeping on their back just hate it. And their body senses strain and wakes them up to move. But back sleeping, when you do it correctly, allows gravity to open your lungs and encourages nasal breathing, which helps to lower stress hormones. Side sleeping is safer for most people because it naturally keeps your airway more open. It's also easier on your spine, but only if your neck is properly supported and your knees and hips and your spine are neutral under gravity's pull. So if you have the right setup, sleeping on your side or your back can prevent micro awakenings and give your parasympathetic nervous system that rest and digest mode room to take over. And here's exactly how to set yourself up for success. Start with your head and neck. Use a pillow that keeps your head heavy but neutral, not bent forward, not tilted, and not craned back. You might need more than one pillow. You might need a thicker pillow. You might need a thinner pillow. If you sleep on your side, use a pillow that fills the space between your ear and your shoulder completely so your neck doesn't sag under gravity. Add a small pillow between your knees to stop your hips from twisting and pulling your spine out of line. And if you sleep on your back, elevate your legs just a little bit with a small pillow or a rolled towel under your knees, and let gravity just ease the pressure on your lower back. It can make a huge difference for your sleep quality. You can tuck your shoulders slightly back so your chest stays open, making breathing easier and signaling calm to your nervous system. Keep your wrists neutral instead of bent to avoid tingling or numbness. And if you're a stomach sleeper, do whatever you can to train yourself out of it. It's the worst position because gravity is literally pressing your organs and twisting your neck all night. It does take time to retrain your body, and having a really good mattress can help. Memory foam mattresses usually have toxins that don't feel good. I sleep on an essentia mattress. You can use Code dave@myessentia.com and I do that because it stops my body from having these problems. Because even small tweaks like adjusting pillow height or supporting your knees or opening your shoulders can help with gravity. So can a really good mattress. But these hacks it's about how you reduce tossing and turning, you cut down micro awakenings, and you finally slip into this deeper, more restorative sleep. But posture alone isn't going to flip your brain's deep sleep switch. Because even with the right sleep posture, if you fuel your body the wrong way before bed, your brain's going to keep waking up all night. Most of us never realize that what we eat and when is one of the biggest hidden disruptors of deep sleep. In particular, we assume that food only matters for weight loss or energy during the day. But if you sit down and you eat something right before bed, your insulin levels stay high at the exact moment your brain is trying to drop into repair mode.
- [08:06]
You eat clean, you train hard, you sleep well. But if the air you breathe is toxic, none of it matters. You take around 20,000 breaths a day. Each one delivers oxygen or pollution straight into your bloodstream. Most homes carry mold spores, VOCs, wildfire smoke, and microscopic particles small enough to slip past ordinary filters. Once they're in your body, they trigger inflammation, stress your mitochondria, and drain your resources long before you even feel it. That's why I use Air Doctor. Its ultra HEPA filter traps particles down to 0.003 microns. That's a hundred times smaller than what standard HEPA filters catch. Built in sensors track your air quality in real time and adjust automatically when your environment changes. Plus, it's sleek and quiet. Clean air isn't optional if you want to perform at your best when your air is clean, everything works better. It's why I have an Air Doctor in every room in my house and in my office. It's that important. Go to airdrpro.com daveasprey to breathe like it actually matters. Because it does.
- [09:13]
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- [09:41]
Dave Asprey
Now@Vervo.Com and late night carbs spike blood sugar more which Causes a crash in the middle of the night. And that's why you suddenly wake up at 2 or 3am and you can't get back to sleep. It turns out that when melatonin goes up, your body becomes insulin resistant, which is why carbs at bedtime are so bad for you. Also, a lot of protein too close to bedtime can mess with your sleep quality. Protein takes a long time to digest, and if your body is too busy using energy to digest protein, even moving blood into your stomach and your gut, well, it's not going to go into your brain and your body won't focus on repair and recovery. And yes, alcohol. It tricks you into falling asleep faster, but it absolutely destroys your REM sleep cycles. REM cycles are the dream rich stages of lighter sleep that help your brain reset and store memories. So heavy digestion will raise your core body temperature, which blocks your body's ability to enter deep sleep. Because you're supposed to be colder at night, not warmer because you just ate a steak. People try expensive supplements and some of them really work. But it doesn't quite connect your wake ups to the food chemistry that's happening inside your body. One of my favorite sleep supplements is from qualityolife.com I help to formulate it and use Code Dave too. And you can save some money. And there's one small change in food timing that will also flip a biological switch for your sleep. Eating at the correct time sends that signal to your nervous system. It's safe to rest now and it's time to rest now. So by not overeating and not eating too late, it means your gut won't compete with your brain for those resources. So you're not digesting when you should be repairing. And when you fix that food timing, your digestion magically gets better. Your hormones work better and your body chemistry shifts into nighttime mode. And here's exactly how to do it. Eat your main dinner three hours or longer before bed and keep it balanced. Lots of protein, healthy fat and some clean carbs if you're in a carb eating cycle. In fact, you might find that having some carbs in your evening meal improves your sleep. It does for a lot of people. Avoid alcohol and avoid heavy fats too close to bedtime. That's why you eat three hours before, because those will delay melatonin and strain your digestion. You want to hydrate earlier in the day and taper off liquids at night so you don't have to wake up to pee. You might find that using a little bit of Electrolyte in the water you do drink in the evening also helps it go into your cells instead of your bladder. And most importantly, align that last bite with the setting sun, or at least before full nightfall, and that single adjustment will calm your digestion. It'll shift your circadian window, stabilize your biochemistry, and tells your body that it should actually get real rest. But even if your posture is perfect and you've timed your meal at the right time, there's still one factor that can destroy all of your progress in just a few seconds. And it's something that people overlook the most, even though it's easy. We've trained ourselves to use screens and lamps and overhead lights all the time, and they're just a part of life and we think they're harmless. But that bright glow from your phone, your tv, doesn't take very much. It literally tells your brain that it's still daytime. And artificial light from screens and from LED lights literally shuts down melatonin production almost instantly. Even five seconds of bright light can change your biochemistry. And this is because throughout all of the last 2 billion years of life being on the planet, there has never been bright white and blue light in the middle of the night, ever. And if there was, it came from lightning, which lasted for less than a second. So if you're sitting there in the bathroom, brushing your teeth and wondering why you can't sleep, and you wake up all the time, just look up. That'll tell you why. Overhead LEDs and bright bulbs trick your body into thinking the sun hasn't set, or worse, that it already set and then rose again. And your body has a built in rhythm called the circadian rhythm, and it controls so much of how you age and how you feel. It's like a master clock controls when you feel wide awake, when you naturally get hungry, whether you wake up full of energy, and when you're ready to pass out for the night if you disrupt that rhythm, when with late meals or worse, with bright lights, even for a few seconds at night, your body gets really mixed signals. You feel wired when you should be sleepy and you feel tired when you should feel alert. And everyone's rhythm is broken today because we're exposed to massive amounts of unnatural light long after the sun goes down. And lights today are much brighter than they were 10 years ago or 20 or 30 years ago. So the problem gets worse and we get more and more stressed because our sleep gets worse and worse, because our lights are on all the time. Even the faint glow of a television in the background Confuses your body's Internal clock and TV backlights today are 10 times brighter than they were in 1990, and this is affecting us. And your indoor light in your living room is a hundred times brighter than natural dusk. That's enough to spike your cortisol. Tell your body it's daytime. Suppress melatonin right when your body needs it, which keeps you on high alert when you should be powering down. It's no wonder so many people lie awake at night, even when they feel exhausted. But there's an actual switch inside your brain that controls deep sleep. It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or scn. It's a tiny little cluster of neurons behind your eyes, and it acts as a master clock for your whole body. Think of it like a control center that tells all of you, whether it's day mode or night mode. So your eyes are not just for seeing. They feed light signals directly into the scn. And when the right light hits your eyes in the morning, that switch sets a timer for when melatonin is going to rise later at night. So if you flood your eyes with bright light after sunset, you can fuse the switch that's going to delay. Melatonin keeps your nervous system alert, which means even if you do go to sleep, it's not deep, restorative sleep. And once you understand that, the light becomes the main lever for sleep quality. Even more important than food, if you were to dim your environment to candlelight vibes and shift to warm red light at night, your nervous system gets the message that it's safe to sleep. Because unless it's really bright, red light doesn't count as light. Your body just lets it go in, and it doesn't change your timing signals. When you expose yourself to actual morning sunlight as soon as you wake up, you anchor your circadian rhythm for the entire day, which pays off with deeper sleep that night. Think about it like this. You're mimicking nature. Bright sunlight in the morning, say, hey, buddy, wake up. And then in the evening, dim firelight, red light, which is, hey, body, slow down. And when you do this magically, all of your hormones get better and your sleep gets better. When you master light, your body learns to transition automatically. Your cortisol peaks in the morning, which gives you energy. And melatonin rises at night, which gives you rest. The easiest way to have the right color light at night is truedark glasses, which I invented 10 years ago. I don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet. When the sun goes down, I put on our glasses designed for evening time. And it blocks all of the colors of light that tell my brain that it's daytime. That means I can watch Netflix and I don't pay the price when I go to bed. Just go to truedark.com to check these out and use Code Dave too, and you can save some money. It's like noise canceling headphones for your eyes. And we published a study in a medical journal showing that TrueDark glasses shift your brain waves within 15 minutes, which moves you more towards calm and away from stress. These actually work. That's why I made them. When you get your circadian rhythm fully dialed in like this, your sleep becomes way deeper. Your rim cycle's more stable, and if you use a sleep tracker, you see the difference. Your parasympathetic nervous system takes over. Your body starts repairing itself. It cleans your brain out better. It resets your hormones. And here's how to reset your circadian rhythm. And flip on your sleep switch. Wear the TrueDark glasses. They're going to filter blue, green, and violet light in the evenings, which are what talks to your SCN and breaks your circadian rhythm. Ideally, it's 90 minutes before bed. Dim every light in your home as much as you can. It's not normal to have a brightly lit home in the evening, so just dim everything. Switch your bulbs over to amber or ideally red lamps, and avoid these bright overhead fixtures shining down, because your body knows if there's bright light above you, it must be the middle of the day. And if you're going to use screens, which, let's face it, most of us do, wear the TrueDark glasses or use at least the app on your phone. That'll shift to night mode. And yes, we should all go screen free at night, but most of us don't. And if you can watch the actual sunset without sunglasses on, that sends a signal to the SCN that the night cycle is beginning. And make sure your room is completely dark. You need real blackout curtains that completely block light. Cover any LEDs, any little light sources with black electrical tape. It's going to maximize your melatonin production. And it's surprising what a little green LED will do to ruin your quality of sleep. Keep your bedroom cool, because temperature plays a meaningful role in signaling your body that it's nighttime, so you get better sleep. You want to minimize noise and electronic devices and turn off WI fi if it's really close to your bed, at least, because that is shown in studies to disrupt sleep in the morning. Spend five or ten minutes outside in real sunlight. It doesn't take very long. Just take off the sunglasses before you do it. And sadly, if you're behind a window, you don't get the full morning signal. You need to be outdoors, and that single habit locks your circadian rhythm in and it sets your sleep up that night to be much better. Look, for thousands of years, humans didn't need sleep hacks. We just followed nature's rhythm. And you don't need to fix your sleep, you just need to stop breaking your sleep. The switch has always been there, and tonight you can finally flip it on.
- [19:12]
Podcast Disclaimer Narrator
A human upgrade Formerly, Bulletproof Radio was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.