what’s up everybody? Welcome to the fit to fat to fit experience podcast. I’m your host, drew Manning. Welcome back for another amazing episode of this podcast. Today we have an amazing episode with my good friend Sean Stevenson, a K a the model health show, a K a the sleep expert. We’ve had them on before in the past, but I brought him back on again because he is relaunching his new and improved book called sleep smarter. Uh, which is an amazing book. In this episode you guys, we dive into the specifics of how sleep affects you at the hormonal level. We go over his top hacks for helping you get to sleep faster and getting more quality sleep. Because just like our philosophy with working out, for example, it’s all about working out smarter, not necessarily harder and longer, right? So it’s more about the quality of sleep you get and not just the quantity.
And Sean is the expert on all this and he talks about, um, how to, for example, how to calm your inner chatter. So one of the issues that Lynn and I have with getting quality sleep is sometimes you lay down and you start thinking about what about this, what about that? You start stressing and worrying. Anxiety builds up. And before I know an hour has gone by and you’re still awake. So we talk about how to calm your inner chatter, how to get through that. I talked to him about my, my specific issue sometimes is where I’m training really hard and I’m not eating enough. So if any of you have ever experienced that, we talk about how your exercise affects your sleep and how your nutrition affects your sleep as well. So this one is a great episode packed with a lot of great information, great knowledge that were thrown at you guys.
Um, so, and I am flying solo today so it’s just can be me lens out of town. So, um, I hope you guys really enjoy this episode, but before we dive in, you guys, our show sponsor for today is dollar workout club.com now dollar workout club.com for those of you who are new to my podcast, um, those of you who have been listening for a while probably are tired of hearing me talk about it. But Darla, workout club.com is something that we’re so passionate about is because it’s something that we created. Now what it is, is you get access to five at home workout videos, five motivational videos and five healthy recipe videos delivered to you new content each week for just a buck a week. So if you’re looking to, uh, maximize your results in a minimal amount of time, all of our workouts are between 10 to 15 minutes.
And just like I said, exercising smarter, not longer as the key and that we have great healthy recipes that you can implement for you and your family. And then motivational videos to help you tackle things like, uh, you know, how to stay motivated and have stay inspired, how to overcome cravings. Um, and those kinds of things to help you maintain a healthy lifestyle. You guys, so go check it out. A dollar workout club, but.com it’s just a buck a week, you guys, it’s high quality content versus you know, you’re going to pay 10 to 15 bucks for daily burn or Beachbody or these other online fitness programs that are out there and you don’t get access to me, Lynn and Natalie like you do in these other programs. Um, and like I said, it’s just a buck a week. So check it out. Dollar workout club.com. Now let’s dive into today, today’s show with Shawn Stevenson. All right, what’s up, Sean Stevenson, thank you so much for coming back on the fit to fat to fit experience podcast. How’s it going, bro? It’s going great man. Thanks for having me back. There’s the voice
voice,
the velvet audio velvet man. We love you. We love having you on, man. I know we had you on about what, six, seven months ago and you’re back on again. Dude, we’re super excited to talk about your new book, sleep smarter. Um, and I can’t wait to dive into this man cause I loved your first book and this one obviously it’s, it’s, how would you describe it compared to the first one? Like what if someone says, Oh man, what’s different about this book?
It’s a huge upgrade man. It’s like that first transformer movie.
But then they brought Mark Walberg on board,
radically upgraded the, the budget, you know, so
that’s a great analogy. I just came up with that too. So that’s good on the fly man. That’s a really, really clever man to be honest with you. So I’m going to think transformers now I want to read your [inaudible]
like serious upgrade. I’m just thinking of Mark Walberg now, but I mean see how your mother, for me
it’s classic man. So you, you’ve been busy man. I know this book is, has kept you busy cause for those of you guys who don’t know, me and Sean that, I mean we’re like best friends and we talk all the time and I know how hard he’s worked on this new book. It’s been kind of stressing you out a little bit, right? I mean it’s put a lot of time and effort you’ve had to put into this. How have you dealt with the stress of writing this new book and having to meet deadlines and things like that? How has it been for you?
Yeah, well, it’s been great having you in my life and to be able to ask questions, bounce things off of somebody who kind of knows the experience. Um, but for me, yeah, it’s been a little bit of a labor of love. But luckily I love to write, you know, that was something that kind of instilled in me early on. And I even gave a special shout out, I’m in the acknowledgement section of the book to my eighth grade English teacher, ms Blackmore. And I remember she published one of my poems in the school newspaper and just like, it changed my life because it made me feel like my words matter if made me feel like I matter. And so I love writing. Uh, it’s the other stuff, you know, the, the, the media, the, um, the marketing, all of the small things because I just want to give, you know, I just want to share my gift.
I just want to help people. But it’s really about the structure and making it as easy possible for people to say yes. You know, as crazy as it sounds to be able to help themselves. And so that’s been, you know, a big part of it and doing a lot of interviews, meeting a lot of amazing people. But um, you know, I’ve actually been able to have that good training ground to employ a lot of the strategies that I talk about in the book, especially traveling, you know, I just got back from a little mini tour, uh, for the prelaunch of the book in California and I live here in the Midwest and wow. I mean just of course jumping the time zones and then having the meetings at different times and, and the travel involve even while you’re there in town because yeah. LA traffic.
Yeah. This is, they need medication, AKA meditation. They need math. And also this is why podcasts are so amazing. Like my, my biggest audience, and you guys can see this too with your tracking is in California and I was huge shout out to you guys listening out in Cali, love you guys. And we were so close to actually moving there but that’s a whole nother story. But you know, just that experience really allow me to, to put the stuff that, you know, I wrote in the book into practical practice, especially from the traveling perspective, but you know, seeing this stuff in clinical practice over the years, 10 plus years in the clinic and seeing people’s lives transformed just by optimizing their sleep has been a gift in and of itself. So I’ve been handling the stress pretty well, you know, and I’m just like I told you guys a little bit earlier on, I’ve think I’ve really structured my life so that I can enjoy the process that’s so important to me because one of the things we can talk about, what if we get into like sleep and relationship context is people that are sleep deprived haven’t been clinically proven to have less satisfaction.
And less happiness after a big accomplishment than people who are well rested. Wow. You know, so you guys know like a big wedding or a big birthday party or big trip or something and you put so much energy into and then before you know it, it’s over and you didn’t really fully enjoy it. You know? And I know for example, with my wedding, my wife slept for like three days afterwards. She was asleep on the plane with a blanket over her head. I’m like, I know they’re going to think she’s a terrorist. I know her too. They’re going to think there’s something wrong with her. You know? It was like just creeping me out. I’ve never seen her that like that. And so it was a blur to her, you know? And just having the opportunity to be conscious of this experience and enjoy the process is really made it all good.
That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. So really quick before we dive into the book, I know we’re gonna talk a lot about sleep, you guys and how important sleep is and just how just seriously how it affects you. It now on the cellular level affects your personality, affects who you are at the core. Before we jump into that, like you have a 15 year old son, right? I do. Okay. So here’s, here’s my question for you Sean. I know this book is kinda geared towards, you know everybody, but I want to know for you guys with a teenager, how do you implement these strategies? Does your teenager follow it or do they kind of just, you know, I’m going to go to bed when I’m tired. I’m going to sleep in as late as I want. How is it for you guys with a 15 year old son? And what kind of tips would you guys give to parents who have a 15 year old son? Wow. Or a teenager.
We might’ve talked about this a little bit before, but for, especially for teens, it’s finding out what they want, you know, and using their, these type of things is leveraged, you know. So for example, my son, even when I was in Cali, he texts me a picture of the scale because he’s been working to gain weight ever since football ended and he’s almost gained 18 pounds here and just T, you know, it’s been two and a half months, which is absurd, you know, and he’s been doing everything by the book that I’ve encouraged him to do, including focusing on optimizing his sleep, you know? And so it hasn’t been that difficult because he, I’ve got that carrot dangling, you know, so some people, it’s the carrot, they’re a carrot or they’re a stick. And so he’s definitely a rewards based individual and he wants that prize.
So whenever I’m like, Hey dude, you know, you really should get to sleep, you know, you’ve got to get up and you know, make sure that your body gets recovered. And he’s like, right, I know. And then he’s gone. You know, he just goes, he gets off of the computer or his phone and he just shuts it down and he gets asleep. You know? And it’s really that simple as finding that leverage point. Whereas I mean every now and then he’s like, you know, he’s still a teenager. Like he wants to stay up or whatever, but he still gets it. I don’t have to tell him very often because it’s a part of the culture of our family too. And that’s what’s so important to guys is the culture that’s in the family itself. You know, like what things, what do, what are the things that we do, what are the things that you know, we don’t do.
And a lot of people we like to classify ourselves by the things we don’t do. Like, you know, if somebody has that label that we have is a vegetarian for example, we’re talking about the things that we don’t do a lot of times and it creates a separation. But it also brings you together with other people who are in the same Guild. You know, the other people who are vegetarians. And so it’s kind of looking at the potential problems that that comes with. But a lot of times there’s a lot of positive things that they come in there. Um, not just the negative. So that’s kinda what it is, man. We created to where it’s, it’s automatic.
That’s awesome. I know and last time we, we, we did talk about this, but on a nutritional level, how did you get your kids to eat healthy? But it follows the same pattern, right? That falls the same culture that you guys create in the family. And so yeah, I was just curious about this time talking about sleep cause you know,
I hadn’t thought it, yeah, I hadn’t even thought about that. And of course I had like the most unhealthy sleep habits as a teenager too and was like, yeah, how do you actually educate your children about sleep in a way that they’ll,
well you got to your dad’s Sean Stephenson, your dad’s got a book called sleep smarter, respect, respect.
So let’s start to dive into the book and let’s start with some of the basics. Because I know for me it was, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I even learned, which is so crazy and naive to me how important sleep was. I mean, you know, like, Oh, sleep’s important, but most people actually don’t know, you know, scientifically physiologically like why it’s so important and how it affects so many components of our lives. Why don’t you just go through some of the basics of what sleep can do to improve your life? Like how helps with like muscle recovery and different things like that.
Mmm. Okay. Well, and maybe reference some of the studies in your book that kind of come to mind too. Okay. So, sure. Let’s start with, you know, since this is fit to fat to fit experience, you know, there we go. Let’s start with that angle. And it’s really important for people to understand, you know, we think that our bodies are changing because we’re working out or because we’re eating healthy. Well, the reality is, as crazy as it sounds, those things are important, but fat loss is all about your hormones and there is no other physiological process that has more bearing on your hormone function than sleep does. It’s more powerful than food and it’s more powerful than exercise. And actually those two things largely depend on the quality of sleep that you get. And that’s one of the things we’ll talk about today, obviously, but one of the studies, so there was a study recently, and I didn’t even mention this one in my book, there’s so many, but there’s one similar in the book, but this was just a recent one, and this was from the university of Chicago, and they found out the dieters who got eight and a half hours of sleep nightly lost 55% more body fat than they did when they were on the same exact diet.
But God, just five and a half hours of sleep a night. Whoa. Wow. St more body fat. That’s a lot. All right. Is everyone talking about supplements? It’s like, let’s talk about fog man. Yeah. The ultimate supplement is the vitamin S, you know, that is the thing. And so the only difference here, same exact diet, but just change the amount of sleep that they get. And so, and also I’m not a big proponent of more sleep. I’m a big proponent of better sleep, you know, getting higher quality sleep because it’s really about getting through your normal sleep cycles, which range about 90 minutes for each and make it sure that you’re getting enough of those complete cycles to regenerate you. So a lot of people have broken sleep cycles because of a lot of different issues, which you know, of course we could talk about today as well.
But there was another study that was done and this was in conjunction with the American Academy of sleep medicine and they did CT scans over a five year period, which is so cool because it’s, they’re actually doing scans and this is over a long period of five years. And what they found was that individuals who slept for under six hours a night had a 32% gain in visceral fat over that five year period versus people over that five year period who got, you know, seven hours of sleep per night, having only a 13% increase. So we’re talking about twice as much visceral fat increase and that, you know, there’s two kinds of fat basically. Well there’s really three, but there’s two kinds of fat that we don’t necessarily want. A lot of. One is a subcutaneous fat and that’s the stuff that’s under our scans. It’s kind of like insulation.
It’s all right, you know, make you, you know, nice and cozy inside of the visceral fat though. That’s that Oregon fat belly fat, that’s the stuff that’s like just cramped up in between all the organs in your midsection that create that quote, beer belly, right? So this is the stuff that a lot of people are trying to avoid. Another name for the visceral fat is omentum fat, which the Greek translation of omentum basically means fatty apron. All right? So we’re developing, growing this other organ that functions a lot like a brand new organ, mainly a reproductive organ, because the more fat that you start to accumulate in your midsection, you start to produce a lot more estrogen. And that’s for men and women. All right? So it starts to get really crazy because estrogen is a pro growth hormone as far as fat. And it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just, it needs to be imbalanced. And both men and women have this, this same issue. And so this is just yet another reason, you know, another kind of black and white study saying, Hey, if you’re not getting optimal sleep, you’re going to be storing fat even if you’re doing all this other stuff. Right.
Wow. Yeah, that is. So I know what I heard. So I had started again learning a couple of years ago about sleep and how it affects so many things. Like you said hormonally, I was so surprised. I remember reading something that people that were sleep deprived were insulin resistant. Like somebody with type two diabetes, like they could become temporarily more insulin resistant. I was reading all these things and then it started to become a major component when I was training people, especially if they were, you know, if they weren’t getting a lot of sleep and they’re like, what can I do? I’ve hit a roadblock. I would tell them like, stop getting up early and exercising and get extra sleep. And it was amazing cause they, you know, felt like that was counterintuitive and then they would do it and they’re like, wow, I started losing weight again. And I’m like, sleep. Sleep is so crucial to like, like you said, balancing our hormones and just our progress. And it’s, it’s never, it’s really not talked about in our industry, which is crazy.
No. And I love what you say Shawn. You know, sleep like you’re getting paid to do it, you know, sleep like it’s your job. But I think the problem is people don’t know how to do that. Cause we think quantity. Like I’m going to set the alarm, Oh, I’ll be asleep for eight hours. I’ll wake up at this time. But it’s about quality. How do we get people to shift over from, okay, quantity, you know, six hours or eight hours of sleep to quality sleep. What are some like the top three things that people can do in order to really get quality sleep? Cause here’s my question. Is it better to get six quality, quality hours of sleep versus nine hours where you’re tossing and turning? I’m assuming it’s the six hours, right? Oh of course. Yeah.
Down. And so what it’s really about is cycling through your normal sleep rhythm or sleep cycles. So there’s a period, and it depends on which experts you talk to is four to five stages of sleep that are pretty easy to observe, uh, from any individual in a sleep study. And so, uh, but I like to break it down to kinda two simple categories, but then there’s these transitional periods between them, which is REM sleep and non-REM sleep. Okay. So REM sleep, that’s rapid eye movement. And this is basically when you’re doing a lot of the dreaming, your brain is in a higher brain wave frequency. So you know, you cycle through these different brainwaves. And I don’t know if you guys know about this, but there’s basically, um, five different brainwave frequencies we can monitor as well with humans. Uh, or four, again, depending on which expert you talk to.
But basically there’s beta and beta is normal. Awakeness is, we’re in beta right now. Okay? Just everybody that’s listening, tuned in. You’re in beta unless you’re like the Dalai Lama or something. All right? So, and then we can, once we get more relaxed and the initiation of sleep stars or some people who meditate as well, it starts to transition into alpha. Okay? So alpha, and this is where it’s kind, kinda calm, relax, and a lot of intuition could start to happen as we moved transition into theta. And this is where deep rep relaxation experienced meditators hit here, uh, in a lot of kind of, um, uh, the, the imagination is really born from this state. And a little fun fact, kids are relatively frequently in theta up until the age of about seven. And this is why also there, it’s kind of like a hypnotic trance.
Their imagination is so real. Like superheros are real. They’re, they’re, they’re, uh, uh, frozen, you know, the frozen characters real, you know, like they’re so impressionable and so open to ideas and, and exploration and imagination because of theta. And then we have Delta. This is where the deep anabolic sleep really takes place. And this is the non-REM sleep. Okay. So the other brainwave frequencies I talked about, we can kind of cycle through when you’re in REM sleep. But um, Delta is where you get the most anabolic growth and recovery. So what we want to do is stack conditions to make sure we’re getting adequate amounts of all of these. One of those things, and this is a low hanging fruit for everybody to get started, is making sure that you’re getting in some form of exercise in the early part of the day. And so there was a study done Appalachian state university and they broke exercises up into three groups, group a exercises, 7:00 AM crew B at 1:00 PM and group C at 7:00 PM at night, group a, spend more time in the most anabolic deep stages of sleep.
And they woke up more recovered, faster physical recovery. And they had a lower blood pressure in the evening, which is a marker for lower stress levels. All right, so all of that from doing exercise in the morning. Now there’s a caveat there. I’m not saying that you can’t exercise in the afternoon or evening, it’s just as far as sleep quality’s concerned. Getting some in in the morning can really be really helpful. And if you want to work out later in the day, that’s cool too. But make sure that you get some activity. And in the morning I recommend a just a minimum of like five minutes, five to 10 minutes. You could do some body weight exercises, you could do some to Bata, you could do some odd jumping. I’ve got a little mini rebounder here in my office, you know, throw on a podcast, you know, listen to the fit two fat to fit podcast or the model health show or the model house show.
It’s a toss up between those two. Either way, you’re going to be winning. So turn on your favorite podcast, do a little bit of exercise to start your day. The reason that works. And this is really what I focus on, you know, it could be because some people are how people, they just want to know how to do something. You know, just tell me what to do and I’m going to do it. Like now that I know Sean exercise in the morning, I can get more sleep and better sleep at night. Deeper anabolic sleep okay on it. But I’m a why person myself, you know, and I want to know why something works. And so what’s going on here is that doing exercise in the morning helps to basically reset your cortisol rhythm. And so what does that mean? Well, your normal cortisol rhythm for a human of cortisol is supposed to be peaked in the morning.
So we’ll say between 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM and gradually decline as the day goes on, bottoming out in the evening. And what that bottoming out does is it allows for melatonin to be secreted because melatonin and cortisol have an inverse relationship. They’re basically like sort of like flash and reverse flash, you know, they’re like opposites of each other and it’s not that one is good or not so good. So let me not make the superhero analogy, but it’s just understanding that if cortisol is elevated at night, melatonin is at the ground floor, you’re just not producing it properly. And same thing. So a lot of people that are feeling extremely tired in the morning, their cortisol is probably too low and melatonin is not optimized, is not being secreted properly. So to help encourage that normal cortisol rhythm, doing some exercise in the morning can really help to get your day going.
And doing that consistently over, you know, a couple of weeks every day can really transform somebody’s life by transforming their sleep. So that’s one of the strategies to help to, to get higher quality sleep. Um, versus, you know, like you said, tossing and turning because a lot of people, they’re like already like I sleep eight hours a night, but I still wake up feeling wrecked was probably because your sleep cycles are getting interrupted from a number of things that I talk about in sleep smarter but more so we focus on the solutions. Like I just gave about, you know, getting five minutes of exercise in the morning and that’s a great, that’s a great tip for people cause
people ask us, you know, I’m glad you said that. People ask us a lot, you know, if it matters when they exercise. And it’s funny, I I never knew knew that study. So I would just say, Hey, it’s just important. You know, that you fit in time for yourself. It really shouldn’t be that much of a difference. Any workouts better than no workout. But it’s, it’s great to have the science and the facts kind of educating people about the benefits. If they can get in, like you said, even just like a Tabata, they can in a quick workout
in the morning and how it’s could affect their sleep. That’s awesome. Especially for our moms that I feel always get very little.
So yeah, that’s all. Here’s the other thing that you kind of mentioned. I want to talk about the, the melatonin myth which you go into in your book a little bit. Cause here the, here we are in this industry where it’s like, Oh I’m tired. I can either take Ambien or I could take something natural. You know, melatonin like that’s natural. Some people think but what’s your opinion on melatonin and where you like what’s your, you know, is that something people should take or is it more so just balancing it out cause you said it’s not good or bad, it’s just the proper amounts. It’s, it’s good.
Wow. I’m going to do something unconventional here. I’m going to say hold on on this topic because there’s something important that I want people to, to be able to take away in regards, because we mentioned earlier about the the, the importance of sleep when it comes to your body composition, fat loss, weight loss. I want to make clear one of the things that that’s going on there behind the scenes and like I started the show by saying fat loss is really about your hormone function and one of the most important hormones that’s produced when you’re getting high quality sleep. And the vast majority of this is produced when you’re sleeping is human growth hormone. And this is the most anabolic stage that we can be in as humans. This is during his deep sleep. And so H G H promotes growth, maintenance, repair of your muscles and bones, and it also facilitates your body’s use of amino acids. So if you’re like going broke trying to buy protein powders and you’re not sleeping, you like you’re wasting your money because your body can’t even utilize this stuff properly unless you’re producing the right hormones. All right. And same thing repairative enzymes are being produced. Um, the melatonin, the testosterone follicle stimulating hormone, all these things that help to build your body up, make you, uh, have a tremendous amount of vitality. This is happening during sleep. And so now to transition to the supplement question. Yes, melatonin itself. So,
Oh guys, listen, we’re listening. We’re listening show. Just because
buy it at whole foods does not mean that it’s safe.
All right, it’s not, it’s okay. All right. Whole foods has cookies. It’s still a cookie, you know, organic, gluten free, it’s organic, living
free, a vegan, all that.
It’s taken me too far, man. Like somebody like I’m going to get a gluten free mattress next time. You know, just like all these catchphrases, you know, and a lot, obviously this stuff is very relevant, but it’s just understanding, it’s not that the cookie is necessarily bad. I truly believe that everything kind of has, it has it,
but still keeping your perspective, like it’s still a cookie, you know, it’s still a supplement is still an isolated compound. This is what’s most important to understand. And melatonin is a hormone. All. So this is straight up hormone therapy without a license. You know, like you could just go ham on melatonin and nobody’s going to hold you accountable. So here’s the issue and I documented this and sleep smarter as well. Um, this really important study, and this is just the first of many that are coming out now found that individuals who were consistently taking melatonin had a reduction in their cells, receptor sites for melatonin. So what that means is you can still produce melatonin, but your body’s ability to use it starts to diminish. And that’s a big problem. All right, so this is, this is so important. Understand that we don’t want to just take an end product, you know, we don’t want to try to supplement something that our body produces on its own.
We want to support our body’s natural production of melatonin by doing simple things that, you know, like exercising in the morning, for example. And another thing is making sure that we’re, um, getting less exposure to artificial light. In the evening, uh, Harvard did a study and they found that exposure to light in the evening was enough to basically suppress melatonin secretion. But all light is inquiry. It created equal, you know, as far as artificial light, blue light was the most impactful. Green light was one third as impactful on disrupting people’s sleep cycle and suppressing melatonin as blue light. And then red light was found to have little effect. So if you want to, you know, get it sexy, get the red light going at night, you know, that’s a good idea. It’s going to help you sleep better. Then that fluorescent led, you know, a white, blue light bulb that’s beaming out.
So ness number one is melatonin is an end product. So let’s not start there. All right? There are instances where I would say, Hey, it’s, it’s advisable. It’s okay, but that’s a very rare circumstance. What we really want to do is start with things that have a lot more evidence, historical evidence, not just recent clinical evidence. All right? But in that would be things like kava, kava, valerian, um, camera mile. These things have some clinical, um, some clinical proof of their effect, effectiveness and efficacy, but also they’ve been used for thousands of years. Sometimes, you know, like kava kava is like the national drink of Fiji. You know, he’d been down in that stuff forever and it’s, it’s been clinically proven to be a mild sedative, but the human body has more of a resonance and, and, and kind of acceptance of this because it’s a natural substance.
Not saying that it’s perfect, but from there then we can move to more isolated compounds, which I would say is a second tier, but we don’t want to do right to melatonin. We want to use melatonin precursors. So this would be things like five HTP, five HTP is a precursor to melatonin. So is L tryptofan. So, and this allows your body to do a step instead of just taking boom melatonin here, you know, just dropping it into your system and you know, your body figure it out. You know, instead of doing that, you give your body something so it could still do some work to help to build this really, really important rejuvenative hormone. And last thing, I got to mention this, too many of these pharmaceuticals today, you know, and dr Sara Godfried wrote the forward for my book and she’s a New York times best selling author of the hormone cure and the hormone reset diet.
So she knows a thing or three about hormones and just taking 20 prescription sleeping pills a year is enough to radically increase your mortality rate. People don’t know that. Yes, basically, yes. So we’re talking about barely a pill a month or two a month. Freeze your chance of clocking out early. We’re disrupting this natural pattern and what it’s been shown to do is add on only about 30 to 40 minutes of sleep and not necessarily high quality sleep. Again, because we’re not normally cycling through our natural sleep cycles. And so what’s happening is we’re disrupting our human growth hormone production. We’re disrupting melatonin production, we’re disrupting our repairative enzymes. All of this stuff is getting messed up because we’re taking, we’re trying to treat a symptom instead of addressing the underlying cause of our sleep.
Yeah, no, that’s so true, man. That’s really scary. You know, I have friends that take Ambien to put them to sleep, Adderall to keep them awake, you know, and caffeine on top of that, you know, it’s like this is a dangerous cycle. Cause then you’re like, obviously you are not gonna be able to sleep if you just take the ambient away right away.
Well and I also know parents that give their kids melatonin.
Yeah, I know that’s every night cause their kids won’t go to bed.
Yeah. That’s really scary. Yeah. And it’s about education though. Like I said, I didn’t even know and I’m in the industry till two years ago. Anything about the importance of sleep and then I just feel like there’s not enough. That’s why I love your book. Like it’s really the, the Bible for sleeping. There’s not enough information like helping people. Like I know so many women like myself. Like tell me what you would tell a mom like this. This is what I get all the time from women. I can’t go to sleep because at night all I do is think of my to do list everything that I should’ve done that I didn’t get done and everything tomorrow that I need to get done. And so I lay in bed and I’ve been totally guilty of this for like over an hour. Just stressing about that and I just can’t sleep. Like what do you tell people when they say stuff like that?
Yeah. I even posted this quote in it. I, this came across my desk years ago when I first started doing research, uh, in sleeping. It’s this quote, it says, my bed is this magical place that I go to remember everything that I was supposed to do in my life, you know? And so, or a lot of people, it’s that same story, you know, um, they happen to bed and then the busy-ness kicks in, you know, the, and we call this inner chatter, you know, slightly clinical term, you know, a lot of inner chatter. And the first thing that I want to express to everyone is that there’s nothing wrong with you. All right? This is something that a lot of people have going on and it’s actually a really great gift, especially as you mentioned for the moms out there to be able to process so much information, especially with all the responsibilities that you have today.
Now, so what I w what I want to compare that to or like to connect that to as a sort of visual cue here is a lot of windows open on your, on your computer screen, okay. On your, on your desktop or your laptop, you’ve got a ton of tabs open. All right. And so that’s all right. We’ve got a lot of things going on and we know we’re going to get to everything, but what we’re doing now with sleep is we want to minimize those windows and just have one open and that one is just sleep, just the sleep window. So how can we do that? How can we just minimize those windows for now and just focus on that one which we want is sleep and so that we can wake up and be better the next day. Because the reality is
you guys, is there a fire over there?
Nope. Oh, I know. I do hear. I do hear. Do you hear that? It’s a fire alarm. We have our headset on.
It’s gone. It’s gone though. They put the fire out, the fires out. Everyone’s saved. Everyone was rescued. And we’re good to go. You’re welcome. Oh, I know what. It’s a truck backing up and it’s making this beeping. Sorry about that. You got good ears. You can hear stuff going on in the background in Hawaii from st Louis. That’s crazy. He has some good ears.
My superpower is that good sleep? Yes. All right. So here, here’s the deal. What do we do to minimize all those other windows and just be able to focus on getting great sleep? Well, this is actually very, very simple, but I’m probably going to mention something that had so many people are like, you know, uh, I’ve been meaning to do that, or I just, I’m going to learn. But it’s meditation. We absolutely have to have a practice of meditation today in the world that we live in. It is essential. It’s like there’s, there’s no way around this and that doesn’t mean that you have to sit cross leg on the floor. I’m in a closet by yourself. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. You don’t have to do that if that’s what you’re into. Yes. Go for it and own it up all day. Do it. But there’s also other types of meditations. There’s guided meditations. There is binaural beats, you know, you can listen to certain, um, certain sounds in a way actually change instantly. Change your brainwaves like we talked about earlier. Um, there’s moving meditations like Tai Chi and Qigong. There’s so many different practices. It’s really about,
no, go ahead. What about like breathing techniques like count counting with their breath? Is there, are there those that you recommend? Like a four count hold for, for count.
I’ve heard of the four count. Hold for four. Four count. Hold for four is a good kind of like slight meditation technique. Sorry. Yeah, no, no, no. This is good because you just, this is what I was going to talk about next. Drew thinks we’re on the same page. Great minds think alike. I know where you’re going with this. Exactly. It’s, so that’s, that’s another style of meditation that’s free, easy. You have instant access to all the time. Now here’s why it works. So you’re breathing is part of your autonomic nervous system and some of the other things that your autonomic nervous system is controlling is beating your heart, is digesting your food, is controlling the dilation of your pupils, but it’s also controlling your breathing. But now that I’ve started talking about breathing and drew mentioned breathing, you’re probably more aware of your breath right now, aren’t you?
You know, and this is something that a lot of us, it’s just kind of like, was I not breathing before? I don’t know. Was I doing it right? It happens automatically. But what’s so interesting, unlike being able to beat your heart or jump in and digest your food, you don’t want that kind of responsibility. You didn’t know. Like you don’t want to have to be able to do that job. But the crazy thing is with your breathing, you can actually jump in and take, turn off the autopilot and grab the wheel and control your breathing. And this is an evolutionary advantage because our breathing is heavily lined up with our fight or flight response and our rest and digest response or the, um, sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system respectively. So we can have a false alarm and change our, our entire physiology. Uh, G just by being in fear, right?
We’ve all had this happen while we might be walking down, um, you know, in a park and we see a stick and he’ll kind of looks like a snake or something and he like freaks us out. Like, Oh, you know, but it’s just like, Oh, it was a false alarm. There’s no reason for that fight or flight response has evolved through us to be able to protect us from danger, you know, or we get a a really, uh, scary phone call, you know, about something. But then we come to find out it was just a false alarm. Everything’s okay. You, you need to be able to instantly switch over. Animals in nature do this easily, you know, like that Impala is fault full out fight or flight getting and getting away from that cheetah, you know. But once it does, it shakes it off and it gets back to doing Impala bags, you know, whatever that is.
Eating leaves and you know, drinking water and you know, doing it, doing it in Pala style. And so that’s all that, that’s what’s going on with us. We can ruminate on these things. We can just like sit in process and rethink and you know, think about even more negative things happening. We have this infinite capacity to have to add fire to that, to that, um, to that stress. And so by us being able to jump in and take the wheel, we can calm ourselves down instantly. And so one of the breathing practices, like you just mentioned, it’s very simple and it’s just, you know, sitting up tall in your chair. And first of all, you have to learn how to breathe again, which sounds crazy. Um, it’s thinking about breathing and filling up your lungs from the bottom up. So that means when you breathe in, you’re going to actually have your belly to relax and come out a little bit.
But we’re all taught like keep those abs on. You know, like I walk by, you know, I used to do this on my side just like it. I’m 20% on boom in his stomach, you know, and, but just to be able to relax into, to allow yourself to have a little pooch, you know, he’s okay. You know, we all get so tense and we keep ourselves from breathing using the full complete capacity of our lungs. So think about as you’re breathing in, you’re filling up a container from the bottom up with water. Okay. You’re filling up that your lungs from the bottom up with air. And so you’re becoming a natural breather instead of a chest breather. Cause a lot of us are just breathing up in our chest region, region. And I can do this, like if we were at a live event and you ask somebody to come up on stage and ask them to breathe, take a deep breath immediately their shoulders would go out, right. And instead of your shoulders shouldn’t be moving, your belly should be moving, you know? But that’s a clear sign of that chest breathing.
So Lynn was really funny. Lynn was actually doing that when you were talking about taking a deep breath. She was like, I can see you’re like, what are you talking about? Like relaxing your abs. He’s shirtless right now recording this. And he started like flexing his ads and like you’re talking about, I’m relaxed. It’s just naturally flexed all the time. Yeah, that’s a flexor. Saurus yeah, he doesn’t even know how to breathe. Letting his stomach out. And he’s like, what? No, sorry to interrupt man. We’re just having a good time with you.
So really, really easy is just sitting up straight in your chair or you know, on the floor. Just getting in a comfortable position and then closing your eyes and taking that deep breath and filling the bottom from the bottom up your lungs with air and breathing in for a count of five. So it’s one, two, three, four, five. Then you hold it in for five seconds, one, two, three, four, five. Then you breathe out, get everything out of your body for five seconds, five, four, three, two, one. Then you hold it out for five seconds by four, three, two, one. Then you repeat the cycle, breathe in deeply for five seconds, one, two, three, four, five and as you repeat this process, and of course we could just do a whole kind of guided meditation.
I was like falling asleep here. We’re already falling asleep. We did it. That was only one. That was one rap guys. So as you do that process process,
you start to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest system and it turns off your fight or flight system, you know for a lot of us were chronically in the sympathetic dominance basically. And so having that tool and you have access to that any time to to relax your system, to basically put you in more of an anabolic state even though sleep is really the master anabolic state, you can do that simply by changing your breathing and having access to that and changing your brain wave frequencies simply by changing your breathing is a great tool to have to help the calm down the inner chatter and according to the research and this is sighted and sleep smarter. The American Academy of sleep medicine published a study showing that meditation is an effective treatment for insomnia. And the study showed that over a two month period, sleep latency, total sleep time, a wake after sleep onset.
So this means basically not waking up sleep efficiency. So going through your normal sleep cycles, sleep quality and depression all improved in patients who use meditation. And this was just a two month study and gosh, right, amazing. Amazing stuff. Right? And so it’s really important understand that this isn’t some strange kind of weird, you know like drinking the Koolaid thing. This is important process that you need to start to master an employee on a regular basis. Just five minutes in what the research show was at. Meditating in the morning can help you sleep better at night. So that’s just one of the different pieces for kind of calming the inner chatter. But it’s a really important one.
I love that because meditation for me, I started, started it a little bit about a year ago, but I really got into it since I’ve been in Hawaii especially. Cause I have a friend that teaches meditation and it has transformed my life. It’s interesting to hear the science behind it because I initially thought it seems so woo woo, but I experienced all of those things that you said. I felt more at peace, more calm. I felt like I was more in tune with uh, different things in my life that I was happier, that I was sleeping better. Um, and it was funny cause in one of his meditations he says, you know, the average human breeds about 12 to 20 times a minute. And on average we live to be like mid seventies. And then he joked around like a tortoise breams breeze about four times a minute. And the, the oldest tortoise was about 183, you know, so to like focus on calming, calming ourselves and calming our breathing.
And personally I like meditations that have more like tools that I can use, which are the ones that I do. But even just like you said, that simple breathing technique could really ground you back and calm you down and add a lot of benefits. So I love that you shared that. That’s like such an amazing tool. I know for me when we were talking about at night and not being able to turn off our brain and I think so much and I talked so much obviously and for me like a lot of times I do like to meditate in the morning but I’ll do a small meditation at night. Um, and a lot of times I’ll actually fall asleep to it. Like I just relax enough and call my brain enough that I just literally will pass out mid meditation. So
yeah, man, there’s, there’s so many good things that, um, I wanted to discuss with you, Sean, and I’m going to be a little bit selfish here and talk about something that I personally struggle with every once in a while. Cause you’re sleep guru and
I kind of want, maybe there’s other people out there that suffer with this, but it’s, it’s, and I don’t know how to describe it, but basically when I’m exercising, exercising really hard, like I do a really hard workout that day and I, you know, I think it’s me not eating enough calories and there for some reason there’s times where I’m in bed laying there and all of a sudden I, I feel this almost energy come on where I’m like, my brain is starting to go and I’m even, I’ve done the breathing technique and all that and the only thing that will calm me down, I’ll lay in bed for like a good hour, tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable and like trying to sleep. The only thing that helps is me going to eat some food, you know? And I’m like, is it because I’m, and I feel like my, my heart’s racing and I’m a little bit sweaty or I feel like I need some food. And then probably about like 20 minutes after that, then I’ll, I’ll be able to fall asleep. But it’s have you ever had people that are like, you know, maybe they’re not eating enough and their body is feeling stressed and it’s waking them up to go eat. What’s your thoughts on that?
Of course, man, this is why we have lights in the refrigerator. All right to show, no, and I appreciate you sharing that because definitely there are definitely other people have experienced this and there’s a couple of things going on here. You know, um, number one, and this is a huge tip for any practitioner out there, any person who strives to be a master in their profession, especially a master, a health practitioner, physician coach, that kind of thing. If you listen to somebody tell you their problem, they’ll tell you the cause and cure within that. Okay. So he already told me what to do.
What did I just do that? Yes,
tell me that I’m probably not eating enough. All right, so you just said it. You’re like having his Lee hungry and tossing and turning in bed because yeah, your body is not as satiated. You know, like your active guy and your metabolism is, is pretty hot. So it’s your meal timing. That’s all it is. It’s just a change in your meal timing and probably eating a little bit more of certain categories of food or eating a little bit more food. And so we all know what we can, you can kind of fall into that food coma. Right? And some people, we call it the itis, like you get the itis after Thanksgiving dinner, kind of like comatose. You become a part of the furniture, you know? And so how do we, what’s going on here? Well, one of the things that can happen is we get a little bit of a serotonin hit from carbohydrates in particular. So can I ask, like what do you tend to go for when you get up
now? Yeah, here we go. We’re getting deep. So I will go for like, honestly something quick is either like a, like half of a quest bar with a scoop of almond butter to be honest with you. Some type of nuts or fat, um, versus, or sometimes like a couple of of Harbo they eggs. You know what I’m saying? Some of that’s quick and easy. That has mostly protein and fat and for whatever reason like that makes me feel full and then I can sleep easier. But it’s quick energy without
it being fast food or you know. Right. Processed carbs. Look at, look at drew. Nobody else is getting up in the middle of the night and go into like people are going to,
I agree man. You got to make sure my six pack has a six pack. Well that’s the thing is like I get up in the middle of night and yeah, like I’m like is there, is there any pastry? That’s what I have in my cupboard. But that’s the thing is if there is, I will stuff my face with the end. I’d even feel guilty about it. I’m like I just need calories of some type. Like I’m so hungry but when I’m trying to be good it would be those types of foods. Okay. So this is,
it’s important guys, like a important lesson to take away. Everybody listening is, and Lynn just said is like if it’s in the house, like this is classic. If you’ve got it there and your dealing with some kind of weird stuff with your sleep, I promise you those pop tarts are getting hammered, you know, I promise you those potato chips are getting hammered and it’s like you might have promised yourself that I’m going to eat great, I’m going to work out, I’m going to go all this stuff, I’m going to follow, you know, drew and Lynn what they’re talking about. But then you end up with that guilt and that shame and that, uh, you know, strong, got to start over. You know, they start over on Monday syndrome, you know, and so a lot of that is because your willpower versus your biology, you gotta set yourself up for success.
So, but anyway, so back to this point. All right, so with carbohydrates in particular, you’re going to get a little bit of a serotonin kick when you eat carbohydrates, you know, really yummy stuff, you know, um, the, the pastries, the ice cream, but also ha quote, healthier version. So like, you know, sweet potatoes, um, uh, some fruit, things like that as well. Uh, you’re going to get this hit of serotonin and so serotonin is a precursor to melatonin. All right? So I hope that started to make sense so it can, it can start to transition and help your body to calm down. A little aid plus serotonin in of itself is like a feel good relaxation hormone. All right, so you’re going to get that instant hit. Another thing is that blood sugar crash, that will inherently happen if you eat carbohydrates by themselves, especially, you know, something that’s a higher carbohydrate with lower fat and protein.
So that can be enough to put you to sleep. However, you can be pulled out of your normal sleep cycles and this is why somebody might do that, but they’ll wake up feeling exhausted because they didn’t get their normal sleep cycle because you also can go go hypoglycemic if you get that big sugar crash and go to sleep, you know, I was sugar spike and be nice and comfortable and happy and then you go to sleep. That sugar can crash in the middle of your, you know, maybe the first hour of you sleeping or whatever. Something like that and it’s going to pull you out of your sleep cycle. So that’s one thing. The other thing is the fat and protein construct here. So those things are very grounding, especially, um, higher fat foods. And so that’s kind of what I recommend is as far as like eat, go ahead and give yourself permission before you even go to bed, drew.
So you don’t got to get up, just go ahead and have a high fat snack. You know, and that’s, it’s sort of like if you’re eating carbohydrates, it’s like you’re, you’re, if we give the analogy of your metabolism is like a fire, right? It’s a fire. It’s your, it’s your, um, your fireplace at your house, right? And if you throw some carbohydrates on your metabolic fire, it’s like throwing some paper, like a stack of paper onto the fire. It’s going to burn really bright and hot, and then it’s going to disintegrate very quickly. Versus eating fat is like putting on a small log onto the fire is not going to get that big spark. And, and hot fire is just going to be a steady, you know, it’s going to help to encourage a steady energy and steady burn. So that’s the analogy I like to use.
And so that’s on, this is going to keep your blood sugar more stable, give you some kind of grounding, uh, nutrition. And also just that the pleasure. Like we’re here to eat. Like we should love the process and enjoy our food, you know, so we gotta get out of this whole weird thing of like, I can’t eat late at night. You know, that’s not necessarily true. Now here’s the thing, you got to hear this though guys here. This is so important and I talk about this and sleep smarter. Somebody that’s, I have a normal body body constitution. Um, a normal BMI is with the, they actually use in the research was BMI is not necessarily the best tracker, but is where they use, someone does have a normal BMI, body weight. When you eat a meal, you’re getting about a 5% increase in your cortisol level.
And that’s actually good. It’s normal because stress hormones are going up from eating that meal because your body is doing a lot of work to decipher whether or not this food is going to heal you or hurt you. All right? So it’s a biological evolutionary response to make sure that you’re not putting things in your body that are going to hurt you. And also it has to start converting that food into you. It has to start making you out of it. So it’s a little bit of a stressful event. Now, this research also showed that individuals who are overweight, individuals who have a high, um, body mass index, high body fat, when they consume a meal, you can have an upwards of 50% increase in cortisol, right? So your cortisol level can shoot right up because there’s a lot more biochemical stuff going on when you eat a meal.
And so, you know, uh, drew obviously has been in this situation, you know, very, very publicly, but myself too. You know, when I first, um, before I made this, you know, transformation in my own health, being overweight, absolutely. Like I saw, I saw this happen firsthand that you know, eating foods would like, ah man. It just gives you this kind of a rush, a good feeling of comfort. But then there’s this low and this crash and a lot what’s going on here is you’re getting this increase in stress hormones and then as your body starts to repress, you kind of get depressed. But the reason I don’t want to focus on that too much, the reason I’m bringing this up is that again, cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship. So when cortisol is up, melatonin is down. So if you’re getting a big spike in cortisol right before bed, guess what’s happening to your melatonin because you ate a meal too late.
So for an individual who’s, their goal is weight loss is body fat loss. I would say definitely to structure your day in your meal so that you can get at least a two hour amount of time before you finish eating and you go to bed and two hours is solid. So if you’re going to bed at 10 o’clock or you’re going to bed at 11 being done, eating by nine, eight 30, that’s all it takes. And that gives your body time to shift over to the parasympathetic nervous system, um, to turn off that fight or flight and this other small things like being present with your food while you’re eating, you know, not watching, you know, game of Thrones and eating your dinner. You know what I’m saying? Um, shout out to game of Thrones though, you know, a Khaleesi. Yeah.
[inaudible]
be aware that all of these things matter to help to encourage your body to get the optimal sleep that you need because your body’s going to transform the most now from that food, not from your workout or from that sleep that you get. So structure your life so that you get high quality sleep. Eat your, I would say to eat some carbohydrates actually a, have a nice whack of carbohydrates to get that process we talked about earlier in the evening versus in the morning. And there’s so many other tips or strategies we could talk about here, man. But I’m just going to pass the mic to you.
No, but you know what’s great about all this, I’m kind of looking at what everything you’re saying here. It’s so interesting how sleep, exercise, nutrition are also related to each other. One impacts the other. You exercise in the morning, you’re going to get better sleep. If you eat at, you know, and you feed your body, you’re going to sleep better throughout the night. Like they’re all so connected and they’re all so important that when one is lacking, if you’re, if you’re lacking, you know, quality sleep. But if you’re lacking good nutrition, it’s gonna affect those other areas of your life. And then in the end, that’s why it’s so hard to reach your goals. And so some people don’t realize that. They’re like, I’m eating healthy, I’m exercising all these things. But yeah, you’re, you’re, you have so much stress in your life, you’re not sleeping well. And that’s why, you know, most likely you’re not seeing the results is because those three things, the asleep, uh, exercise and nutrition aren’t in line with each other. And they’re so interconnected times
with things like that, like trying to explain to somebody, it’s like a table and each component is a leg of the table and they think, well as long as I’m doing the other things, I don’t understand why sleep’s impacted me a lot. It’s like, well it’s a table and you just took out one of the legs. Like are you really surprised? It’s that wobbly. Like have you ever tried to eat on a three leg table? Like not, not the easiest. So they really do all correlate work hand in hand. For me, I think the hardest part and what the value of your book and what it did for me is I, I mean I love that there’s information out there that’s great, but for me I’m always like, okay, great. I know sleep’s important. I know I need it. And it’s like, great, welcome to motherhood.
Like you live my life and you get more sleep. Like it’s like when a doctor is like, you know what would help you is if you stress less and you’re like, really no kidding. Like thank you for the advice. But I love about your book is you actually give the kind of like you did on this podcast, you give those tips like you actually give strategies that people can implement in their life to sleep better. And that’s the thing. I read article after article about why it’s important, but then in those articles I was always like, when I learned about this a couple of years ago, I was like, Oh, what do I do though? Like what do I actually do? So like for anyone out there that’s now realizing crap, like this is why I probably haven’t seen the progress that I need or have felt as good as I do or why I have my hormonal imbalances. This is the tool guide. This is your Bible of how you can start to improve your sleep. So
yeah, and here’s the, here’s the other thing is comparing this to the fitness industry. For example, we all know like, yes, you need to exercise, but it’s great to have a structure of knowing what you’re doing and having strategies in place. Because at the end of the day, yes, we will all be better off if we all exercise of some, if that’s walking, running, biking, swimming, Zoomba, CrossFit, I don’t care what it is. If you’re doing something, it’s better than nothing. Same thing with sleep. Yes, we all do need to sleep more. We need to sleep better. Okay? But how can we upgrade that knowledge? Like how can we improve upon that and advance in our knowledge of here’s how to get a great night’s sleep. And so that’s kind of what I want to transition to. Now, Sean, is without going into maybe like too many specifics, what are some things as far as, okay, mattress sheets, pillows, which at the end of the day, all of this stuff maybe isn’t that important, but how do we upgrade?
Okay, so what type of mattress should we have versus here’s a crappy mattress that’s probably causing this certain types of sheets that are good and bad pillows. Are those good or bad because a lot of the knowledge that we have nowadays is like nutrition, uh, you know, uh, exercises like, okay, let’s go back to the days of our ancestors and what did they do? Well, they didn’t have mattresses back then and you know, how do they get quality sleep? So can you touch on those kinds of things if you’re okay with talking about that? For people that want to upgrade their quality of sleep with those types of things, cause I’m assuming those things make a difference. Right?
Absolutely. Uh, but you just, again, you already said the thing which is, you know, there are people in third world countries who were sleeping on the ground at night. They sleep better than people in the most fancy Tempurpedic. Um, it just, your side of the, you know, the changes, the gravity, you know, you can actually float and then sink in water and it’s like a flotation, all this crazy stuff that we could get, you know, a hyperbaric chamber, Michael Jackson style, all this stuff. And there are people sleeping better who was sleeping on the ground, you know, and that’s really what I focus more on all the other lifestyle factors that enable you to sleep good at night. But the bed and the pillows and all that stuff absolutely matters. And this is just takes a little bit of common sense. So, um, the, the national sleep foundation actually Wrexham recommends, which I had no idea about this, that you get a new mattress every seven years.
And for a lot of us just kind of like we get a mattress and that’s it. Like I was not planning on getting a new mattress and is this like I saw no need for it, but I didn’t realize that my kind of like I would wake up and I just felt a little bit of like kind of off like aches and aches and pains. Like my body just felt out of sorts for so long, you know, sleeping on the same mattress. And it wasn’t until I upgraded and I found out that, you know, number one it’s about is something called mattress resiliency. And this is an actual thing that can be measured that a lot of people don’t hear about. They just hear about, you know, it was like this is a triple pillow top, a soft as a cloud, a foam mattress. You know, it’s like all these, you know, fancy, cool things.
Or do you just kind of like those words that make you feel good, that pull you in? Like it’s fluffy, you know, and not like what’s the real thing here was really making sure that my, my body’s an optimal position. So when you’re, when you’re lying down, your hips are the heaviest part of your body when you’re lying down. And so wherever you lay on your mattress, that part of the mattress where your hips sit is going to start to lose its resiliency first and automatically, that’s going to start to pull your spine out of alignment. All right? And for a lot of people that might manifest and the biggest thing that people call off work for and the United States is back pain. All right? So that’s like the, the top thing is like somebody threw their back out or you know, they’re just having chronic back pain.
And let me not say the biggest, it’s one of the biggest and a little do people know? It’s oftentimes a result of their mattress that they’re sleeping on. And this might not show up his back pain. If your spine is out of alignment for hours because you spend about a third of your life on a mattress, all right? And it can be showing up in knee pain, you know, or shoulder pain or your neck is stiff. And this is because your spine is off. So your body’s going to start to, as it’s moving through the world, it’s going to be moving differently because your spine is off. It’s going to also show up as digestive problems. Um, acid reflux, uh, things like that. Because also when your spine through your spine and chiropractors know this well, you’ve got roots and connections to all the major organs in your body as well, you know, so make sure that you’re checking into, uh, the mattress resiliency.
Uh, and I don’t want to start, I don’t want to throw out any names right now, but in sleep smarter, I recommend, you know, I’ve got a resource guide, a bonus resource guide where I’m putting in because things change, you know, where I put in the ideal wellness mattress, you know, like the best mattresses for your sleep health is not just about resiliency. The biggest concern is how your mattresses are actually processed and treated. So I made the joke earlier about a gluten free mattress, right? Well, the crazy thing is, you know, there are organic mattresses out there, but more importantly, it’s avoiding, uh, sleeping on surfaces that have been treated with, um, deadly chemicals and flame retardants. All right? Which a lot of people were sleeping on mattresses and have no idea of that. Our mattress are offgassing for years and slowly poisoning us.
And like when you see the research on this, it is a, blew my mind. I, you know, I talked with my publisher about this and I haven’t even talked with this about this with anybody guy. So was this a good idea? And I just couldn’t in good consciousness, put a such an important book out for the world without talking about something that is extremely alarming, especially when it comes to kids. All right, so there was a study done and this was in New Zealand. It was a really a Countrywide study. And here I’m actually going to, let me grab it. Actual head. I’m going to tell you the real numbers here.
Okay.
Yeah. Cause you know, you know when people start telling the stories or they start like paraphrasing things, you know, 60 to 70% of statistics are made up. So it’s good to get the exact numbers right. So all right, here we go.
Okay
man, this was a tough, tough chapter to write. All right,
so this, this chapter, so this is, it begins on page one 27 in the finished, in the finished book. So the subhead is hotbed of questions. Okay. And so in this particular study, as I mentioned, this was done in New Zealand. Um, they did a nationwide study to basically address SIDS, which is sudden infant death syndrome. And in this study, the researchers found that individuals who were, um, sleeping on certain mattresses tended to have this issue of being sick and also potentially the infant losing their life. So, okay, here’s the number. So this was done in 1994 and they were looking into the offgassing of mattresses and thanks for bearing with me as I found the page guys. So the new England, basically their government advised parents to wrap their baby’s mattresses in an inexpensive, nonstop toxic protect protective cover. And this was over a 20 year span that they monitor this.
All right? And so over this 20 year span, not one child for from seeds that use the mattress wrap, right? It was not one single SIDS death reported for more than 200,000 New Zealand babies who slept on a mattress wrapped in a protective cover. But there were 1020 crib deaths reported since the mattress rapping campaign started. So these were kids who would not sleeping on measures. They were wrapped. And so what’s going on there? Well as, as we talked about before, the offgassing and the chemicals. And also a lot of times what tends to happen is, especially if you have multiple kids, the kids just kind of sleep on the same mattress. You know, it just kind of gets passed down and micros start to decompose and they start to mix with the chemicals in the mattress and they can create some toxic fumes that the baby is inhaling while they’re trying to sleep. And so I had to mention this just to let people know that that number was too startling to not share. Like that correlation is remarkable, you know? And so this is something so, because it’s, it’s a big fear and I know you guys felt that when we put our little baby down to go to sleep, especially when they first get here, it’s just like, is it like, I just want to watch them the whole,
yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I actually got a special monitor that would like send an alarm if it like could tell the baby wasn’t breathing. I was like paranoid.
Yeah. Yeah. You’ve all been there for sure, but impairs who have like four more kids, like a friend Larry, um,
by the last child. They’re like, I could sleep through anything. I don’t,
it’s fine, let’s go, you know? Um, but it’s just important to understand that a lot of things that we take as normal is not normal in our society, you know? So the way that our matches it started off as a good idea of like, obviously we don’t want our beds to be super flammable, but there are safer treatments that can be used, you know? And also we’re looking at, we don’t live in a society anymore where people are like laying, because a big part of that was people would fall asleep in their bed smoking cigarettes. You know what I’m saying? I’m pretty sure your two year old is not like, you know, smoking a Marlboro. You know what I’m saying? Like, it’s a radically decrease incidents of any type of problem happening. Of course it’s better to be safe than sorry, but to what extent is, my question is just really about, again, educating people on that piece.
Lastly, I just want to share one quick point, the other things, and again, we could do a whole show just talking about dad, but, um, the, the bedding, same thing, you know, I didn’t really even know about thread counts until, uh, it was Aziz Ansari, the comedian, and he was like talking about, he’s got some, like a Gypson thread, like 4,000 thread count sheets. And I’m like, what is that? And he’s like, it’s like sleeping in lotion. And I’m just like, wow, that sounds interesting. And then when I got in bed, I noticed like, wow, these sheets are kind of cutting me up a little bit. Like, this is very soft and nice. This is a lotion, you know, this is like, um, this is like Brillo, you know, it’s like, yeah. So, um, and my wife, she actually had some higher thread cow sheets. So it’s just these little things can create a greater degree of comfort if you’re aware of them.
You know, it’s not a big deal, but at same thing, you know, we, if we can opt for getting, um, our, our bedding that’s not treated with toxic chemicals, um, you washing our stuff and I just did a, a show that, uh, came, is going to be coming out before this airs on estrogen dominance and understanding like a lot of the, the stuff that we use is detergents and things like that. [inaudible] they have Zino estrogen compounds that fit into our estrogen receptor sites. And this can lead to things like, uh, for guys, uh, gynecology, gynecomastia. So development of breast tissue, um, increase rate of things like prostate cancer for women. Uh, being exposed to Xeno estrogens can lead to the fibroid tumors, can lead to, um, cancers of the reproductive system. But again, a lot of people don’t know this stuff and this is our job and everybody listening because we are the people listening to this are in the, like the, the best of the best of the best people who are adamant and, and conscious and seeking out to find out how to take the best care of themselves. And the people they care about. So we’re the leaders here. So it’s up to us to first of all do what ourselves and demonstrate. And second of all, you know, to really focus on showing our family and our loved ones and our friends what’s possible. And these small things can make a huge difference in your sleep quality and also in your health overall.
Yeah,
I know that’s [inaudible]
we can, we can just keep talking about this for like another hour,
but it is, it does come down to people, you know, gaining the knowledge for themselves and making it more mainstream. Cause it does sound, you know, for people that are just in your middle America that this sounds woo, woo, this sounds like hippy stuff. Like what are you talking about? Like my mattress has gases, I don’t see any guesses coming out of it, you know, so it’s, it just needs to become more mainstream and yes, it needs to be passed on. And that’s why this is,
and what I love about both your podcast and of course is this book is everything. Everything to do with you is scientific. I love that you have studies backing up everything. And of course like drew said, like we could go into this for like another hour, but obviously we have to wrap up but get the book if you really want all the knowledge. I mean we got through as much as we could but sleep smarter, you know, get, get the book because you’re going to get all of the useful tools that I use to implement. Actually I sleep amazing. Now the joke is I really do sleep like a log now. Sometimes I don’t even hear my kids but um, but it’s made a huge impact on my life and sometimes people are like, you sleep so much cause I’ll be like, Oh I slept a solid night hours last night. And they’re like, what? It’s almost like looked down upon like, it’s like a badge of honor to get four hours of sleep and be drinking like a double, you know, a cappuccino with a double shot of espresso. And I’m like, no, screw that. Like I get eight to nine hours of beautiful, uninterrupted sleep. I’m a happier person. I’m a better mom. I can feel the difference in my body. Sleep has changed so many things for the good. So yeah, everybody get the book.
Alright.
Wow. Lynn, thank you so much. And I just want to say guys like this is a really important time. You know, where, because sleep isn’t really a sexy topic, you know? And so like making it interesting, making it fun, making it sexy as it can possibly be and changing the culture around it because you just said like, it’s looked down upon, which is odd. It’s so odd because to get results in our, the way that we’re program is like, I need to work harder. I need to XL exercise harder, I need to dye it harder. And it’s kind of difficult for us to wrap our minds around because sleep is something where you do nothing and you get stuff. And so a lot of us have created this barrier in our mind that nothing comes for free. Nothing comes, you know, without a cost in our world. And I promise you there are things that come automatically to you by the very nature of you being alive is your birthright. You deserve good sleep at night. Love is free, I promise you that. You know, it’s just with certain kinds of love.
Okay.
It’s just being aware that certain things are just built into the system and part of the reason that you’re here and your divinity is to be able to take rest and to be able to show up and be the best version of yourself for you and the people that you care about because they don’t just want you, they want the best of you. And it’s really answering the call. Like, am I really showing up as my best self and can I start sleeping smarter to make sure that I’m the best version of me for everybody I care about.
Yeah. That’s great man. Yeah. Thank you so much for talking about that. Sharon. We’re going to wrap up here in a little bit, but just for those listening P G or sleep like you’re getting paid to do it. I almost messed that up. Say pay like your sleep said backwards. Yeah. Sleep like you’re getting paid to do it. Sleep like it’s your job, you guys. And that’s what I love about your book is you have the 14 day plan, which keeps people accountable. You know, we track our calories, we track our workouts. You know, there’s all these apps for that. I love that you included a 14 day plan where people can journal about their sleep and how they’re doing and that makes them more accountable and it becomes more of a priority in their life, which means that’s what’s, that’s what they’re focusing on. It’s going to help them develop a plan and stay accountable to having a better sleep, a lifestyle which is going to help out so many other ways. So that’s what I love about the new version of sleep smarter. Uh, before we wrap up, uh, let’s, we are going to do a quick little lightening round with different questions this time Sean,
cause he already knows what’s coming cause he knows how to ask him random questions. He’s probably prepping like it’s probably the same thing. They’re just kidding. So they’re all new questions and you know the deal. I’m not going to ask you to sing this time. We’re not amazing to do tricks. Psychology to me. I know I’m going to ask you the exact same things you’re going to be like totally thrown off. Okay. We’re going into lightning round. Just a few questions. Remember first thing that comes to mind answers quickly as possible. All right. Okay. Of all your pet peeves, what is the weirdest one? Or at least the first one that comes to your mind?
And this is tough. I can’t think of anything right now. He’s got something, something that really bothers me is 24 hour gyms don’t asleep. That’s what am I. This is one of my things right there. You go by and you know, it just happens to be like when I was traveling and you know, it’s nine, 10 o’clock at night and there are people just like, you see him through the window, like a hamster on the hamster wheel going at it. It’s just like, it bothers me a little bit.
Oh, that’s hilarious. I love that answer. Uh, I always would be like, why would someone even want to work out at 3:00 AM? Why does there need to be a 24 hour? I get it. Okay. The last book that you read that you simply could not put down, it was so good. Other than other than sleep smarter.
Oh wow. Um, man, all my books are stairs. I’d have to look at my shelf. Um, first one coming to mind that like, I really, I didn’t, well yeah, this one I didn’t want to stop reading, but I had to because they had to get to work was, uh, the urban monk from dr Pedram Shojai. I’ve heard of that one. I haven’t heard. I’ve heard of it. I heard it’s really good too. Yup. Yup. He just hit the New York times bestseller list with it and it’s, it’s, it’s important for this time is where I really love that book is great.
Oh, cool. Yeah, I haven’t heard that one. I’m gonna have to check that out. Okay. If money and your career were no obstacle, where in the world would you choose to live?
[inaudible]
I gotta say
wow is so tough. Ah, I, I haven’t been to Hawaii, so I don’t know. But from the places that I have been, I would have to say San Diego, which is where we almost moved to.
Oh, it’s beautiful in San Diego. That’s a good thing.
Have you talked about in your podcast why you guys didn’t move there, Sean? I haven’t talked about it yet, but you know for another episode, but I know I know why, but I’m just wondering if you talked about it before. No, I have it. Okay.
Okay. Last question for me, at least in this year, has one and you have to answer. You’re going to say I want both. You can’t. Okay. Precarious. Would you prefer to be smart or happy? Happy. I love it. That’s easy. All right. I didn’t think it was that he, I mean,
Oh, that’s true. You’re so smart. You could figure out a way to be happy that you’re just like, okay, here’s the, here’s this.
You can analyze it. Yeah, it’s just shot. I love, I love how smart you are. Literally sometimes when you’re talking and I’m like, huh, what? And you’re like, you know the different types of, and literally every time you talk
I’m like, how does he contain all this information into that brain? I love it, but I was just like, that’s a good question cause I wanted to know you’re so smart, but you choose smarter. So happiness, good choice. Happiness.
I got two, I’ve got two questions for you, Shannon. What’s one thing that you can’t live without? And before you answer that, let me kind of, you can’t pick your family or you know, cars or food or something like that. And I’ll give you example of something that I say that I, it’s, I gotta have it. Chapstick. I have to have chapstick, you know, after I brush my teeth, like if I had a dry lips, I, I have to have chapstick. So what’s one thing in this world that you, you don’t think you could do without?
Wow. Oh man. I’m trying to think of something that I might use consistently. Yeah. But it’s just like basic stuff is coming to mind. Like water. Um, I guess it would be, um, Oh, I wouldn’t say I can’t live without it though, but, um, I have some that I use every day. Is this magnesium topical magnesium I’ve heard you talk about. So that, that’s something that I’ve every day for three years, probably about three and a half years I use, um, at night, you know, right before bed and I even travel with it, you know, it’s one of those things we’re chronically deficient in magnesium for most of us and trying to take, take it internally. Um, it can pull a lot of more, a lot more water to your bowels if you take too much and so that can create disaster pants before. So you gotta be careful about that. Um, but the topical application is just really wonderful. It helps to, uh, magnesium is a, uh, kind of calming, um, grounding mineral. So that’s something that I would, I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t have it. And so that’s what I was going to ask you. If you did it,
have it, would there be this placebo effect of, okay, I’m not going to be able to sleep now, I’m not going to get a good quality. See, like what if you ran out or you forget to bring it? What would happen?
See, that’s the thing, man. Will placebos tend to, or the no, Cebu as you call it, no bull. It’s really, it can be both, you know, but the research shows that even when you know that it’s probably a placebo is still works. Um, so I could say like, I’m aware of that issue that I could have with it. But when I say every day I was speaking in an extreme, there definitely been like spots like, um, this week, you know? So just say I’ve used it every day for the past 30 days except one. And that was this week. And I consciously chose like, I’m just not gonna use it tonight, you know? So every now and then I’ll just not use it for a day or two. Gotcha. And I still sleep great because of all the other practices. It’s just this little extra layer of yumminess that happens with sleep, you know, with you, you have your magnesium levels up.
Gotcha. Okay. No, that’s fair enough. Um, okay, last question and I’m going to ask you something that Shawn T asked us when we were on his podcast and I’m curious to know your answer. If you were, if you were stuck on a deserted Island,
you got it and you had to pick one of two people that’d be stuck with, would you be stuck with Kanye or Justin Bieber?
Like the worst? Literally when we got this question I was like, I can’t even,
no, you are, you analyze it for like a good little bit like wait a second, you got to change your mind.
Yeah. I mean I won’t say what I said cause I want to hear your response.
Okay. Well I know that, I know that he said it was Kanye. We probably find a way off the Island a lot easier just because he’s a genius. Right. You know, he knows everything, but I got to say, if it was like straight up, just me and on the Island with one other person, we’re stuck there. I got Bieber fever then you know like me and beads.
That’s funny. So tell them your answer.
I started with Bieber. I said, you know I choose Justin Bieber because I just think he’d be more enjoyable. I guess he could like serenade me. Who knows? But then I like stopped. I was like, no, Justin Bieber is such a worse, but there’s, he would be so unhelpful. Like I
gather wood for you. He wouldn’t be able to make food for you.
And like, even though Kanye probably wouldn’t want to, I could like reverse psychology, that shit is, and I’d be like, you know, you probably couldn’t make a hut like you probably suck at. And then all of a sudden there’d be like a hut made. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. I’d be like, all right, so I could use Kanye versus like, I think with literally with Bieber, he would just sit there and look pretty and that would do me no good.
Hmm. So deep, deep love.
Okay. That was such a deep last question, Matt, that we’ve got to end on that note, Sean, but thank you so much man for coming on again. We really, really appreciate what you do in this industry and, and how many people you influenced before we, we sign off. Where can people find you? We’re competing, competed, find the book, everything socially,
media, all that. Awesome man. Well, most people know me from my show. Um, which you can listen to this podcast on the same platform that you listened to. This one is called the model health show and right now we’ll, this past week we were number one in the country and fitness, nutrition, uh, which we’ve been dozens of times. It’s just crazy to be able to say that so people could check out my show there and to pick up sleep smarter here in the United States, you can go to any of your local bookstores and grab it there. I highly recommend to do that. Or of course, anywhere online. So amazon.com Barnes and noble.com books a million. Anywhere that you buy books, grab yourself the real thing, the hard copy book and it’s, I promise you it’s going to add a lot of years to your life and life to your years. So you could do that. And also you could check it out through sleep smarter, book.com I’ve got a couple of little cool bonuses there as well, but definitely just head out and grab yourself a copy and it’s going to bring a lot of value to your life and the lives of people you care about. Awesome.
Oh that’s yeah. Okay. What about, did you say your social media and all that?
Yeah. Yeah. So if people go to the model health show.com all my social media is there, so Instagram, Twitter, all that good stuff. So yeah, the model health show.com is where he can find me.
Awesome. Thanks so much Sean. We really, really appreciate you dude. Please stay in touch and uh, hopefully either you’ll be out here in Hawaii soon or I’ll be in st Louis soon to see you.
Awesome man. I love you guys. Wealth of information. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me back on guys. I love it. Thank you, Kevin. Bye.
[inaudible].
Alright, you guys, I hope you enjoy today’s episode was Sean Stevenson talking about his new book. Sleep smarter, make sure and go check that out on support him. And if you can definitely get sleeped down, you’ll notice how your life will improve in so many different ways. It’s definitely a, an episode you want to share with your friends or family or loved ones that you know, suffer with, um, not being able to get quality sleep. Uh, also you guys stay in the know with us. Make sure and sign up for our newsletter. Uh, can, you can go to my website@fittofattofit.com to stay in the know without coming events and travel schedules and appearances and things like the TV show, future episodes of the podcast. Um, also follow me on social media at fit to fat. To fit a lens website is to fit@home.com and all of our social media handles are at to fit at home.
Um, and then also you guys, if you guys love this podcast, please help support us. We would love to keep this going for you guys. Great information, great people that we bring on here. Um, please go to iTunes, subscribe, hit, subscribe, hit five star review if you really enjoy it and leave us a review and definitely share it with your friends and family. We really appreciate you guys being a part of our fit, fit, fit, family, and always supporting us throughout the years. We definitely have so many big plans for the future, so please, um, support us in this way. We’ll see you guys back here for another great episode next week.
[inaudible].
