Transcript of Episode 149: How to Sleep Smarter
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Shawn Stevenson
Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode number 149. We have our resident Cellular Healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, here of course, and today we welcome special guest Shawn Stevenson. Super excited to have Shawn on the show. If you guys don’t know about Shawn, you have to check out his work. He’s doing a lot of awesome things in the health and fitness realm. I’m going to tell you a little bit more about him here, and then we’ll jump right into the interview.
Shawn Stevenson is a bestselling author and creator of The Model Health Show featured as the #1 nutrition and fitness podcast on iTunes. A graduate of the University of Missouri – St. Louis with a background in biology and kinesiology, Shawn went on to be the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a successful company that provides wellness services for both individuals and organizations worldwide. Shawn is also a dynamic keynote speaker who has spoken for TEDx, universities, and numerous organizations with outstanding reviews. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV, Shawn.
Shawn:
Hi. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Shawn, thank you. One of my favorite questions always is this; how did you get involved in this, right? I love to hear people’s story because mine’s from pain to purpose as well. I know that you have a story, so why don’t you tell our listeners and viewers that story.
Shawn:
Sure. Sure. I feel that all of us have a super hero origin story. It was not planned out of the gates for me to be in the health space. Now, let me make this clear. When I went to college, I did choose to go premed, but I found out very quickly that I actually hated science. It didn’t work out, and so I jumped over into business, finance. I saw some movies. I think one of them was Boomerang with Eddie Murphy, and I was like, oh, that’s a cool job. He’s in marketing. I’ll try that.
Just the typical college experience, didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but being a doctor sounded good. Fate had other plans for me, and actually, while I was in college, a couple years in I got a pretty devastating diagnosis, degenerative bone disease, degenerative disc disease. My spine started to—well, it wasn’t just starting, but it was deteriorating very rapidly to the degree that—my physician at the time, he said that I had the spine of an 80-year-old person. I was just at the ripe young age of 20. That led to a lot of pain, a lot of lack of function. I couldn’t really get around quite right.
What brought me into the doctor was this aching pain going on in my leg, which if—you guys already have probably talked about this before. My physician at the time, even though he meant well, he elicited something called a nocebo effect in which you give somebody a negative injunction that something bad is going to happen. He told me there’s nothing I could do about it. He told me that this is just something that happens. He told me I’m going to have to deal with it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Just for our viewers and our listeners, they’ve heard of the placebo effect. Where you say this is going to work and it does. Really, it’s a sugar pill, maybe, or something else, but the nocebo effect works too, right? You tell someone they’re going to die in six months, and low and behold, they’re dead in six months, or they have cancer. Then all of a sudden it manifests so, yeah, got it. Man, that’s something.
Shawn:
You got it. What’s so crazy is that, clinically, placebos are about 33% effective across the board on average, all right, so this is where you were told that this drug, even though it’s just a sugar pill or a sham treatment, is going to work for you because our minds are so powerful. The most powerful drugs in the world and healing capacities are within our bodies. People don’t really realize this, but drugs are actually interacting with this pharmacy in your body. Your body’s choosing whether or not to take it on, and so this is what happened for me from a negative perspective. I went in with this nuisance pain going on, and then I get the MRI of my spine. I get this diagnosis, and now, cut to two weeks later, I can barely move. I can barely get around. I’m laid out on my floor, and now I’m fitted with a back brace. My life is looking—I’m scared. What’s going on?
Fast forward the story just to get to the nuts and bolts. Two years go by, a little over two years, and if you’re in fear of getting around, you’re not doing very much. By the way, I—and I always recommend this too. If you get some bad news with your health, with a diagnosis, make sure you get a second if not third, fourth opinion before you do anything like surgery, getting onto extreme medications, things like that. I had the wherewithal to do that. I didn’t know exactly why. I was just looking for answers, but in this case, I got the same story. There’s nothing you could do. I’m sorry.
Two years go by. I gained a bunch of weight. Fifty pounds of extra Shawn showed up on the scenes. Also, just not being mobile, not only did my spine atrophy but all the rest of my body. If you don’t use it, you lose it. I began to really break down, experienced a lot more pain. Two and a half years go by, but this is when things take a change. It was right on the tail end of talking with the last physician that people were telling me this guy is going to be able to help you. He’s the best and this kind of thing, but he was conventional in his thinking. When he saw my degeneration, he’s like I’m sorry. There’s nothing you could do, same story.
This is when it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was scared. I was in depression. I was feeling a lack of purpose because now I was barely even going to school. It hit me that these two years went by, and I had just been waiting around for somebody to help me. I’d been waiting around for somebody to come and give me some good news. Even though my physicians meant well, they were not walking in my shoes. They didn’t have the final say about what was possible for me, and so it really hit me. I need to do something, or I’m just going to give up. You got a choice here.
I actually decided to get well, which most people never do. I always like to just—I don’t want people to glance over that because it’s so important. Most people, it’s wishful thinking, or I’ll try. We’ll see what happens. Instead of making a real…
Dr. Pompa:
I have to say this.
Shawn:
I’m sorry?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I have to say this. I have to interrupt you. Sorry. We call them three percenters. Meredith will attest to this as well that I always tell the doctors that I coach, man, it’s a decision. Three percenters are the people that get well, change the world, and make a difference. They simply, at one point, do exactly what you just said. They make a decision to get well.
They make a decision for their life to change. They make a decision, and then boom. Their life takes a different course, man. You’re a three percenter, so go on there, three percenter.
Shawn:
Thank you. I receive that. I receive that. I feel that the saying that “many are called; few are chosen,” it’s really, if you update that information, many are called; few choose. Few choose. We all have this capacity within us, and so the conditions often times have to be bad enough. Rock bottom is a good place to be sometimes because it’s only up you can go from there.
Our jobs in this field are to help people to get to that place without hitting rock bottom, and that’s where the real masterful work takes place. For me, that decision led to a string of events. It wasn’t like a miracle seeming—well, it kind of did but a very analytical, scientific-minded person, but it wasn’t like a rainbow came out. It was like some kind of a party happened, and I got better immediately. It was I put a plan together that was—it had three components, and I still talk about these three things today. I didn’t know how much they mattered then. It’s just like I just picked up pieces just from sports or whatever.
One was I changed the way that I was eating, which is kind of Captain Obvious. I was in college at the time, so I was eating what I call the tough diet, aka typical university food, TUF, and so lots of pizza, lots of donuts, lots of cereal. Cereal was like my—it was gourmet for me. It was just like I would sit around, especially late at night, and have Toucan Sam or that little Honey Bee. We’d sit together, and we’d have a fine meal. I was making my tissues out of garbage, basically. I grew up like that. When people talk about fast food diets, that was the foundation of my diet growing up, and I lived in a household where it was a lot of—I mean, pretty much all processed food. I didn’t eat any vegetables except broccoli.
My body really works on a hierarchy of needs, right? Your body could really care less about building your bone tissue if it has to build your blood, and calcium is needed to build your blood, to help your blood clot for example. It’s just leaching and pulling these minerals out of my bones. I didn’t know this, and so I changed the way that I was eating. Step two, movement. Your body requires movement in order to heal itself as well, and so I kept being put on bedrest. I took that as a permission slip to not do anything, and so many people do that. I’ve came across research, what I talk about in the book, that shows exactly why exercise is so important. It’s not about getting a six pack, which is a side effect. It’s about assimilation and detoxification.
The third part was true rest and recovery, and that’s really where I focused my work the last few years. If you’re not sleeping, you’re not healing, and that’s where the real change happens with your body. This is where increase assimilation, detoxification, especially even for your brain. Your body gets better when you sleep. When you’re up, it’s catabolic, literally, but when you’re sleeping, it’s known as the anabolic state for human beings. This is when you get the increase production of growth hormone, all that good stuff.
With those three things, long story short, I was able to completely reverse the degeneration, which I got a scan done about nine months later. Just within six weeks I lost over 20 pounds. The pain I’ve been experiencing for many years is gone. I was able to get off my medications within a couple of months, and that led me to writing books, working with patients. I opened my own clinical practice in nutrition, shifting my course of study back to science and school, and #1 podcast, bestselling book, and all this cool stuff. I’ve just been able to impact the lives of a lot people, and I’m very grateful for the whole experience.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. From pain to purpose, like my life as well and so many listening. Look, it did come with a decision. I hope people hear that part. I mean, no doubt you made a decision. Your life changed. We’ve interviewed Bruce Lipton. He wrote the book Biology of Belief, and he has proven, now others, that our thoughts change our cells, every cell in our body. It really is a thought. Obviously, past abuses, the way we build our thinking, who we think we are, our identity -inaudible- our life for better or for worse, but with decisions like you made, we can change it back.
Let’s focus on the sleep thing. I said this to you when we were off air; people watching this show have sleep issues. A lot of people that watch and listen to this show, neurotoxic issues which manifest in the brain, parts of the brain. The hypothalamus pituitary, which controls their adrenals and their thyroid and even their pineal gland, it sits slightly outside the blood brain barrier. They are poison. We know that, this neurotoxic illness, one of the first symptoms is problems with sleep. Either they can’t get the sleep, or they wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, or they remain asleep, but they wake up wiped out because they really didn’t hit -inaudible- sleep.
Talk to us, man. What did you learn? That obviously played a huge impact in your healing for you to write a book about it.
Shawn:
Yeah. Yeah. Actually, what you just mentioned, it becomes a self-perpetuating issue because of the fact of if—already we’re dealing with an issue where we can’t sleep, and not being able to sleep causes us to not be able to sleep more. What do I mean by that? Basically, when you’re talking about this toxicity, what was recently discovered is that your—you just said it. We have the blood brain barrier, and your cells throughout your body are building lymphatic system, right? People have probably heard of the lymphatic system. It’s your extra cellular waste management system.
There’s four times more lymph that you have than you have blood, but there’s the blood brain barrier. Your lymphatic system basically has to pump its way up past your shoulders, and then dump back into your system. The blood brain barrier doesn’t allow that to get to your brain directly. There’s a whole complicated thing to talk about that. Bottom line is this. Your brain has its own detoxification system, which is run by the glia cells, and so it’s been dubbed the glymphatic system. This system is actually ten times more active when you’re asleep than when you’re awake. This is when your brain really does the housekeeping.
Your brain is literally doing millions of processes every microsecond, and new brain cells are getting produced, new connections. Even right now, there are massive connections getting made in your brain, and there’s waste products that result from that. Today, Alzheimer’s disease is now really pointed to the fact of an inability of the brain to clean itself. It’s this buildup of these waste products and your brain not being able to detoxify itself. That’s huge. Ten times more active during sleep, and your brain cells actually shrink up to 60% when you’re sleeping to make even more room for cleaning itself. That’s one of the big things for people to really walk away with and understanding. It’s not just, oh, you need to get more sleep so that you have more energy. Your brain is literally breaking down rapidly if you’re not getting high-quality sleep, and your brain is governing this whole system. That’s one of the big things.
What I found clinically was, number one, for the first maybe ten years, I didn’t really focus on it in my practice, even though it helped me so much. Just because I was sleeping so good, I never thought about it. That’s really the Hallmark of when you’re healed. You just forget about the thing unless you consciously tune into it. When I tell my story, I have to put myself back in those shoes, and it’s discomforting for me.
Dr. Pompa:
I know.
Shawn:
With people coming into my practice—and we had over 80% reversal rate for things like type 2 diabetes. Before people get on insulin, just helping people with metformin, things like that, just by changing their lifestyle. There was always a group—and I know you’ve seen this as well. There’s this percentage of people that wouldn’t get the results other people were getting, and sometimes, ironically, it would keep me up at night. What is going on? Are they lying to me? What is it?
I finally started asking people and this was a little over five years ago about their sleep. I was shocked. I could not believe people were operating. Walking around like this. Some people, I only get four hours of sleep a night, or I get up at night to go. I’m tending to my kids or my husband, whatever the case might be. They had these stories around their sleep that I never asked about.
This is what I do. I always try to find what are the things that are clinically proven to work? I have to package it up in a way that makes sense, and that it’s easy for people to implement. I just went on this rampage of scouring the data, looking at journals. What are some of the things that are clinically proven to help people sleep better yesterday? Once I started having people implement these strategies, it was like the floodgates opened in the results that they were getting now, whether it was getting off metformin, whether helping to balance their insulin levels, insulin sensitivity, I’m sorry, helping people with getting off statins, lisinoprils, that kind of thing for their blood pressure getting normalized, losing weight that people have been struggling with for ten years. All of a sudden the weight started coming off.
I was like, wow, this is really crazy. This is powerful stuff. That eventually led to—again, I’m very analytical in my thinking. It was like this isn’t a book yet. I didn’t even think about a book, but I wrote a blog post on it. It became my biggest blog post ever by far, and then I had my podcast platform. This was just a couple months into doing my show, and so I did three shows about sleep. They were top ten most downloaded as well. I was like, wow, people really want to know about this stuff, but they didn’t know they wanted to know. It’s like Apple’s approach. You guys don’t know you want this yet, but we’ll make it, and you’ll love it.
I was trying to be as little like Steve Jobs because I didn’t want to end up like Stevie-No-Jobs by doing something people don’t really want. That was the birthing of the book. With that said, in the book we really focus on tangible, simple, real world, easy to implement strategies. There’s 21 strategies all clinically proven to help people to sleep better. Obviously, we can get into some of those today.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. I can’t expect you to go through all 21 perhaps, but come on. Let’s go. Our viewers are going come on. Let’s do it, man. Let’s go. Give us one. Let’s start through.
Shawn:
Sure. Let’s start with a low-hanging fruit. I always like to start there. Something that people can do without flipping their whole world upside down. I’m sure that you’ve heard about this as well. Appalachian State University did a study, and they had exercisers who train at three different times throughout the course of the study to track their impact that exercise timing had on their sleep. What I’m going to share with you today is that, if you simply adjust the time that you exercise, it’s going to be able to help you to sleep better at night starting immediately.
What they did was they had exercisers to train exclusively at 7 a.m. in the morning, so this was the morning exercise group. They had them train exclusively at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, so this is the afternoon exercise group. Then they had them train exclusively at 7 p.m. at night, which is the evening exercise group. At the end of the study, they tracked all the data. Then they were hooked up to sleep monitors. They found that the morning exercisers had more efficient sleep cycles. They spent more time in the deepest, most anabolic stages of sleep, and they also had a 25% greater drop in their blood pressure at night compared to the other two times of exercising. That’s correlated with an activation of your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your “rest and digest system.” This is turning off that fight or flight that essentially keeps people up at night, all of this from working out in the morning, all right?
The results for the afternoon was really negligible in how it influenced sleep. It was just middle of the road. Evening sleepers, there is some benefit as far as falling asleep faster, but not necessarily falling into your sleep cycles properly. Evening exercise increases your cortisol, and also, it increases your body’s core body temperature, which we’ll talk about that in a second. Bottom line is this. You can still exercise at those other times. If your time to work out, you’ve got that hour after work or whatever it is, go for it.
I did an experiment with this myself for an entire year as well. Make sure to get five to ten minutes of exercise in the morning no matter what. Here’s the big tagline for today’s show. A great night of sleep starts the moment you wake up in the morning. Getting up and getting five to ten minutes of exercise in, it does something. It’s called a cortisol reset. This is why it had such a big impact on them. Your cortisol should be elevated at its peak between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. in the morning. Many people, clinically we call them tired and wired where their cortisol is too low in the morning and too high at night. This helps to reset that. Get that cortisol spiked in the morning so it can get on its normal track to gradually drop as the day goes on.
That’s number one; five to ten minutes of exercise. If you can fit your whole workout in in the morning, go for it, but so many people who—and by the way, let me—I want to make this important caveat because there are going to be—lots of people are going to get benefit from this, but there are going to be some people who are like I work out in the morning. My sleep still sucks. If you work out in the morning and then you’re doing a lot of these other things we’re going to talk about wrong or not as advantageous, yes, you’re going to end up with some problems, but simply getting five to ten minutes of exercise in the morning is going to be effective and helpful for over 75% of the people who do it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s awesome, and I can add to that. In the morning, you have your greatest anabolic rise between testosterone and growth hormone so another reason to work out in the morning. By working out in the morning, because you get your hormones going in the right direction, there’s this natural progression as the day goes on to lower your cortisol. Go into parasympathetic later. It all works together. All right, man, give us another one. Let’s keep rocking.
Shawn:
Sure thing. Sure thing. Oh, just really quick, types of exercise, this could be—I’m a big fan of rebounding so jumping on a mini trampoline. That’s what I did this morning.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Good for the lymph.
Shawn:
Yeah. Rebounding, you can go for a quick power walk or just a quick run around the block. You can grab your kettlebell, and do a bunch of kettlebell swings. Tobata is just four minutes, and then do some stretching, lots of stuff that you can do and take advantage of. The important point is just to do something to really get your blood pumping and to get that cortisol reset. That’s number one.
Meredith:
I have a question, Shawn. Do you advocate working out on a fasted stomach if you’re doing it first thing in the morning?
Shawn:
If people aren’t officially, officially metabolically broken, yes, absolutely. Fasted exercise is wonderful.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Shawn:
Go ahead.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s what we do. No. It’s just something that I do as well. You get the extra bonus by exercising in the morning. Then exercising empty stomach in the morning, you get even more of a hormone sensitivity, so perfect.
Shawn:
Exactly. When I say metabolically broken, I’m talking about they have some issues with their insulin sensitivity, blood sugar issues. Then I would recommend maybe they bring in a little fat, maybe some MCT oil and some coffee, or tea, or something like that. It just depends on the person but, generally, yes, absolutely, fasted exercise. Again, it’s just a small amount too. Yeah, that’s number one. That’s a good question. Oh, I’m getting a little feedback.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re good. You all right, Meredith? Meredith, can you hear him?
Meredith:
Yep. Yep. I’m good.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay. You froze there for a second.
Shawn:
Yeah. I’m getting an echo from everybody.
Meredith:
Now I am too. Okay. Wait. Now I’m not. Now I’m not. Now I am.
Dr. Pompa:
Now? Try it now, Shawn.
Shawn:
Okay. Hello. Hello.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I can hear you.
Shawn:
Okay. It’s better.
Meredith:
I think we’re good, all right.
Shawn:
Okay, all right, live TV. All right, so moving on, another strategy here and this one is a little bit more—something you’ve got to get dialed in for yourself personally. This goes back to really talking about this communication between what’s going on with your brain and what’s actually happening with your sleep and toxicity, as we talked about a little bit earlier, and this is probably my—I’m not going to say that. I can’t say my favorite chapter. One of my favorite chapters is “Fix Your Gut to Fix Your Sleep.” There’s this really important connection when we talk about the pineal gland for example. Your pineal gland is—what I was taught in school, this is the seed of where your melatonin is getting produced, right? Here’s what’s so crazy, and this just blew my mind when I found this out. You actually have 400 times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain, all right, 400 times.
Meredith:
Wow.
Shawn:
Actually, you can have a procedure done called a pinealectomy where they remove your pineal gland. I don’t recommend that, definitely don’t just do that. What they found was, when the pineal gland was removed, the levels in melatonin remained relatively the same in your body, all right? You have the enterochromaffin cells in your gut. You have all these different cells that produce hormones as well, and this has been left out of the equation. When we talk about this, that there’s so much melatonin action happening in your gut, immediately, just logical thinking, what I put in my gut is probably going to influence that, right? Whether I’m eating a banana or a bagel, it’s probably going to influence what’s happening with the hormones in my belly. Not only that. Also, over 95% of your body’s serotonin is in your gut as well, and this is a precursor to melatonin. This is big time action for producing these sleep related hormones.
The pathway that connects it all is called the vagus nerve. Not it all but a big majority of it. This was UCLA. They found that the vagus nerve, 95% of the data from your gut-brain connection is your gut telling your brain what to do, and not the opposite, all right? Many people consider it the second brain. You really have to understand this. With all that said, number one, we want to avoid things that are going to destroy or disrupt our gut integrity and the production of these hormones that are getting—hormones and neurotransmitters, so it’s serotonin is a neurotransmitter in your gut. This is basic things like being very judicious in antibiotic usage, avoiding pesticides, insecticides, fungicides; avoiding artificial foods, artificial sweeteners, process foods; all things that are going to throw off the gut bacteria. Here’s the last connecting piece is that Caltech researchers found out that specific gut bacteria in your belly actually determine whether or not these hormones are getting produced. They interact with cells that produce these hormones, so the gut bacteria is the whole game.
We want to support our gut bacteria. How do we do that? Making sure that we’re getting a nice intake, a regular intake of fermented foods, specifically fermented veggies, as what I’ve found across the board to be most helpful to people. With the yogurts and the fermented drinks like kombuchas and things like that, the production can be a little bit too much for people. We can end up with super high alcohol content with some kombuchas where they got to put a warning label on it. I got tipsy one time. I didn’t know. I haven’t really drank in my life. It’s one of those things, just me personally.
I drink this kombucha, and I remember I was riding home. I was in the passenger seat. My wife was driving home. Everything was just so funny to me. She’s like, “You’re tipsy.” I was like, “No, I’m not.” I’m laughing at it or whatever. I’m like, “Is this what it’s like?” It’s just everything seemed a lot more funny. Anyways, I don’t know what everybody else experience is drinking, but everything just got really funny to me. You got to be careful with that and also the sugar content, especially with stuff that you buy on the store shelf with these different products.
That’s number one, as far as the gut. Number two is prebiotics. Make sure you get a healthy dose of prebiotics that your gut bacteria can actually thrive and feed on. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating a bunch of fermented veggies or taking a probiotic supplement. Those are great for some people, for a lot of people, actually, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the substrate for those bacteria to colonize. You need prebiotics as well. Just a couple of those would be things like Jerusalem artichoke, onions, garlic, resistant starch people are talking about today, resistant starch. It depends on you and the processing. For some people it could be beans, but make sure that you soak them. Maybe sprout them possibly. Tiger nuts is another thing for people to just go to Dr. Google and look up, so make sure we get some resistant starch in there.
Lastly, there are these categories of good sleep nutrients, and I’ll just throw some bullets out at you guys for this. Why I’m calling these good sleep nutrients, these are essentially precursors that help to build these sleep related hormones. You might not think about a lot of these in these context, but I’m going to really enlighten that today. Number one, vitamin C, we know about this for our immune system, but it’s actually critical for that pathway of making sleep happen. This was the Public Library of Science, and they found that individuals who were deficient in vitamin C were more prone to waking up at night and having less efficient sleep cycles, all right? You need vitamin C. This is something that other animals produce it. It’s not an essential vitamin for them, like lions for example, but we need to get it from our diet.
Great sources would be Amla berry, acerola cherry, camu camu berry. Then typical foods like peppers, citrus foods. Things like that, kiwis. Another one is magnesium. This one is huge. This is probably the biggest one and the one I’ve seen most effective clinically as well. Magnesium is responsible for over 300 biochemical processes in the body, many of these regarding relaxation and sleep.
Dr. Pompa:
Could you repeat that? Could you repeat that? The thing went out there for a second. You said this is a big one, and then it went staticky.
Shawn:
Got it. Magnesium is a really big one in the fact that it’s responsible for over 300 biochemical processes in the body. Many of them related to relaxation and sleep. It’s quite possibly the biggest deficiency, mineral deficiency, in our world today with over 80% easy being deficient in magnesium so making sure that you get your magnesium optimized. Number one, food first, great magnesium sourced foods. Anything that’s deep dark green is just a cue for high content of magnesium. I love spirulina for this, chlorella, green leafy vegetables, but also, supplementation would probably be ideal for many people here. You have to be careful with the supplements. If you take a little bit more than your bowel tolerance, it can cause diarrhea, aka we call it disaster pants sometimes. You have to be careful about that.
What I love the most is topical magnesium. This has been for centuries. Epsom salt for example is magnesium sulfate, known to relax your body. Help to soothe muscles. Help you sleep better. I really love super critical extracts that are absorbable into your skin like a hormone cream. People are like, well, how do I get it through my skin? It’s just rubbed right onto your skin, and it can help to elevate your magnesium levels as well without the problems with diarrhea or anything like that.
There you go. Make sure you get plenty good sleep, nutrients. You’ve got to take care of your gut integrity, and that’s going to improve your sleep as well.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. We interviewed Stephanie Seneff on one of the shows in the past. She’s the Senior Scientist at MIT. She showed that glyphosate, number one herbicide used, sprayed on everything. Matter of fact, they’re spraying it on even to desiccate grain, whether it be rice, wheat, whatever it is, to harvest it. It shrivels it up. It kills it. It makes it easier to harvest and even more from the harvest. Literally, it’s being sprayed everywhere on our food unless you’re eating 100% organic.
The point is this. It kills the bacteria needed in the pathway you were speaking of. It’s called a shikimate pathway where our bacteria are needed to make the neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine relax our brain that we need for sleep, and we can’t make the chemicals. What are people doing today, Shawn? They’re taking the chemicals. They’re on antidepressants, right? Oh, not only does it affect your sleep. It leads to depression as well.
Shawn:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
People are understanding this. I’m watching people shove it in their mouth, these nonorganic products, nonorganic grains which really have the most of this on it. It’s creating a leaky gut. It’s disrupting the bacteria that make the chemicals for the brain. This is an epidemic. Most people are not sleeping.
Then, everything you said happens, right? Their brain gets more toxic. I mean, I could go down the list of everything. Toxic brain, Shawn, are why people don’t feel well today. It’s why people can’t lose weight. Brain detox is a huge part of my cellular healing. It’s a last phase. We have a prep phase. We have a body phase, and we have a brain phase. I got my life back, Shawn, by detoxing the brain, and here’s the catch-22. Toxic brains, they can’t sleep, right?
Shawn:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s like just some of these tips that really help them. They’re huge. They’re huge for people. Helping people get to sleep is part of the healing as you spoke about and part of, really, the detox process. Yeah, I mean, any other brain hacks that our viewers should know about? I’m sure you’ve got them, man. Come on.
Shawn:
Sure.
Dr. Pompa:
Now, listen, I have to turn it over to Meredith because she loves your podcast. She was like, “Dr. Pompa, we have to interview Shawn. Our viewers will love him.” I got to give it over to her to ask some questions. Any more hacks? That’s my last question on this.
Shawn:
Sure. Sure, definitely. Wow. Everything that you said is just so on point. If we can get people sleeping even 10% better, that’s going to lead to better brain function, detoxification, these hormone pathways, your endocrine system.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right. Yeah.
Shawn:
Each percentage we can improve is going to improve the whole game. You know what? I’ll do one more low-hanging fruit, but also, it’s become very popular in culture. I’ll just put this out there. It’s so funny because it’s been about four years since the first version of Sleep Smarter came out. Many of the things like the words and the way that I’ve said them have come out in popular culture. You might hear Arianna Huffington saying them, which she already told me she used my book as well. You start hearing these things…
Dr. Pompa:
Do you have your book close to you there? Hold it up.
Shawn:
Oh, sure, of course, of course.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m sure they can go on Amazon and buy it.
Shawn:
Yeah, of course. It’s available Amazon. Anywhere books are sold you could find it, but then there’s more information at sleepsmarterbook.com. There’s some bonus videos there too when you get the book there.
Dr. Pompa:
Sure. Awesome.
Shawn:
Just understanding that, even if you’ve heard some of these things before, you might not have heard it in this—in the fashion that I’m going to share it. Often times it’s important. Many times we hear something. It’s like, oh, I’m meaning to do that, but now we’re going to actually get the full click for this one. Harvard Researchers confirmed that, yes indeed, exposure to artificial light, specifically blue light and the white spectrum coming from our devices at night, does in fact suppress your melatonin and elevate your cortisol, all right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Shawn:
This is well known now. In Harvard, there are pretty smart guys there as well. Here’s what’s going on. They found that to artificial light in the evening, specifically during the day, it has no effect. There’s no effect on your cortisol or your whatever, your melatonin. Those things are in sync. Light exposure during the day, your genes expect that. At night, the tables are turned. What they found was that every hour that you’re exposed to your device, whether it’s television, your iPhone, laptop, computer, every hour in the evening suppresses melatonin for about 30 minutes. Okay?
Dr. Pompa:
Wow.
Shawn:
If you’re on your device for two hours or you’re watching two episodes of your favorite Netflix show, then chances are you’re going to be suppressing melatonin for about an hour afterwards.
Dr. Pompa:
Sorry.
Meredith:
The dogs.
Dr. Pompa:
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
Shawn:
It’s all right. It’s all right.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, exactly. Meredith, do you have your blue blockers handy? You could put them on for us. There’s a fashion statement.
Meredith:
I have them at home, but I love them. They’ve actually impacted my sleep as well. I wear them in the evening, and sometimes I wear them during the day if I’m staring at the computer screen. Is that the wrong thing to do?
Shawn:
Not necessarily. I mean, the thing is, of course—and I’ve seen this clinically. That people that do a lot of work staring into the computer screen all day, they definitely start to have issues with their eyesight but also headaches. Things like that. There are other ways you can cool your screen down, but you don’t necessarily want to take away all the ambient light during the day. That helps to get those sleep pathways on line, so your daytime hormones need to be produced as well.
Here’s the thing. With this exposure to blue light at night, it’s like what do we do about it? Our use of our devices is not going to go down any time soon. Number one is to give yourself a screen curfew. I recommend an hour before you plan on going to bed. That’s the top choice, but here’s a couple of hacks. You already mentioned the blue light blocking shades are great. Put on these glasses at night.
There’s devices, I mean, like apps and tools now so my iPhone right here. Apple, this is a multibillion dollar company, all right? Again, I’ve been talking about this for several years. The data is out there. They’re not going to do this for no reason just because it sounds good. Hey, we’ll just put something else on the iPhone. In the tool setting, they have something that’s called Night Shift that immediately pulls out the most sleep sucking troublesome spectrums of light from your screen, and it does this automatically. You set it and forget it, all right?
They did this for a purpose, and here’s my theory on it. Chances are it’s very much like the whole Morgan Spurlock Super Size Me thing where it’s like lawsuits are going to start taking place. Hey, your device caused my obesity. Your device caused my cancer, which research is showing that individuals -inaudible- increase in cancer rates, and so they’re being proactive in helping people. Hey, there’s a tool here that’s going to make sure that you can sleep a little bit better, and so that’s for iPhones. For Androids, for people out there with Androids, there’s—it’s a little bit more sketchy. They’re a little up and down. You got to find one that works for you, but Night Shift—I’m sorry. Not Night Shift but Twilight. Just like the movies. All right, Twilight is an app you guys can download.
For your laptops, desktops, f.lux, F-dot-L-U-X, you can just go to Dr. Google. Just go to Google, type in F-dot-L-U-X. Super easy app downloads to your computer, to your devices. I’ve been using it for over three years. I absolutely love it. It’s easy to deactivate. I can see it on my screen now. It’s not on right now because it’s daytime. If you got to look at a design or something like that, you can just deactivate it. Activate it right back on.
Basically, these is protection. It’s like the light in your eyeballs are like having sex, and you need to have some protection because you don’t—never mind. You get what I’m saying. Make sure that you’re using protection at night when you’re exposed to these things. Best case scenario, though, give yourself this screen curfew. Because even though you’re protecting your optical receptors from this light, it’s still stimulation. It can be this—especially with the internet. The way it’s set up, it’s literally set up in a way that—dopamine is about seeking.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s true.
Shawn:
Dopamine is more of an active compound. It’s the opposite of what we want to be happening with serotonin for example. Dopamine makes you seek, and it’s a wonderful thing because it keeps you to be driven and to look for things. The internet, it’s infinite stuff to look for, and if you seek, you also need to find something. When you find something, you get an opioid hit, right? This is like drugs. Your brain is producing these drugs every time you find something.
With the internet, if you go to Facebook, you scroll. You look. You find. You look. You find. You look. You find. Very quickly you become addicted, and you don’t even realize it. This is why you’re like you know what? I’ll just check my Instagram for a minute, and then 30 minutes goes by, and you’re like what the—what happened? What’s wrong with me?
Then you return to doing what you were supposed to be doing. It’s because it’s very addictive. How about we give ourselves a little bit of a curfew, 30 minutes minimum, and fill that space with something of equal or greater value? That’s the key. If I’m telling you you need to get off your device 30 minutes, you’d be like whatever, man. I could do it. You try, and then you start getting the internet jitters. It’s like, well, just let me check one post. You know?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Shawn:
You start negotiating. You have to fill that with something of greater or equal value. That could be talking to your spouse. What a concept, actually spending that time together, your kids, hanging out, playing some games, doing some journaling, reading a physical book, having sex. This is a great opportunity to fill that space. Hopefully, that’s more entertaining than Facebook, hopefully. Find something. Just fill that space with something of greater or equal value. Even with that said, there’s also a chapter dedicated to sleep and—relationship to sleep and sex in the book too. These are all strategies to give ourselves a screen curfew or to approach our technology a little bit smarter.
Dr. Pompa:
Ah, man, that’s great stuff. Yeah, I mean just the apps alone. Hey, you can go in your iPhone, and I’m sure it’s in the settings area just to turn that on. You don’t even need an app, right?
Shawn:
Nope.
Dr. Pompa:
Then the phone one, just in probably the phone—I’m sorry. For the computer, the f.lux, right, you can just download that.
Shawn:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Perfect. That’s awesome. That’s great stuff. I love the hour. You’re right. I mean, the light’s one thing but it’s the stimulation. Every time you open an email, every time you look at a text, you keep looking at your phone just because you’re just—those hits, they’re dopamine hits. You just want that lift.
Believe me. You could have 20 bad emails. Not that that would happen. A good little thing that you get that high from, man, it’s like pulling the lever, right? It’s like failure, failure, failure, but your brain just wants that random hit. Never knowing when it’s going to come. That’s what opening emails and texts and Instagram, that’s all it is. It’s the randomosity of the whole process. It’s the addiction, part of it.
Like you said, search. It’s the search. That’s addiction, find. Man, leave the addiction. We could do a whole show just on your whole day, right, plugging around on your phone. I hate this thing. Anyway, that’s another subject. I’m getting off on it now. All right, Meredith, you have a couple other questions for Shawn.
Meredith:
Yeah, digital detox, yeah. I have a dual question too. You mentioned melatonin. A lot of my friends and people who I know who try to be health minded take supplemental melatonin to sleep well. What are your thoughts on melatonin and taking it as a supplement?
Shawn:
That’s a great question, really, really great question and very timely. Just to get right to the point with it, we first and foremost have to understand that melatonin is a very powerful hormone, all right? It’s a very, very powerful hormone. Not only is this this glorified sleep hormone, but also, this is quite possibly our body’s number one anticancer hormone as well. Also, it’s a very powerful stimulant for fat loss, all right? Melatonin can actually increase your body’s production—you have something called brown adipose tissue, which burns white adipose tissue, aka the fat that people are trying to get rid of a lot of times, so it has a lot of roles in the body. Your body produces it in accordance to what is natural for you. With that said, there are many other hormones that we can take dietarily, or supplemental, or with medications. You have to be very judicious and intelligent about it first and foremost.
Second thing, when it comes to supplementation with melatonin, so what they’re—I dug around. I was trying to find the good and the not so good so I can come from a balanced perspective. What was found recently is that there were many theories that taking melatonin will stop your body, suppress your body from producing it itself, but that wasn’t true in the data from what I found. What it does do, consistently taking melatonin will decrease the receptor site sensitivity for melatonin. Basically, it will make your body—your body will still produce melatonin, but it won’t be able to use it because the receptor sites are now insensitive to it or less sensitive. That’s the thing. We want to be careful in taking supplemental melatonin because we will eventually shut down our body’s ability to use it properly.
With that said, I think melatonin supplementation is good to go in spot cases, whether somebody’s—maybe they just changed a time zone, or two, or three. They’ve had a tough week of sleep, and they need to just get back on track. Relying on it as a consistent thing is not a good idea. Also, the dosage, too many products out there, melatonin supplements, it’s too high, the amount that they’re giving you when you’re producing it. It’s micrograms. Not grams, all right? You have to be aware of that as well. There’s a little bit of information on seeking the right amount in the book as well.
What I would recommend people to do personally before jumping to melatonin—which I think, again, melatonin can be great. It’s something good to have on hand for those spot cases, but it’s to use precursors. To let your body do part of the process. Precursors to melatonin are things like L-tryptophan. 5-HTP is another one. These are precursors, so your body still does a step in the process. Even go back even further to just things that are time tested and used for thousands of years without potentially negative side effects like—I’m sorry, like chamomile tea, all right? Well documented, used for a very long time. It helps relax the nervous system. It can help with sleep, also blood pressure. Lots of benefits but not negative side effects attached to it.
Chamomile might not be strong enough for some people, so then we’d go to the next step up which might be like kava-kava or eventually valerian, which is a more strong sedative. These have been used for a long time. Melatonin taken in a supplement form was invented yesterday. In the timeline of humanity, it hasn’t been around that long, so we want to just be a little bit careful with that. That’s a great question though.
Meredith:
Awesome. Love it and great answer. I totally agree. Just lastly, I’m curious how detoxification fits into your plan with sleeping smarter and how you implement that.
Shawn:
Yeah. It’s weaved in and out of the book throughout the chapters, just this whole understanding. We live in a very different world today where we’re dealing with 42 billion tons of toxins dumped into our environment every year, some crazy number like that. We have to be adamant about doing things to protect ourselves, protect our organs, protect our tissues because we are also—especially our thyroid, for example. It’s very negatively charged, and it’ll attract a lot of positively charged ions or aka heavy metals. You have to do something today where you’re helping your body to protect itself and also to detoxify these compounds. My biggest approach and what I share in the book also, I do a chapter specifically dedicated to nutrition related to food. Also, weight loss related to sleep, and how those two things are connected. It’s to avoid the problem in the first place. That’s my big approach.
Prevention is the best medicine so making sure that we are in fact eating organic, wild crafted food to the best of our ability. Usually, your ability is much more than you say it is or think it is. Shopping at farmers markets, making sure that we know where our food is coming from. We’re very disconnected from that today, and I get it. We’ve all got a lot of stuff going on, but farming percentage of society went from 20% to less than 1% of the population now is producing all the food that all of us are eating. We need to get more connected to our food again. Make sure that we’re being very focused and persistent in the quality of food that we’re getting.
Simple practices like the rebounding. We mentioned earlier the lymphatic system benefits that come along with that. Doing simple exercise, walking, moving that lymphatic system, just basic stuff like that is really my approach that I weaved into the book. There are several other things as well that—especially in the context of this show that I know you guys have provided for people. I’m a big fan of all of it. Niacin supplementation, there’s so many things that you can do to help your body to protect itself, to do its job, to detoxify itself so you can sleep better. Also, that better sleep is going to turn around and lead to faster weight loss, better blood sugar management, heart health, so many different things, anti-aging. It really all starts with having this overall arching strategy.
Meredith:
Yeah. Awesome.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Thank you, Shawn. No. This was great takeaways for our listeners and viewers. No doubt about it. We so appreciate it. I hope people buy your book and learn more. Check out our True Cellular Detox. I think it fits in really well with what you’re doing. It really does. Great message, man, thank you.
Shawn:
It’s my pleasure, will do. Thank you, guys, so much for having me on this show. It’s been a pleasure.
Meredith:
Awesome. Shawn, how does everybody find out more about you?
Shawn:
Sure. Most people know me from my show, the podcast, which I think you mentioned. It’s crazy. This just started off as an idea, but now we have millions and millions of listener downloads every year. It’s called The Model Health Show. You could find that anywhere you listen to podcasts, whether it’s iTunes or Stitcher, SoundCloud. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, you could find it.
Also, you can listen online at our website, our home online. It’s themodelhealthshow.com. The modelhealthshow.com, we have all the shows there. I have some pretty cool articles and stuff too. We have videos of most of the podcasts. You’d be in the studio with us, and we like to have a good time.
People can find me there, and all my social media is there too. I’m pretty active on Instagram now. I really love it, even though it’s addictive, but I’m on there a lot and doing the Insta Stories, and people can follow throughout my day. That’s where people can connect with me, and also, they can find Sleep Smart there as well.
Meredith:
Awesome. Thank you so much for everything you’re doing. Thanks for the awesome information you shared on the show today. Thanks, Dr. Pompa, as always. I hope all of you watching and tuning in have an awesome weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care everybody.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. See ya.
