How To Get The BEST SLEEP of Your Life & LIVE LONGER In The Process! | Dr. Mark Hyman

if your cortisol is high in the afternoon or high in the evening you might feel tired and wired you'll want to sleep but you can't or you might fall asleep because you're really tired and then you wake up in the middle of the night today we're going to talk about sleep and not just sleep problems in general but why we may wake up between one and

four in the morning and how you can fix that because a lot of times people have restless sleep they wake up a little night they can go back to sleep and it really affects the quality of your health their life and everything else so sleep is critical to our health to longevity to our mental health to basically every physiological function we have and it really is

important to fix it so let's talk about what you can do to stay asleep and to sleep more deeply so we know that poor sleep makes us less productive and makes us tired hard to focus basically having sleep deprivations basically equivalent of being drunk in terms of your performance you know I read a study once where they were snipers who were you know excellent shots in

the fan eight hours sleep they were like 100 accurate if they had seven hours of sleep they were like 95 accurate if they had six hours sleep they were like 70 percent accurate and if they were like less than six hours sleep they were basically like 50 it's like almost uh hit and miss so not good even when you're an expert in something you can't function

when you're tired so next to sort of nutrition exercise and maybe even before it's somewhat are you sleep maybe the fundamental Foundation of health and disease prevention and even weight control so why why is it so important how to how to The Sleep dysfunction lead to changes well it's a very important hormone called cortisol which is your stress hormone and and it helps um when it's

in Balance to go up in the morning to get you energetic and focused and do the things you need to do for the day and at night it's supposed to go down and you're supposed to calm down and relax now a lot of people have an inversion where their cortisol is all in the morning they can't get out of bed and at night they're tired and

wired sound familiar I bet you've some big experience that I certainly have at different moments in my life when you get down to bed you're exhausted but you can't fall asleep because you're just wired it has to do with your adrenal glands and they they're designed to keep things in Balance to regulate your weight to moderate your stress response to control blood sugar regulate inflammation and

regulate sleep and wake Cycles so when we're constantly in a state of stress we're we're actually often struggling with sleep because of of the way in which it affects our sleep so when you're when you're thinking about it when your cortisol is high you're running from a tiger you're in danger you don't want to be sleepy you want to be alert and that's the problem so

if your cortisol levels are balanced and they're high in the morning and then low at night and your blood sugar stays even we'll talk about why that's important because fluctuations in blood sugar often will cause midnight or middle of the night Awakening but when your cortisols and your body stress response imbalanced and your pineal gland produces something called melatonin that pulses really strong in the afternoon

and the evening which gets you ready for sleep and let your cortisols drop off and then you can feel calm and go to sleep at night and feel sleepy and if you're healthy and balanced in your circadian rhythms and your cortisol melatonin Cycles you'll be fine but if your cortisol is high in the afternoon or high in the evening you might feel tired and wired you

want to sleep but you can't or you might fall asleep because you're really tired and then you wake up in the middle of the night like between one and four and that happens when you sort of go go go go go do your email you're working working and busy and then you go to bed and then you fall asleep or you're exhausted but you end up

waking up because your body is still in a stress State there's still high levels of cortisol so how does how does stress affect your sleep wake Cycles well it works in a lot of different ways psychological stress uh can be a big factor right worries about family work money physical stresses lack of exercise is a stress believe it or not too much screen time junk food

toxic Lifestyles a hormonal imbalances you know environmental toxins all these Drive increased inflammation increased brain inflammation and and also increase cortisol Because by the way do you know this that when you eat sugar or starch your body responds by jerking up the adrenaline and cortisol levels so literally eating sugar is a stressful experience to your body even if you're getting pleasure and you don't think it's

stressful and you're meditating while you're eating sugar you're still going to have a high cortisol and high adrenaline um so one of the one of the things that are the two most common things that are screwing up your sleep wake Cycles it's probably blood sugar imbalances and spikes and crashes and blood sugar um and chronic stress so what should you do to optimize nutrition so you

can regulate your stress hormones through food and lifestyle and how do you deal with actually regulating sleep throughout the whole night and get high quality sleep so first thing is our bodies whether we like it or not are biological organisms and they run in circadian rhythms and they need to be balance so you have to live in Rhythm and I I experienced the dangers of not

being in Rhythm when I worked in the emergency room I would sometimes work uh seven in the morning till five at night shift then I'd work at two in the afternoon until two in the morning shift then I work at 11 o'clock at night to a seven in the morning shift then I'd work at eight in the morning to an eight in the morning shift 24-hour

shift I was all over the place and my whole system became disregulated and ultimately it led to chronic fatigue syndrome and a bunch of other stuff my system just kind of collapsed because I was pushing through all these circadian rhythms which have to be in balance for you to be healthy and whether we like it or not you know we tend to do a lot better

from our health perspective if we go to bed at the same time if we wake at the same time if we eat at the same time our bodies are designed like that so you you want to make sure that you actually don't eat before bed because that's the worst thing you can do but you need to make sure you're having meals during a regular time space

so don't eat three hours before bed don't need a heavy meal before bed because I guarantee you that'll screw up your sleep also carbohydrates uh I think if you want to actually eat some starchy things like sweet potatoes or some more starchy foods and you can handle it metabolically make sure you do it at night because the serotonin levels go up and it helps with sleep

when you have your carbohydrates but still don't need white flour sugar process all that processed food also not eating enough is stressful if your body's not getting enough food it's also considered a stress now you can do timer check to eating and you can sort of narrow the window which you eat for longevity purposes and so on but you also want to make sure you're getting

enough food and not actually starving because that will increase cortisol and you'll wake in the middle of the night now if you want to lose weight you can use what I think is probably the most effective treatment ever found which is the 10-day detox diet and help people lose 120 130 200 pounds it's like a gastric bypass without the pain of surgery vomiting and malnutrition um

another thing you can do is is get stuff out of your head write your voice down at night so get a little you know piece of paper or journal or maybe in your phone write down all your worries what you have to do your days should be organized the next day free up your mind so you can actually let go of things and go into a

deep restful sleep next you can try a number of supplements and things that I found very helpful magnesium is super important it's the relaxation mineral it helps regulate the stress response helps you regulate cortisol helps relax your muscles I recommend two to four hundred even more of magnesium glycinate before bed glycine also helps with sleep so you can use glycine and you can use that to

help relax the nervous system and your and your muscles uh next try some melatonin mellow out with a little melatonin you can use half to up to two to three milligrams of melatonin at night and that can often help you reset your circadian rhythms particularly with travel also ashwagandha is an ayurvedic herb that can be really powerful for resetting cortisol I use a product called cortisol

manager which helps at night to reduce the stress response and improve Sleep Quality also make sure as I said to get in Rhythm you know where you can sleep at the same time try to go to sleep before 10 that's the best sleep you can have is before midnight believe it or not so getting bit by 10 try to be asleep shortly thereafter 11 at the

latest try to wake up at the same time every day also make your bedroom completely sleep uh supportive for example make sure you have eye shades or blackout shades on your windows or eye shades on your eyes earplugs if it's noisy make sure you you really take care of creating a carefully controlled environment next is caffeine you know some is tolerated okay and metabolize that others

don't so I encourage you to sort of maybe stop after breakfast coffee don't have coffee throughout the day that's particularly important if you're still struggling I would probably just stop coffee and caffeine altogether alcohol definitely screws up sleep so if you want to sleep well and you're not sleeping well quit alcohol just get off it it can interrupt sleep it creates poor Sleep Quality also sunlight

is big great basic great medicine you mean what I mean sunlight I'm gonna go to sleep no but 20 minutes of sunlight in the morning without sunglasses on Outdoors not behind a window has a big effect on your circadian rhythm so we are a photo biomodulating organisms the light affects us it regulates our biology G and it's important to make sure you have a good 20

minutes of light exposure in the morning so those are some simple tips that you can do to help sleep issues Often by the way at night if you're having a crash in hot flashes at night and night sweats that can often be low sugar and so that's really important to balance your insulin and blood sugar and I've written a lot about that like the 10 Day

Detox Diet is a great way to do that now if you're still having trouble sleeping there are many other reasons it could be uh you know inflammation from food sensitivities it could be thyroid issues could be menopausal stuff could be toxins heavy metals depression many things fibromyalgia chronic fatigue make sure you work with a functional medicine doctor but check it out if you love that last

video you're going to love the next one check it out here in high blood pressure is a problem of inflammation and oxidative stress and what's triggering that often is the insulin resistance which is triggered by the mountains of sugar and flour we have every day I mean the average American has about