 Everybody doctor here. Welcome to my new series called sleep and the fasting brain, right? I'm super excited about this series because number one, I love talking about fasting and I love talking about sleep. Number two, I love talking about the two together. I also think I have a lot to offer here as well. I talk about the importance of sleep in a lot of places in case you haven't noticed like I talk about sleep here in these videos. I talk about them here. You get the picture, but why? Why do I talk about sleep so much? I call poor sleep, weight loss, roadblock number one for a long list of reasons. You can see here that a lack of sleep makes you hungrier, makes you eat more, move less, gain fat, lose muscle, and makes you insulin resistant. I've also talked about the fact that poor sleep is anti-exercise. So for a long list of reasons, I think sleep needs to be a part of your weight loss program. But I'm not going to convince you that sleep is good for you here in this video. You already know that sleep is important. You're here because you haven't been sleeping well since you started fasting, and I'm here because I want to help. To understand how fasting impacts our sleep, we have to understand the fasting brain and how it's different from when you're eating. So let's look at the series here that we're going to cover. So here's part one. We're going to talk about how fasting can impact your sleep. In part two, we're going to look at sleep strategies to calm the fasting brain. In part three, we'll look at sleep supplements to calm the fasting brain. And then in part four, we're going to look at what to do if nothing is helping. Please reach out and share if fasting has impacted your sleep in any way for better or worse. I especially want to hear from you if you've found something that actually helps you sleep so I can share that with other people. Fasting's impact on sleep is a great example of how unique we all are. Some people sleep better when they fast. Some people get less sleep but they actually feel perfectly fine and they enjoy the extra productivity. And then some people sleep terribly while they fast and they feel it. I would say that I've actually fallen into all three of these categories along the way. I had terrible sleep for the first three weeks when I first started ADF. I would sleep about three or four hours and then I'd be wide awake. Some nights I was able to get back to sleep after laying there for quite a while. Other times I just had to get up. It got so bad that I actually considered throwing in the towel and trying something else to lose weight. So thank God that I stuck with it because the rest is history. After those first few weeks I started sleeping unbelievably well. I think part of it was my body getting used to fasting as I became more fat adapted. But my sleep also improved because I started taking sleep seriously. I made all the changes that I'll talk about in part two of this series and more. I also started taking a combination of the supplements that I'm going to cover in part three. So I practiced what I'm preaching now. The science behind my sleep transformation is the reason that I made a six hour course on sleep and how it impacts weight loss. I have no doubt that it was just as important as diet and exercise along my weight loss journey. What about now? I no longer snore. I no longer have sleep apnea that's documented. And now that my body has recovered from being 414 pounds, I need less sleep than I did early on in my journey. I used to sleep eight or nine hours or more in the beginning when I was first starting to lose weight. Now I need seven to eight hours on my eating days and six to seven hours on my fasting days. I typically do wake up one hour earlier on my fasting days. But the sleep I do get is amazing. I track my sleep using the ordering. Fasting, keto, weight loss have led to the best sleep of my life, both subjectively and objectively. On nights when I'm fasting, I have improved heart rate variability, which heart rate variability is a measure of how your body responds to stress. I have a lower resting heart rate. I have more deep sleep early in the evening, and I have more REM sleep later on. Plus I have a lower body temperature. So every objective measure that ordering gives me tells me that my sleep is better actually when I'm fasting than when I'm feasting. I am not trying to brag or rub your face in my sleep success, not at all. I'm only trying to show you what is possible. Let me know if you have any questions about the ordering. Maybe I can make some videos about it because I have really enjoyed it. I switched to it from my from an Apple Watch, and it's been love at first night, as I like to say, because it gives me all the sleep tracking that I want, along with step counting and everything else. Or actually just sent me a link yesterday that I can use to give to you for $40 off of your own or a ring if you want to give it a try. So look for the link in the description. So how common are sleep issues while fasting? Right? So show a hands. How many of you have struggled with sleep at some point during your fasting journey? Right? Sleep issues from fasting are the most common complaint that I've heard in my intermittent fasting course in my Facebook group and then here in the in the YouTube comments. Right? That's why I'm making this series now. But what does the science actually have to say about the topic? So let's look what does the science say is fasting safe, a chart review of adverse events during medically supervised water only fasting. This was a chart review from 2006 to 2011 looking for adverse events related to water fasting. So everyone in this trial, they were patients that were 21 or older who had water fasted for two days or more, two or more consecutive days. 768 patients met their inclusion and exclusion criteria. And insomnia was the most common complaint by far. So 257 of these 768 visits that be 33.5% of the visits were related to insomnia caused by fasting. Next one, safety, health, improvement and well being during a four to 21 day fasting period in an observational study, including 1422 subjects. So this is a one year observational study. Like it says there, 1422 subjects. They participated in a fasting program that consisted of fasting periods of between four and 21 days, but these were modified fast. So they were consuming between 200 and 250 calories on their fasting days. So of those 1422 subjects, 1311 of them completed a questionnaire looking at signs and symptoms of those. So 14.94%. So 169 of them had sleep disturbances and which was the most frequent mild symptom by far. So you can see that sleep disturbances with fasting are common. But why? Why can fasting impact sleep? Fasting can have a profound impact on your metabolic rate, mental clarity, energy levels and focus. This is why we fast in the first place. These are great things during the day, but they can become a problem when it's time to sleep. You could argue that fasting's impact on our sleep is hardwired into our physiology. Let's look at it from this angle here. There are three reasons that animals, and we are animals, will sleep less than they want. Number one, they are caring for their young. I've been there, done that, maybe you have as well. Number two, they're starving and need the extra time to hunt for food because food is short. And number three, they're stressed and trying not to get killed by a predator. So this actually makes perfect sense. Your body wants you to stay awake and to have energy and have mental focus to either find food or not become food. Fasting is leading to a stress response. That's just how it is. If our ancestors just laid down and died, we wouldn't be here. This theory makes sense, but let's look at the science that supports it. So here we're going to look at what I call the four horsemen of the sleep apocalypse. We have norepinephrine, cortisol, arexin and PPA are alpha. So don't worry, there won't be a test. Let's go ahead and start with norepinephrine. I've talked about this in the fasting course because of the study that talks about metabolic rate, but resting energy expenditure in short-term starvation is increased as a result of an increase in serum norepinephrine. So this result, this was a four-day study, and they saw a 14% increase in resting metabolic rate, which is pretty awesome. This increase in resting energy expenditure was associated with a more than doubling of plasma norepinephrine levels. So the average norepinephrine levels went from 1,716 pico-moles per liter to 3,728 pico-moles per liter. That's a 117.25% change over the four days of the study, so a massive increase in norepinephrine. Why does that matter? Well, the other name for norepinephrine is noradrenaline. You've probably heard of adrenaline or adrenaline junkie. So norepinephrine is adrenaline's cousin. Its function is to increase alertness, arousal, and attention. This is why fasting is amazing for mental clarity. But alertness, arousal, and attention are three enemies of a good night's sleep. Next we have cortisol, which you've probably heard called the stress hormone. Fasting does lead to an increase in the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol helps your body make alternative fuels during a fast. But cortisol spikes before bed, make it hard to fall asleep, and then cortisol spikes in the middle of the night may wake you up and make it hard to fall back asleep. So what's the science say here? The effects of intermittent fasting on the circulating levels and circadian rhythms of hormones. So this review looked at how fasting impacts cortisol levels. We'll look at a couple of charts here. So here we see the dashed line is blood cortisol levels during fasting. The solid line would be cortisol levels when eating three meals per day. So as you can see, cortisol levels are elevated. So studies in this review found that fasting increases cortisol levels and shifts the peak from the morning to the afternoon. So that later you're going to get this peak in cortisol, the more likely it is to impact your ability to fall asleep. This is yet another reason why fasting can disrupt your sleep. But there is also some good news here as well. Let me show you the next one. So this, the dashed line here, is an estimated changes in hormones after long-term intermittent fasting in humans. So once you get adapted to fasting, you'll see the cortisol levels will stabilize. They do stabilize, but they do also remain slightly elevated. This makes perfect sense because cortisol plays a role in what's called gluconeogenesis, or the creation of new glucose. When your body turns non carbohydrates, like glycerol from your body fat and amino acids, into carbohydrates. So fasters like us need to make more glucose because we aren't getting it from food while we're fasting. This is also evidence that explains why sleep issues would get better over time or are eliminated altogether. And that's my hope for all of us. All right, systematic review and meta analysis reveals a cutely elevated plasma cortisol following fasting, but not less severe calorie restriction. So this review also found, right, strong evidence that fasters or fasting leads to an increase in serum cortisol. Here we see the meta-analysis of the change in plasma cortisol levels in the fasting studies that were part of this review. The dashed line on the left is where we would start and then you see the plasma cortisol levels have gone up in all four of these studies. But we also see some good news here, so I'm going to read a quote. The meta regression analysis showed a negative association between the serum cortisol levels and the duration of calorie restriction, indicating serum cortisol is increased in the initial period of caloric restriction, but then decreased to the baseline level after several weeks. These results suggest that severe caloric restriction causes an activation of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access, which may be transient. So the good news is what goes up seems to come down and then your sleep should get better over time. That's the hope and that's what happened with me. So the effect of cortisol does lessen over time. I think this is because your body gets more fat adapted and if you can easily burn fat for fuel while you're fasting, then you don't need cortisol to struggle to find alternative fuel sources for you. Then we have orexin. So maybe you haven't heard of this one. Most of you have heard of cortisol, but orexin is kind of neat. Orexin, the term actually comes from orexus, which means appetite in Greek. So orexin is released when animals, including humans, are in a state of starvation. Orexin forces animals artificially awake for a longer period of time. Does this sound familiar? So what's the science say? The effects of diurnal intermittent fasting on the wake promoting neurotransmitter orexin So eight young healthy volunteers were fasting during the month of Ramadan. So diurnal fasting from dawn to sunset. The results showed that orexin levels went up during fasting and went down after eating. All right. The role of orexin in modulating arousal, feeding, and motivation. So let me read you a quote here. Orexin deficiencies result in narcolepsy in humans, dogs, and rodents, suggesting that the orexin system is particularly important for maintenance of wakefulness. So that means that low levels of orexin cause narcolepsy, which is involuntary sleep during the day. Perhaps it's high levels of orexin that are causing your involuntary wakefulness at night. So back to that same review here, same study. The responsiveness of orexin neurons to peripheral metabolic cues suggests that these neurons have an important role as a link between energy homeostasis and vigilance states. So I like that term vigilance. Let's talk about it for a second. This means that fasting puts us in a hyper-vigilant state. This means we are abnormally or highly alert to potential danger or threat. When I think of hyper-vigilance, this reminds me of when I first became a daddy, a new dad. The slightest sounder movement would wake me up so that I could make sure my son was safe. That's what I think of when I think of hyper-vigilance. But this same state of hyper-vigilance could be what is waking you up in the middle of the night as well. Lastly, we have P-P-A-R-Alpha. So P-P-A-R-Alpha, sorry, is a key regulator for burning fat for fuel, as well as ketone production, which both will occur during fasting. But it also plays a role in wakefulness as we'll see in a moment. So what does the science say here? Peroxazone proliferator activated receptor alpha, see how we why we say P-P-A-R-Alpha, mediates the adaptive response to fasting. So we read a quote, the nuclear receptor known as peroxazone proliferator activated receptor alpha, or P-P-A-R-Alpha, was found to play a role in regulating mitochondrial and peroxazone fatty acid oxidation, suggesting that P-P-A-R-Alpha may be involved in the transcriptional response to fasting. So this just says that during fasting you need to mobilize more fat for fuel and P-P-A-R-Alpha plays a role. This is great news because we want to make ketones and we want to burn fat for fuel. But, and you know there's always a but with me, let's look at the other side of this coin. So the role of nuclear receptor P-P-A-R-Alpha in the sleep wake cycle modulation, a tentative approach for treatment of sleep disorders. So another quote, remarkably this nuclear receptor has been described in sleep related brain regions, leading to the hypothesis that P-P-A-R-Alpha might be involved in sleep modulation in as much as activation of this protein promotes a robust enhancement of wakefulness while it reduces sleep. So this also explains why fasting and ketogenic diets can impair sleep in most people. All right, let's put this all together. All right, so the four horsemen of the sleep apocalypse, we just looked at norepinephrine, leading to energy, increase in metabolic rate, mental focus, cortisol, leading to a stress response, orexin, activating wakefulness, the opposite of narcolepsy, and then P-P-A-R-Alpha is, yes, helping your body make ketones and burn fat, but also stimulating wakefulness. So when we look at these effects, it shouldn't come as a surprise that fasting can lead to sleep issues. As a matter of fact, I'd be more surprised if fasting didn't lead to sleep issues, at least to some extent. But enough of the bad news. The good news is that sleep issues typically get better or go away completely as your body adapts to fasting. Several of these studies talked about that, how transient these changes are and your body will adapt. I'm living proof of that. I went from sleeping terribly and sleeping three or four hours a night to sleeping really perfectly or optimally. So the great news is that I'm going to help you build a plan to get the sleep you need in the rest of this series. And maybe you'll need it forever or maybe you'll just need it for a few weeks until your body adapts, but either way it should help and it does help most people. So we know that our stimulated fasting brain is the cause of our sleep issues. So where are we going ahead moving forward? So in part two, I'll share how proper sleep hygiene can help you deal with the alertness and the wakefulness that fasting causes. And then in part three, we're going to look at a long list of supplements that can calm the fasting brain down enough to get to help you get to sleep and then stay asleep as well. All right, and then in part four we will come back and we'll talk about what if nothing helps in these other videos. I hopefully very few of you watch that video because you don't need to but so I really can't wait to see how I can help, right? This is this is the melding of two of my passions and I want to see you be successful fasting and you can't be successful fasting if it's ruining your sleep. So I am here to help reach out if you have any questions. I'll make sure they get covered later on in the series. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.