 Could fixing your sleep extend your lifespan? Okay, you wash your car your clothes your house your dog your dishes You but do you wash your brain? That's right. If you're not getting enough sleep, you're not giving your brain the proper cleaning cycle and I'm not telling you anything you don't already know but without at least seven hours of sleep each night It's literally cutting years off your life and sadly. It's probably cutting years off of your memory So how in the world is losing sleep shorten your lifespan? Well, let me count the ways Studies show a higher risk of cognitive decline earlier than normal Chronic lack of sleep can lead to depression which can lead to skipping exercise and quite frankly poor eating choices There have been phenomenal research on the lives of shift workers the lack of sleep correlates strongly with insulin resistance metabolic inflexibility overeating and dramatic increase of cancer in shift workers Now let me give you a personal example as a resident in surgery and heart surgery in the United States Particularly as a chief resident in heart surgery the chief resident was literally on call 24 hours a day 365 days a year that meant if someone came in with a heart attack in the middle of the night And you were asleep that meant you were doing that operation and If you had a full schedule the next day So what you didn't sleep? The longest I ever went without sleep was four days And then I got three hours of sleep and went back at it. So During that time I Kept myself awake by eating carbohydrates. I cannot tell you the number of times I went to the snack machines at the hospital and bought ding dongs and hostess cupcakes and candy bars and I gained a lot of weight I Then went to England to do my pediatric heart surgery fellowship and the difference was night and day the chief resident the the senior registrar was only on call every third night and Was only on call every third weekend So two out of every three nights you were at home. You were not allowed to be called Two out of every three weekends. You were not allowed to come into the hospital and imagine my shock You know type a personality Showing up on Saturday morning my first weekend off After I had operated on little babies and children the day before to see them And I was literally stopped at the ICU door by my colleague who said what are you doing here? And I said well, I'm here to see my babies. They said no, you're not allowed in the hospital We'll see you Monday, and I said but I operated on these kids. They said no you trust us. We trust you You're off. I dealt with guilt for a few weeks, but then I got used to it. I lost 30 pounds in one year Just by getting adequate sleep Those two weekends off two out of three nights Just the lack of sleep Was killing me because I was killing myself Trying to stay awake by eating sugary foods Dramatic example that I'll never forget But sleep is one thing. It's the type of sleep that makes a huge difference There's essentially three types of sleep There is light sleep Now first of all light sleep is good for you because we're now beginning to realize that Sleep is the time when your mitochondria those energy producing organelles factories in all of you, but particularly in the neurons of your brain Do the repair work and we're beginning to realize that the reason Melatonin is produced During sleep and right before sleep is not so much to put you to sleep But it's been discovered that melatonin is one of the two Antioxidants that actually repair your mitochondria So as I talk about in unlocking the keto code We need to stop thinking about melatonin as the sleep hormone But talk about it as the brain neuron mitochondrial repair Hormone so even light sleep is when this takes place Now many people have heard of REM sleep rapid eye movement sleep This is the time when you dream Now what's important about dreaming is that dreaming is the time when memories are taken from basically our Short-term memory bank and Deposited into our long-term memory bank and it's the time that Neurons send out what are called dendritic processes to connect up with another neuron to solidify this memory so without REM sleep you're going to lose a lot of the memories That you should be storing But perhaps the most important is deep sleep Now deep sleep usually occurs early in the sleep cycle and During deep sleep. We now know that the brain undergoes a wash cycle and During this wash cycle the brain can shrink by as much as 25% very much like squeezing out a sponge and As that brain shrinks the brain Squishes out all the toxins that can accumulate like amyloid like tau like Bacterial toxins and it's this wash cycle this deep sleep That's really critical long-term in protecting your brain Now here's the problem this wash cycle requires huge amounts of blood flow That blood flow needs to be available early in the sleep cycle, but Eating and digestion requires huge amounts of blood flow And so after you eat for about three hours maybe four Most of the blood flow in your body is directed down towards your gut to do digestion I've said this over and over again, but when I was a young kid If you ate lunch your mother would make you wait for one hour before you could go swimming Because everybody knew that if you went before that you would develop cramps and die Now there was some truth to that old wise tale That is that during digestion all that blood flow went to your gut And it wasn't available to your muscles to go swimming and you could get cramps. Would you die? No But the point's well-made What happens if you're eating near bedtime your brain is going to get a cramp Because it's not going to get the proper blood flow To do the wash cycle and the system called the glimphatic system is now Really one of the cornerstones of why you really need to stop eating About three hours before you go to bed Now we are a nation of late-night snackers but part of the reason we have an epidemic of Dementia of Alzheimer's of Parkinson's is that we have Created the perfect storm For not allowing our brain to recover every night in the way it's supposed to recover finally we have Inundated our eyes with blue light almost all of our light bulbs emit huge amounts of blue light Our computer screens our TV screens emit huge amounts of blue light that blue light Literally tells our brain not to shut off Not to do the things it's supposed to do so what do you do? Try not to look at a screen before bed if you are going to look at a screen Get yourself a pair of blue light blocking glasses There's number of them out there that are really good quality You can wear them over glasses. You can clip them on glasses. There's no excuse not for wearing them Darken your room as much as possible get light blocking shades get light blocking mass Try time to release Melatonin start with a small amount say three to five milligrams if you need to work your way up to 10 milligrams but make sure you buy time to release melatonin not the straight stuff Thanks so much for watching this episode, but don't go anywhere. I think you're gonna love this next one There's actually never been a study that shows that you should drink eight glasses of water a day