The Science of Sleep Optimization: Why Your "Healthy" Sleep Routine is Failing You

Most people view sleep as passive downtime. In this episode of ‪@CellToSystems‬, we reframe it as an active, mandatory biological workflow. We dive deep into why sleep is the ultimate system for cellular repair, metabolic health, and cognitive longevity.

1 in 3 American adults doesn't get enough sleep; and up to 70 million Americans chronically suffer from a sleep or wakefulness disorder (NIH; National Academies of Medicine). We explore the terrifying reality of sleep apnea, the controversy of "histamine storms" from leftovers, and why failing to hit deep sleep means your brain is "marinating in its own waste."

Inside this episode:
• The glymphatic shift: How your brain flushes amyloid plaques during deep sleep.
• Metabolic wakefulness: Why glucose drops at 2 AM trigger the "cortisol loop" and how to stop it.
• Clinical triage: Identifying the #1 cause of nighttime cardiac death.
• The wearable trap: Moving from "scorecard anxiety" to using data as a biological dashboard.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Celtic Systems Podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Listening does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Always consult a qualified health care provider regarding your medical conditions or before changing your health regimen. Do not disregard professional advice or delay seeking it because of something you heard on the podcast. Reliance on the information provided is at your own risk. Guest opinions are their own. Celda Systems may utilize affiliate links, feature sponsored content, or discuss companies in which hosts or guests have financial or advisory interests. Relevant disclosures will be noted during the episode or below.

SPEAKER_03 0:37

Hey, welcome back to Zelda Systems. In this episode, we're going to cover sleep. We're going to go deep into every aspect that you can possibly think about because sleep is so important. So without further ado, let's get going. So uh there's a study that came out was talking about um sleep and sleeping too much. Do you guys know about this one where you're sleeping beyond nine hours and has some risk for cardiovascular or all-cause mortality?

SPEAKER_04 1:04

I hadn't heard about it, but I I do know that, you know, when I oversleep, it uh doesn't help. You know, I feel really tired and sluggish, and my mind doesn't really work, and I actually feel like I go to bed earlier that that night, too. So I'm not sure what the study said, but I could definitely feel it. I it'd be it would be interesting to understand uh how it's related to cardiovascular disease, though.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Well, and focus and attention are tough and staying on task are is difficult. Especially focus, I would say, is where I the the hardest part is for me staying with I mean, there's been days when I've been sitting with patients in the room and I can feel myself like it's it's pretty unpleasant.

SPEAKER_03 1:45

Aaron Powell So Dr. Free, is that under sleeping or is that oversleeping when you're usually it's undersleeping.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

You know, you can you can override sleep with adrenaline for a little while and then it starts to catch up to you.

SPEAKER_03 1:55

Aaron Powell Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I once had a conversation with William Dement, the you know, godfather of sleep medicine, wrote The Promise of Sleep. And um he basically said that there were more deaths really attributed to uh lack of sleep than even drunk driving. Um not that long after that, I actually saw a truck, you know, an 18-wheeler, just in uh we were in Chicago and they were on the freeway and the guy had fallen asleep and was just all I mean, it was crazy. We called 911. It was wild to see that um somebody actually fall asleep at the wheel. And I've had that happen to me where I basically, you know, traveling so much, fell asleep at the wheel one time. Luckily, if the person that was with me grabbed the wheel, but uh pretty scary, actually, to think about it. I I don't know if that's ever happened to anyone here on the show, but um Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:44

It definitely happened to me. I woke up in the middle of the uh the grass on on uh the highway uh when I was really young. I had been uh moving. Uh I was packing up from college and uh we were just packing up all day and then long car ride home. And um yeah, I dozed off and luckily nothing happened. Same situation that they grabbed the steering wheel. That was that was really scary, and I haven't actually hadn't thought about that in a in a long time. So that is that stat is probably surprising, but but but does make a lot of sense. And and even when I used to work the overnight shift, which talk about being bad for your health, but I I worked the overnight shift, you know, 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. for for three years. And I remember um those drives home, the drive home were were kind of scary, you know, trying to trying to stay awake. And we have so many nurses and doctors working in hospitals all night long. Um and so it does it make sense. It's scary, not talked about a lot though.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

I remember those days I did I did plenty of overnights too in in the early portion of my career. And I just remember I had about a 30-minute drive home from the hospital. And uh remember those moments where I would close my eyes, knowingly close my eyes, and just sort of keep going down the road, foot on the gas, hand on the steering wheel, knowing like, okay, you you gotta open your eyes though right now, because if you go one or two more seconds, you really are gonna fall asleep. You know, terrifying, terrifying.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Working in the hospital and you're um you know that the beeper's gonna go off. So you have this sort of Pavlovian response to the beeper where your body just goes, I remember after the after residency, this was back in beepers, that shows how old I am. But the back in residency, I remember like after residency, I was a surgery resident, and um, you do you get called for traumas in the middle of the night. And uh, I remember after residency, there were a few people around me or whatever that had beepers, and I'd hear that same sort of tone, whatever it was, the common beeper tone. If you if you played it for me right now, I'd be like, I would have an adrenaline surge, I'm sure, as related to that. Because it's because it's so, you know, you get so used to it. You're not sleeping, you get used to not sleeping, this sort of hyper-vigilant state that you stay on. You hear it from uh patients now too, especially um, I have this one patient who is the mom of a, she has a son who's neurodivergent. And um, and as part of his neurodivergence, he has uh seizures that occur typically in the middle of the night. And so this um person, so this his mother is my client, and she has uh hypervigilance and it keeps her from sleeping. So she's got to keep sort of one ear open, and she's in this chronic sleep deprived state where she's not getting any deep or REM sleep. Uh and we know a lot of um a lot of diseases and medical problems come from that. She's recently had a um fairly significant cardiovascular event that um has affected her a lot of things in her life. So it's pretty terrible.

SPEAKER_03 5:40

Pretty wild. You need to think about it. Um I have sleep apnea and I didn't know for years uh my wife would say, well, you know, you snore. But then uh I did finally have a sleep study, and sure enough, uh I stopped breathing 26 times a night, which was considered to be moderate. Um how often do you run into that when you see patients, Craig? Is that something like you're are you guys looking at how how some sleeping, their their sleep scores? Because these wearables we know drive people crazy, but how are we tracking it to really know? How do how can we find out if somebody has sleep apnea?

SPEAKER_02 6:16

Yeah, it's one of those questions that you just can't pass up. I mean, you it it's gotta be addressed uh anytime there's uh new patient intake. Um so I'm always asking patients, you know, do you do you snore? Are you waking up uh throughout the night at any point in time gasping for air? Do you feel like your heart's racing? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel as though you're well rested and you're functioning on all cylinders from a cognitive standpoint? Um, the risk factor or the risk associated with untreated sleep apnea is multifactorial. I mean, everything from driving up your blood pressure to uh pulmonary hypertension and the risk for atrial fibrillation and other um cardiac arrhythmias, you know, so it's one of those things that needs to be addressed always. What I'm surprised by is the amount of people who understand who could be presented with um, you know, the downstream negative sequelae of untreated sleep apnea and just say, no, I'm never gonna wear a mask, or I don't really want to go get the test in a sleep lab. I mean, you're you're dealing with a life and death situation. We know that something like bad sleep apnea is one of the most common causes of you know cardiac death at night when somebody is, you know, trying to get rest. Um, so it's something that needs to be addressed, always needs to be inquired uh about. And uh the people that do ultimately incorporate some you know component of positive pressure uh support uh do uh you know have substantial improvements in their quality of life.

SPEAKER_03 7:46

Hey, I'm I'm curious, Dr. Pastrana. Um there are a lot of sleep medications out there, some you know, three like come to mind right away. Um and what what are your thoughts on that long-term effects of those? I mean, I I I think that uh at one point in time, Jed Black, Dr. Black, um, had said to me that they felt like um you know long-term use of one of them was not not a problem. But I wonder, is that is that an issue? Do you guys think that's an issue for patients?

SPEAKER_04 8:19

Well, it's really hard because we know how important sleep is. Um my recommendation was always to try as hard as you can um to stay off of them, just because once um, you know, once you go down that route, uh in my experience, most of them have to stay on stay on it. Um the sleep that they are getting, even with medications, is not even that great a sleep to begin with, anyway. And so we try to delay um any type of sleep medication as long as we possibly can, uh, prescription-wise. Now, there are other things like um some more natural products like L-theanine, uh, had good success with Ashwagonda, uh, things like DHHB, um, which is dihydrohonochial B, have been beneficial. But I I what I've found is that it's more uh lifestyle modifications that we were really working on around sleep rather than what the right supplement or or drug is. Uh, usually found you know, caffeine intake, uh them stimul being stimulated before bedtime, the environment around where they're sleeping were always like almost bigger levers to pull on than than the actual medicine. And and then I also noticed that you know different people have different uh issues with sleep. One is you know falling asleep to begin with, and then the other one's like staying asleep. Um people have different personalities, you know, um higher um, you know, that that active brain type of people where like things like L-theanine work really well in them, I've found, um, where it just it's not as not necessarily a sleep aid, but it just kind of calms the brain down a little bit so that they can get into sleep. And so I think it's a very personalized approach, but it's one where I haven't seen that great a benefit um even as a pharmacist when it comes to sleep medications. And it's more around lifestyle modifications, around what to do for sleep.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Yeah, you uh, you know, the modern world rewards sympathetic dominance, but then it balks when people can't sleep. And um I just don't think you can supplement yourself out of a dysregulated nervous system. I think you have to realize that longevity is in um these sort of lifestyle things like you're talking about, Leonard, where you know, we know that the mitochondria don't work as well when you're taking, when you're not sleeping well. So uh so undersleeping, you're gonna find things like increase in reactive oxygen species, increase in uh nitric ox uh species, you're gonna find um impair impaired um NRF2, you're gonna find altered uh NF kappa B, all of these things talking about increasing inflammatory processes in the body. You know, when you go to sleep, if you look at your HRV and you see that HRV should be sort of like a hammock in your um HRV, um, that lowest point is when the glymphatic system opens up. So the glymphatic is this beautiful network of uh of channels that allows for, I always tell patients, this is like where the um the channels open up so that the trash collectors can come take the trash out of the brain. And so it can function for so long with accumulation of trash. Imagine in your office, if you're functioning and you're accumulating trash, you can function for so long, but at some point you have to remove the trash to be to continue to do what you do. And uh, so that's sort of where it where all that comes into play. Um, the biggest concern for me, if we're talking about longevity and s and sleep and longevity, is you have to be able to sleep because in otherwise we're talking about neurodegenerative states.

SPEAKER_03 11:44

Yeah, it's that deep sleep where the amyloid plaques are removed, right? That's where that's happening. Interesting. What was it we were talking uh earlier about the person that had the procaine therapy uh and then there was the cold immersion. Can we talk about that again, please?

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Yeah, sure. So yeah. So I we most of my patients wear wearables and we talk about what they're doing with their deep sleep, what, et cetera. And so one of them came in a few weeks ago and was talking about where about his wearable. He was getting around one minute of deep sleep per night. And as we um, as I treated him, we did uh about three um uh therapeutic stellate in uh infiltrations during his treatment. And uh they were weekly. At the end of the three weeks, his wife was sending me his uh aura ring reports. I think she collects them. But uh, she was like, oh my gosh, she's got 45 minutes of deep sleep. So that was really great. And then the second client was really another interesting one because she does uh cold plunging and has been fighting against doing cold plunging for a long, long time. But she regularly monitors her sleep. She gets a decent amount of regular deep sleep, but not a massive amount of deep sleep, like 20 minutes on a regular basis. And she's two young boys, doing children, so she's a little hyper-vigilant as far as that goes. And then she went and did cold plunge with lots of resistance, uh, was fearful of going to do it. And then she went in and she's gotten about two minutes now of cold plunge. And as long as she keeps her hands out, she's fine. But she got two hours of deep sleep the night that she did her uh cold plunge, and she's repeated that test a couple of times with the same results. So fascinating to um to watch.

SPEAKER_04 13:30

That is fascinating. Right but right before sleep?

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Uh no, it was just the day of sleep.

SPEAKER_04 13:34

The day of, okay. Yeah. Because I'd imagine that would really wake you up before you went to bed.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Yeah, you would think, right? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 13:41

Oh, that's really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 13:42

There was talk about like taking a warm bath before going to bed actually would help somehow uh to get to sleep. You know, for me, I never have a problem falling asleep. I always have a problem waking up in the middle of the night. What I found was recently I started doing something I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but uh Christy had suggested that um I take some ketones before going to bed. And then I always wake up hungry in the middle of the night. So I started taking some EAAs before going to bed. So ketones and EAAs. And I have to tell you, when I do that, I get a full night's sleep. It works really well for me. Does that make sense in any way, shape, or form to any of you?

SPEAKER_02 14:25

Well, ketone aid on their website, you know, has it list the they have a direct link to the NIH study that shows a significant reduction in wakefulness after sleep onset with the use of the exogenous ketones. So yeah, I think the science is there. Leonard, you were gonna say something?

SPEAKER_04 14:41

Aaron Powell No, I've I've heard, you know, small doses of the ketone esters. I didn't know that there was an NIH study, but it wasn't the first time I've heard of people using that right before bed. I wasn't sure what the mechanism was because it's also the same thing that drink before I go on a long run. So um it's interesting these things that will give you energy can also impact how well you sleep at night.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Aaron Powell Well, and keeping in mind that you know you have to have a certain amount. It's sort of that goal, everything is Goldilocks, right? You have to have a certain amount of IL-6 in order to be able to fall asleep. You have to have a certain amount of cortisol to be able to fall asleep.

SPEAKER_02 15:13

Um I I'm always uh pretty happy and thrilled when I wake up in the morning and I realize, like, oh, I actually slept through the whole night last night as opposed to waking up a couple times. You know, and the research also shows that uh sleep that is too fragmented, right? I mean, somebody can be sort of hitting all the metrics of they're getting, you know, the right amount of time in bed, um, total duration of sleep is on point, but sleep that's overly fragmented is just as detrimental as somebody who's building up like chronic sleep debt. Um, you know, so that's where the quality really comes into play. And I tell my patients that sleep really begins when you wake up in the morning, building those habits, you know, of how you're going to start your day, trying to get some morning sunlight, activating dopamine, you know, continuing to support that uh cortisol surge that you get in the morning, avoiding uh any sort of caffeine within the first 60 minutes to really let your body take over and do all the heavy lifting with wakefulness and alertness uh is critically important. And, you know, as you continue on through the morning, well, that's when we should focus the majority of our exertional training. Um, you know, cutting out caffeine, cutting out caffeine after maybe 1 p.m., uh, because we know for some people they're slow metabolizers. And uh caffeine is basically going to, if we think about like what, you know, sleep and the mechanism there with fatigue, it's uh it's adenosine. It's actually the the product that is residual from ATP and energy that is, you know, becomes such like an overwhelming impulse that allows us to ultimately get to sleep. And so when we are utilizing caffeine, we're blocking those adenosine receptors. Uh and that's one of the ways that something like caffeine works. Some people are very slow metabolizers of caffeine. And their half-life uh with a cup of coffee, they may not even realize it, could be anywhere from you know eight to twelve hours. So looking at things like that and just trying to nail down on uh reducing blue light exposure, which we all know the detrimental aspects of that, keeping the room cold, right? And um, we had talked about the hot shower, the heat exposure. Well, any sort of cooling, our body naturally cools when we go to sleep. Uh so if we can sort of mimic that or we can support that with a little bit of heat exposure followed by some rapid cooling, um, that does help to induce uh drowsiness. And the same can be said for keeping those in-home temps between like, you know, 60 and 68 degrees.

SPEAKER_03 17:42

It's really great. You guys are talking about all the like, you know, behavioral modifications rather than like uh it's interesting, um, Leonard, you talked about um L-theanine, and that was part of a there was a protocol that somebody was um talking about that was um magnesium-3 and eight, L-theanine, and apigenin, and they were really big on that. But I think at some point in time, don't we all sort of just get used to what we're taking and it becomes less and less effective?

SPEAKER_04 18:13

Aaron Ross Powell Well, that's what I felt. Um you know, and uh like the L-theanine has to be a high dose too. I mean, I was taking up to 600 milligrams uh of of that. Um but yeah, I feel the same way. Uh I might get like a good night or two here or there, but it's not something that you know you use all week long. It's you just don't get the same effect. You feel like you found the perfect combination of magnesium and L-theanine, and I finally found it. And then, you know, day three or four, it doesn't work like it did.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Well, and the Intellix, uh, we've started doing that Intellix DNA test on people too. And one of the cool things about that test is they um they'll show us the histamine intolerance. And there are, I don't know, eight or ten histamine elevating gen uh genes that they test for. So it's or gene variants that they test for. So it's really interesting to see that because if we're talking about histamine, so think about in the springtime when you have um when you have a high histamine count, right? Because of spring allergies, at least in Georgia, that's what we have. And if you have this high histamine count, histamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. So a lot of times in the beginning of spring, the before I start to have the sort of sinus-y or whatever allergy kind of symptoms, I'll start to feel anxious. I'll just start to be anxious and I'm wakeful and have a little bit more sleeping. And I go, why am I so anxious? And then I go, Oh yeah, it's February. And so, uh, so this high histamine. So one of the things, if you're seeing some of these variants in genetics related to either histamine removal like DAO or um histamine production, you're going to need to address those and remove as many of the histaminic things from your environment, both diet and in and the world, if you can. Obviously, there's some things you can't remove, but the things that you can uh get rid of, decreasing your um histamine in general. And then also in some cases, needing to use an antihistamine, because it typically at bedtime, histamine is converted to histidine, so you go right to sleep, just like you know, glutamine is converted to GABA going to sleep. And those things in some cases don't happen because of genetic variance. And that can help us guide what we're doing to recommend for people for sleep.

SPEAKER_03 20:21

Aaron Powell That is super interesting, the notion of um histamine and and and diet, right? I at one point in time somebody said something about leftovers can create uh a high amount of histamine um from just eating leftovers, which I thought was interesting because you know so many people talking about meal prepping, right? Wouldn't that create a bunch of histamine in the process?

SPEAKER_04 20:43

I must tell my mom that she freezes everything. She freezes pizza from like two months ago. I'm like, mom, please just throw the two extra slices away. We'll just get a new pizza.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

I'm gonna use this as an excuse to eat my wife's leftovers. Yeah. She's like, Greg, why did you eat that? I wanted to eat that. Well, babe, I'm saving you from a histamine response. Histamine storm.

SPEAKER_03 21:04

There you go. Don't want, don't want you to feel anxious.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

So loving and thoughtful.

SPEAKER_03 21:08

So, you know, we talk about uh we've talked, we've covered a lot of stuff, and I think sleep hygiene, you know, we touched on a bunch of it. Um, the cold, you know, the cold room, the dark room, all of that sort of stuff. Are there any other things? I mean, I'll obviously the elephant in the room that we haven't talked about is alcohol and how that really affects sleep. Um, there's been a lot of talk about that recently. Anyone want to take the sabbat that one?

SPEAKER_04 21:34

Well, just from personal experience, when I did have my aura ring, it was just awful, you know. Uh I know that when a lot of us used to get together at the the masterminds, you know, sometimes you go to an event and you're so excited to see your friends and you have a couple more drinks than you typically would. Um, and your your mind's so stimulated because you're learning so many things. But uh, you know, some people, it's some patients, it's hard to kind of convince them because they they they think that they can sleep better or at least fall asleep better. um when they drink and um they feel like they sleep a little bit harder uh but like craig was saying it's a it's it's it's uninterrupt or it's interrupted. And so yeah that is that is the number one thing that that is going to ruin your sleep is is alcohol.

unknown 22:13

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

It's just keeping you out of that gymphatic um system. So you're you're not ever opening the trash chutes.

SPEAKER_04 22:21

Yeah. And that that's the that that to me is the um you know the probably the most important thing of there's so so much damage that's happening to us on a daily basis, but that lymphatic system that you're describing um is is where just like that waste removal, just knowing that your body's recovering. And this is what we've had a lot of discussions on exercise and recovery and this is when recovery is really happening. Injuries, recovering from exercise, all that's happening you know uh when you sleep and you're just preventing your yourself from uh that rec that recovery by by doing anything that's gonna get in the way of of sleep. And when it comes to like performance and like you know athletes, especially especially professional athletes, it's more known now that they they take their sleep really serious. That's going to determine how well they perform the the next day.

SPEAKER_03 23:09

Yeah for traveling teams I think that's really one of the things that's tough, right? Is trying to get the sleep while you're on the road.

SPEAKER_04 23:15

And then another interesting I remember either reading an article or talking to somebody about um the people that do sports betting in lines. If someone was traveling cross country even if there wasn't it was at a neutral a neutral place the line the the statistics the the people that set the lines for sports betting would be completely different by a couple of points just because of the team having to travel and change um time zones. And so it's um it's definitely it's definitely a real thing. But the qu the I guess the next question is okay you got really bad sleep um there's nothing you can do about it now what do you do in the morning? Does anybody have a oh no I didn't sleep but I have a lot of stuff to do protocol for the morning.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Like ketones, exogenous ketones and I cell water.

SPEAKER_04 23:57

Yeah yeah the the ketones for sure um and then there was that study that recently came out with the 15 to 20 grams of creatine. Did you guys hear about that one?

SPEAKER_01 24:08

No.

SPEAKER_04 24:09

It was like a sleep sleep deprivation study where they found that um they can almost eliminate the cognitive side effects of sleep deprivation with 20 grams 20 grams of creatine which is not something that you typically take. You might get a lot of water retention but they still say I'd be the stay puffed marshmallow Yeah but they said they showed that 20 grams of um creatine in the morning actually erased any of those like the the cognitive decline from sleep deprivation, which is a pretty interesting study. And I know that I just go for a couple extra scoops of creatine if I do have those days where I got to get stuff done but I I didn't get the sleep that I wanted to.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

And then there's uh the um genetically engineered Z biotic that um breaks down formaldehyde is that that ad that I keep on getting with the guy with the two I believe you're gonna get it now for sure.

SPEAKER_03 24:54

Yeah he was on uh shark tank yep yeah that's fascinating definitely a different uh way to think about it any other sleep hygiene things we should be thinking about you know um what about pets in the bed oh gosh right I know it's so hard I love my dog I know I know I get mad at my dog when he does it he like leaves in my bed I'm like where are you going? Thought we were I thought we were just getting comfortable yeah we had we actually had for when uh our our dog was a puppy he slept in the bed and at some point in time we had to let him you know move on and um it was kind of tough but I felt bad for him but I was really glad to actually not be disturbed by him moving around all night. Um I'm a light sleeper so it's was not really healthy for me. Also I think there's an issue around uh what pet dander and all that kind of stuff with regards to hair and all that.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

Well and you have to imagine if you know what they're bringing in from outside and you know it's like wearing it's like putting your shoes in your bed.

SPEAKER_04 25:57

Sometimes I leave my shoes around the house or put them on a table. And Kristen gets pretty mad at me. But she doesn't mind cuddling with the dog in the bed. So thanks Suzanne I'm gonna use that.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

You're welcome Yeah but there's and then we also have to think about like with our partner in the bed. And so uh there is a reason why people used to sleep in twin beds separate from each other that they used to sleep better because they were sleeping in separate beds. They didn't have the disruption there certainly are mattresses now that can be helpful for removing that disruption the the middle of the night waking to urinate the getting up at at night or the just restlessness or the snoring. And so a lot of uh clients I'll encourage them to wear we have these lovely um Envy makes these beautiful sleep masks that are made with real silk covers that can be washed and they're copper infused to prevent infections and they're huge covers over your whole face but your you know earplugs or those the um Leonard you were telling us last time about that um that headphone thing that you got that that Kristen got you.

SPEAKER_04 27:00

Yeah the um what is it called the brain tap. Yeah the brain tap but you know you know what another thing um I forgot that we had it um because we just moved and we didn't bring it with us was the Uler those things that uh um change you can change the temperature of your mattress that really made a difference for me because we were able to get the mattress really we're in Florida so sometimes the the sun can come in and the the bed gets a little hot but being able to get that um the bed down to like 60 degrees because I love being freezing um I d I definitely noticed a difference there.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Yeah but we have a I have a bedjet and it's it's my favorite toy in the whole world. Yeah yes you have a bedjet too Craig?

SPEAKER_02 27:41

No but I'm really curious what is a bedjet?

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Oh it's not pretty so yeah don't try to introduce it but it's I love a bedjet it's a um like an air conditioning unit that goes into what they call a cloud sheet that's two layers the bed jet goes into the cloud sheet and the layers split and you can turn it up to 109 degrees or it can go down as low as I think 60 degrees. And so you can turn the fan up and down and uh so my mine is set where it turns on at 109 degrees for five minutes. I go get in the shower come back go to bed and it stays off until one o'clock in the morning and then it goes down to six sixty degrees and stays on six degrees and the fan varies a little bit in the middle of the night.

SPEAKER_02 28:27

Wow that's beautiful that is intense there's nothing worse than being hot and trying to go to sleep. You know what I mean? It's just in my opinion it's the worst feeling. A couple of years ago I was in Costa Rica and of course it was hot down there and um you know you're out in the sun all day you're getting a little bit of a tan maybe a little bit of a burn and I was rooming with these people who are from uh the UK and I think they're a little bit more conscious over there. If I can make sort of a blanket statement they may may be a little bit more conscious about there about over there about energy utilization and things like that than we are here in the United States. Again, blanket statement. And um so they were you know really sort of reticent to turn up the AC to the level that I would like and I just remember these were like miserable nights trying to get to sleep and it's like 92 degrees in the bedroom. I'm like, come on.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

The other elephant in the room that we're not discussing is the TV in the bedroom. And Chris, like you and Kristen were discussing the dog in the bed. You know, I'm having that discussion right now about whether I put I don't have a TV in my bedroom but whether I put a TV in my bedroom. And I I think that's a really poor choice. I think it does a lot of things that aren't great for relationships and I think it does a lot of great things a lot of poor things for sleep. I think it affects your sleep a lot going to bed, even if you're wearing blue like blocking glasses, you're awake there's an awakefulness that happens and you know sometimes you'll fall asleep to watching TV and then there's a whole other thing about the sort of drone of consciousness that goes on and the um the influence of those things on your on your subconscious as you're not quite sleeping through the night. I I think that those are things we need to be very aware of and that we get really pulled into sort of the the polarity that's happening around our country right now and uh and a lot of that that we probably don't need to if we're not having our TV in our bedroom.

SPEAKER_04 30:31

Yeah that one's a big one for for me and and Kristen because just like the alcohol thing, there's some people that feel that they can fall asleep better with with the the with the TV on where I I don't care. Anything can be on I'm and this is a sign of sleep deprivation is if you hit the pillow and you're out within like a minute or 30 seconds, like you're sleep deprived. And I'm I hit the pillow and I'm I'm out. But what happens is what you're describing is uh in the middle of the night two o'clock in the morning she forgets to turn the TV off uh and I'm dreaming or like my subconscious is on big bang theory or like friends, you know? And I'm just I wake up so frustrated. So um but and then she's and then she's completely out because we have the opposite thing. I'm a morning person, she's a night person. I fall asleep right away she takes a while for her to fall asleep. And uh but yeah that's a that's that's a that's that's a a good one because the you know if you think about the differences between deep sleep where you're doing more of the recovery side and REM sleep where it's more of like the emotional restoration. But if you're in that REM sleep or you're slightly waking up and all of a sudden you have TV in the background kind of messing with your it's almost like the the cleanup of your emotional stress. There's the there's the body physical cleanup that happens during deep sleep and then there's like the emotional cleanup that's happening during REM sleep. And you can really disturb that by having the TV on in the middle of the night.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Let's not forget about how sleep deprivation affects um intestinal barrier dysfunction and how important it is for us to be able to so this is one of the things I'll say to patients things that that'll affect your intestinal barrier dysfunction is sleep deprivation, uh colonoscopy PrEP, infectious things, and cortisol. And so we know that one of the things we use to treat that intestinal barrier dysfunction is the the oral, one of the oral peptides that's a tight junction barrier restorer. And I'm such a huge fan I use it all the time. It's it's oral it's easy to use lots of patients respond. They respond within two weeks or they're not going to respond. Like I would say more than 50% of my patients respond really well to it. So that's kind of fun to use something that's really effective and that really hits a lot of different inflammatory pathways. Talk about lowering your histamine load if you are able to restore that tight junction. And so starting with improving their sleep dysfunction can be helpful because we know that this sort of a chicken and egg thing if they're not sleeping their intestinal barrier gets worse. If their intestinal barrier is worse their sleep gets worse. So it's sort of uh you have to break the cycle somewhere.

SPEAKER_03 33:05

Yeah. So I think the bottom line is on all of this, however we get there, sleep is super important and there are so many things that go into it and a lot of things that just people were not aware of. But it seems like now more than ever people are aware and um and there are solutions there are things that you can do to make sure that you're sleeping the right way. As we get close to wrapping up are there any kind of final thoughts on anything that we didn't cover?

SPEAKER_02 33:32

I I think just to dovetail on what you said, you know, it is one of those core elements that's at the foundation of any cellular longevity medicine practice sleep stress management, um, nutrition dietary exposures exercise mobility strength training so on and so forth it it's indispensable uh we got to have it everybody does it you know and those that don't do it well unfortunately suffer health consequences so um critically important for immune surveillance cancer surveillance recovery um yeah Suzanne any final thoughts I often ask patients what is it that you're is there something that you're not listening to yourself about so do you need to make a decision?

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Do you need to change a career a relationship a um a way of living is there something that you need to change because almost always a sleep deprivation is due to some sort of choice you need to make that you're not willing to make or some sort of decision that needs to happen um that you're putting off making.

SPEAKER_04 34:38

That's great that's great advice um I've noticed that myself and and this is where I got away from trying to figure out like what the magic supplement is or what the combination of compounds is. And no matter what I I just can't outdo what Suzanne is talking about. You know, a tough decision, something that you're not facing, something that you're worried about. I I complain all the time about not being able to sleep and then all of a sudden that thing that I was working on for six months that finally finished the next thing I know I'm sleeping no problem that the the entire next week until I come up with some other right idea or business that keeps me awake at night. But it's it's it's such it's it's just situational. I I think I think that's great that's great advice.

SPEAKER_02 35:17

Makes me wonder I I haven't seen research and I'm sure it's out there but I I haven't you know found it myself what people who do and engage in like transcendental meditation and just really have very robust um meditative experience and uh protocols, you know, how their sleep looks and like I bet it's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 35:40

One thing I do want to come back to because we talked about TV in the room, phone in the room. So here I'm gonna I'll just gonna call myself out. So I am a terrible you know put it on YouTube and listen to something to fall asleep to or you know when I wake up in the middle of the night and exactly what you said about uh Dr. Free, what you said about um all of a sudden you start hearing something that's like you know go I have this premium subscription so it goes off and just like starts finding stuff and next thing I know I'm listening to some crazy thing. I don't know where it comes from and I'm dreaming along with that. It's the most bizarre I think like keeping the phone out of the room. What are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 36:23

There's a lot of really interesting information a lot on um electromagnetic fields and exposure to the brain and the proximity I think the recommendation is that the phone is at least six feet away from your head so we have an actual alarm clock like an old school you know actual alarm clock it has like a bat projector on the ceiling so you don't even have to turn your head you just open your eyes it's right there and you go back to sleep. But it's uh you know and and the phones go in the in the kitchen at night.

SPEAKER_04 36:54

Wow so if I fall asleep with it like and it like falls on my head that's that's that breaks a six foot rule, right? Because that's how Kristen found me the couple nights ago with the phone on my face.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Yeah I'm not saying I do it really well it's tough.

SPEAKER_04 37:10

I mean you know we are just primed for always being accessible you know and I think it's changing our brain because I I I remember when I would scroll death scroll right before bed it would like really affect my sleep like really bad. And now what's happening is I can fall asleep with my phone in my face and sleep just fine. So I that just tells me that my brain changed and that scary with it. Yeah they're like okay this is the new normal we'll roll with it.

SPEAKER_03 37:41

Think about that it's just so interesting to think like it wasn't that long what it's like 20 years ago we had uh you know this type of device we've only had it around for so long the ability to actually watch something I mean I guess you could always listen to an MB3 player or uh you know something like that. But that that is uh it's pretty wild to think like you could have a brain change that quickly around something like that.

SPEAKER_02 38:06

Gosh MP3 that's a term I haven't heard in a long time in and of itself.

SPEAKER_03 38:11

Right we were talking about beepers before so you know I think I went yeah I think the beepers did come before the MP3 players right we did have that that's true. All right guys as always this was a ton of fun. I always learned so much it's just so interesting and I always go back and listen to these numerous times. I hope everyone who watches them seems like we're getting more and more viewers all the time. Hey thanks for joining us on this episode of Cell the Systems please remember to like share and subscribe and remember that when you share this episode with someone you may be giving them information that could change their life in such a positive way. We truly appreciate it when you do that and we look forward to seeing your comments uh once again thanks for joining us