Unlock the Secrets: 5 Game-Changing Tips for Better Sleep

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John, welcome to the podcast. John Tesh with gib Gerard, and we are dedicated to helping you get a better night's sleep. So we're calling this podcast how to unlock the secrets five game changing tips for better sleep. These are tips that we've given on our coaching program before, which you can find@tesch.com they're also tips that we used ourselves, and so gib number one is that is sleep position. So research tells us that sleeping in a particular position not only helps you your back feel better, it reduces the risk of Alzheimer's disease. I had no idea you lie on your side, legs bent with a pillow between your knees. So internist Dr Holly Phillips says that position alleviates strain on your neck, and new research shows it helps remove damaging proteins from the brain, the ones that accumulate and eventually contribute to the development of Alzheimer's. It's because don't miss this lying on your side improves circulation to your head and neck and increases oxygen flow. What say you look what you're talking about is the best position for the best night's sleep. And all you have to do is ask a pregnant woman the only way they were able to get comfortable during their pregnancy. You know, the that you buy, the they get the long body pillow. They put it between their legs, they lay on their side. It's the only and they gotta lay on the I think it's the right side. Right is that you gotta lay on your right side so that it doesn't put the wrong pressure on your on your veins, and that's the only way they can fall asleep. Well, obviously, you know, pregnancy is an extreme example of this, but for all of us, that's going to put the best pressure on our body, the best position for us to get the good night's sleep, to not have those tiny little discomforts that interrupt our deep sleep, and when we interrupt our deep sleep, all of the other stuff happens. We end up having metabolic disorders.

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We end up having brain disorders because we're not properly cleaning out the brain after a whole day of work. So we've we're learning more and more the importance of sleep. So many people for years would brag about how little sleep they get, and now we know we need it. You need to get the you need to get into those, those deep sleep positions, and you need to get that deep sleep and on the side with the pillow between your legs and your neck properly centered, is perfect, yeah. And there have been, like, over the years, and I follow a bunch of these guys. They're these, you know, personal development guys that are all about, oh no, you only need five hours sleep, four and a half hours sleep, and you get out there and hustle and and you can really burn yourself out, yeah, without really getting up sleep. It's, I mean, it's, it is, it's a magic elixir. And then again, it has all kinds of consequences when you don't do this. Speaking of consequences, number two, according to research from UC Berkeley, middle aged adults who slept six hours or less a night, they were a full 30% more likely to develop dementia in their late 70s compared with people who got a solid seven hours a night. An extra hour of sleep per night makes that big of a difference, they say the folks at Berkeley, because when we sleep as just as gib said he led this, the brain goes into housekeeping mode, clearing away damaging plaques and proteins.

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That's That's what we found out. So for years, they didn't know that you needed sleep. They just knew or why you needed sleep. They just knew that if you went a certain amount of time without sleep, eventually you would die. Right, right? So they knew what those limits were, that that was the that was the edge of what sleep science had told us. And now we know, you know, our body has two modes, and most of us are in the wrong mode. Most of the time, our body has building mode and cleaning mode, like, That's it, and if you and the problem is that we don't sleep enough and we get too many calories, so we're always in building mode.

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And what happens when we're in building mode? We get metabolic disease. We get the kinds of we end up, you know, overweight and and we end up with cancer and all of these slow death diseases, when we are not properly getting into the cleaning mode. So the cleaning mode, if you have to, you have to not eat for 12 hours every once in a while. So you get into something called apoptosis, where your body actually breaks down cells and gets rid of the cells that are not working for you, and it actually will get ahead of the cancer cells. The same thing is true with sleep.

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If you're not getting enough sleep, you're not properly cleaning out your brain, and you are going to, you know, you're just going to be worse the next day, emotional regulation, all of it. So we've been doing this show for over 20 years, and I feel like every single year we get another study on whether it's Alzheimer's, or it's on productivity, or it's on relationships, and they're now, they're all it's almost like one of those Venn diagrams, where it's all connected to sleep and so sure to that. To that point, we've talked before about a consistent sleep schedule. You know, it's great for your your your hormones in your heart. But now there's another reason why you want a consistent sleep scale schedule, because it will improve your gut health. This one comes from the European Journal of Nutrition, they found in their study that when people went to bed and woke up at the same time every day, they had higher levels of healthy gut bacteria known to reduce the risk of disease, but people who varied their sleep schedule by just 90 minutes later or earlier had more gut bacteria linked to obesity, because a lack of sleep leads to inflammation, which damage. Is the gut. And, you know, I know we, we've, we've talked about, if you a lot of people sleep in on the weekends and try and you can't catch up, but it can also give you sleep jet lag, yeah, and then, and then Sunday night comes around, and it's, you know, one o'clock in the morning. You can't fall asleep because you slept in till noon on Sunday. As a father of three kids, I haven't slept in in a very long time. So I don't really get to replenish my sleep on the weekends, because my kids wake me up. But, you know, you can't. You can make it up, but you do the best thing you can do for your body is to go to bed at the same time every day and wake up at the same time every day.

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Your body will anticipate sleep.

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All of your bodily processes will be better if you, if you are able to do that, the thing with lack of sleep and your gut bacteria. I mean, look, we talk all the time about the difference between chronic stress and inflammation and and acute stress inflammation. So, so chronic stress inflammation is, it's, it's that crippling anxiety about the future. It's, it's Doom scrolling. It's lack of sleep. It's always being tired and overcoming that with energy drinks and stimulants in order to make it through the day. Acute inflammation is, you know, is exercising, it's massage, it's acute stress is, is going on a jog and getting your heart rate up in into your ideal, you know, zone two area, so that your your body actually recovers from that. It's it's all of its acupuncture, it's all of these things that make your body processes actually deal with with the inflammation and issues in your body, and then it cleans itself out. If you stay in that high level of alert, your body breaks down. And it's true of the bacteria that you feed in your stomach. And by the way, just like all of this stuff. It's self perpetuating.

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So the worse your sleep is, the worse your gut bacteria is going to be, and the worse your gut bacteria is going to be, the worse your neurotransmitters are going to be, which means you're going to be have a harder time falling asleep and get into this consistent sleep schedule. You need to break the cycle and just go to bed at the same time every day and wake up at the same time. Yeah, that's good. That's good. And I've mentioned before that I'm, you know, I've, I've been fighting, successfully fighting, cancer for for almost 10 years now. And my doctor, Dr Christopher logo fetus at MD Anderson, he's talking a lot now about about the studies that they're finding, how important it is to have really vital gut good back.

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Gut bacteria, very good bacteria for fighting cancer and from and for preventing cancer as well.

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So, yeah, again, it's going to affect nutrient absorption. It's going to it's going to change how much your blood sugar spikes when you eat food. If you have good, healthy gut bacteria, you can handle all kinds of stuff.

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Yeah.

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So here's number four. The number four tip for a better night's sleep is pay attention to your light bulbs. And gib and I do this naturally only because what we started doing this before we saw this information, because when we're lighting a television studio, the temperature of the light bulb is very important. And so what the experts are saying in this area is we should stop concentrating on wattage and look at the Kelvin number. Oh, yeah, it's on the box. So you want a light for your bedroom or anywhere you spend time before turning in to be below 4000 Kelvin. That's according to sleep specialist and our friend, Dr Michael, Bruce. That's the softer yellow glow. Yeah, that's basically as the sun sets. That's what that's what that looks like. Everybody knows. In fact, we can now get our computers to mimic that.

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Yeah, you can. You can set your computer, and, by the way, do this there, if you, if your computer doesn't have it on its existing operating system, there is an application called flux that will do this. It will, it will change the temperature of the colors on your screen down to that yellow hue. It looks a little bit weird, but it is.

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It's nice and softer on your eyes. It makes it makes it easier to go to sleep. Yeah. So again, like 3500 or 4000 Kelvin for right before you're going to sleep.

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Now, the higher the Kelvin number, like 5000 6000 maybe even 7000 that's the more, the more light it emits in the blue spectrum. And you know what that means, because blue, white light, is what signals our brain to stay awake. That's why we say don't be on your iPad late at night. And you can also get light bulbs specifically designed for sleep. If you just Google light bulb for sleep, you'll see a ton of them. But again, just remember that you want it 4000 or below for when you're going. So you want it to look a yellow basically, yeah, you that slight yellow tinge the old school light bulb.

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Yeah. You want it to look like, almost like candle light, right?

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Like a slightly brighter than candle light, the you want the blue light in the kitchen, you want the blue light in your office, where you need to focus, and you need to and you need to be able to stay awake when you when you want to work, but in the bedroom, as you're turning in for the night, you need to start practicing sleep hygiene and light. And the light that you take into your eyes is a great starter point, yeah, and they we've seen the neurologist, Dr Andrew Huberman, talk all the time about about how he wants us when we first wake up to as soon as you can get get sunlight into our eyes.

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You know, they don't look directly in the sun, but don't, you don't close your eyes and look at the sun, either look off to the right or the or the left.

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And how important that is for getting rid of the melatonin in your body, yes.

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So that this. Goes back to the previous story that we just talked about, which is the importance of a consistent sleep schedule. If you can start turning those lights down to these, these lower Kelvin temperatures at night right around the time you want to go to bed. And most cell phones, by the way, now will let you put your sleep schedule into it, so that you can tell it when you want to go to bed and when you want to wake up, and it'll remind you that it's bedtime, and it'll remind you that you're you need to start preparing in the next hour for bed, like my phone will do that. So we're all attached to these devices all the time. You might as well use them for good. And getting outside as soon as you wake up is a great Kickstarter to get you into the mode of waking up at the same time every day, because your body will begin to expect that little, that little shot of feel good hormones when you get into the sunlight first thing in the morning.

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And let me just say, as a man of 72 years of age, I've, you know, traveling to Europe, back and forth, doing all kinds of crazy jobs in the in the media industry, I have tried several different solutions, as in sleeping pills. And it just, it never works. You know, it just you'll always end up either being, no matter what they say, you end up relying on it. And there are other things that you can do, in fact, going to a sleep study, things like that.

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And so the last thing we'll talk about is how a dinner high in fiber and low in fat is is like a sleeping pill. So fatty foods, they stimulate neurotransmitters called orexins, which keep us awake, but fiber takes longer to digest, so the nutrients are released more slowly into the bloodstream, and that helps your body have an easier time winding down. So this comes from the Journal of Clinical sleep medicine. They found, here it is. They found people gib who eat a high fiber dinner. They fall asleep and stay asleep, but they fall asleep 12 minutes faster than average.

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I mean, so look, we know that we don't get enough fiber. Most processed food is fiber deficient. It's high in sugar and fat and a lot of these other things and salt preservatives that keep them shelf stable. But fiber is one of the things that's extremely lacking in most of our diets. This is, this is that old adage of eat like a king in the morning, a prince in the afternoon, and a popper at night, meaning you should have your biggest meal of the day in the morning, when your body has time and space to to to digest it. So you know the old farmer eggs and bacon is not a bad idea to give you the energy to make it through the day. And then, as you move towards evening, you know, fruit and things that are high in fiber, that will, that will. You know, first of all, it'll feed that good gut bacteria that we were talking about before. It'll keep you from having those processed meals before bed, and it'll also keep you from that heavy feeling that keeps so many of us awake.

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I mean, as I get older, I noticed we were just in we were just recording the new version of round ball rock in Nashville, and we went out every night after we recorded or when we were traveling to a big, beautiful dinner. And they were great. They were really fun. I had a fantastic time. But I did not sleep at all on that trip because we would have these really rich meals. And I don't normally eat dinners that big.

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And I came back to the hotel room and I could not fall asleep. This is why, yeah, it's all that digesting. Yeah, exactly. So there you go. I hope you like this. I love going through it with gib. It's the five game changing tips for better sleep. So this is all the data, and if you want application, that's what we do every week. On the on our coaching program. It's live coaching, live zoom coaching.

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And so we take all this data, all the stuff that our researchers find, you know, every single day, and we talk to you about how you can apply it, not only in the world of sleep, but also all kinds of other things, whether it's improving your memory or or winning your morning or even even learning how to play piano, you know, any of that stuff, it's all it's all there in the podcast. Check us out@tesh.com and again, we have 20 years of stories exactly like these sleep stories that we can help you apply to your life. That's what we that's what the point of this coaching. Thanks again for being with us for the podcast.

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I'm John Tesh for gib Gerard, and we'll see you next time. Get a good night's sleep. You.

Unlock the Secrets: 5 Game-Changing Tips for Better Sleep

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