How To Hack Your Sleep With These Habits - Shawn Stevenson - #726

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Shawn Stevenson. He's an American nutritionist, bestselling author and a podcaster. You spend more time asleep than any other activity, and yet no one teaches you how to do it properly. Thankfully, there are some simple routines, hacks, foods and habits that you can implement to improve your sleep and longevity immediately. Expect to learn if poor circadian rhythm is responsible for the modern mental health crises, the most important habits to improve your sleep routine, how to get the best sleep of your life, the number one determining factor of how to live longer, how to fall asleep quicker and stay asleep longer, the best foods for sleep, the healthiest ways that you should be storing your food, and much more. Do you want to change your life this year alongside thousands of others all doing the same? Well, Gymshark 66 might help you do just that. Over 66 days, Gymshark 66 challenges you to focus on small wins every day to help form life-changing habits. All that you need to do is download the free Gymshark training app right now on Android or iOS and choose your three habits. Then start taking them off every day and track your progress. Why 66? Well, research shows that it takes 66 days on average to form a habit and forming new healthy habits can truly change your life. So get involved by using my link, gym.sh slash Modern Wisdom 6.6 or search Gymshark training in the app store. That's gym.sh slash Modern Wisdom 6.6 or type Gymshark training in the app store. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Whoop is a 24 seven health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, strain, recovery, stress and more to provide personalized insights that help you to reach your goals. Whether you're obsessed with putting in a little more effort in the gym or getting those extra hours of sleep, Whoop helps you improve your everyday health and wellness. Each morning, Whoop gives you a recovery score that acts as your daily guide for how much you should exert yourself. At the end of the day, you'll get a recommendation for your ideal bedtime and wake time. You can also track over 140 different habits and behaviors to see how they impact your overall health. You can stop guessing about what's happening inside of your body by wearing a small thing on your wrist that tracks absolutely everything. Also, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4 Strap. Plus, you get your first month for free and there's a 30-day money back guarantee. So, you can buy it for free, try it for free and if you do not like it after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Head to join.whoop.com/modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com/modernwisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Shawn Stevenson.
Andrew Huberman mentioned in an interview that I did with him recently, that the potential mental health epidemic that we're seeing at the moment could be downstream of poor circadian rhythm, dysregulated sleep, disrupted sleep. How much truth do you think's in that?

**Shawn Stevenson** (3:14)
Ooh, circadian medicine is really top tier science right now. We're synced up with the 24 hour solar day, all of our hormone production, our neurotransmitters, we're synced up with what the universe is doing. And the funny thing is, humans can kind of hide out from that interface, but our genes are really expecting us to be in constant communication with what's happening outside. And humans are really interesting, we can create our own habitats. We're kind of like big hairless beavers, or many of us are hairless.
But even when we're creating, it's still nature, because we're a part of nature. But we can essentially hide out and create a 24 hour day artificially. And so our circadian timing system is getting really screwed up. So absolutely I agree with him. And here's the rub, right now in the United States, estimated about 115 million Americans are regularly sleep deprived to boot.

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)
Out of 330

**Shawn Stevenson** (4:11)
Yeah, so it's a sizable amount. And we're talking about on a regular basis, like essentially daily. And my big thing is always looking for what is the connective tissue? Why should people really care about this? And I always like to tie to metabolic health and how we look, right? And a really fascinating study was done. And this was actually published by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. And they looked at people's biometrics and used CT scans to look at their belly fat for five years, tracking a group of people. And they found that people who were sleep deprived gained over twice as much belly fat in that five year period. And sleep deprived in this particular study was less than six hours a night. All right, so kind of, there's something about six as being that sweet spot. And by the way, there is no cookie cutter amount of sleep. That's one of those things that, you know, we just kind of drink eight glasses of eight ounce water a day, like it's very superficial. Is that the same for Shaq? And for Simone Biles, it's going to be different. And the same thing holds true with sleep. It's not just the number of hours, it's the quality of those hours. It's a lot like the calorie conversation, you know. Yes, calories matter, but the quality of those calories definitely matter. And I've been a big proponent in pushing into popular culture this term epichloric controller recently, which we can circle back to and talk about. But in particular with sleep, I want to share one other piece too, because especially right now in this energy equation and how important this is, and some of your friends and colleagues as well, like Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, a really good friend of mine, we're looking at how important testosterone is, not just for maintaining our muscle mass and our energy, but for longevity. And this is critical for men and women is finally really shifting gears to be all encompassing of humanity, how important testosterone is. Now listen to this. This was published in 2011 in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, top tier medical journal here in the United States.