Why My Testosterone Is 2X Higher Than the Average Man

Shawn Stevenson (0:00)

You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson.

We are about to go super deep today, so buckle your seatbelt. The average 45 year old man today has dramatically lower testosterone than men the same age just a generation ago. In fact, a brand new study published in the journal Human Reproduction, including the data from over 100,000 participants, revealed that total testosterone levels in men have declined by approximately 54% between 1972 and 2019 But here's what's most unsettling about this situation. Many of these things that are suppressing testosterone levels are the very same things that we've normalized in our world today. Right after my 45th birthday, I had my own hormones tested. My total testosterone came back at 1,058, more than double that of the average man in America today. And my free testosterone came back at 143, which is near the very top of the reference range. And these results have happened naturally, without TRT, without peptides and without hormone drugs. So today, I'm going to break down the exact science-backed methods that I use in my life personally to achieve these results. There are seven specific things, the seven S's that will ensure that your testosterone levels stay optimized as well. Now let's kick things off with the first S, sleep. A study published in the Asian Journal of Andrology found that there is a heavy sleep-dependent factor in producing testosterone. The researchers noted that testosterone remains elevated for the duration of sleep, and the subsequent decrease in testosterone depends on the duration of being awake. Essentially, testosterone decreases more and more the longer that you're awake. In many ways, sleep is like a testosterone charging station. You plug in at night, power up the battery, then go throughout your day using that charge to do what you need to do, and then recharge again at night. Now, the question is, what happens when you don't properly recharge? Well, the mind-blowing study, cited in the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed the impact that sleep deprivation has on healthy young men. The results were shocking. Over the course of the study, young men who were sleep deprived for just one week, getting a maximum of just five hours of sleep per night, they saw their testosterone levels drop by up to 15%.

Now, this might not sound like a lot on the surface, but the researchers equated this to their testosterone levels dropping as if they were now suddenly 10 or 15 years older.

Now, the good news is that these results were temporary. Once they were able to get adequate sleep again, their testosterone levels normalized, got back up to that baseline. But the question is, what happens when you're doing this night after night on a regular basis?

Additionally, all right, so we know about this testosterone piece and the overall equation of men's health and sexual performance, for example, is an aspect of that that's often tied to testosterone. But you need to know this as well. Sleep deprivation has also been found to create significant dysfunction in things like total sperm count, sperm motility, morphology, and testicular size.

In truth, sleep deprivation is like hormonal birth control for men. And I am so serious about my sleep. This is one of the biggest reasons why my testosterone is literally double that of the average man in the United States. I came up much the same way as the average person here in the US. I didn't think anything really about my sleep, especially in my childhood. This was just something we were forced to do. Bedtime was like punishment, right? And also in the environment that I come from, where there's unpredictability, there's violence in the household, there's violence outside my door, going to sleep was never really restful. I never knew what was going to happen. And I also never really knew what I was going to wake up to. And so there was a level of stress even tied to this sleeping behavior. But once I got a little bit older, you know, my family moved into a nicer part of St. Louis, where I'm from, then things got a little bit more normalized. And this was coinciding with the time when I'm getting into my teens and I'm wanting to have more autonomy and I'm wanting to stay up. All right? Damn the sleep. I want to stay up and live life and do things and play video games and connect with the ladies. You know, this is when we had the phones, but we had one house phone line and there's a couple of phones in the house, but one phone line. So you could be on the phone, trying to spin your little game or whatever. And your stepdad picks up the phone, get off the phone. It can kill the vibe very quickly. But anyways, the bottom line is, I was not a respecter of my sleep. And I carried that into my adulthood. But once I truly experienced and I saw firsthand the value of my sleep in my cognitive performance, in my energy, in my body composition, the list goes on and on and on, I started to really prioritize my sleep. Now this might sound like taking the fun out of things, but I'm telling you, I get that good sleep and then I'm dangerous when I'm up, all right? I'm having the best time ever, I'm executing on my goals, I'm experiencing life much more full, a much more HD version of life and I know what it's like to not have that when I'm well rested. And so some people might think that I am robbing myself of time to be doing things, but I am getting even more value out of the time that I am awake because I prioritize my sleep. Now, the question is, and for you in the takeaways with this, what's the biggest culprit that's deteriorating the average person's sleep quality today that we have normalized? Because getting good sleep is something that we just did. We didn't have to get special apps for this. We didn't have to read books. We didn't have to do all these things, take all these things, have all of these biohacks. We just slept, but today there are things in our environment that we've normalized that are creating all of this friction between our desire to go to sleep and us actually getting that sleep. And the number one thing today that's causing this disruption is our relationship with our tech devices. Multiple studies, including a study cited in the Journal of Applied Physiology, has found that artificial blue light from our devices is an especially powerful melatonin suppressant. Now, if you want to have higher testosterone, then you need to wear protection for your eyes in the evenings when you are associating with these screens. Our laptops, our desktops, our iPads, tablets, smartphones, televisions, the list goes on and on. For myself personally, I've been wearing blue light blocking glasses for about 15 years every night. I was wearing them last night when my company left. And this is something that early on when I was doing this, this was very abnormal in my environment. Nobody else was doing this. And on the strength of my international bestselling book, Sleep Smarter, these blue light blocking glasses and other devices have become a big part of the wellness culture. But what most people don't realize is that today, the technology has come so far. But most people are unaware that most brands of blue light blocking glasses do not block blue light efficiently. And they're not actually lab tested to be effective. They don't block other well established spectrums of light that have been proven to disrupt our sleep quality, like green light, for example. And this is why I utilize the blue light blocking glasses from Bon Charge. They're scientifically engineered to block out 100% of melatonin disrupting blue and green light for improved sleep and regulated circadian rhythms. Their glasses are FDA registered and proven to be effective. They're made in an actual optics laboratory by trained optical technicians. And because of this, they're able to provide you with prescription lenses if you want it, or non-prescription lenses like the ones that I wear. And they have so many incredible frames to choose from. Just go to boncharge.com.com. Model right now to take advantage and get 15% off when you use the code model at checkout. Again, this is something that I utilize every single night. They're going above and beyond with the technology and also making it cool. They're so much cooler than the wood shop light glasses that I was wearing 15 years ago. All right, go to boncharge.com. For slash model to take advantage. But in addition to this, how about we take some time off of our devices in the first place? Because it's not just about the artificial light, it's also about the stimulation and interacting with our dopamine pathways, serotonin and just all this neuroendocrine chemistry that's getting seduced and stimulated by scrolling on our phones or scrolling through Netflix. And so again, just giving yourself some time to be off of your devices. I recommend at least a 30-minute screen curfew, just to allow your mind and your body to start to unwind. And in addition to that, there are many other well-established factors that I've been talking about, again, for well over a decade of making sure that we're sleeping in a largely dark environment as we can possibly get, and making sure that we are sleeping in a cool environment as well, to really take advantage of this thermal regulation process that our bodies naturally do, and seeking a cooler climate, because that's how we evolved. No matter which part of the globe we're on, it's a little bit cooler in the evening. But we can artificially keep that temperature higher in our homes and not really be aware of it. And so cooler environment, dark environment, give ourselves a screen curfew. These are some of the science-backed tips. But if you want more information, of course you could check out Sleep Smarter, anywhere their books are sold. It's 21 clinically proven strategies to help you to support getting a great night's sleep. And another big part of this actually drives perfectly into the second one of our S's for optimizing testosterone.