Want Deeper Sleep? Follow These Expert Health Tips

Mark Hyman, MD

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Farmacy. Not getting enough key sleep supporting nutrients is bad. Blood sugar imbalances are bad. Gut dysbiosis is bad. Too much caffeine is bad.

Alcohol is bad. All that messes up your sleep. And not getting enough sleep messes up your life. It also messes up your health, and it, by the way, leads to poor food choices. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale.

And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, supplement store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products. Welcome back to another episode of the doctor's pharmacy and health bites where we take juicy little bites into current health topics.

And today, we're discussing one of the most essential yet often overlooked aspects of our health, maybe the absolute foundation of our health, sleep. Now we all know how important sleep is, just not in terms of getting enough of it, but ensuring that the quality of our sleep supports our overall well-being and health. Sad news is millions of people struggle with sleep issues, whether it's trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, simply not waking up profesh, getting up too early, the whole shebang. Now sleep is foundational to everything we do from maintaining a healthy weight to supporting our immune system, even enhancing our brain function. Yet in our fast paced world, many of us aren't getting the deep restorative sleep our bodies really crave and they need.

And today, I'm sharing my top health and nutrition tips to help you achieve better and deeper sleep so you can wake up feeling rejuvenated and ready to take on the day. We're gonna explore how what you eat, how you manage stress, and even your daily habits can significantly impact the quality of your sleep. And by understanding the connection between nutrition, lifestyle, and sleep, you're gonna be better equipped to make the changes needed for truly restful nights. So let's get started. Now sleep is one of the most crucial pillars of health, and yet many people struggle to get enough or good enough sleep.

And I'm not talking about quantity. I'm talking about quality too. Quality sleep is crucial to how well we show up in the world, and yet more than 50,000,000 people, I've even heard 70,000,000 have a sleep disorder, and over a 100,000,000 Americans of all ages reported not getting enough sleep. That's about a third of Americans. Now good quality sleep is crucial.

It can help make or break our health. And today, I'm sharing my top health and nutrition tips to help you achieve better and deeper sleep. I wanna give you an overview of the importance of sleep. It's critical for overall health, for longevity, for our mental clarity. We literally wash our brains at night.

We literally take them to a car wash at night. If we don't sleep, we don't get that brainwashing, literally. It's essential to our emotional well-being. The importance of a good night's sleep cannot be understated. It helps us maintain a healthy weight, helps support our hormones like cortisol and melatonin, balances our blood sugar levels, our insulin.

It's essential for our brain. It improves our cognitive function. It helps our memory consolidation, our ability to make and recall memories. It regulates our emotions and reduces the risk for depression. Not bad for just a good night's sleep.

Now it's essential also for our immune system. It reduces inflammation. It boosts something called autophagy, which is cellular cleanup and repair. It enhances, DNA repair, tissue repair, physical performance, reduce the risk of heart attacks. I mean, it is just an incredible medicine.

Sleep is medicine. It's also responsible for activating the brain's immune system. When you sleep well, the glymphatic system, it's like your lymph system, but in your brain, cleans up all the waste. And it's a recently discovered system in the brain that plays a critical role in clearing waste and toxins to the brain while we sleep, which is why when you see people with Alzheimer's, there's often a sleep issue preceding it. In fact, sleep dysfunction or inadequate or poor quality sleep is a major risk factor for Alzheimer's and dementia.

And that's really why getting adequate and quality sleep is so important for brain health. Now during sleep, our brain cells shrink. It allows more space for the cerebral spinal fluid to flow around and clear out the waste efficiently. But what kind of waste does the conflitic system move? It's not like, you know, coffee grounds.

Right? It removes metabolic waste, metabolic waste products, and things like amyloid beta and tau proteins, which are associated with neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's. Now for these reasons, good sleep is associated with all sorts of stuff, chronic disease prevention, cancer prevention, diabetes prevention, obesity and weight, prevention of Alzheimer's, dementia, longevity itself that boosts energy, vitality, focus, productivity, and health span, all those things that we love. Now what disrupts our sleep? Now there are 3 main types of sleep disorders.

Insomnia, and there's 2 major types of insomnia, sleep onset insomnia, where you have trouble falling asleep, and sleep maintenance insomnia, where you tend to fall asleep easily but wake frequently throughout the night. Now, my practice, the most common cause of sleep maintenance insomnia tend to be more chronic conditions like caffeine overuse or dependence, blood sugar imbalance, toxic overload, chronic stress with elevated cortisol, and a bunch of other stuff. There's another big issue with sleep that's often undiagnosed called sleep apnea. That's when you have intermittent periods where you're not getting adequate oxygen during sleep. Now it can be short bursts of not breathing for a few seconds or longer, bursts of 10 seconds or more, and it can lead to all kinds of damage to your brain, to your heart, your metabolic health.

And it's often associated with snoring and waking up sort of suddenly in the middle of the night. Mouth breathing is also not great. When someone is taking an air exclusively through their mouth instead of their nose, that's bad, and that can occur during the day or at night while sleeping. And people who struggle to breathe through their nose during the day, like you have sinus or allergy issues, which are fixable with functional medicine, they're gonna have a major problem with mouth breathing at night and during sleep, and that can affect your sleep. Not getting enough key sleep supporting nutrients is bad.

Blood sugar imbalances are bad. Gut dysbiosis is bad. Too much caffeine is bad. Alcohol is bad. All that messes up your sleep, and not getting enough sleep messes up your life.

It also messes up your health, and it, by the way, leads to poor food choices. It is a vicious cycle. I'm gonna explain that. But there are serious consequences of sleep deprivation, which is you wanna eat sugar and starch all the time. And I can tell you that for sure because I used to work in the emergency room or be up all night delivering babies, and all I wanted was sugar all night long and all the next day.

Any carb or sugar I could get my hand on, it was like an addict. And normally, I wasn't like that. So it's definitely the sleep deprivation. And they've done studies like this on young college students, and it shows exactly this. Lack of sleep leads to all kinds of cravings for unhealthy foods like sugar and carbs because this happens because leptin levels decrease without enough sleep.

Leptin is the hormone that makes you feel full. And what else happens when you eat sugar and starch or when you don't sleep? Your ghrelin levels increase without enough sleep, and ghrelin is the hunger hormone. So one, your appetite, I'm full hormone goes down, and ghrelin, the hunger hormone goes up. That's a bad combo, and that causes increased appetite and the desire for high calorie foods, a greater craving for sweet, starchy foods, salty foods.

So chronic sleep loss is actually linked to higher body mass index and weight gain. In fact, the study found that when healthy participants had their sleep shifted just by 1 hour each day and restricted sleep to stimulate jet lag. They were prediabetic after 3 weeks. That's crazy. And their resting metabolic rate dropped by 8%.

So you basically burn 8% less calories a day if you just didn't sleep. That's amazing. Now what else affects sleep? Well, sleep hygiene. What is sleep hygiene anyway?

People talk about it. What is it? Well, it refers to a set of practices and habits that set you up for a night of high quality sleep on a regular basis. These habits help create the ideal conditions for a restful, uninterrupted night sleep. Good sleep hygiene starts when you wake up in the morning.

Pay attention to your habits. What's getting in the way? So how do you optimize your routine for better sleep? Well, let's talk about what those are. Create a sleep sanctuary.

Make your bedroom your sanctuary. It should be dark. Blackout shades are ideal. Cool. 68 degrees or lower.

I like to sleep at 63 or 4 degrees and quiet. If you don't live in a quiet spot, get these silicone earplugs, they work, or white noise machine, but make sure you do the right thing. If you don't have blackout shoot shades, use an eye mask. You can get a cooling pad if you can't regulate temperature where you are. There's, 8 Sleep, which is a great sleep pad that goes on your bed that can cool you at night.

Also, you might wanna try mouth tape. That forces you to breathe through your nose if your mouth breather helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system. Well, we're trying. Remove distractions. Right?

Just keep crap out of your room. Get the electronics out of the bedroom. Limit artificial light. You know, if there's things that are kind of lit up in your bedroom at night that have weird lights on them, like things that are plugged in. Just cover them over the black, paint or electrical tape.

Just just make sure you don't have any light in your room because your mitochondria are paying attention. Your skin is paying attention. If your eyes are closed, only sleep and sex should be allowed in bed. So move your TV, computer, workstation out of your bedroom. Also, probably a good idea to limit blue and artificial light at night.

You can get these red light bulbs at night. You can use candles. You can lose blue blocker glasses. Screen time, not good before bed. Try to reduce or eliminate screen time at least an hour or 2 before bed, and and make sure you you can use apps like f dot luxe to change the settings on your computer.

There's ways of shedding the setting on your phone so that it changes and removes all the blue light before bed at the end of the day. You can use those blue light blocker glasses, a red light app on your phone, all those things. Because blue light does inhibit melatonin production. It may not be as big of an effect as we think, but there's certainly a role. Make sure you kinda dim your lights in your house around 8 o'clock at night.

If you don't have a dimmer switch, put them in. Use lamps. Use incandescent bulbs if you can. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. This is really important.

People don't pay attention to this, but your body is a circadian machine, so it does well when you set it into a routine and schedule. Get 20 minutes of morning sunlight that helps regulate your circadian rhythm and improves sleep quality, helps regulate cortisol, melatonin. Make sure you exercise. Getting outdoor exercise first thing in the morning also really helps reset your circadian rhythm. Just 20 minutes every day.

You just take a walk. Take your dog for a walk. You can go for a walk, call a friend, listen to audiobook. Habit stacking is great. I like to listen to learn, and so that's a great way to walk and and get get act active, both your mind and your body.

Do strength training that helps 3 times a week to build muscle and balance your hormones. Make sure your diet's sorted, you know, and get yourself on a whole foods nutrient dense diet during the day. Last meal no later than 7. No late night snacking, please. Caffeine intake, make sure you limit that.

Afternoon, especially after 12 PM, or if you're really sensitive, just cut it out altogether. If you're stressed, and we all are, to tell you the truth, just do practices that help to reset your nervous system. Take an Epsom salt bath. Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate, has benefits. Incredibly helpful.

I do that regularly, almost every night. Magnesium sulfate is basically got sulfur, which is detoxifying. Magnesium is relaxing, gets through your skin. You can put 10 drops of lavender oil in there. I call that my ultra bath, and that lavender reduces cortisol.

Do guided meditations, yoga nidra. You can do yoga and stretching and breath work before bed. Maybe you can use a meditation or reset your nervous system with various apps like Calm or Headspace. I like Binaural Beats. You can use Newcom.

That's one of my favorite apps, and use calm. Maybe also write down what's in your head. You know, all this stupid stuff is in your head every day, and sometimes it's just good at night to just write all down and let go of those thoughts. Maybe you listen to calming music, you know, don't watch the news, don't scroll through social media, you know, read a book, do a puzzle, do something that's kind of just calming. Deep breathing also really helps.

Try the 4, 7, 8 technique. Breathe in for 4, hold for 7, breathe out for 8, and repeat, and just do that for a few minutes. Alright. What else can you do to help your sleep? Detoxify.

What am I talking about? Well, your immune system is really important to identify and neutralize tox exposures, and the number one way it does this is through your detoxification pathways, which are most active while you sleep. In fact, your body does a lot of its waste elimination during sleep. First, you wanna minimize exposure to environmental toxins that interfere with sleep, and there's a lot of them out there. There's, like, 80,000 toxins, and I test for them.

And it's amazing how many people are so polluted, literally. So where are you gonna be looking for these personal care products? Look out for ones that are organic, paraben, phthalate, preservative, and fragrance free. You can look at the Environmental Working Group website, ewg.org, and look at their skin deep app, and it's a great app. They can put in the products you use, make sure they're not full of crap.

What are the good ones? What are the bad ones? EMS sometimes are affecting people. Different people are are sensitive. Some people not, but they can definitely interfere with sleep through melatonin suppression, change in brain wing patterns, increase wakefulness, stress response.

So, you know, you can have one of those devices that, automatically shuts off your Wi Fi at night. Some people build a Faraday cage in their room. They literally put a, sheet cloth over their bed that blocks out all the, EMS in the room. It doesn't really help with deep sleep. I notice when I go camping, I sleep way better.

The EMS also affect wakefulness, they affect your stress response, they change your brain waves, so that's not good. Also, folks, don't sleep with your phone next to your head or under your pillow or in your near your bed. Don't charge your phone next to your bed. No. If you leave your phone in your room, just turn it off, like literally just turn the whole thing powered down.

Unplug anything that is plugged in next to your head. Turn off the Wi Fi router at night, you know, just be smart. Cookware, don't get exposed there. Teflon's bad. Watch out for those nonstick cookware things.

Plastic, stay away from plastic, my friends. I know it was the greatest thing Dustin Hoffman said the future was plastic in the movie The Graduate. Well, it was, and it's also the end of us if we keep using plastic both to the planet and our health. We're getting microplastics pretty much everywhere, sperm and penises and plaques in the arteries. It's, we're we're kind of polluted pretty bad.

If you're using, storage containers for your food, don't use plastic ones. Use glass or stainless steel. Air filters are great. Water filters are great. I recommend Air Doctor, Aqua True are great.

Remove any scented plug ins or air fresheners. Those are full of toxic chemicals. So, you know, it's a lot of stuff I'm asking you to do. Just don't worry about doing all of it. Doing the best you can.

It may seem daunting to replace all of your skin care products. Do it over time. Change your cooking tools, and the household items and skin care products. Just sort of slowly do it. And over time, you'll find out the best stuff and just shift your purchases to new ones.

So just just try to find toxin free stuff when you're shopping. Like, for example, next time you're running a shampoo and next time you go grocery shopping, make sure you get organic food if you can. And and if you need to, throw out those old plastic food containers, get glass containers. Just these small changes do add up. The more you reduce your toxic exposure, the more effectively your immune system and your brain, your lymphatic system will heal your brain and help your body detox.

You also want to support your detox pathways. Sweating is great. I love a sauna. I try to do a sauna almost every day. Exercise also is great.

Hot baths are great, really important to help remove toxins. Certain foods are really good at removing toxins. The whole broccoli family, cruciferous vegetables, are great. Broccoli, collards, kale, cabbage. They have glucosinolates, cell fluorophanes, and isocyanates, all these plant chemicals that up regulate glutathione and really help.

Also, supplements can help with sleep. What can you be taking? Well, a multivitamin that can fill in missing nutrient gaps in your diet. Magnesium is my number one sleep supplement about 200 to 400, even 600 before bed. Usually start with magnesium glycinate.

That helps a lot. Melatonin also can be very helpful. 0.3 to 3 milligrams wouldn't go higher than that. That can help reset circadian rhythms, especially when you're traveling or time zone shifts. Now it's generally considered for short term use, but evidence is less care for long term, especially in children.

So be careful of that. Melatonin use among kids has actually increased dramatically, which is crazy. 530% between 2012 and 2021. And it may interfere with development, delayed puberty. So it's a hormone.

Be careful. B complex, also helpful. Really important for serotonin production, as I mentioned. Melatonin. Vitamin D 3, also important.

A randomized controlled trial found that supplementing with magnesium, melatonin, and b complex for 3 months, once a day, 1 hour before sleep, had a significant effect on sleep disturbances and was highly effective for the treatment of patients with insomnia. Now that's better than taking a whole bunch of drugs. Additional sleep supplements for deep sleep and relaxation may include herbal supplements or teas, things like valerian root, passionflower, magnolia, rhodiola, chamomile, lemon balm, all common in the nervous system. And for people who are tired wired and stressed, there are certain adaptogens that can be helpful, like ashwagandha at night, can help with high cortisol at night, help you get to sleep for your tired wired people out there, Siberian ginseng or Eleutherococcus, also very helpful. It can help relax the nervous system and promote better sleep.

Probiotics, believe it or not, may help. Probiotics and gut microbiome plays a role in everything, including sleep, and probiotics support gut health. And a healthy healthy gut can enhance the production of all kinds of neurotransmitters that are made in the gut, like serotonin and melatonin, which are crucial for sleep. So all that's really important. In fact, there's a probiotic that is out there that apparently helps with deep sleep, and a number of my patients have tried it and found it helps their deep sleep.

So, there's all kinds of research needed, but it's a very exciting field. 5 HTP also very helpful. This is a precursor to serotonin. It's a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood and sleep. By increasing serotonin levels, 5 HTP promotes relaxation and helps promote sleep quality.

So that's great. GABA, another great one to take. I like something called 200 milligrams of Zen, which is GABA ampionine. I take that at night. It's our inhibitory neurotransmitter, so it's sort of like the natural Valium.

It it makes you stay calm and easier to fall asleep and stay asleep. L theanine, that's another one I I think is great. It's the amino acid that's found in green tea that promotes relaxation without causing drowsiness. It increases the production of GABA, serotonin, and dopamine, all of which help improve sleep quality. And L theanine, which comes from green tea, also reduces anxiety and stress, making it easier to achieve deep restorative sleep.

Now I'm going to link to all these supplements in my online supplement stores. You know exactly which product to get, where to find them, what's good and what's not, because not all supplements are created equal. So be careful out there. As we bring today's episode to a close, I want to leave you with a reminder of just how powerful and essential quality sleep is for your overall health and well-being. Now we often overlook the importance of a good night's sleep and rest, but it's truly the foundation upon which so many other aspects of our health are built, from mental clarity and emotional resilience to physical vitality and exercise performance to long term wellness to longevity itself.

The benefits of deep, restorative sleep cannot be overstated. Now we covered a lot of ground here today. We explored how your diet, your lifestyle, even your environment, can either support or sabotage your sleep, Whether it's making sure you're getting the right nutrients, creating a sleep friendly environment, or managing stress effectively, there are lots of ways you can take control and improve your sleep quality. Remember, it's about progress, not perfection. Start by making small manageable changes, whether it's just adjusting your evening routine, incorporating more sleep supportive foods in your diet, cutting back on late night screen time, whatever it is, just try to do the basic things.

And I encourage you to reflect on the tips we've discussed and identify a few that resonate with you. Try implementing them consistently and see how your sleep and, ultimately, your life begins to improve. Make sure to prioritize your rest. Remember, you deserve to wake up feeling refreshed and ready to take on the day. Thanks for joining me today, and don't forget to rate, review, and follow The Doctor's Farmacy and our Health Bites wherever you get your podcast.

Stay healthy, stay informed, and I'll see you next Friday for another episode of Health Bites. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health, and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And follow me on all social media channels at doctor Mark Hyman, and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Farmacy.

For more information on today's episode, please check out my new video and audio podcast, Health Hacks. It airs every Tuesday and includes a more detailed breakdown of these Friday health bites episodes. I'm always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes, and lots more. And now you can have access to all of this information by signing up for my free Mark's Picks newsletter at doctor doctorhyman.comforward/marxpicks. I promise I'll only email you once a week on Fridays, and I'll never share your email address or send you anything else besides my recommendations.

These are the things that helped me on my health journey, and I hope they'll help you too. Again, that's doctorhyman.comforward/marxpicks. Thank you again, and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Farmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at Delta Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions and neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.

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Just go to ultra wellness center dot com. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner near you, you can visit ifn.org and search find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who's a licensed health care practitioner, and can help you make changes especially when it comes to your health. Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the general public.