3: 10 Hacks That Will Change the Way You Sleep

Michael Kummer: You're listening to the Primal Shift Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Kummer, and my goal is to help you achieve optimal health by bridging the gap between ancestral living and the demands of modern society. Get ready to unlock the transformative power of nature as the ultimate biohack, revolutionizing your health and reconnecting you with your primal self.

All right. Hello everyone to another episode of the Primal Shift. podcast. Now in this or the next couple of episodes, really, I'm going to talk about the eight primal shifts or core principles that I think make up the foundation of a healthy lifestyle. The previous episodes of this podcast were more like, you know, setting the foundation and explaining what the podcast is all about.

But now we're going to dive right in. And in this episode in particular, we're going to talk about the very foundation. of a healthy life. And that is sleep. Sleep is incredibly important, obviously, as you might know. And I used to say that if you don't sleep well, nothing else matters. That might not be entirely true because other things certainly matter.

But I firmly believe that without Quality sleep, consistent sleep, it's impossible to obtain optimal health. So in this podcast, in this episode in particular, we're going to talk about how does healthy sleep look like? What happens in your body when you sleep? What are the side effects of poor sleep? Many of which you probably already know, but there are some that might surprise you.

I'm going to share tips with you that you can implement to improve your sleep. tips you can implement today. I'm going to share with you some tools and supplements that I've found to be useful to help me improve my sleep, optimize my sleep, and to get into a consistent sleep routine. And then we're going to dispel some of the sleep myths that are sticking around and that people think that are true, but that aren't really helping with or planning optimal sleep at all.

Now, before we dive in, make sure you subscribe, you follow, you share, uh, because that really helps get the word out and help other people find this podcast. And ultimately with that, you know, you help me make more episodes and share more tips and tricks on how to improve your health. So I much appreciate it.

So let's talk about how healthy sleep looks like. Well, a healthy sleep follows a regular pattern, so you cycle through various stages of sleep throughout the night multiple times, including light sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, there might be brief periods of awakening, but the more regular Cycles are, the more regular those patterns are, the better your sleep is and the more rested you wake up in the morning.

You should also fall asleep relatively quickly, not too quick. So if your head hits the pillow and you're out, that's probably a sign that you're either sleep deprived or there's something going on. You should fall asleep within 5 to 15 minutes on average. So it shouldn't take you an hour to fall asleep.

If that happens, then there is something funky, maybe with your hormone release, with your melatonin release, or with some other things that we're going to discuss throughout this podcast. You should also be sleeping through the night. I mean, you're not a baby anymore, so you should not be waking up and staying awake for hours at night.

You should sleep through the night. And yes, of course, you know, you might wake up. You wake up regularly, in fact, but most of the time you might not remember those awakenings. They're very brief and basically just, you know, they're just a transition between the different stages of sleep. If you wake up several times a night and have trouble falling back asleep, if you're up for half an hour, an hour, then something is going on that, um, Can likely be fixed with implementing some of the tips that I'll share in this podcast with you today.

And when you wake up in the morning, you should feel rested and you should be relatively alert at least after about 30 minutes or so within the first 30 minutes, you should be ready to roll alert and full of energy. If you're still sleepy and walking around with one eye closed one hour after waking up, something is going on that probably needs to be addressed.

But if you wake up and within half an hour you feel rested and alert and ready to roll, then that's another sign of that, you know, having had a good night's rest. So what happens in your body when you sleep? Well, a lot happens when you sleep. Sleep is not just time where, you know, time wasted, where you're not doing anything, where your body isn't doing anything.

Quite the opposite is the case. There is a lot of stuff going on inside of your body when you sleep. There is, you know, all the physical repair that happens, all the cellular pruning and renewal and, and getting rid of dead and damaged cells and repairing muscle tissue, repairing, you know, any tissue in the body really that needs repair.

There is memory consolidation going on and synaptic pruning, so there's a lot of cognitive work that your body does while you sleep, in particular during REM sleep, rapid eye movement, or REM sleep is when a lot of the memory consolidation is going on, it's a very active phase of sleep where your body is doing a lot of things.

But funny enough, there are also things that your body isn't doing during REM sleep in particular. For example, your body is incapable of, of regulating its own temperatures. A thermal regulation is basically disabled during REM sleep, which, you know, is maybe one of the reasons why you might, you know, suddenly feel cold and you wake up in the second half of the night because your body has been incapable for a while during REM sleep to regulate its own temperature.

There is also a lot of. Uh, a lot of hormones that are being released leading up to sleep like melatonin and then leading up to waking up like cortisol, but also testosterone, growth hormones, all of those things are being released during certain stages of sleep. And that's why it's so important to protect those stages of sleep so that hormone release can occur because those hormones ultimately support your health, your recovery, your growth.

And many of the other things that are associated with your fertility, you know, if we talk about, you know, sex hormones, et cetera, side effects of poor sleep. I mean, many of those, you know, there are some side effects that are fairly immediate. Like if you had a bad night, you know, you wake up, you're mentally, maybe not where you should be.

You're maybe physically not very capable. You, your performance in the gym might suffer a little bit. Those are all things that are manageable. I want to say if they happen once or twice. But of course, if you have poor, chronic poor sleep over long periods, then, you know, you're going to be aging faster because all of those repair, all of those repair mechanisms that happen while you sleep are impaired.

You might suffer from cognitive decline. You know, your brain function will decline. If you don't have high quality sleep every night, your sex hormone levels or hormone levels in general are going to be out of whack. So you might have low testosterone, which can lead them to impaired weight loss, which can lead to, you know, just.

lower strength if you're, especially if you're a man, which can lead to, you know, bone density issues, which can lead to a lot of things that have to do with optimal sex hormone levels, you know, reproductive issues, etc, etc. Speaking of hormones, there are also certain hormones that are well regulated during sleep and, or that can be negatively impacted if you don't sleep well, such as your hunger hormones, ghrelin and leptin, those hormones that either tell you when you're full or that make you hungry.

And so if those levels are out of whack, then during the day, if you're sleep deprived, you are more likely or more prone to overeat and overeat in particular, the wrong types of food, you know, the high energy type of foods, you know, something that's maybe processed carbs because they provide quick energy, which is one way of the body trying to mitigate its lack of energy.

do to poor sleep. And so that makes it very difficult to lose weight. A lot of people who are struggling with losing weight have incredibly poor sleep. And that's one of the reasons why they're unable to lose weight or maintain healthy weight. If you're very likely to gain weight back quickly, it could be your diet, which is an obvious factor, but also poor sleep is the second.

most common factor that I've seen in relation to weight management and body fat and body composition in general. Poor sleep also reduces your stress resilience, so you're more likely to get stressed out, anxious, and with chronic stress and your inability to deal with that chronic stress comes a reduced immune function, so you're more likely to get sick.

So there are a lot of things that can happen to you, a lot of side effects that you might have to deal with if you're, if you sleep poorly. And so by sleeping, by not protecting your sleep, by not sleeping optimally, by not getting high quality sleep every night, you're weakening the foundation of your health.

And you know that, that's not new. So let's talk about some of the things that you can do to improve your sleep. And one of the overarching principles of good sleep is protecting your sleep. And by protecting your sleep means doing everything you can to maintain a consistent sleep and wake time. That consistency has been the number one factor in my life that I've noticed that has helped me dramatically to improve my sleep and to wake up rested and energetic most days doesn't happen all the time because life comes in a way.

I'm not perfect. I'm doing stupid stuff all the time. That's then, you know, impacts me negatively in one way or the other, but maintaining a consistent sleep and wake time is one of the most powerful tools you have in your arsenal. to improve the quality of your sleep. And the reason behind that is because your circadian rhythms, your circadian rhythm is the clock that's built into every cell of your body.

So every cell in your body follows a predefined rhythm and the Better that circadian rhythm is working, the better you sleep. Because hormone release, melatonin in the evening, cortisol in the morning, and many, many other things all go based on that circadian rhythm or happen based on that circadian rhythm.

And the better you maintain a consistent sleep and wake time, the more in line everything works with that circadian rhythm and the better you sleep. And so, You know, I used to be, and I'm still am, that guy that, you know, when there is an, you know, when I still had my day job and, you know, after a conference or trade show, you know, everyone would go out for dinner and then, you know, have drinks and go to the club or whatever.

I was the one going to bed because I wanted to maintain a relatively consistent bed and wake time to perform optimally the next day and the next day and the next day and to stay as healthy as I possibly could. So, Be that guy because, and know that you're not the only person doing that. There are many, many other people out there who go to bed roughly at the same time and wake up at the same time.

And by that, I mean, within an hour, ideally within half an hour, but you know, try to go to bed roughly within an hour at the same time every day and wake up roughly at the same time every day, it does wonders to your sleep. And it's this one of the easiest things you can implement. It doesn't cost you any money.

The next one is to expose yourself to natural sunlight early in the morning and throughout the day. And the importance of that is that the sunlight, when it hits your retina, it directly influences your circadian rhythm. It supports your circadian rhythm and it supports the release of those hormones that follow that circadian rhythm.

And so what I do when I walk the dog in the morning and the sun is just above the horizon, I stare directly into the sun for about five minutes. Of course, you don't want to do that if it feels uncomfortable, if it's, if it hurts. Don't do it. Look right next to the sun, like as an offset, but if it feels comfortable and usually early morning sun does look directly into the sun for about five minutes, and that does wonders to how quickly you will fall asleep in the evening and how good your sleep will be that following night.

And then during the day, I try to expose myself again to natural sunlight. I take my shirt off, go in the backyard, and I try to, you know, get not only the sunlight into my eyes, which is the most important aspect, but also onto my skin. And by doing so, I sleep much better. I've proven it over and over again.

My wife has as well. If we expose ourselves to sunlight, we sleep better, period. If we don't do it, we sleep. not quite as good and it's repeatable every single time. Speaking of light in the evening and in particular after sunset, try to reduce your exposure to artificial chunk light. Back in the days, you know, humans, when there was no sun and before the discovery of how to use fire and how to start a fire, you know, there was, there was no light going on after sunset, obviously, but even You know, the light from fire, you know, burning wood or whatever, the frequencies you get from there don't contain a lot of blue and green light frequencies that disrupt your sleep.

They're actually conducive to good sleep. So try to expose yourself to those reds, deep reds and orange colors, and not so much to the greens and to the blues by, you know, either getting bulbs that are, have a warmer light. By, you know, turning off your phone or switching, changing the screen color to red, by, you know, doing the same on your computer, by just trying to reduce your exposure to artificial light.

If you do that, then you're good to go and you don't have to worry about, you know, wearing blue light blocking glasses or something like this. We'll talk about it in a little bit, but just reducing your exposure really, really helps. The next thing is also leading up to bedtime, really try to protect the last few hours before going to bed.

And by protecting, I mean, don't expose yourself to anything that might upset you or make you anxious or make you angry. So don't look at your social media feed. Don't watch the news in the evening. Don't start a discussion with your spouse. Don't do any of the things that might lead to anxiety or stress because that usually means you're going to be thinking about it before going to bed and that disrupts your sleep onset.

At least it does for me and it does for everyone I've talked to. So stay away from anything that might upset you. And the easiest way to do that is to put down your phone, get off your phone, get off social media, most importantly, and enjoy family time, read a book, you know, journal, do whatever it takes, take a walk, but don't do something that will cause or lead to racing thoughts before going to bed.

Keep your bedroom cold and dark. And hopefully free of electronics. That's a no brainer. You probably know that already. If you want to fall asleep quickly, and if you want to sleep well, you know, darkness is your friend. Cold temperatures are your friend. Your body needs, the core temperature of your body needs to go down by about two degrees Fahrenheit before you can sleep.

So anything you can do to support that reduction in core temperature is beneficial. And two of the things you can actually do that might sound counterintuitive is to take a hot shower or a hot bath or jump into the sauna. before going to bed because exposing yourself to those high temperatures dilates your blood vessels and that in turn helps your body dissipate heat quicker and reduces core temperature quicker than if you don't do those.

So it sounds counterintuitive, but it actually works. Take a hot shower, jump into the sauna, take a hot bath before going to bed and you'll fall asleep quicker. Avoid large meals. And that's something that I sometimes violate myself, but eating a lot of food before going to bed is a bad idea and a recipe for not being able to fall asleep because your stomach is working hard and digesting.

And even though, you know, when you go to sleep and relax, rest and digest your parasympathetic branch is the one that's supposed to be active at that time, but you can overdo it. If your stomach is too full, your body needs to work really hard at digesting. So I would give it best case scenario, four hours between your last meal and bedtime.

to ensure your stomach is empty and you can fall asleep without any issues. Again, if you need to eat late, I would recommend having a small meal, something that's easily digestible and eating them the next morning, you know, and there is also nothing wrong with fasting. If you come home late, You don't need to eat, you know, you'll be perfectly fine skipping that meal and sleeping better.

If you are on a business trip and you, you know, you're out with your boss and you have to eat and there is nothing you can do to avoid having that late meal, then I would actually wait a little bit before you go to bed to help your body digest. It'll probably help you fall asleep quicker then. Don't consume caffeine in the afternoon.

I mean, I know many people think that all coffee doesn't. you know, harm them that does, doesn't impact them. It does. Caffeine impacts everyone to varying degrees. Obviously you can be more or less sensitive to caffeine, but everyone is impacted. And so by consuming caffeine in the afternoon, it's a recipe for less than optimal sleep.

Period. So I typically consume my last cup of coffee and I have one or two, usually before 10 a. m. So anything later, and I can tell that it impacts my sleep, even if it's only a tiny bit, but it does. Avoid alcohol, as you know, we talk about it in the myths, but alcohol might help you fall asleep, but it is disruptive for the rest of the night.

It impacts your REM sleep, it impacts your deep sleep, it does, it's not conducive to high quality sleep, so avoiding alcohol. Before bedtime at least, give it a couple of hours if you want to have a glass of wine or whatever and your sleep will thank you. So those are some of the tips that you can use.

Now there are, you know, not everything is, is easy to implement for everyone every single day. And there are certain, there are circumstances where, you know, those things you might not be under your control, like when you're traveling. And so I want to give you a couple of tools and supplements that have helped me to optimize my sleep.

They are not meant to replace a consistent sleep and wake time or consistent sleep routine and proper sleep hygiene, but they can help you mitigate some of those issues as they come up along the way. And one is, and that's actually something we are doing regularly, is to supplement with magnesium. I'm going to link down in the show notes.

not only the tools and supplements that I can recommend, but also more resources about sleep, hygiene, and improving sleep quality and stuff overall, so check those out if you want to learn more. But magnesium is one of the things, it's a de stressor, it helps you reduce your body, deal with stress better, and that helps with sleep.

We take magnesium pretty much every night before going to bed, and we've seen it dramatically improves how well we sleep. A bed cooling system, that's probably the number one thing that I would recommend for Everyone, because temperature control or temperature plays such an important is such an important factor in the quality of our sleep, that having a bad cooling system that maintains the appropriate temperature based on this stage of sleep we're in is incredibly powerful.

And so there used to be, there are a couple of difference. Bad cooling systems on the market. I have a detailed blog post comparing all of them. My favorite, there are two ones that I kind of recommend. One is the one that we are using right now is the Dock Pro by SleepMe, formerly known as Chili Sleep.

Unfortunately, the company seems to be out of business or about to be out of business, so can't really recommend buying it. And it's, you can't buy it. And I mean, right now, anyway, because everything has been out of stock for months. Aidsleep is another one that I, we really like great technology and everything.

We also have that at home. And that has made a significant impact on the quality of our sleep. In terms of stress management and calming down, tactile stimulation, like, you know, Apollo Neuroscience is one of those devices that we use a lot to help us cope with stress and to make us more resilient to stress.

And that has also helped me a lot to improve the quality of my sleep and help me fall asleep when I have racing thoughts, or I think about, okay, what is, you know, the script about my next podcast episode or whatever. So Apollo is a great tool sauna or hot shower before going to bed. I mentioned it before blue light blocking glasses.

If you have issues. Mitigating your exposure to blue lights in the evening. So wear glasses, um, very effective. Uh, I have a review of the ones that I used on. I'm going to link it down below. Turn your iPhone into the screen to red. And by that, I don't mean the night shift that Apple has, because that's pretty much useless, but you can really turn the screen to red.

It's in the, um, I'm going to link down below a blog post where I describe the steps to take, where you can just. You know, side click three or, you know, click on that side button three times and your screen turns red. That takes out all of the blue and green frequencies and, you know, from that light spectrum that can also help you fall asleep.

There are certain light bulbs that mimic like the lights, the, you know, sunset light kind of that are less, have fewer blue and green frequencies. Those are, you can use in your bedroom maybe. journal, you know, or just brain dump. That's one of the most effective tools that before going to bed and I have stuff on my mind, I write it down.

Whatever is on paper, I know that I don't have to think about. And so I kind of transfer it from my head onto paper and pick it up tomorrow. And it really helps me fall asleep quicker. You know, you can have decaf tea, there are certain teas that are helpful, like maybe chamomile or essential oils, just stay away from lavender, which is a popular like stress relief kind of um, you know, essential oil because it's estrogenic, we're going to talk about in an upcoming episode what that means and why that's bad, so lavender I'm not a fan of, but other essential oils that help you calm down and relax are useful.

Melatonin, I almost didn't want to mention because it's been abused, you know, melatonin is a hormone and In the body, whenever you introduce a hormone exogenously, meaning that you, you know, an exogenous version of that hormone, you get it into your body from the outside, it usually suppresses your body's own production of that hormone.

So if you supplement with melatonin every day, then your body stops producing melatonin. Not a good thing. But melatonin can be useful in small doses. I'm talking about maybe max one or two milligrams, usually even less. When you, you know, travel across time zones, when you need to adjust your circadian rhythm, you know, those are the times when I leverage melatonin to adjust my circadian rhythm and, you know, fall asleep at a certain time or get sleepy at a certain time, but it's not something you want to use chronically.

Last, before we wrap it up, let's talk about some of the myths associated with sleeping. And one of the, I think, most prevalent ones is that, oh, I don't need a lot of sleep. I am fine with five, six hours of sleep or even less. It's bullshit. You know, I hate to break it to you. You're not working optimally with less than seven hours of sleep.

You know, obviously you can compensate for some of that in the short term. Yes, I've, you know, when I came back from a trip or whatever, and I worked out, I performed very well in the gym. I was, you know, I can function. Very well on, on few hours of sleep temporarily, but I'm not functioning as I would with enough sleep.

And so less than seven hours for most everyone on this planet on a chronic basis is not going to work, is not going to lead to optimal health. You know, no matter what you're trying to tell yourself, you cannot get by with five hours of sleep every day. You're going to suffer. You might not notice the way you're suffering.

You might think you're doing well, just because you don't know how it really feels to be completely rested. I thought for most of my life for two decades or more that I feel really good. I'm healthy until I actually felt really good. And I'm like, holy moly, for two decades of my life, I felt Less than good.

And I thought it was good. So you need at least seven hours of sleep, you know, on a consistent basis and sleep that that's the other thing, you know, it doesn't go away. So even if you say, you know what, Monday through Friday, I'm going to get by with five hours. And then on the weekend I sleep eight, you know, sleep that, you know, accumulates, you know, if you are three hours short every day.

times five, that's 15 hours. You're not going to make that up on the weekend. That sleep debt does not go away just because you want it to. The second thing is we talked about it briefly before, alcohol helps with sleep. It, it might help you fall asleep because it's a sedative, but when alcohol gets metabolized, it actually acts as a stimulant or the metabolites are stimulating.

And so that negatively impacts your deep sleep or your REM sleep, depending on when you drink. And so now alcohol doesn't, is not conducive to good sleep, no matter how you spin it, you will, your sleep quality will suffer if you drink before going to bed. Being on your phone helps you fall asleep. That's, and you know, even my, my, my wife says, Oh, but reading, you know, some stuff before going to bed, you know, helps me fall asleep.

Here's the thing. If you need your phone. If you need to fall asleep or if you need your phone first thing in the morning or both, you're addicted. Something is wrong with you. It'll break it to you. You do not need your phone to fall asleep, you know, but if you feel like you do, that's a sign of an addiction and you need to break the cycle.

And what I've done, and, and I am not ex. Taking myself out from that, you know, I'm not, you know, I wasn't that same situation where I used to look at my phone last thing before going to bed or before falling asleep and first thing in the morning. And at one point I realized I feel like I need this. And whenever I feel like I need something, it's a sign for me that I have to stop doing this.

Because it's not good. And so I put my phone away. Now it goes at around, you know, 6pm, maybe it goes into my office, it goes into airplane mode. And it's, I'm done, you know, I'm not gonna look at my phone right before going to bed. And I'm not gonna look at my phone first thing in the morning. And guess what, I fall asleep just fine, you know, and I wake up just fine.

I don't need my phone. You don't need your phone. It's it's a crutch, basically, that's like a pacifier for a baby, you know, there is a time when it's, you know, to Remove it. And same as goes with the phone. Caffeine. I talked about it before. Yes. Caffeine does impact you having a coffee after dinner or with dinner is a very bad idea unless you want to have less than optimal sleep.

The other thing that I hear a lot is, Oh, it's okay to cut sleep short. You know, if you can work out in the morning instead, because you know, exercise is important and yes, it is important, but it's not more important than sleep. Don't cut your sleep short to go work out. Not bad idea. Don't do it. Sleep is more important than exercise.

Sleep aids and melatonin. I talked about melatonin already briefly. Sleep aids are real sleeping pills. They don't help you sleep well. They knock you out. They make you unconscious basically, but they don't, they are not conducive to optimal sleep. You're not going to get your REM and your deep sleep that you need if you're in sleep.

Sleep aids. If you need sleep aids, you know, you need to fix some of those other things we talked about before to get optimal sleep without needing any of that. Now, melatonin again is an exception. If you're traveling, if, you know, we change daylight savings time or whatever, and you need to help adjustment, melatonin is fine for a short period in low doses, but nothing that you want to take consistently and periodically.

Now with that, we're going to wrap it up. Before I let you go again, I want to, you know, shout out to MK Supplements. That's the brand that I launched, uh, now I think two years ago, we produce, uh, grass fed, grass finished, beef organ supplements, the best sources of micronutrients like vitamins and minerals and MK Supplements helps me make this podcast happen.

So I have to thank. My own brand for, you know, supporting my effort here from, uh, for, for paying for some of the time that I invest in making this podcast. So thank you very much. Check it out. I'm going to link it down below, including a discount code. If you want to try out MK supplements, which would be highly appreciated, you know, you directly support this channel here, this podcast.

Check out the description to show notes. And with that, we're going to wrap it up. I'm going to see you at the next episode. We're going to talk about the second primal shift that's super important for optimal health. So stay tuned.