¶ Road Trip Intro And Big Questions
All right, I'm here on the road in LA with the famous Sean Stevenson. Yep, sleep smarter, man. That's what started your whole gig, man. I'm excited to be here with this conversation.
Yeah, me too. Thank you for coming to hang out.
Yeah, man. We're gonna we're gonna learn how to sleep smarter, but we're gonna learn about relationships and health, which I can't wait to have that conversation because there's I have so many intriguing uh questions about that, because I believe most people watching this will say, Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm healthy, I'm healthy. But wait a minute. If relationships affect health, maybe you're not as healthy as you think, and people live longer with relationships. So we're gonna have that conversation.
But okay, man, let's start here, right? You know, how did you end up in this field, bro? I mean, like, you know, you ended up here for a reason. I want to hear the reason. I love to start the stories because pain to purpose is the name of my podcast.
Oh, that fits me perfectly. Yeah. So tell me.
¶ A Hip Break Changes Everything
It was not my intention to be working in the health space. You know, I grew up um with aspirations of playing sports, you know, just kind of like a neighborhood superstar. And um, you know, I went to a uh kind of a high-performing um high school as far as like churning out college athletes. So everything was looking good. But something really interesting happened when I was 15. I ran a 4540 right before the season, the season. But in track practice, I was doing a 200-meter time trial.
So that's like half of the track. So people understand how many people can actually run a 4540. It's not many. Okay, how many people in the NFL? That's a that's an NFL time, you know. Like we're talking cornerbacks, running bags, wide receivers. The fastest run back. Yeah. And so again, I was just 15 when I ran a 4-5. But at track practice, running the 200-meter time trial, coming off the curve into the straightaway, my hip broke. It broke. My hip broke, my iliac crest. Avascular necrosis broke?
It just the iliac crest, the tip of my hip just broke. And there was no other like I thought I maybe I pulled a muscle or hamstring or something.
And they didn't say you had something called avascular necrosis.
Of course not. Okay. I got an x-ray done like days later, and the it was actually a physical therapist that I went to see, and he put the scan up and was like, Oh, that's the issue. That's why you're limping. You know, so is the bone just kind of broke off. Wow. And nobody stopped to ask how. Yeah. This is the whole point.
That's where my brain's going right now. That shouldn't happen. Exactly.
A kid running, breaking his hip, that should never happen. Right. But I was exposed to standard of care. Right. And so I went to a physician who referred me to a physical therapist, which the physical therapist did treatment for me, which was great. Little ultrasound, little he brought he gave me a portable whirlpool to attach to my bathtub. Right. I remember those. You know, yeah. So, you know. That was kind of like an 80s thing.
But also just a little sidebar, ultrasound, you know, using sound as a treatment, right? And there's so many studies on this now. But anyway, so the crazy thing was, you know, being a young guy and you know, pretty healthy, I got I got better. But again, nobody stopped to ask how this happened to a kid. Fast forward, half a dozen more injuries. I could not stay healthy.
I've got game film at my house right now from decades ago where I break away on, you know, maybe a you know, a 39 sweep and I beat the safety, but then I just fall because I tore something or just my body was falling apart. Wow. And it wasn't until I was 20 years old when I got diagnosed with degenerative disc disease and uh degenerative bone disease.
¶ Degenerative Diagnosis And Nocebo Spiral
Basically, my bone density was so low and my spine was deteriorating. Yeah.
And so and they would have found it when you were 15 if they'd asked the question, why did that break?
Yeah, yeah. But you know, standard of care. Here's so here's some meds. Yeah, stay off the leg. I was happy to get out of class early, you know, because I had the crutches. I could take the school elevator, you know, and I just I didn't question anything. And so, with this diagnosis, what brought me into the physician then was just this kind of nuisance of a pain, sciatic pain. At again, I'm 20 years old when this is happening.
Yeah. And I get the MRI done for this, two herniated disc, L4, L5, S1. And you don't remember injuring your back? No, there was no trauma, there was none of that. Right. No, no. I from the outside I looked healthy, but I'm gonna tell you exactly why that happened to me. And so in this experience, I saw my physician and I asked him, okay, so how do I get better? You know, so what do I gotta do to fix this?
Because I was used to working with my coaches and you know, and he literally he kind of put his hand on my shoulders like, you know, I'm sorry, son, this is you have degenerative disc disease. Yeah, this is incurable.
Yeah, you're unlucky.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And for some reason, I asked him again, I was like, okay, so but what do I do to like get better though? You know, like should and this was the part that I still to this day, and I can try to rationalize why I said it, but I asked him, does this have anything to do with what I'm eating? Should I change the way I'm exercising? I was just kind of excited because I knew, okay, this is why my leg is acting funny. And he looked at me like I was from another planet.
He said, This has nothing to do with what you're eating, this is something that just happens. And I'm sorry that it happened to you, right? So abandoning laws of physics in our universe, you know, just like there's causality. If you don't know the answer, don't just say this just happens. Yeah. But I didn't know that at the time. And so I left there.
But his whole paradigm was based on you're you're unlucky. I mean, any condition, you're just unlucky. Yeah. And it might be your genes, that's how unlucky you are.
Exactly. Yeah. But I left there heartbroken, you know, because now I came in there aspirational. Yeah. And I left there with I have this incurable condition. And I went from a nuisance of a pain to within a couple of weeks, debilitating chronic pain. And it got to the point where I couldn't even stand up without this stupid just I don't even I can't even explain the word. It's a terrifying electric shock would go down my leg every time I stood up. And so I stopped standing up.
I sat as much as I could for the next two years. And real really fast, did you uh believe him at that point because he's the doctor? You're talking about the nocebo effect. Yes, of course. You know, and it we know this now. There's I know the the mother of uh mindfulness um research, Dr. Ellen Langer, she sat right there in that chair, and she's the first woman to receive tenure in psychology at Harvard, has been running these experiments for years. Yeah, and our minds are so powerful.
And placebos, you know, just when we have a randomized control, plus a randomized placebo control trial, gold standard, yeah. We have to account for that because placebos are effective across the board on average, they're about 33% effective. And we're talking about everything from you know, uh supporting with depression to cancer treatments to you know healing meniscus, the list goes on and on. It's incredible.
I mean your belief could heal you, but no SIBO means your belief could make you sick.
Exactly. And and by the way, that's why, again, they have double blind trials, because if someone's they're getting headaches, oh, they're getting, and then every all of a sudden you have 30 to 40 percent of the people getting headaches, you know, even no, they it wasn't physiological. Right, yep.
So it's getting a negative injunction that something bad is gonna happen, or you know, you're never gonna walk again, this is permanent, those types of things. And what her research indicated, what she shared with me later, was that it is especially powerful when it's coming from an authority figure. Oh, yeah. Right. And so somebody that you believe has the answer, they know I don't know. It just penetrates deeper into your psychology. And so, you know, having this nocebo effect take hold.
Again, I was on all the different medications that I could get. Uh at the time Celebrex was popping, that was like one of my main ones, but I barely missed Viox, right? And that whole debacle that happened with Viox, I was a prescription pad away because I would have just taken whatever. And by the way, Viox ended up uh taking the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and many of them young people, right? And so I was just looking to get out of pain.
And like I said, this went on for two years.
And did they put you on any um osteoporosis drugs as well? That no, just the just the pain.
Okay, just just pain management. And um, so, anyways, two years go by, not getting up as much as I can. So, what do you think happened? I probably gained a lot of weight. And your bones got weaker, actually. And I got weaker. It wasn't just my spine that was atrophying, now everything else was.
And everything changed, and just bringing us to you know how I got here today, I saw, which I recommend everybody always get, especially if we get a bad diagnosis like that, get a second opinion, at least. Yeah. But now I add to that, maybe somebody who has a different thinking than the first physician who told you that there's no solution.
Now, were you thinking, hey, surgery on these discs, right? You know, get I yeah, I mean sciatica. I mean, were they recommending maybe surgery or not yet?
Or what I would have done whatever they recommended to get out of pain. I was terrified of the pain.
So they were they weren't even saying you you need surgery at this point on these discs.
I was a candidate because I was so young, uh-huh, and just who I happened to interact with as far as these physicians, they weren't jumping right to surgery, but they definitely brought it up.
Yeah, okay.
And so again, it each time I see a different um physician, I leave there with a different medication and uh basically a Yeah, you were on the treadmill. A prescription to not go to work. In your 20s on the uh the medical treadmill, basically, yeah. And I'm trying to get my degree at the time. I'm in college and I go from like a 15 credit low to 12 to 9. I'm barely I'm hanging on with one class. I'm embarrassed to walk around campus. Like my leg is not working right, I'm in chronic pain.
Gosh. And all of that changed after seeing the final physician that I went to and him telling
¶ Deciding To Get Well Again
me the same thing. I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do. And I was at home, sitting on my mattress, which was on the floor in Ferguson, Missouri. And I was just, and this is I'm being honest with you, I was thinking about that physician that he's at home probably right now. I had this like grandiose picture. He's sitting around a table with his happy family. There's a fire going in the background, they're like past the mashed potatoes. He's living his life, he's not thinking about me.
No, I'm sitting here suffering by myself, and I giving my power away to him. He told me I can't get better. That started fire in you. It started firing me, and something came right into my mind, and this is speaking to the what we're gonna talk about today. It was it was a relationship, it was my grandmother. And she had been calling and checking on me this whole time, and I would always be like, I'm fine, grandma, like you know, me, mom fine.
Typical grandma, you know, but she knew I wasn't fine, yeah, and she invested so much in me, and she she I believed that I was gonna change the world, you know, because of her implanting that in me so young. And here I was, I'd given up. I'd given up. And she sense that of course. But the reason that I gave up was because of the environment that I was in. I had to fight every day, you know, the stuff that I was going to just in my environment to survive.
You know, like literally, you can go out my door and you know, get shot, you know. And so there's a lot to fight against, and this gave me a permission slip to stop fighting. But that wasn't who I was born to be. And so she came rushing into my mind, and in a split second, I decided to get well. That's a huge thing right there. I decided. And when you make a real decision about something, you cut away the possibility of anything else.
And here's the thing it wasn't like I'm gonna this is gonna be this miraculous thing. I literally was like, I decided I'm gonna do what it takes to feel better. And so I changed this habitual question in my mind for those past two years, every day was why me? Why me? Why is this happening to me? Why is this happening to me? Why won't anybody help me? And it was this victim, and I'm just finding stuff in my environment to affirm what my habitual question is.
There's a particular activating system in your brain finds the things to affirm that.
And so this is like my dominant question. So for the first time, I asked, what can I do to feel better? First time in two years. And that night, I slept through the night, which was rare. You know, I was on all these medications that helped me sleep at night as well. So pain and sleep medications. And I slept through the night and I woke up excited. And so what I did was what I knew how to do, which was just I was being logical, I was like, okay, my spine is not doing well.
Let me take some of this weight off of my spine, the pressure. So let me lose weight and let me go to the gym. And I was in pain. So I started off on the elliptical, or I'm sorry, stationary bike, just pedaling was hard. The next week I felt a little bit a little bit better. I did some elliptical, I was walking around the track a little bit. The week after that, I started tinkering with some weights. And that was part one, moving again. Part two was I changed the way that I was eating.
At the time, and this is where the problem really lies for me personally, and this is affirmed in JAMA, you know, a study on children, 20-year study, finding that uh children in the United States, upwards, it's getting close to 70% of their diet is 70. I'm sorry, it's ultra-processed food. And so, as you know, there are outliers on both sides. I was in the more of the 90 to 95% ultra-processed foods. That's how I grew up.
Wow. All right, so an average day is like a bowl of some sugary cereal or donuts or mini muffins, big old glass of orange juice, orange juice, yeah, milk. Then for lunch, I'm getting fast food, whether it's like ultra-processed milk, White Castles, uh, McDonald's, Long John Silvers, and then for dinner, you know, again, it's fast food again. Usually like Chinese food was very cheap. And I'm not talking about a nice Chinese restaurant.
I'm talking about bulletproof glass, yeah, yeah, you know, passing through fried rice, best soda.
Bulletproof glass. I'm dead serious.
This is where I grew up. That's what I was gonna say. Yeah, I was like, I didn't I didn't have a Chinese restaurant where I grew up with bulletproof glass.
I gathered that's where you grew up. Yeah.
So, but if I didn't have like a couple of dollars to get these things, which was very cheap, of course, already, I'd have like ramen noodles at home. Yeah.
I could packs. I did a I did an Instagram with ramen noodles. I mean, it's it's not even food, bro. I mean, it's like it's the furthest thing back.
That flavor packet. That flavor packet can like power jets. I mean, how possible. I wonder what would happen if you put that into a plant.
I would yeah, I would kill it. Um I call you a three percenter. And I there was a study done some years ago about people who changed the world, people who overcome cancer, people who extraordinary things. And the turn of the century, uh, the Revolutionary War, they they they named them three percenters. These are the people who said, uh, I'd rather fight and die for our my honor. I'm gonna fight for the country, that live or die. Here we go, right? Three percent did that, right?
It's like so they became known as three percenters. But in this thing, they they interviewing thousands of people, and they all had one thing in common with all three percenters. Okay, they made a decision, and that's what you said. I said, finally we made a decision. So all these people, and and I I made a decision one day when I was sick too. It's like, you know what? I I'm I'm going to, and then just fill in the blanks. I'm gonna fight, I'm gonna figure this out, right?
Because I went through feeling sorry for myself too, and angry and the whole thing, right? But you made a decision. So I want people to hear that. Don't let that slip under the rug because everyone right now, despite your condition, can make a decision to make your life better, whatever that may be, and may even be healed. So you made a decision, and here we
¶ Ditching Ultra Processed Food
are. So the diet decision, you realized, you know, I mean, okay, growing up though, it's kind of all you knew. So how did you come to the conclusion that this is a bad diet? This might be even part of the problem. How did you come to that conclusion? I'm lost a lot.
It was relationships again. Uh-huh. It was relationships again. Um at the time, I've been like kind of going out with this girl that I see every now and then, and she was a grown woman.
Oh, what did she see in you, bro? I don't see it. You know, it's like you're you're broken down, you're overweight, you're gonna feel sorry for yourself. I mean, now you're you're transitioning out then, you became a little more attractive.
What did she see in me? Ah, something in you, yeah. So, no, she saw me. Your real identity. No, I don't know. I don't know. She, you know, again, I I had some qualities that, you know, that were attractive. Right.
And so that was that was your real identity. It was just buried.
She she somehow saw that.
Yeah, maybe there's like a subtle Bruce Lee, Bruce Leroy glow. All right.
Or maybe she spoke to your grandma. I'm just saying.
So, anyway, so she was in chiropractic school, and I just thought she was super weird. I went to uh get together with her and her chiropractor friends one time, and they're all like doing adjustments on each other. And having a spine problem, this was an interesting for you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but it was I didn't think about that. I didn't think about my spine issue in relationship to anything they were doing. Yeah. Okay. I just thought it was weird.
I thought the food there was weird, and I just kind of wanted to get out of there. But once I had this revelation, now I'm seeing things that I had seen that had been there the whole time. She took me to Wild Oats, which has since been bought by Whole Foods, where it's like this little kind of mom and pop more like and um they had like wheatgrass shots and you know, all these different supplements. And I went over to the book section, and there was a book, Nutrition Prescription.
It's like this really thick book, and I went to my condition, degenerative disc disease. And there were studies, yeah, right. And so again, I being in school and being like a researcher, and you know, I had actually taken nutritional science, which is the craziest part. Yeah, you learn about vitamin A, B, C, D, you know, it was it had no relevance to me as a human being, you know, what I was learning. Even biology was just kind of like we're studying a cell without context.
And so when we're looking at the cell, we're looking at food, right? Our the nutrients we eat makes that nucleus. Sure. You know, the our our menu makes the membrane in the mitochondria. Yeah, right. But and so this created a context, and I was like, oh, this study found that omega-3 deficiency dramatically increases the risk of degeneration in the spine and hips. And I was like, that's me. My spine, my broke my. And then you asked the question, what's omega-3? That's it.
And where am I getting it? Where am I getting it? Or not? So I start to take all these different supplements, right? So I became a natural pill popper, all right? And I felt better. Don't get me wrong. And I started to eventually very closely, because of my college lack of funds, how can I get these in food? Right. And so I started to search for these things in foods. And I was not getting this on my, you know, fast food, my drive-thru diet. We'll call it a drive-thru diet.
Yeah, that's a good name. And once I started to eat all these really higher quality foods, and this is a true story, as I'm sitting here looking at you now. I didn't eat a salad until I was 25. That was the first time I ate a salad in my life. All right. So I ate the vegetables that I would eat, which was like green beans, broccoli. Brought from a can. The green beans for the fruit. I was getting fresh broccoli, though. Now I'm going to Whole Foods.
And, you know, and now I'm making smoothies and like blending stuff to get these nutrients into my body, right? And so Is this girl still in your life? No, no. Okay. All right, all right. So I didn't know how compressed it. My wife don't even need to hear this part. Like, there was no life before her. Okay. So this let's just keep that, just bleep that whole part. So that was that was number one was movement. Number two was my changing my nutrition.
And the third thing was once I started sleeping well, I got better so fast. To tie all this together, it was about six weeks to the day when I made that decision. Uh and this is not typical, but I tend to be thinner. You know, I was like the skinny kid in my family. That weight just flew off me. I was getting close to 200 pounds.
Oh wow.
And I had dropped somewhere around like 18 pounds in you know, about a month and a half, almost two months. And the pain that I'd been experiencing every day of my life for two years, I had me terrified to get up, it was gone. Now, I'm sure I didn't get to share this with you, but I was so scared for it to come back. I was doing everything so cautiously. I had to train my mind to be okay doing things again and stop searching for that pain to show up and accept that I was okay.
And so with this transformation, a couple of months go by and people start coming up to me at my university. One of my teachers stopped me on the way out of class. He was like, Sean, can I talk to you for a minute? I'm like, what the fuck? What did I do? You know? And he um he was like, So what did you do? And I was like, What what do you mean? He was like, You look so good. And I was like, Oh, like, and I started talking about how you know I changed my my practices.
And he became one of my clients. I got certified as a personal trainer, started working at the university gym as I continued to get my degree. And so friends, um colleagues, I'm sorry, um, professors, faculty, students, these are all my database really of expiration. And I got to work with people from all over the world, which is such a blessing. And my this is something else I don't talk about this often.
I want to share this with you for some reason, but I was very Before this happened, I was very self-centered. Um, because of the environment that I was in, like I I was I had to watch my compensation mechanism, right? And so, but I didn't know I was. Yeah. And so that experience really kind of just cracked me open.
Yeah. And once I made this change from like being so self-centered to so focused on how can I help this person, like I didn't know that changing my physical health would change my mental health so much in my in the way that I thought. So, you know, just to put the cherry on top.
I call that an identity shift. You know, it's like growing up, you didn't know, you didn't know your true identity at that point. Oftentimes it takes a pain, if you will, to really for us to find and step into that identity. Some people don't ever. You did with that decision that you made that day. But then you started realizing, you know, who you really are, who God created you to really be. And then that's when the joy starts. Yeah.
That's when the real life starts. You know, when you when something heals and you truly heal, you kind of forget about it. So my sleep trubles were just something of the past. I didn't think about it for years. And as after I graduated and I opened up my office and I'm working with people every day, and people are getting great results.
¶ From Client Results To Sleep Focus
You know, we're, you know, working with people all kind all manner of different health conditions. But one of the biggest things people are coming in for was weight loss. And most people were getting the results that they were looking for, but there was this percentage of people that would ironically kind of keep me up at night sometimes thinking about like what is going on? Like, why why? And the tendency is to blame, right? So I'm I start blaming them. They must not be. Right.
And finally, after about five years in practice, I started asking people about their sleep. And it got me back to remembering like, if you're not, if you're not sleeping well, you're not healing well. And how quickly I got well when I was able to sleep. This is when and how my sleep improved accidentally was the things that you do that you do during the day help you to sleep better at night.
And so helping people, and we talked about this before the show, I knew that these individuals wanted change, but they didn't want to change that much. And so I looked into the data like what are some science-backed things that people can do in their lives to improve their sleep quality without having to turn their lives upside down. And once we employed those things, people's blood sugar finally normalized.
Yes, their weight finally came off, their blood pressure normalized, their hypertension, their skin cleared up. Yeah. Right? All of these unusual things started to happen when I started helping people to sleep better.
And that's what led to this book, right? Sleep Smarter, which I mean, this this book has been a hit, still is. I mean, people, you know, I can't tell you how many people. Oh, have you read Sleep Smarter? That was before, you know, I even knew your name, man. But okay, so a lot of those principles that you learned fell into this book. So let's talk about the heart of the book. Um, you kind of already are tapping into some of it right there. Um, I think you said something really smart.
People want to sleep more or better, but yet they don't want to change certain things, right? My wife, uh yeah, I want to sleep better. Yeah, I'm like, well, stop looking at your phone every night she looks at her phone, right? And it's like, now finally, uh, one of her trainers said, All right, just do me a favor. For one month, wear the glass if you're gonna look at your phone. I I've been telling her that forever. But so people don't want to change. You can't be a prophet in your own land.
Exactly. You know that. You know that you know what I learned. I just I just I just learned to pray for, and you know, she probably does the same thing for me, and then watch God change. Somebody will show up. Someone'll show up, and that's what happened. But anyway, so talk about that because I think that's some of the brilliance of the book, too, is this you're making these things simple. And you already said what you do in the during the day affects your sleep at night.
Yeah. So the first iteration of Sleep Smarters came about 12, 13 years ago now. And at the time, this was still a fringe thing. Publishing didn't, you know, sleep wellness books didn't do well.
Yeah, it's 12 years ago.
Yeah, and so it's changed dramatically. I'm so grateful for that. And it's because, and why I focused on it and really pushed through to make this book a success was I knew that it was a missing
¶ Why Sleep Loss Burns Muscle
part of the health conversation. So much happens during sleep that simply there's no supplement, there's no exercise, there's no therapy, it simply cannot be replaced. It's so powerful. And so what I did was I started off finding connective tissue. Like, why would somebody want to actually focus on sleeping better? Because the cultural uh mantra is like I'll sleep when I'm dead, you know, like and we have this Joe, you know, Joe.
I mean, I'm sorry, FOMO, fear of missing out, it's all this stuff to do. And so I came across some research, for example, from the University of Chicago, and they were looking at, and this is a ward study, right? So they have people in like basically locked in and monitoring how their sleep impacts weight loss, in particular fat loss.
And so they put them on a calorie-restricted diet, and in one phase of the study, and this is a crossover study, so participants are experiencing both parts, both aspects of the trial. One aspect, eight and a half hours of sleep, track their results with their weight loss. Another phase of the study, they sleep deprived them. Take away three hours of sleep, five and a half hours of sleep on on average per night. After compiling all the data, when individuals were sleep deprived, they lost 55%.
Let me say that again. Flip it. When individuals were well rested, they lost 55% more body fat. I didn't say weight, actual fat mass. All right. On the other side, when individuals were sleep deprived, where the weight was coming from, they lost weight too. Muscle. They lost almost 60% of that weight loss was coming from their muscle.
So what you're saying then is people could save money on a Zempic and just not sleep and they'll lose their muscle anyway. I mean, you know, if you want to just cut out a funny, don't you think? Cut out a minute. Because that's what's happening with a Zempic. People were like losing uh a little bit of fat and a lot of muscle and wondering what happened to their metabolism. Um but yeah, okay, so that's uh you know But the question is why?
Why would sleep impact their metabolism so greatly? And it is the most powerful regulator of what our hormones are doing, you know, to put it bluntly. Yeah. You know, melatonin isn't just this glorified sleep hormone. It has roles in metabolism, it has roles in uh cancer and cancer prevention in your immune system. The list goes on and on. We tend to put things in these pithy little boxes and testosterone in particular.
Yeah. And so now we've got you know some recent studies on this, college-age men, and you know, again, being able to put put them into a ward study and to see what happens when you sleep deprive them for just one week. Testosterone drops 15%.
And by the way, I always say weight loss, weight loss resistance, which is a new thing, meaning you change your diet, exercise, still can't lose weight, is more to do with hormones than anything, even the foods that you're eating, right? And so what you're saying is sleep has such an uh an amazing impact, positive or negative, on your hormones, that it really was the answer of why those people lost fat or muscle. Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. Um, hormones, cognitive function, uh, nervous system, um, you know, appetite regulation. So there's so much has come out since, but even in Sleep Smarter, all those years ago, I wrote about the impact of sleep deprivation on leptin, right? Or one of our primary satiety hormones. You know, we know, and I've written uh books since there's so many different satiety-related hormones and hunger-related hormones as well. And sleep impacts all of them greatly.
Just one night of sleep deprivation, our leptin levels can plummet and gorelin just skyrockets. This is why we tend to be hungrier if we just see our own you know, personal experience, anecdotal experience. If we're tired, we tend to be hungrier and want to snack more. And so it is a powerful force multiplier to focus on our sleep wellness.
Personal uh story with my son. Um, he had lost 80 pounds, he lost, you know, doing finally listened to his dad and me, and then so, but he was still running this odd schedule where he would just go to bed at like two, three in the morning and sleep late at night. And I kept saying, Listen, uh, you know, your circadian rhythm matters, right? So he's the kid that, you know, it's if I just send him a couple little things, he'll read it, he'll ponder, and he comes with his own decision.
So he he's a three percenter. He he made a decision that finally, because he couldn't get off this last little bit of fat, right? And um, and he had some weird anxiety things that were come and go. So he decides that's it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna get my sleep. I'm going to bed at 10 o'clock. I'm gonna make sure my last meal's four hours before bed, and I'm gonna wake up, you know, in the morning when the sun comes up. So he made this decision. He did it.
Well, lost all the fat that he couldn't lose, right? All the anxiety goes away. And he's like feeling amazing. So if he were here right now, he would do that personal testimony. All he did was just shifted his uh, you know, he was still getting eight hours of sleep, but he was shifted. Um, you know, and he just turned it back and went with the, you know, just normalized his circadium rhythm. Yeah. Wow, what a difference. So powerful.
We know again, just even 24 hours sleep deprivation, what it does to insulin sensitivity goes down. Um, obviously, you know, just this conversation conversation with cortisol. Yeah, you know, and our stress hormones being elevated more and the catabolism that can come along with that, it just our immune system suppression. Sometimes, though, the body, we're incredibly resilient in spot instances. So sometimes we get a boost in immune system function when we're sleep deprived.
But maybe for like a night. Well, again, that's but if we're chronically developed.
That's what Amesis, the body's trying to adapt.
Yeah. If we're doing this stuff chronically and we see higher incidence of the development of autoimmune conditions when people are sleep deprived, higher incidence of heart disease, strokes, cancer, the list goes on and on. We know that it matters, but in our culture today, it's undervalued.
Yeah.
And so if I could, I could share a couple of strategies to help people.
Yeah, that's what I want to hear. But I do want to make this comment first, and maybe it's a question. How does Trump do it, bro? He sleeps like I hear four hours a night, and he outruns everybody, right? I I I have an answer for that, but let me hear yours. He's AI generated. Okay. Um yeah, that that's that's actually really funny. I I think I I've he's like just he's God generated in my mind. It's like God is using that man and he'll get away with just about anything.
Um, but it's like I I just can't imagine you know him sleeping four hours a night and being too focused. I'd wake up like this. Oh my God, like I'm I'm guys, uh, yeah, I'm I'm not having that meeting today.
We do have some genetic variation, obviously. There are certain people who've kind of, you know, just throughout human evolution, there though there have been those people who are the lookout, you know, those people that are, you know, the ones that are out, you know, kind of uh even keeping odd hours. And so having this cookie cutter, everybody needs to sleep the same amount, everybody needs to sleep at the same time. There's variation with humanity.
But the majority of people, yes, that kind of seven to nine hours, and yeah, you know, and then certain paying attention to circadian rhythm, circadian medicine.
And that's about what would you say, seven to nine hours is about the range that people fall in.
But it's not just the amount of sleep, it's the quality of those hours. And that's really what I push forward into culture because it's akin to you know calories. It's not just the amount of calories, it's the quality of those hours.
That's a great analogy, yeah, exactly.
And so, you know, being able to be mindful about that, because you can be unconscious and still wake up.
You can drink a bunch of alcohol and be unconscious and yet, you know, absolutely not go into that recovery phase and deep sleep.
That's a great one for us to start with,
¶ Alcohol Curfew And Sleep Nutrients
is our intake. Like, so what are we doing?
Yeah, because these are the tips, right? These are the things that people need to do, these are the big things. Yeah, these are the things that matter and can make a result like that.
What's let's talk about the nutrition and and because it makes a huge impact. So you mentioned wine or you mentioned drinking alcohol. You know, having for many people it helps them to relax, to wind down. And this is not bashing, you know, wine or alcohol. This is just talking about the science. And what occurs and what again helping people to fall asleep is yes, indeed.
And I share one of the studies in the book, it does indeed help you to fall asleep faster if you have some wine before bed, but it massively distorts your REM sleep. And so there's something it's called a REM rebound effect. And so it's kind of delayed. And so even though you're unconscious, you're not going through your sleep cycles efficiently.
And so the repair, you know, certain enzymes, you know, what's going on with your lymphatic system in your brain and clearing out and what's happening with your liver and your heart, everything is out of out of sync. And so this is where the phenomenon that we have in our culture, we call it a hangover. We think it's just it's from the alcohol, yeah, it's from the lack of recovery. Yeah, this is why some people can like just keep drinking and the hangover is not gonna be there, right?
Until they stop drinking. And so, you know, and again, that's just a part of this conversation, but keeping that in mind, give yourself, if you're going to drink, give yourself a curfew, at least a few hours. Yeah, sure. For your body to because your liver is very, very good, especially if you're healthy, yeah. It's very good at cleaning house. Drink some water for every glass of wine that you have. A glass of water, that is a good principle. You know, I'd say have two.
You know, if you really want to be killer, you might piss a lot, you know, initially, but just being able to like help your body, nature's solution to pollution is dilution, right?
And by the way, if you have a sleep ring or you know, something like that, a way of tracking your sleep, monitoring your sleep, you can see it. You know, if I drink three glasses of wine, heart rate up, heart rate variability down, and you know, REM sleep and deep sleep suffer, right? Every time. If I drink one glass and give myself a few hours before bed, I don't even, I don't notice it, right? Meaning adapted, didn't adapt.
Now, again, some people might be able to do my wife can get away with two or three glasses, I can't, right? But everyone's adaptation is different. But, you know, there's a line.
Yeah. There's a processing time for all of it, and everybody's different. Yeah. And that's to keep keep that in mind as well. And so just staying in the same lane with our intakes or something we're taking in. I it's a chapter I talk about good sleep nutrients. And I talked about this in my in both of my other books as well.
Um, but good sleep nutrients, and so you can have the best mattress, you can have the blackout curtains, you could have everything that you can imagine, a perfect sleep sanctuary. If you don't provide your body with the raw materials to make sleep-related hormones and neurotransmitters and to support your body in doing the process of sleep, you're going to struggle.
Yeah.
And so, so what are those? I'm gonna I'm just gonna share a few. Um, one, and this was a study published in PLOS One, finding that one of the most easily accessible nutrients that many people end up deficient in is incredible when it comes to supporting sleep health. Deficiency in this nutrient was found to lead to more um wake after sleep onset. So people were make waking up more frequently. And that nutrient is vitamin C. All right.
So making sure that we're getting proactively, intentionally, plenty of vitamin C rich foods. All right. So what does that look like? The berries, uh, green veggies, a lot of green veggies, broccoli has vitamin C, a lot of um um supplements out there as far as vitamin C, but this is the caveat. Most vitamin C supplements, like those little packets you see at the checkout, they're made from modified corn syrup and corn starch.
Yeah, horrible. Right?
And there's a study that was conducted, and this was in a journal of cardiology, looking at the impact of these synthetic vitamin C versions, you know, like those packets or what you might get in a supplement, versus a whole food-based vitamin C. Right. So this was in this particular study was Camus Camu Berry, which is a very high source of vitamin C. And for these the test subjects, they were proactively doing something very inflammatory, which was smoking. All right.
For they looked at a week study. There was no changes in the biomarkers for, and they would look like C reactive protein, homocysteine. No changes with the regular vitamin C, the synthetic vitamin C. But there was a significant improvement in uh uh reducing inflammation using the food-based vitamin C. So it helps to reduce inflammation, all right? So get plenty of vitamin C rich foods if you're gonna supplement food-based supplement, that's number one. And I'm gonna this is no particular order.
Yeah, because this one I'm gonna share next is probably for many people the most impactful, which is magnesium. All right, yeah.
Magnesium is having a moment, it's it's missing in our soil today.
I mean, so people are magnesium deficient big time. You know, you could check my record. I've got shows I did, interviews I did 15 years ago, you know, touting. At the time, we knew that there was like 300-ish biochemical processes that required vitamin C. Yeah. I'm sorry, that required magnesium. Now it's closer to like 800 to these are verified, but there's more. There's thousands, all right, because magnesium is very intimately tied to our mitochondria.
As a matter of fact, talking with one of the leading experts in the world in mitochondria and function and health, uh, she shared that our mitochondria can't even make copies without magnesium being present. All right, it is so important.
And so, but when it comes to sleep, we've got some really remarkable studies on seeing magnesium helping to support the production of melatonin, improving uh sleep latency, so people falling asleep faster, improving overall sleep time, and improving people going through their sleep time, spending more time in the deepest, most anabolic stages of sleep, right? All from utilizing magnesium. But what kind? There's so many. There's so many forms of magnesium.
Yeah, malate, glycinate, citrate, yeah, right?
And oxygen. Again, when I was in in my university class that I paid for, we didn't talk the teacher. Literally was like, you know, make sure that you take a multivitamin, you know, get your vitamin C. We talked about the vitamins and minerals, but I wasn't taught there was multiple forms of vitamin C. There's multiple forms of B12, there's multiple forms of magnesium.
Yeah.
Active forms, what kind do you need? Food covers most of it. Okay. Nature figured this out. So eat a wide variety of magnesium-rich foods. So this is gonna include things like uh anything green, really, is gonna be a good source of magnesium. Uh, chocolate, dark chocolate, of course, good source of magnesium. Um, there's a variety of different seeds like pumpkin seeds, tons of foods you can find magnesium. All right.
So food first, and if you're gonna supplement, it's gonna take a little bit of experimentation to find out which form of form of vaccine.
You like your body likes, yeah. Yeah, because some of them, some people flush easier than others, you know. So some people, you know, it causes too much moisture to come into the colon, and you know, and then uh they just get the runs. So that's me.
Some people, but some people might need that.
Yeah, you know, it might be a little side benefit to kind of clean, clean house if you've been, you know, not using the bathroom regularly, using some you know, magnesium supplement. Um, but again, magnesium, and I'll just I'll share one more. So uh again, vitamin C, magnesium, these are good sleep nutrients. And one more that I'll share. You know, this is something that is often attributed to getting sleepy because of Thanksgiving.
Ah, tryptophan.
Tryptophan, yeah. It's the turkey, you know. So it's just so much tryptophan. That's not why we get sleepy, it doesn't work like that. So tryptophan is a precursor to making serotonin, which is a precursor to making melatonin. So it's kind of like the opening act, and it's just a part of that process of making something related to sleep, right? And so we want to eat plenty of uh tryptophan-rich foods, right?
So, of course, like yes, it's found in turkey and chicken, and there's certain seafood you could find, some tryptophan, but there's plant sources as well that you can find tryptophan in. And um, you know, so just keeping that in mind, being proactive about it. And yeah, so those are some good sleep nutrients to to target.
That's why people take 5 HTP and it helps them, you know. So it's it's uh precursor. So he's pulling out the book, folks. Let's see it, let's see what comes out. You know, sleep is one of those funny things that I like you said in the beginning that people have their rituals, they don't like to change, but some of their rituals could be affecting their sleep, right?
I mean, like for me, if you know, reading emails and texts and things like that, that can stimulate a thought and I can't turn my brain off, or worse yet, a negative thought, and then my cortisol rises and now I'm up for two hours. So I just have to make it a rule that I just do not look at emails, text, my phone, you know, two hours. Hours before bed, I just don't like to do it.
Let's jump to that next because that's the most important today, as far as like tactical. But just tryptophan foods really quickly. So turkey, chicken, eggs, sweet potatoes, chia seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, almonds, yogurt, leafy greens, all good sources of tryptophan. So again, that's just a couple of these good sleep nutrients. And it's kind of hard to miss them if you're eating real food and eating a variety of real foods.
But this can be part of the issue when we have a very restrictive type of diet and we start missing out on things where we might feel better in one area, but then over time we develop a deficiency in something else. Yeah.
Yeah, there's even things called functional deficiencies, meaning the magnesium, as an example, is so important in so many different processes for hormones, you know, sleep, mitochondrial energy production, that your body will prioritize it to survival mechanisms first, which then leaves you a deficiency in something else. And so you don't realize that you might be chasing, you know, one thing in your health uh because your body's pulling magnesium from that.
And then you don't associate it because now all of a sudden, you know, now it's linked to bone weakness because you're not pulling calcium in your bones is just one example. Uh, but anyway, so it creates other deficiencies because your body prioritizes it.
Yeah, precisely, precisely.
All right, mechanisms.
¶ Screen Curfew And Blue Light
So the number one thing that is disrupting people's sleep today is our relationship with our technology for sure. Easy. Yeah, you know, and like you just mentioned, you know, just to having some time to have a screen curfew. I was talking about this, you know, 15 years ago. Today it's even this isn't slowing down anytime. So the question is why?
So some researchers at Harvard uh did a study using basically e-readers for people to electronically read uh a book before bed and found that it suppressed melatonin, increased cortisol, delayed sleep onset, uh, reduced the time people spent in deep sleep. The list goes on and on. It massively disrupted their sleep quality versus using a physical book. Yeah. All right. So we know that it causes these issues because our brains and our biology is all synced up to light inputs. Yeah. Right.
So this is literally circadian medicine. When we're staring at these devices at night, it's a treatment. Yeah. All right. Blue light treatment. Right. And so there's um, you know, obviously our smartphones, our laptops, iPads, televisions. But I like this stuff. The game is on, movie night, stranger things. You know, this is these great things in our in our culture. So if you're going to, yes, use some protection. All right.
Which the blue light blocking glasses is great, but you got to make sure that they're like actually like verified, tested. I was there, I've got pictures from again back in almost 20 years ago where I'm like wearing these wood shop glasses, basically. And I've got I'm like literally, like with my youngest son who's 14, like before he was born, you know, and like especially when he was a baby. There's like pictures of me holding him. It looks like I just built a fucking birdhouse.
Yeah.
But my wife, and I I can't, I'm grateful that she still like saw me as attractive, you know, but like I would wear these at night every night. But the technology has improved so much. And again, you just got to make sure it's from a reputable, reputable source, can be helpful. But, and this is the thing, there's still stimulation, right? And yeah, like I said, you still can read the email, your brain goes, yeah, yeah.
You know, being able to actually go into sleep mode, like our technology, and giving ourselves and our nervous system time to actually wind down and to decompress, right? For many people today, the last thing they do is get off their phone and just like, or their TV, like I really should get to bed, right? And I proposed this a while ago, and I think it's more complicated now, but it's so rewarding if you get tapped into it, which is to give yourself a uh uh screen curfew.
Yeah, exactly.
Here's the thing though, we're addicted, all right? And so with addictions, and I've talked to all these addiction specialists, I'm grateful. Um, one of the ways that people see success, especially again, if it's like we'll just call it a light addiction or diet addiction, and is to replace it with something. Yes, right. Don't go just cold turkey, replace it with something of equal or greater value.
Yeah. And so when you're deciding, like you want to go to bed at 10, and you're deciding to get off your device by nine, what are you gonna do? You can't just sit there and twiddle your thumbs. You're you're gonna want to get a hit of that screen, yeah, at least, you know. And so you got to fill it with something that is of equal or greater value, and that's gonna be dependent on you. This could be time with your significant other. Maybe you're not rocking with them at that point, which is fine.
I have a chapter on the benefits of sex and sleep as well. So there's a higher probability for many people if they're actually spending quality time together.
Um I got their attention.
This could be, you know, maybe uh reading a physical book, as I mentioned. Uh, they still exist. And this could be taking a you know a warm bath. Read sleep smarter. Right, right. This could be taking a warm bath bath. Yeah, you know, magnesium bath and you know, winding down like that.
And and and new habits form. Yeah, you just have to commit to it. Yeah. You know, three percenters just say, you know what, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna start with a week, and then we can turn into two. And after 21 days, man, you're hooked.
Yeah. And this, and then also, of course, technology is still a possibility. This could be a meditation. You do you put on your meditation music. This could be listening to a podcast, but something maybe that's not too stimulating. Yeah. Right? Just something, an audio book to help you want to.
But I I think that if I could just give a little help, I think that, you know, an aura ring, you know, the the whoop, I don't even know what some of these other technologies are called, but it helps. Because if you can prove to yourself, what I would challenge people to do is do it for three days. If you have a device to measure, you're gonna see a difference. And that motivates people to move on.
It's when they don't see the value of it and they're missing the value of the screen or, you know, whatever that brings. You know, but when you, it's a powerful drug when you see, wow, that look at my sleep difference. That motivates people. I've seen that help people a lot. So great, great, great stuff.
¶ Relationships As A Health Multiplier
I want to save time because I think this could be the most important part of this conversation that we have. And it's something that if we say that sleep is undervalued with health, and it is, relationships is even more undervalued with health, at least as people don't associate that. So you kind of, you know, you mentioned your grandmother, and you said, yeah, well, that's part of what I'm gonna talk about later. So maybe we start there.
But I mean, make this connection in the time we have left to, you know, relationships and health. And I want to know what people can do about it.
Okay. I'm gonna share two quick studies. Uh, the first one was conducted by researchers at Brigham Young and University of North Carolina, huge, huge meta-analysis. One of the biggest studies ever conducted. It was over 300,000 participants and 148 studies. And they were looking at what is contributing to lifespan with all these people. And so they looked at everything exercise habits, uh, smoking habits, you know, um, what's going on in their relationships.
After compiling all the data, the researchers found that individuals who had what they refer to as warm social bonds or healthy relationships had a 50% reduction in all-cause mortality. Wow. All right. More so than beating obesity, more so than quitting smoking, more so than exercise. All those things matter. Relationships matter more. And I'll tell you why in just a moment.
But but right here though, I I want to I want you to clarify this. Everyone listening is going, I have relationships. So define what what you mean by that, what the study did.
That goes to the second study, okay, which was conducted by um Dr. Rob Robert Waldinger and his colleagues at Harvard, and he shared this data with me. And I asked him this question specifically. And this is the this is the longest-running human study ever. It's about it's over 80 years now. Okay, longitudinal study, following the same people as long as they've been alive.
And they literally are tracking them down annually, whether they like lived in Boston, then they moved to Waikiki or wherever, they tracking them down, taking blood work, doing all this analysis. It's incredible. The study started off trying to find out what creates success in life. And it evolved into what is making people live longer. And so his data, and he's a very skeptical individual, and so he's the fourth director of the study, getting the baton passed to him.
So he didn't believe the data at first, indicating that healthy social bonds or warm social bonds were the number one determinant of how long people lived. And so he went into the data, he went to other researchers to try to disprove it himself, and it just kept coming back that yeah, this is this stands out far and above everything else, is the quality of our relationships. And I asked him why, why that is, and what qualifies as a good relationship.
I was like, So this does this mean like they don't argue much or whatever? He was like, No, this is what he says, we hear his exact words. He said, Some of the healthiest relationships they fought like cats and dogs. He said cats and dogs, and it was cute when he said it. Yeah, and uh he said, but but they had a bedrock of affection. Even when they were having their little disputes, they would still be close, they would still touch each other, they would still see each other.
All right, and these warm social bonds, like why is this working so well? He said that it really the end the research is indicating how it helps us to metabolize stress. And stress, as you know, this is the this is the biggest killer in our society.
It affects every hormone, as we pointed out earlier, right? You know, so I mean, when affection, I mean, was it touching? You said seeing time, was it time like you know? I mean, what what what was it? Like, you know, um, I guess how did they define that affection?
Yeah. So we can break this down into specific uh pieces or steps or things to identify. All right. So one of them is the ability to perspective take, right? So being able to quote, put yourself in someone else's shoes, that is very challenging, especially when you're irritated to see from the other person's perspective. And it's a skill really that develops.
Some people, it is more innate, and also it depends on how we kind of grew up and the environment that we're in and all these other nature versus nurture, but having that capacity, regardless if you get, if you have a disagreement or irritation or you know, get into an argument, that helps to keep people closer together. And yes, physical touch is a huge one, huge. And it's just that feeling, and again, this is not about sex.
Yeah, no, this is about you know, that proximity and specifically the impact that it has on our hormones. In particular, oxytocin really stands out in these studies relating to how our relationships impact our health. So oxytocin is having a moment now as well, kind of um seen as this like love hormone or cuddle hormone, so much more than that. I talked about oxytocin that sleeps smarter, you know, almost 15 years ago, because it has this neutralizing effect on cortisol.
Like it's one of the hormones that has been identified that it really does help with helping to relieve and reduce stress. Another thing is being there, just being there for somebody and then feeling like you have their back. This psychological thing in this very uncertain, crazy world, this crazy planet spinning around in the middle of space, just to know that there's somebody who cares about you at the end of the day.
That's that's a tribal thing, right? Protection is there.
And being able to offload and to express if there is a stressful event, having somebody to share it with.
Yeah.
But in particular for men, that doesn't, we don't necessarily want to share, but just having somebody that's there for you at the end of the day, right? So there's different expressions of this, and these are just some of the qualities, but it is very impactful. And I've got to tell you why. This is the biggest reason why it's so impactful on our health long term in our lifespan. It's because our relationships control all those other things more so than anything.
Your sleep, who impacts your sleep more than your wife?
Yeah.
Nobody. Yeah. All right. Who impacts your sleep more than your kids or your my dog, your pets, you know? Like it is our relationships that impact more than anything the food that you're eating. The foods that I grew up eating were a result of the relationships that I had. Your exercise habits. This is a really cool study. This was done in the 90s, and these researchers were looking at couples' behavior and working out together. So married couples.
And so they had married couples who train together and married uh couples who train by themselves. And they followed them for a year. All right. And what they found at the end of the study was that married individuals who train on their own were 43% more likely to drop out of their exercise program. The people who are married, married couples, only 6% likely to drop out of their exercise program over the course of that year. There was something. Now, this is not everybody.
Again, we tend to start being just like, well, this and that. But there's something remarkable when it works with people working out together, exercising together as a couple. Yeah, it helped them to be more consistent, right? So this could, and it doesn't, it's not just your partner. This could be your best friend you work out with. This could be your group exercise class, this could be your buddies that you train with or you go hiking with.
It is a layer of accountability that most of us deeply need today, more than ever. Right. So every aspect of our health that we can name, it is our relationships that have the most cultural, unconscious influence on that thing.
Yeah. When I mean they look at people in very healthy cultures, communities, you know, some reference them as blue zones, but that community was a big part of their happiness, you know, and therefore it extended itself into every aspect of their health. So community, I mean, it starts with, of course, you know, your first relationship and then your family and then beyond. And I guess that defines it.
I guess the thing that I'm sitting there thinking of my viewers, well, shoot, like what do we do about that? Meaning, you know, I feel blessed as you say this, right? I mean, I have a really good, tight family unit, always have. Growing up in an Italian family, it was family, it was really, really important. Um, that transcended into my family, but that's not the case for many people hearing my voice right now. What do you do?
Yeah. You know, this is a cult, I said culture on purpose. What is culture? It's the shared attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors of a group of people that's passed on from one generation to the next. Our culture has changed dramatically, especially here in the United States, where there was a tradition of families staying close in close proximity. Today we're scattered.
Yeah. So many people do not have proximity to their people who grew up in their area and they don't leave their parents or their kids or you know, brothers and cousins. And you're you're blessed if you have access to that. Now, this does not mean that all hope is lost, because family is bigger than just our biological family, of course. And so, with that being said, our culture has shifted in a way that makes this more complex.
And so, how do we how do we nourish and and and support this and create this in our lives? All right. So, some action
¶ Building Warm Bonds On Purpose
steps. Number one, if you feel like you don't have the relationships that you desire and deserve, you have to make it a study. All right. I was raised by the wolves, all right? Like for real, for real. I grew up in a violent environment outside my door and inside my door. And I was able, but it's not, it was not all bad, by the way. There's a lot of love, a lot of beauty as well, you know, my grandma as well.
But you know, my mom, my stepfather, my stepfather passed away um a couple years ago, right before my family cookbook came out. He was a chef, he was an inspiration for me.
And by the way, do we have the the your cookbook um has a lot of this these principles in it, right?
Yeah, it's based on this this emerging summons on relationships. Yeah. Uh-huh. And so, you know, um right here.
And I'm I'm sure this they can get this on Amazon. Yeah. Right. But a lot of this relationship stuff is in here. Yeah. Yeah. Not to mention um the bulletproof glass Chinese restaurant menu uh menu that I'm getting.
So there's over a hundred uh recipes in there, and this is based on um, there's over 200 studies in the book, peer-reviewed studies, um, 240-ish to create the nutrition. And I just did an interview with this in one of the biggest shows in the country, and one of the hosts is just like, we've got a ton of cookbooks. Like my wife gets cookbook. She was like, Your cookbook stays out.
It's the only one that we really consistently eat from because the food is delicious, and not just like because I'm saying it, I'm a foodie.
Yeah.
All right. My my stepfather was a chef.
Yeah, we're free, too.
And so I've just basically upgraded a lot of the kind of uh traditional uh all-American meals, but also just diversity inputs as well. But I'm saying that to say that um he passed away right before the book came out, and he was in assisted living for uh about 13 years because of brain damage from drugs and alcohol. And you know, he was automatically my hero. I wanted to be strong like him.
I showed up every day, he went to work every day, even though he was an alcohol and er alcoholic in every sense of the word. He got up and went to work. And he brought that check home and you know, made sure we had food on the table and clothes on our backs. And so I had that perspective, but that's gonna lead to for me and my siblings, we're going to automatically start to adapt some of these behaviors. And so I had a choice to make.
Yeah, yeah.
And so unconsciously, I was making some of the other choices that's not ideal. But to learn about how to have a healthy relationship, I had to study it. Like I read books on the subject, I took courses on the subject. Yeah. Even when I met my wife, that was really because like the in love thing, we had that. We had that notebook vibe, right? We were just we were locked in. But over time, it's like you're getting on my nerves, you know.
Like, I don't know how to really handle this doing life with another person. Yeah, yeah. So we took a course together, you know, like um it was Tony Robbins' Lovers for Life course. And we learned about, I realized, like, oh, you love differently. Yeah, yeah. How you like actually perceive love is different from how I do. Right, right. So I might do this grandiose thing and write you a poem or whatever. You're just like, oh, that's cute. Yeah. When for you, it's like it's quality time.
You would rather me not be off writing a poem somewhere, you just want to be around me.
Yeah.
Right. And for me, you know, it's it's other qualities as well. And so learning, making it, if it if it matters to you, make it a study. So that's number one. Number two, you got to get in the environment, right? You got to get out of your shell. If you want to have healthy relationships, you've got to, and I'm saying that because I was definitely turtle status myself. And I was alone really when I was going through all these health issues.
I was thrust into working with people, and it just kind of forced me to be around people and to see these incredible individuals in front of me and how to serve them. Yeah. And so getting out in the real world, yes, our technology is awesome, but is a supplement. All right. We've got all these great online groups you can be a part of, and but there's nothing yet, and I don't think there ever will be, that can replace real human connection.
Because even as we're here together right now, we're sharing microbial data. There's a microbiome interface happening, right? There's file sharing. There's obviously it changes in our neurochemistry and our brain waves. Princeton publishes data what a couple decades ago now of just people being in a conversation, our brain waves sync up.
Yeah.
Like, you know, we know about mirror neurons. The list goes on and on. We need each other. So what does that look like for you? If you're looking for what what is that, the relationship that you want? If you want people who are healthier, go to places where people are healthy. Yes, right. Obviously. Go to the gym. Go to, you know, places where people are hiking or you know, meetup groups. There's tons of using online. What are some meetup groups and workout groups? Right.
Here in in LA, there's a group workout every Saturday. At this incredible space in Englewood. That's totally free to the public, right? Look for ways to get out of your shell, put yourself in the environment. We know, again, like maybe this is like your church group. Maybe this is a book club. Maybe this is your tennis club. Shout out to Johnny Bowden, Dr. Johnny Bowden. He's in his mid-70s. He plays tennis five days a week. But his tennis group, they got a group text thing.
They hang out, they talk about other stuff.
Yeah, it's a community. It becomes a community.
Find your tennis group, whatever that looks like for you. Maybe you're a hoolie hooper. You know what I mean? Whatever that looks like for you. So get out of your show.
Speak to the person who's like, they're looking at their group, their their groups, their life, and their people around them. And they're like, oh my gosh, this is my problem. This is affecting me. What would your like, you know, immediate advice be to them? What would what do they do right now to change that tomorrow?
Yeah. The reason that we are in it and we stay in it is because of, you know, um, there's certainty there.
Yeah.
It's a big driver of human behavior and our psychology. But there's also a feeling of responsibility. There's often feelings of guilt if we want to move away, you know, to move outside of that or to not allow anymore. And so there's just like layers of psychological um anchors that keep us stuck. And so what I would say is to not try to like just again go code turkey, but just to start to invite in and to, you gotta make space, you gotta make room for what you do want.
And so maybe this is like not um, you know, answering all the calls, or not going, you know, maybe it's a you know, once a week thing instead of every day, or maybe once a month that you're connecting with this individual or individuals, just start to create a little bit of space and fill that space with something that you do want, right? Don't just sit around because the old you that you can go and also you can go to a new party and bring the old you with you.
Yeah.
So you've got to bring a new self to a new perspective. Yeah. One of the I what I would encourage everybody to do as well is to get clear on what that looks like for you. Write it down. What kind of relationships do you want?
Yeah.
Don't just have it kicking around, yeah, pickleballing in your head.
Yeah, yeah.
Write it out.
I told my daughter that. What are your values? What are your core values, right? In the relationship and life, list it out. You know, that's your that's your guide right there.
True story, my wife told me this. Uh, this was a couple years after we were together, we were, you know, married. We've been together for uh what 20, 21, 22 years. And she shared that she had written out, like, you know, again, there was there was no life before me either. All right. But she had after she broke up with whoever was before me, you know. It was never before you. Right, before Sean. Yeah, and she decided, like, I'm gonna just write it out. Like, what kind of guy do I want?
Yeah. And wrote all these qualities. That's where my daughter lives. And she said that she was like, it hit her that everything that she had written down that she remembers was me.
Yeah.
And she was already living this life with me and didn't realize it. She was like, You have these qualities, like that, because I'm sure I didn't express some of those qualities early on, you know, but she just got clear and it showed up in her life.
¶ Proof Of Healing And Closing
Yeah. You know, affects your health, man. I'm gonna go full circle on this because we kind of didn't close the loop, right? How long did it take for like the discs to get better? Um, and if we, you know, looked at your spine on an X-ray or an MRI, what would we see today?
Oh wow. I was so afraid to go get that MRI after I got better. Because I knew I was well. Yeah, but this was like that ultimate thing. And it was about nine months later. I went and got a scan done. And I remember as like it was yesterday, man. The physician, he was holding his chin looking at the MRI. And he effectively said, you know, because I was just like, so, you know, because I could see the light shining through my disc now because it looked like black.
Yeah, it's called desiccated, is what that is called.
The two herniated disc had retracted and they were back in place, and there was more volume to the disc, right? So the light was shining through it. And he said, he was holding his chin, he said, Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. And I told him what I was doing, and it I could see he was not listening to me.
I know.
In his mind, it was just a spontaneous remission. Yeah. It was a spontaneous remission. Yeah, but I left there with just this feeling of like so much joy knowing how powerful our bodies are to heal, despite what I've been through. I was afraid that too much time had passed for me to get well.
And just knowing that it was about stacking these conditions, and now I was on a mission to help every single person that I could to understand how amazing their bodies are and to stack conditions in their own favor.
I interviewed a woman and um they they basically sent her home to die. And they sent her, here's the chemo, some oral chemo, blah, blah, blah. It'll buy you some time. And on the way home, she made a decision to not take the chemo and made a decision she's gonna live. And God spoke to her as she says and says she's going to live. And she told her family she's not taking the medication. They thought she was crazy. Her husband didn't, though, because she asked him a question on the way home.
Remember when you had God speak to you and you changed your whole career? What was that like? You're like, you know, how did that go? And he said it, and she's like, Well, that happened to me. And I'm not taking the medication, I'm gonna live. Well, literally the next day, because she was bedbound, she was up out of bed. Two days later, she was cleaning things. A week later, she was like doing things as normal. A month later, she went back in, she had no cancer.
And the doctor was like, Wow, that chemo was really working. Like the wow. Matter of fact, I would stay on it a whole year because it's working so well. And she disclosed that she didn't take it. And I said, He got mad, didn't he? And she said, Yes, got very mad. It's like, it wasn't that amazing. It's like you you're healed, you didn't take the chemo, and he's mad because you didn't, right? And he knew it was a death sentence with it.
Yeah. Anyway, you know, it's like when he said, you know, just spontaneous remission. That's maybe what he thought as well. But anyway, yeah, it's uh you're three percenter, bro. You know, you made decisions in your life. That's why you sit here with a heeled back, you know, that's why you sit here as a world changer. Yeah, that's why you sit here from the ghetto. Is that where you grew up? I mean, what would you call the this deplorable situation growing up?
Uh, three percenter, you know, does doesn't let their environment like that define them. So that said, what would you say to the people out here? Because my a lot of my viewers are women, they always send these to their kids, right? So what would you say to them? Because, you know, I believe it's everything's a decision. So help them because you it you're you're the expert here. You did it.
Yeah.
Wow. Um in particular, you know, I just gotta tell you, man, like the most influential people in my life have been the women in my life. Um you're so powerful, so powerful to affect change, not just for yourself, but for all the people around you.
And it's a big responsibility, and we need to give more appreciation and love, and that's a part of our culture that's been a little fractured as well, uh, to women, to mothers, to grandmothers, and just women in general, and protect them and also can create conditions to where they can take care of themselves. And so talking with all the top, you know, physicians in the world and psychologists, and it's not bad that you know there's a tendency to be selfless, right?
Because this whole like put your mask on first, you know, and I get it, but it's not always like that. I can see many times when I didn't do that, and it can be incredibly rewarding, but it of course it can put you in a hole as well. And so give yourself the gift of self-care and that time, even if it's just 10 minutes a day, just start there, carve out that time just for yourself.
If it's maybe 10 minutes before everybody gets up, for you to just sit, you know, to journal, to, you know, just sit there and have your coffee, give yourself a little bit of space, fill your cup so that's where I start my day. You're giving from your overflow. And you know, there's gonna be times when you're, you know, giving from the the sips at the bottom of the cup, and that's life.
But now is the time to proactively fill your cup up, make yourself stronger, more resilient, lean on those relationships because I promise you, oh my God, like we want to help each other. Oftentimes we're just silently suffering because we're not communicating. So lean on those relationships. If you feel like you don't have them, wouldn't now be a good time. And so to do that, I already gave some of those steps. Yeah. Make it a study, yeah, get that clarity as well.
And know too, along the way, it's not just the outside changing, it's us changing and feeling, and this is one of the biggest takeaways today is feeling worthy.
Yeah.
And you are. And sometimes, and I this I had to work on this myself, is you've got to train yourself and maybe make that a mantra or meditation that I'm worthy, I'm worthy of love, I'm worthy of feeling good, I'm worthy of good health, I'm worthy of having these amazing relationships.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because that's identity, right? It's like when you realize who God created you to be, you become worthy, right? And when you're raised where you were raised, it's you it's easy to think you're not worthy because of your situation, but your situation doesn't define you, does it? Yeah, didn't define you. Yeah, yeah, man.
Your your destination does not determine your destiny.
That's right. That's absolutely right. Yeah, man. Blessing. Blessing having you, man. Appreciate you, bro. Of course. Yeah, thanks for doing the interview. And listen, get the book Eat Smarter right here, the cookbook. Everyone loves cookbooks, man. Everyone's gonna get this one, but let me tell you Sleep Smarter. This has been a national favorite right here. So you got to sleep to heal, but you got to eat to heal too. And as you just learned, relationships heal.
So get the book, and where do they find you, man?
Uh at Sean Model, S H A W N model on Instagram. And the website is themodelhealth show.com. Where they're listening to this amazing show, they can find the model health show. There you go, man. As well.
Yep. Tap into it. You got it. Thanks, bro. Thank you.