Get everybody sam here.
That was a bit dark last week with a little trip to hospital and my life flashing before my eyes. So I'm going to keep things very upbeat today, but thank you to everybody for such beautiful messages as well wishes. I've had a beautiful week as I've been watching my little Willow. She spent two days in the prep classroom this week, so she's in a little kinder It's this beautiful experience of seeing her grow up and get so
excited about becoming a big kid. You know, she's only going into prep, but in her eyes and her own words, it's becoming a big kid. It's scary how quickly they do grow up. The other thing that Willow and I are doing is so her and I've created a little magician duo. After school yesterday we bought her a cape and a hat and a wand and away we go. So I've had a very magical week in the literal sense of the word, and I'm feeling way wonderful. And
I've got an absolutely brilliant guest in Saufee today. In today's episode, you're going to learn a lot and it's really practical stuff that you can apply to your life, no matter who you are, and I promise you your benefit from it, so make sure you stick around for that.
We're also going to talk.
About the big N word, motivation, which is important to all of us, particularly at this time of year. Stick around and let's get into it. This is one of those topics that I've touched upon with people or spoken
to with different illness experts across my journey. But having a bit of a listen to our guests talks and research, she's absolutely the most well versed and knowledgeable person in this space that I've ever heard, so I'm really pumping her up before she comes on, so no pressure, but I welcome Emily Minoogian.
Thank you for having me.
So let's let's start at the start only. First of all, welcome and thanks so much for joining us. What is our circadian rhythm and why is it so important?
Yes, that's a loaded questions, so I try to keep it as brief as possible, but that's that's our long discussion in so Zakidian just is Latin for about a day and today we're mainly going to be talking about biological rhythms and humans.
But I think it's important to.
Realize that every living organism, whether it be bacteria or a plant, or a bird or a mammal, all have circadian rhythms. And that's because we live on a planet that changes over a twenty four hour period, and so circadian rhythms are away of your body or whatever organism adapting to their environment. So you are the version of yourself that you need to be to do whatever it is that you need to do at a given time
of day. And you could see this, you know, really kind of in nature, like with predator prey interactions.
When to hide, when to forage for food.
But in humans we're thinking about our overall health. We can see circadian rhythms in pretty much everything that we do. So if you look at a behavioral level, when we're awake and when we sleep have this regular twenty four hour rhythm. And we often think this is because of an alarm clock or you know whatever forced as a
sciential impact, which obviously has a role in it. But even if we lived in a cave and had no external cues whatsoever, you would still have an approximately twenty four hour rhythm and pretty much every aspect of your behavior and your physiology. So sleep wake is a great example, but that's only one example of many, many things. So even your mood, your cognitive abilities, all are going to
oscillate throughout the day. If you look at the physiological level, pretty much anything you could get tested at a doctor's office, so blood pressure or heart rate, hormone release, enzyme production, all of those things are cycling over a twenty four hour day, so they're extremely important for again aligning everything that you do with the right time of day.
We know that if we disrupt these.
Rhythms, which is quite common, it's associated with many, many, many chronic diseases. You know, a lot of the major ones, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, effective disorders like depression and anxiety disorders, and so we know they're very important in other organisms. You can also see that if you disrupt
your kadie and rhythens enough, you can decrease lifespan. So we know it's kind of a crucial part of your body that's keeping everything in the right place at the right time, kind of coordinating the whole system, and as a really important a perspect of overall health.
Wow, it's brilliantly explained.
I mean, even as you first started explaining that, the first place my head went was the cave woman or cave man example of they would work with their circadian rhythms, and in today's modern society, so many of us work against it.
I even think about.
There's many things within our own control where we disrupt our circadian rhythm and we shouldn't, you know, Netflix binging and you know, whatever, whatever it might be. But then there's also some people who don't necessarily.
Have a choice.
What if you're a night shift worker or something like that, and that's how you make a living and there's not an alternative.
What what are.
The biggest mistakes or errors or things that really concern you that humans do to disrupt their circadian rhythm and maybe give us, excuse the partner, a bit of a wake up call.
Yeah, So I think the way to think about it is, as far as we're aware, there's a lot of evidence to this is that the two biggest cues to tell your body what time of day it is that can either support your biological rhithms or disrupt them are light and food. And we know that light is going to be the most direct signal to the clocks in your brain that are kind of coordinating everything throughout your body, but also are the most dependent for behavioral things like
sleepwake patterns. And then food is going to directly to talk to all the clocks throughout your body, and that's based off.
Of nutrient availability.
So by controlling food and light, you actually have a lot of power there to either disrupt or for good or bad. You can do a lot with light and food, and I think that those are the common things that we do. So just like you mentioned staying up very late at night, or even if you don't change time zones, which is another thing that our bodies are really not capable of doing quickly, even if you don't change the time zone, but say you stay up much later on
a weekend and sleep in much later. We even have a term for that, which is social jet lag. Where you might not be changing time zones, but your body functionally is that can do a lot of harm and things that you can do.
I think the very.
Simple as far as light goes is just try to dim your lights later in the evening, you know, like after dinner, start dimming your lights down if you can. If you don't have dimmers, turn off a couple around the room, so it is getting a little bit darker.
Give your body that ability.
To try to get to sleep and trying to keep a more consistent schedule when possible. That being said, depending on the schedule that's not always possible, and sometimes it's the weekdays that are really more of the problem than the weekends, and you need that recovery.
So that gets into a lot of nuance. But to your other question of what about.
Shift workers, So this is something very close to my heart, because that is a serious problem.
It's not just a choice.
We have people that are on call twenty four to seven for us because we need them. In fact, we just completed a study that we called the Healthy Hero Study, working with twenty four hour fighter fighters, because people like firefighters and doctors and nurses and police, they're all the heroes of our society that are protecting us four hours a day and for better or for worse, you know, it's probably hurting them and so we wanted to do
whatever we could to help them in any way. And for shift workers, you know, we can't tell them to turn off the lights and go to bed at night because obviously their job doesn't let them do that. What we could potentially do, though, is tell them when to eat.
And so in this study we just completed, we did have firefighters go on what we call a time restricted eating diet, where they're eating during their active phase during the day, the same time of day every day, whether it's a work day or not, and.
We saw that it was feasible for them to do this.
So they ate within a consistent ten hour window, so for example, nine am till seven pm, and they did that every day for three months and we saw that there it was very feasible, there is no problems with
doing it. We saw overall decreases in some of the lipids that can cause heart attacks even within a generally healthy population, and then the ones that were predisposed to risk factors, we saw decreased blood pressure and we also saw improvements in glucoast regular which was really exciting to see that all they had to do was change the
timing of when they eat and see these benefits. And those are super critical for shift workers because we know that they have increased risk for these cardio metabolic diseases, so this may be something that could be preventative or as a.
Co treatment for them.
So that's something we're excited about following up on on a bigger scale, but this is already a pretty large sized, randomized control trial, So there are some things you can do, but it is trickier for some than others.
What a brilliant, brilliant study and obviously yeah tip of the Osberg, but could help millions of people all over the world.
Let's just go back to the lot there.
Because you spoke about dimming the lights before you go to bed, what about letting lot wake you up?
Am I better off to have my.
Curtains open and let the sunlight naturally? I mean I say that like I have a choice. I have a three year.
Old who wakes me have at five thirty every morning.
But assuming I didn't have the little Charlie alarm clock, am I better off to not have the curtains drawn and to and to let the sun mike me out?
Yeah?
It depends on what your what your schedule is ideally, and that there's actually been a study that showed the best way to kind of resink your circadian rhythms is to go camping for a week where the only light you have is firelight, and that way you'll find out kind of how your body relates to light, because not everyone will wake up at the same time in relation to light, so it's actually there's a term for this called chronotype. So warning people will wake up a little
bit before the sun comes out. Later, people will wake up a little after the sun comes out. We're all a little bit around there. So it's not that everyone should be waking up at the exact same time. You have some uniqueness to the clocks within your body and how it relates to light exposure. But ideally, regardless of the light, you would be waking up on your own without an alarm clock, around the same time every day.
So if you find that, you know, no matter what day it is, if your alarm clock doesn't go off, you're waking up within fifteen minutes at the same time, you're probably on a pretty good circadian cycle, and you're probably waking up when your body is expecting it, whereas if you're waking up with an alarm clock, it's you know, it feels horrible to be woken up at that time because you're in the middle of a deep sleep. You're probably waking up not at the right time. Your body's
not able to anticipate it. And that's that's really kind of a sign that you need to get your sleep patterns a little bit better under control.
Yeah.
I like that.
I mean you mentioned the term, which I loved and I never heard before social jet lag before. I have a teenage daughter, and any of our listeners out there they have teenagers. I have a bit of an ongoing discussion, let's call it with my wife, because EV likes to catch up on the weekends, and you know, sleeps into ten eleven o'clock and then kind of you know, sloths around till midday and then she's highly alert, and then
she's still highly alert late at night. But you see it, you know, on this cycle every week that then comes Sunday night, she's still highly alert and vable at getting out of bad you know, particularly men. I choose that Wednesday. She almost gets the hang of it by Thursday, and then the random at guys around again.
So can you sleep too much?
Yes and no.
But I'm very glad you brought this up because I think this is actually the perfect example of when the weekdays are the problem.
Not the weekends.
Raw raw. This is because just like we were talking about your chronotype, it actually changes throughout your lifespan. So when you're very young, it's its earliest phase.
You wake up earlier, you go to bed earlier.
Okay, As you age, it starts to decrease, like delay a little bit. And right when you go through puberty, so the teenage years through the early twenties or when you're at your latest chronotype, your body wants to stay up.
Later and get up later. It's just very natural.
Again, if you were in that same kind of system with no cues, you would still be delayed.
It's it's normal for them to be delayed.
So but by that russianale, And do you think school should start lighter?
Yes?
And this is at least here in San Diego. School times have now officially delayed. Actually throughout California, school times have delayed for high school.
So they used to start.
Around seven in the morning. Now they're not allowed to start before eight thirty in the morning.
Wow.
And the research that's been done on this by delaying school start times by an hour, a lot of people were critical of this, saying, oh, the students will just stay up later and they'll just sleep in more and they're not going to get any more sleep. They're just going to be shifted more, and that's actually not true. For every hour you seem to delay the school start time, kids are actually getting an extra forty five minutes of sleep.
So maybe there's a little bit of enjoying your time off your later start, but a majority of that time is going towards more sleep at night. So I think when it comes to teenagers, you have to really try
to create good sleep habits. I know it's a lot easier said than done, trying not to do these things that make it even harder to fall asleep, like a lot of screen time just before bed, or playing on a phone or playing on a tablet, and that's not just a teenager thing, that's all alts have screen addictions
and many of us do this. But trying to be more diligent about that where you are making it so you're giving your body the best chance to fall asleep at a reasonable time on a weeknight, and then honestly, they're probably still waking up a bit too early for their bodies. They're probably having to force themselves to wake up, So allowing for recovery sleep on the weekends I think is a very reasonable thing to do.
That being said, when they do wake up, getting.
A lot of bright light, getting a little bit more activity in the morning can be a good way to try to kind of keep up with that and tell your body it's time to be awake. But it's not quite as simple as teenagers are being lazy and sleeping in. It is a bit more complex than that, and they really are having to fight their biological clocks a lot of the time to wake up as early as they have to on weekdays.
Most of the time, I'm really glad I understand that bet up because I'm a bit I'm a bit of a dressage.
But it does my complaints and I'm in trum. I'm trying to do it for her.
So you touched on the exercise from my own experience, I know if I get up and I exercise, I'm positive I feel more awake, more alert, more energy, increased mood. I don't think that that's leasabo, I'm sure of it. Is there evidence to suggest that that is the case. And if that is the case, are there rules or guidelines around how quickly, you know, within what time of waking should we get the exercise types of you know, should it be intense exercise.
The timing of exercise is a field that's rapidly growing, and there's a lot that's already known, but it's really starting to be studied a lot more now, So I think a lot more will come out on this from what we know now. Like I said, your body is a different version of itself at different times of day, so you actually have your greatest muscle strength and greatest endurance abilities in the late afternoon. So assuming you wake up somewhere between seven and eight, maybe go to better
around ten. This is talking somewhere around four ish three to four pm is probably when you'll actually do the best on an activity. Like if you're trying to break a personal record, you'll probably do it in the afternoon.
Couldn't agree more.
If I try in white so I'm much strong, I definitely don't lift the most I can lift if I'm doing a six am workout.
Yeah, so that's pretty well and you've already noticed that, right, And then exercises absolutely an arousal queue. So as far as waking up, if you are forcing yourself to be active, it can definitely be a stimulant to wake you up, So that's definitely understood. There is some interesting situations with exercising early mornings, so it has been associated with increased weight loss if you're trying to work out to lose weight,
because if you haven't eaten yet. Specifically, if you're working out after you know you wake up and you work out before you eat for the day, you're tapping into more energy stores that you have, which functionally you are fat, so it can be better for breaking down fat. The only issue that's come up with that is for individuals with type two diabetes, sometimes that can be an issue to exercise first in the morning.
It actually can cause gluecost regulation issues.
So for certain you know, if you have a chronic disease, i'd always recommend talking to your physician first about what the best time you know to exercise is for you, or any kind of those things. But if you're a generally healthy adult, I would say getting any exercise throughout the day is ideal. Whenever you can, you know, fit it in. Some people can do it in the morning, some people cannot, So I'd say whenever is good, but yes, the morning one will probably wake you up, might help
you burn fat a little bit faster. If you're trying to break records, I would definitely go for the afternoon. I would say the one time I would try to avoid is too close to bedtime. So I think three hours before you go to bed should be a detox for your body.
Low light, no food, no exercise.
To let your body came down, let you get be able to go to sleep, you know, don't give any of the cues that it's time to be awake. Aside from that, I think exercise whenever you can, and just maybe be aware you you know, because you didn't get your personal best six am doesn't mean you're weaker than you were when you did.
It it for few Yeah, absolutely, So three hour detox is your is your advice, you know, wanding everything down, lots stimulation, I think that's general.
That's the very general one. I think.
Yeah, I would go with yeah, And that's a little bit anecdotal, right. We haven't done this as an exact experiment yet, but from everything that we do know, I think I would say.
A minimum of three hours, and it might be more than that.
Right.
So one of the main things that we're setting is the timing and eating, and for that we usually recommend an eight to ten hour eating interval. So the way I like to think about it is, say you're in bed or at least resting for eight hours a day, I'd say, don't consume anything that aside from water, drink water whenever, just to get that out there. Drink water at all times, but wait at least an hour after you wake up to have anything else.
Make sure to stop at least three hours before you go to bed.
Those two things combined, that's already a twelve hour.
Interval that includes coffee.
Emily, yes, that includes coffee. There is a debate about black coffee specifically, so adding any creamers or anything like that, absolutely not. There is a debate about if black coffee would be acceptable. I think if you need to do it for any safety reason, like you need to drive and you're not awake, or you're doing shift work, or you know, or it as my colleague loeks to say, if it's the last happiness you have in your life,
then go ahead. But if you can't avoid consuming anything for at least an hour, it really allows your body to wake up properly. And so like for instance, melatonin, which is secreted when you're sleeping, actually suppresses insulin, which is again going to compromise your glucose regulation so and
that those can still be high. The levels can still be high when you first wake up, and so your body may not be able to process food properly, which is why we say wait at least an hour, get your body moving a little bit before you consume something. If you stop eating at least theys before you go to bed and you're in bed for eight hours, you're already at a twelve hour eating window.
So we recommend shortening that a little bit.
Maybe delay breakfast another hour, or advance your dinner an hour or two.
Get to that, you know, eight to ten hours.
But really it's all about consuming your calories during the active part of your day.
I think doing really early eating and.
Stopping eating after lunch is something that may be effective but is not feasible, and I don't think that would work for most people. You know, skipping breakfast and just starting at lunch and eating late I think also has issues. I think really trying to center when you eat to
the middle part of your day. Let that be a queue to your body, keep it consistent so it's actually able to process that food and also give you enough time for your metabolism to kind of relax and clear out and let you get a proper sleep because things like.
Late night eating or a nightcap, you.
Know, having a drink just beforeid to go to bed, you might fall asleep, but the quality of sleep that you're getting is very compromised. It's going to be a very poor sleep because it is an arousal cue. All these things, exercise, light, food, they're all arousal cues, and so you want to take those away to you tell your body now it's time to rest.
Yeah.
So I actually had a question written down of whether you're a fan of interimedted fasting, but I think we know that you are in its simplest form, and if you can get those three quality meals in a night to ten hour window, which I mean from a practicality instructure perspective, I'll give that advice a lot because I think it really helps people just maintain some very simple basic structure with their eating.
Yeah.
One thing I will clarify is what we're pushing, really, or what we're studying, is time restricted eating, which many people will call it type of intermnute fasting, but I think there are some kind of crucial differences. One is time restricted eating does not require any type of coloric restriction right as intermitted fasting usually does. So time restricted eating can be combined with coloric restriction, but it is
not required as part of it. The second thing is that because time restricted eating is really the only dietary intervention that really takes into account circadie and biology, and so it does have to be a consistent and it should be the same hours every day. You're not moving
around this fasting window, which intermitted fasting usually allows. And so I think those are two things to kind of keep mind, is how this is functionally a bit different, because I think that actually makes a pretty big difference as far as efficacy goes.
Yep, I think it's a really important thing to differentiate for people because I was talking about in the form of time restricted dating and I absolutely don't don't recommend the calorie counting side of things. I'm going to finish with one final question only I've absolutely loved that yet today, My god, I've learned so much. We're heading into the holiday season, a lot of people are going to be traveling. How if we can how do we combat jet lag in the more sort of normal sense of it? If
we do have a long overseas trip. What tips have you got for people if they've got a long flight?
Okay, So the couple of tricks you can try to do is one you can try to kind of shift to the new time before you leave. So our bodies are able to shift about an hour a day. So, for instance, you're actually many hours ahead. But if you look at it from a biological view, like what you're what are you seeing? I'm five hours ahead of you, just the day behind.
Right.
Your body doesn't know I'm a day behind. It just knows I'm five hours ahead. So I have to delay five hours to get on Australia time, for example, right. So to do that, what I might do is start to delay my patterns here, maybe three four days before and each day maybe go to sleep an hour later or wake up an hour later. Or if I can't do that because of work, maybe I just start eating a little bit different times. Maybe start delaying my eating to try to get ahead of it a little bit.
The other major trick, which is not always so much fun, is too fast while you're traveling. So it depends when you're traveling too, Right, if you're on the plane when it's nighttime where you're trying to end up, you probably you know, if it's the middle of the night on the new times when you're going to you probably don't want to be eating. So I guess really what you're trying to do is get on the new time zone
as soon as you can. If you need to eat while you travel, I know, so people get an upset stomach or something, go ahead and do that. But I would say once you do arrive at your new location, you just try to get on that schedule as soon as you can. So even if you're a little bit hungry, try not to eat until it would be the next meal or you know, if it's during the day, that's fine, but if you get there at midnight, I would hold off on eating until the next morning. Try to get
on that schedule. Try to get lots of bright light in the morning, try to get your body moving at the times of day. It's really just kind of giving those three cues light, food.
And exercise, and when I say exercise.
Tuneral activity too, you know, trying to use those as much as you can. To say, now is when we're awake and when it shouldn't be awake. Try to take those cues away as much as possible, so you can tell your body.
What time it's supposed to be. The Other thing to keep in.
Mind is it is much easier for your body to delay than it is to advance. So it will be much easier on me to come to Australia than for you to come to San Diego or you know, we're in your return trip. So sometimes getting somewhere you'll feel pretty good and coming back you'll feel horrible. And sometimes it's the reverse, and that's just because it's you know, it's easier for body to delay or response then to try to catch up on something I should have already done.
I genuinely mean this, that was so interesting. Just I could honestly talk to you for another hour. I've got all these wacky questions that I know on my list that have just popped into my head as we've been chatting. And I'm so appreciative our listeners are going to learn so much. And thanks so much for joining us all day from San Diego and have a wonderful day.
Thank you too.
I think we're going to have to have Emily back on the show because it's almost like the more you know, the more you want to know with this topic like that, it was a really really interesting chat from a really really interesting woman. Okay, we are going to now talk about the M word, which is motivation, and we've got some ripper questions and I want to give you some really important advice. You may have heard me say before or you may not have that motivation doesn't necessarily create action.
It actually works the other out.
Action creates motivation, but sometimes it's not actually motivation that is what we're looking for. And in this case, with Sherry's question, I think she's probably requiring a bit of a shakeup and some stimulation and that will in turn improve her motivation.
Hey, I've heard you speaking about getting motivated to work out, and I have no trouble leaving the house and going to the gym, But when I get there, I find it really hard to keep motivated after I do a couple of reps, so I'll find myself sitting down or not doing anything or playing on my phone. So what can I do to finish my workout?
Sherry?
What an interesting question because most people don't get to the gym. Most people actually their barrier is they don't even get to the gym, so you should actually be really happy that you're probably doing the best and the hardest bit consistently. If then when you're getting to the gym you're finding you're losing motivation or stimulation. I'd almost
put the word stimulation in there as well. There's a few things when it feels like your phone's probably a distraction, so I would potentially leave it at home or in the car, and it might be the source of your music, so you might have to go old school and get yourself a good, old fashioned iPod that isn't your actual phone. So that's the first thing. The second thing is it doesn't sound like you've got a very good program. I think if you've got a good program, you.
Know where you are. In that program.
You're always trying to better yourself, whether it's to do more reps or become stronger or better endurance or better form or whatever. It might be quicker recovery between your sets, or faster on the cardio machine. So it sounds like you need a bit of a shakeup. And that doesn't
mean going to another gym necessarily. The gym you might be going to could be fine, but going to one of the trainers, going to someone there at the gym that you know and you like and your trust and getting a new program, saying I need to shake.
Things up a bit.
This is the time frame I want to work out for, this is the frequency I want to come to the gym, and most importantly, this is what I want to achieve. And if they give you a program that goes for longer than twelve weeks, I'd suggest it's the wrong program. So do you want a program that's six to twelve weeks long and it'll keep you stimulated, It'll give you great results within that period if you follow it consistently,
and then you should change it up again. Too many people have been doing what was potentially the right program a long time ago for far too long, and it's now the wrong program. And it's physically not giving them the transformation or the adaptation that they should be getting, and it's mentally just boring them sideways because they're doing the same crap over and over and over again.
So sherey, it's time for a change.
Leave the phone in the car, get a new program, and I promise you your stimulation will increase, and as a cont sequence, so will your motivation.
Have love today's episode.
Of course, I'll be back on Monday for another motivational moment.
Would love to hear your questions.
Stay fit, stay well, stay healthy, have a great weekend, and I'll see you next week