#1834 The Sleep Episode - Dr. Cam McDonald

So but outside that, we just did a bunch of work and on the last day I did some really interesting digging into part of my conscious mind. Yeah, I've my CEO and founder. There's a documentary happening on him at the moment. He's one of the more prolific people in the space of getting in alignment with yourself mentally, spiritually, socially, all of that sort of stuff. And I had some very very valuable time with him and what I've found there's been a few things that I've built in my

mind over time. I'm interested in your opinion this apps and actually for that matter of where some things just feel impossible and so my brain doesn't even go into them. So like there's certain dynamics, certain relationships where I'd like them to improve, but it just feels impossible, So I just check out and I disappear, and he actually stepped me through. It's like this region of my brain, or like the neural pathways of my brain that I think I used to use, and he stepped me through them

one step at a time. It was literally like trying to navigate a pitch black room knowing where the next step was going to be. Men. It completely wiped me like two hours of this stepping into a space of like seeing the possibility of seeing change in something that I thought was otherwise impossible. It's done some really fascinating things to my brain over the last three days, and just even my willingness to turn up for people has really increased as well, which is interesting.

This will probably fail, you know. I think the challenge is to be able to kind of navigate with that that idea, like you can simultaneously feel inadequate while knowing that you're not. And I've said this many times, but you know, I don't know how many professional gigs I've done, but probably over two thousand or three thousand.

come back, so I must not be terrible. But I think like coexisting with fear and self doubt and overthinking and underdoing an analysis, paralysis. That's just the ongoing part of the ongoing human experience.

or that's not possible. And if it is real or possible, then I'm screwed because I don't understand it, and I want to understand anything everything so yeah, I think being comfortable with not knowing and saying, or being comfortable with being wrong, or being comfortable with unlearning and relearning. Yeah, like this is the ongoing how you're one of the smartest people I know.

And the whole idea is that all of the other trains on the network are meant to activate, like, Okay, we're going to start everyone's run at five am, and we've planned this perfection that if everyone starts at five and runs at the speed that we tell them to and goes to the stops theyre supposed to, then everyone's going to get there on time. There's going to be no delays. And essentially all of those other little trains are the different organs that aren't your brain, like your

digestive system, your pancreas, your you liver, your muscles. And let's say that your central clock says, hey, it's two am, so everyone's asleep, so don't do anything. But then your muscles go, I want to go for a run at two am. You've got a train now starting at two am. Everything else starts is designed to start at five am, and you end up with train crashes and delays and what we call desynchrony. So this is the cause of chronic disease in shift work, is when you start getting

out of sync. And this is what's really important. So and I'll come back to that if we need to. So that's the first thing, is that we actually have a rhythm that we want to hold, and that you can go into a dark cave with exactly the same light and somebody actually did this, and it takes a full month for you to change your day night cycle. So if you're traveling for less than a month, there's still a three to four week hangover from your previous

time zone that you were in. And I really noticed that when I went to Vegas, I was I had nights where I was going to bed earlier for Australia time, but it was late for Vegas and I just wanted to keep sleeping through to be on Australian time like that my body wanted to do about the whole week. So that's the first thing is that you can't just shake a rhythm in days like it actually takes quite a while for you to do that, and while that's happening,

there's going to be desynchrony. While that's happening, there's going to be more quartersole, more stress, and you're not going to feel as clear. So that's first and foremost is that there's a time element related to how long you're traveling for. Then that the hack for this, and I some of this has come from humans, some of it's come from my research as well, and that is you

have this thing called a set point. So I wanted to get on Vegas time, which means I want to start going to bed earlier because that means that I'm on Vegas time. Okay. So in order to do that, I have to look at my current time that I wake up, which is six am, five thirty six. So for the two hours before then, is my actually no, two hours before then at let's say four am, two hours before six hang on.

that night. Right. However, if I expose myself to light and wakefulness between two and four, the two hours before the set point, which is extremely early to wake up, my body thinks I now have to go to bed later the next night. So because it's like, oh, you're awake really late before your set point, you must be wanting to wake up, you must be wanting to stay

up later. So what I'm saying with all of this is when I travel, if I'm trying to make my body wake up earlier and earlier, I have to make sure that I'm in pitch dark from two to four am Australian time, because that then will mean that I can then expose myself to light between like four thirty and five, and that's going to continually bring me earlier

and earlier. And you can do that in a few days leading up to flying, and then it's you're not so out of whack with Vegas because you started waking

and started going to bed earlier. So this is what I've noticed, and I'm going the long way, But if someone can take notes on this and they can do it themselves later when I'm traveling, if I'm on the plane, I'll put my blinkers on and make sure that there is no light coming into my eyes even if I'm awake between two and four Australian time, and then I'll open my eyes and make sure I am awake from four to six, and that starts moving me in the

right direction. And I've really noticed that if you are like when you get to Vegas, finally you're actually awake during the two to four period, and that's when you'll feel awful. So that's when your body actually wants to sleep. It's in its deeper sleep. It doesn't want to be awake, and it's messing with the time that you're trying to get on track with as well, because now it things, oh you're up really late. We you've got to stay

up later la da dah. So what I'm saying with all of this is jet lag is firstly desynchrony, and if you're going for less than three weeks to that desynchrony is going to be available in your body, and that lowers your energy level, increases your stress, decreases your recovery, can reduce your motivation, can also make you more impulsive

with your eating. Secondly, you will feel intensely tired during that deep sleep time, and that's an important thing to notice because you might just be feeling awful for a couple of hours in the day, and you can remedy that by actually closing your eyes and actually having a rest at that time if you can, because your body, truly, it's rhythm, truly wants to set that up. So just be aware that it's probably only going to be a couple of hours in the day where you're really getting hammered.

And yeah, I've probably gone on too long. Go for it, No, I like it.

we talk more broadly about sleep for a moment? My first question is, like, we know that people don't need the same amount of for example, cal is per day every single day.

crazy day of just mayhem business activity. I walk thirty thousand steps, I cut down fifty trees, which I would never do because I love mother Earth, and I you know, I went rock climbing and I did three hours in the gym, And is it possible that I need an extra hour sleep that night or is it just that I need different kind of like a deeper sleep, or what's the go with the variability around sleep require moments?

There is you definitely need. So for that kind of day, you've got a whole lot of musculo scaletal strain that you're putting on your body, and there's probably a whole lot of damage that you've done to your muscles just as part of exercise, which is a healthy part of exercise, and it's your sleep that recovers that. So the time between twelve and three am is going to be really really important because that's where a lot of your musculo

scaltal repair is occurring. And then three six am is where you're doing a whole lot of your neural repair when the prolactance starts releasing and you start going into your rem sleep and consolidating thoughts as well. So I would say arguably your immune function, which is obviously chipping away and getting rid of all of the dead cells that starts at eleven, and the muscular skalital repair with your growth hormone release and all that sort of stuff

that's happening through the middle of your sleep. So I would say that portion is going to be the most important portion of your sleep that night, and probably what's likely to happen is that that portion of your sleep will be more active for the next two days as you're trying to repair your muscles, and this is what

you know. It might take a couple of days to repair those muscles, So there might be there might be a greater requirement for sleep, but in some instances it may mean that you recover faster because you have a bigger recovery spike, and you actually feel a whole lot better because you've got deeper quality sleep. You know, as you sleep longer into the morning. There arguably isn't a whole lot more benefits for your musculo scalitt or recovery so in that sense, you may not need more sleep.

You just need to make sure that you're having the right kind of sleep at the right time to recover the tissues that have been strained. For example, yes, yes, yeah, So.

fix it. Like that's a really important process. Yeah, so you've got to be what's really important is body temperature between that type eleven to one, some people like so in our health type circle, the sensors if they get too cold after five PM, if they are cold, they won't mount an appropriate immune response because you need body temperature to mount an appropriate immune response. This is often why the recommendation is there to raise your body temperature

before sleep. And this is because there's a natural cycle of body temperature rising up and that body temperature you need a certain amount of temperature to trigger off a healthy immune response. So, if you aren't getting good quality sleep, or if you're consuming anything that disrupts your immune system like caffeine or sugar, things that put you into a

sympathetic state. Sympathetic is the opposite to parasympathetic. Virtually, let's just say for this example, it's the opposite sympathetic is action. Parasympathetic is rest and digest. The immune function is a very parasympathetic sympathetic activity. It's a rest and digesting activity, So your body needs to be calm in order to do it. If you're out blitzing on red bulls at twelve am, you're essentially doing everything that you possibly can to not have your immune system at the time that

it's supposed to be on. So if you've got shit sleep, you don't mount an immune response, which means that you don't repair as quickly, and that can relate to greater muscle soreness, for example, because that's part of the repair.

It can mean that you now start getting a like a bit of a what's it called an itchy trigger finger for sickness because you're not actually taking care of what's called immunosurveillance, which is I'm going to surveil if there's any bacteria in my body, I'm actually looking for it. I found it, I'm going to kill it. If you don't get that immune response between eleven to one, then

you're just playing catch up the whole time. So burning the candle at both ends or even just burning the candle at night, there's an opportunity for you to miss that immune function. So that's and that means so more likely to get sick less recovery from your body because your immune system is doing all of those things, it's triggering a whole lot of different good things that happen. So body tell that's a starting point. Is that the kind of a few you want? Mate? Yeah?

what's interesting what sleep is. Sleep is your ultimate recover And there's a particular chemical that's very important for brain recovery, and it's called prolactin. And there's another one called insulin, like growth factor. There's also another one like growth hormone. There's another one like vascular endotheli or growth factor v EGF. So all of these things they come in and they repair your brain. They are literally getting more blood to the tissue of your brain so that the neurons can

be nourished. Prolactin is laying down more myelin so that your brain stays fast. Mylin is the thing that allows you to speed your thinking and carries all the important stuff. So you've got those chemicals and they are heightened, they are highest during your sleep. What's happening throughout the day is you're in a state of.

ninety and almost dead even though they're twenty five. And this is because you've got one hundred miles of tissue destruction that's happened with no recovery. And so if you have a brain that hasn't slept, you have zero brain tissue recovery and you start burning your brain out. And that's a healthy thing that you should be doing throughout the day, but then you need the sleep to actually have the time to repair the tissues. And this is also one of the reasons why they don't get you to.

these chemicals and much more sensitive to sleep. So your brain, your impulse control, your cravings, your tolerance, and patience will all go through the floor, as will your memory if you don't sleep, because you're actually getting destruction of the tissue. The second thing is rem sleep, which is the fourth phase essentially of your sleep. This is where you're assimilating all of the knowledge from the day before and you're making new connections and that you may know about the

rat study where they discovered this. Essentially, they looked at a rat through the day when it was sleeping and it was running the maze. The same neural patterns of the maze was running three hundred times in really quick succession. You're actually pulling together all of the stuff that you've learned from the day before so that your brain consolidates it. That's why we study better after a day a night of sleep, of learning the day before, all that sort

of stuff. So if you missed your sleep, you then don't get those connections. This can just reduce your clarity. This means you actually don't develop or grow in your ability to understand things. So brain health specifically declines very very quickly. And you know, one night bad sleep and you start making sentences like that, one night bad one night bad sleep, no good. You know, you get very simple, very quickly.

keep going with our shit. Sleep and list but you think about even I guess relating to Goggins, but like Navy seal training or the Buds where they do their five days with I think they average ninety minutes sleep a day for five days and just you know, psychologically, emotionally, physiologically fucking brutalize them with I guess the main point being to see how people can perform in the middle of the worst fucking conditions and the middle of cognitive, emotional, physiological overload.

So that's an important thing. And this is why you know, not everyone makes it, because not everyone is actually built to be able to withstand that, and similarly to Goggins because obviously he went through that and made that famous by going through it three times in a year or something.

I've just walked over glass. I kind of want to keep walking because I just want to get I just want to get there, or want to feel the pain. I want to know that this is hard. And so when Goggins is giving his advice on tripled down on your weaknesses, what he's actually saying is I'm doubling down

on my mental strength. I see something that I'm not good at, I'm going to use my dopamine built in structures to overcome that, whereas somebody else would use Maybe I need to do this for my family and their family then generates that motivation for them to go as harder they've got to go to. So it's yeah, just as a side.

poor asleep. Essentially, the statistic is is if you're getting less than five point five hours of sleep per night, you are at a thirty percent increased risk of diabetes compared to somebody who's getting normal sleep. So straight away there is a huge increase in diabetes risk, and we actually show signs of pre diabetes within four days of having bad sleep. But then you have good sleep and

that returns back to normal glycemic index. And what I mean by that is your blood sugar levels go nuts after four days, and then they return back to normal if you start getting some normal sleep. So just being underslept, even if you're eating the right foods, can actually put you into a diabetic state, which is really like from an endocrime perspective, because when you don't get enough sleep,

you don't recover as well. Your body thinks that there's something going wrong, and so you go into panic stations and to do that, you have to release a lot more quartisole cortisol, and that you release more quartersole throughout the day. Quartersole throughout the day. It's okay if you're exercising, but too much of it is bad. It makes your blood sugar levels, It makes you insulin resistant. Everyone's probably heard about that, it makes you hard for your body

to do what it's supposed to do with sugar. And so lack of sleep specifically starts destroying your insulince signaling through cortisol, and that then propagates a whole lot of issues as well, and you can translate that to steroid production and cholesterol production, blood pressure, which is obviously been controlled by a whole lot of the endocrin system too, So we see a thirty to forty percent increased risk of cardiovascular disease just by getting less than five and

a half hours sleep. So yeah, and a forty increased risk of premature death like just by not getting enough sleep. So it's the way I'll do it in my keynotes is I say, you're probably going to go home today. You're probably going to tell your part. Oh yeah, some bloke some food was telling us about sleep, and you know I'm not going to change it. But then what I want you to do is just add the sentence

because I want to die faster. That's all I want you to add to the end of that sentence, because we know it's after oxygen and that Walker is good for This is the sleep guy. He said, after oxygen sleep is the thing. If you're in deficiency of it, it will kill you next. So after oxygen, sleep is the thing that will kill you fastest if you're in deficiency.

So when it comes to the endocrine system, you are doing all of your regulation of your cycle and rhythms, Like your endocrime system is so sensitive to time of day, and as soon as you start messing around with timing. That's when you're going to start disregulating hormones.

of sleep there will be slight increases in anxiety. So it's just essentially, if you get less sleep, your body goes, what the hell, man like, there must be something wrong with my environment, and so you become more you start surveiling the world more, and you start becoming hyper attentive to the world because something must be wrong if you're not getting enough sleep. And so just the act of not getting enough sleep indicates that something is wrong, and

so your brain starts going into hyperdrive. So that may be something that occurs. Particularly, your nervous system has to really jump up and you have to use more nora adrenaline, which is a chemical that makes you more alert, you have to use more cortisol. But also what can happen is if you go for a period of time and a lot of people do this, and this is where it all gets interconnected. People go hard for six months

and then they're about to go on their holidays. As far as they've not been sleeping as well, they're about to go on their holidays, and what happens on the Thursday before the Friday holiday is they get sick. And this is because their immune system is finally catching up. And then they go into virtually a depression of I just don't want to do anything. I'm not motivated. I'm not getting the excitement out of things. And that's just a sign of burnout. So if you're not getting enough sleep,

you're not recovering. If you don't recover, your body will eventually say, hey man, you need to stop taking action. And the way that I'm going to stop you taking action is I'm going to stop giving you energy and I'm going to stop giving you motivation. And so you're going to sit there and you're not going to find pleasure in things. You're not going to be motivated to

do things. You're going to find yourself intolerant of things, and you might go along to your doctor and say, I think I'm depressed, and there may be a very real depression going on. It may also be that you've just been underslept for so long that your body is saying I'm sick and tired of giving you energy, that you're not recovering. I actually need to take energy away from you now. So we know that for sleep will

significantly increase mental health conditions. And even my chief medical officer is doing some fascinating research looking at the brain, the different brain rhythms and the very low frequency sort of like Earth has a frequency that you can measure like that level of frequency in the brain, and he's noticing that in autism one of the big determinants of severity is actually they're missing a whole lot of these brain waves during their sleep. They're not getting these particular elements.

And so they've just won a grant in Canada to do a whole bunch of really deep neurological testsing and sleep. By that, so it is obviously interconnected. Your brain requires a healthy immune function to recover, so you need your immune system to be turning on you need size and muscle recovery to support brain development as well, because the movement is specifically related to the brain size of the

areas that are related to anxiety as well. And so yes, essentially, if you are lacking sleep, it is a It's probably the first sign is that you'll have less control over your mind. That's probably the thing that we notice first is that everything becomes heightened and things aren't as happy.

this is very broad. But we have a lot of people who listen to this show who maybe are not necessarily athletes, but they do athletic things, they have athletic pursuits.

putting strain on your collagen fibers. Through the day, you get weaker. The only time that you get stronger is when you sleep. And if you want to question that, do a really hard eccentric workout that you would normally be able to recover with a couple of days of muscles soreness, but then don't sleep that night and watch how the next five days are possibly the worst experience of your life because your body missed it's key time to actually recover. So the whole thing about an athlete,

athletes want to be stronger and faster. The only time that actively happens where their body gets stronger and faster is when they're sleeping. They think it's training, but it's only happening when they're sleeping. Second thing, and this is really important, is and reaction time. As you said it, it's called the P three hundred. This is the time that it takes for you to want to do something to you activating it and athletes need are really good

and so three hundred milliseconds is what it is. But athletes want a P two hundred and tiff here as an activator will naturally have a P two which is an even faster reaction time. And so as soon as you start missing sleep, those pathways start slowing down and your reaction time reduces. And that what does reaction time mean for an athlete? It means maybe you miss a gun, maybe you miss a tackle, maybe you miss an unstable

part of the field. An unstable part of the road, and you aren't, you can't correct, and now you injure. So whenever you start losing sleep, you start reducing your proprioception, reducing your balance, which is absolutely pivotal. And then when we're talking about athletes as well, and this is probably one of the bits of feedback that we get, is that when we take athletes through the process that we do, they go, I just feel so much sharper and so

much more mentally ready. And when you've got when you're when you're trying to push your body as far as you can go, you need to be mentally ready for that. And mental readiness is I have energy to burn and I can push my mind here because that's such an important part of it. So you have when you're more slept, you will be more mentally ready, your mood will be up, your optimism will be there, the potential for you to

experience flow is going to be higher. So not only do it, it is absolutely necessary for you to sleep in order for you to be an athlete's it will significantly decrease your ability to do anything athletic if you aren't sleeping well enough.

do they have this will lift? If an hour is good, then three hours is amazing. I'm like, well, no, no, not at all, but all right, let's finish on this one. And by the way, for people who about forty five minutes ago, we had no idea what we were going to talk about and when I say we, well, we but you've done very well. Last one is really broad. So poor sleep or shit sleep. The relationship between that and this is very general. And health span slash life span.

immune system. Everyone's crazy about fasting because you get autophogy of your cells, which is killing the old dead cells and stimulating the new growth of new cells. You know that happens in sleep too.

let it go. But what I want you to do is to repeat to your partner, and I say it a few times just to really make sure they get it. I just want to die faster. But it's not one of those situations where I get to have this awesome ride and I'm going flatter you know that person. I'd prefer to like drive my car like a roadster and completely collapse on my deathbed or whatever it might be. It's like, no, no, you're going to live, but then

you're going to get heart disease. We're really good at keeping people alive while they're sick nowadays, and this is what life span is. We've got a really good ability to extend a person's life while they have disease. And health span is about extending a person's life while they don't have disease. And so if you lack sleep, you know that handser risk goes up by forty five percent. In some instances, heart disease goes up by forty percent.

Diabetes goes up by thirty percent bowel conditions, which I don't know if anyone's had a bowel condition before. It sucks shit and the and I only said that for the part. I don't like to swear all the time. The all of your life becomes really crap because now you have to be thinking about am I going to die? Or what do I have to manage? Or No, I can't do that because I'm on a BEATA blocker and my heart rate can't go above one thirty otherwise I'm going to pass out if I do exercise too hard.

I can't actually run around with my kids the way that I want to. Or I've got to be jabbing myself with a needle to make sure that I've got insulin, or I've got to go through chemotherapy and radiotherapy, or I've got to watch everything that I eat and be in pain half the day because my stomach will just

not settle down. And I've now got a condition that's that's not happy, or an autoimmune condition where my thyroid isn't working, or or you know where my digestive system is eating itself through chrones or al stive colitis, or I've got rheumatoid arthritis and anytime the humidity increases, now my joints hurt. Like this isn't the way that we want people to live, and our vision and mission everything

we're doing is the elimination of these conditions. So when we're talking about health span, sleep is the thing, like outside of continuing to breathe, it is the thing that is going to recover you and support you to grow and to learn and to get over disease fast than anything. And even and we didn't really get into the individual nuance of Cicadian rhythms and how different people need different things at different times in the day. We don't need

to go into that today. But even understanding that some people need slow mornings, some people need a fast morning, that can actually make all of the difference in your day, like as to how you wake up in the morning too. So anything that you want to any disease that you have is a degenerative process, virtually most of them are.

And that is you haven't been able to recover or you haven't had an immune system that's picked up that there's something wrong, and your body is just less able to surveil itself and a psychological equivalent to this is mindfulness. When you are mindful of your thoughts, you're able to observe them more, and you're able to control them more,

and your stress decreases. Interestingly enough, mindfulness creates observing your thoughts, creates an observation of your body, and through the immune system,

the same two things. The systems are happening together. So if you aren't surveiling your body, if you aren't surveiling your thoughts, you don't know when something's going wrong until something big breaks like a heart attack, like blood sugar and outlivers are an hour out of control, like a pocket of cells that were able to develop that weren't caught earlier, because I part of your immune system is to actually surveil the cells that are not functioning correctly.

So essentially, if you don't sleep, you are specifically asking for increased disease span. And if we got everybody sleeping well, it would blow strips off. Resveratrol for example, that is the only pill that you need to take to increase your thirt one and two genes and take your NMN with it and worry about your sleep. Just drink more red wine compounds and eat this NMN and you can do whatever you want because these two genes are activated

when the rest of your system is slowly dying. So anyway, I've probably got a bit too intense there, but it's pretty important for health span, the old sleep.

things is so important. But probably the most important thing is dim the lights and warm your body up if you can tolerate some warmth at night, dim the lights and warm your body up an hour before you go to bed, and that consistent every night and wake up, just get out of bed consistently. When they do the sleep studies, they don't say, oh, this person was asleep for this period of time. They say this person was in bed for eight hours versus in bed for five

point five. They don't actually say your quality of sleep. Quality of sleep definitely matters, but you can't change your quality of sleep while you're sleeping. You can only do that through your exercise and your food. And that's different for everybody, and we've got other podcasts that've definitely discussed that at length. So it is get consistent with your sleep time, get consistent with when you shut lights down.

Your light and your body temperature are the two primary time givers that determine what time of day it is, and if you can keep that regular, even if it's if you're only getting five hours right now, get a regular five and a half. If you're getting five and a half, get a regular six and try and work your way up to seven. But get that as a regular window in your day. And a lot of these things that we're talking about will just happen for you?

individual makeart. We've got corporate programs. We're working with schools to help children understand themselves that way too, So all of that informations on that website.