896 The Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson

NEW DECADE, NEW SLEEP GOALS. So often we glorify not getting enough sleep. We brag about pulling an all-nighter. We “grind” or wake up at the crack of dawn. Some of us think that staying up is helping us achieve our dreams. But sleep is key to our mental and physical health. It even keeps us young. So why do so many of us put quality sleep on the back burner? On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I talk about sleep with a bestselling author on the subject: Shawn Stevenson. Shawn Stevenson is an author of “Sleep Smarter” and creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the #1 Health podcast in the country on iTunes. A graduate of The University of Missouri - St. Louis, Shawn studied business, biology and kinesiology, and went on to be the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. Shawn says that often we look at sleep as something we should sacrifice to be more present for other people and our goals. But the word sacrifice actually means “to make sacred.” We need to make sleep a sacred practice that heals our body and mind. So get ready to learn how and why you should have more restful sleep on Episode 896. Some Questions I Ask: What is sleep? (16:00) How bad is sugar for sleep? (28:00) What does the research say about eating before sleep (32:30) What is the optimal evening routine? (52:30) What is the optimal amount of hours of sleep? (1:07:00) In This Episode You Will Learn: The four stages of sleep (19:00) Why you need sleep to produce Human Growth Hormone (21:00) About the REM Rebound Effect The relationship between sleep and aging (40:00) How the body receives melatonin (47:00) Hacks for using technology while preparing for sleep (57:30) Why you should keep your room cold when you sleep (1:02:00) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 896 with the Sleep Doctor Shawn Stevenson. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:32Lewis Howes?

  Buddha said, "To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep the mind strong and clear." My friends, welcome to this episode. I am pumped because, man, I used to sleep in like crazy when I was a kid. I don't know if you were like me where you slept in till like 10, 11, 12, 1pm sometimes. And your mom would scream at you and rip the covers off your bed and say, "Wake up, get up, it's time to get up." My mom used to do that to me all the time, but there's something that she had wrong. Because she didn't know the power of sleep and sleep science and the key to actually allowing your mind to be clear, allowing your body to heal with the optimal sleep.

• 1:17Lewis Howes?

  Now, she didn't know I was staying up late. She didn't know how much sleep I was actually getting. She just thought I needed to get up at a decent time and I would usually stay up too late. I was up till like 1, 2, 3 a.m. a lot of those times. And what I realized is that I didn't have great sleep patterns growing up. I wish I had better patterns. Some years I would sleep a lot. And I remember those years being the most productive in sports and the most alert in school, which was already hard for me to do because I struggled in school. I was in the special needs classes. And it was hard for me to retain information in books. But this is all about the science of sleep.

• 1:59Lewis Howes?

  And I'm telling you, sleep is everything. If you want to get, if you want to burn fat, if you want to be smarter, if you want to remember more, if you want to look younger, we're going to talk about the science of sleep. Of all of this and how Shawn Stevenson dives into explaining this and the keys on how to have better sleep for yourself and how it affects everything in your life, your relationships to your finances, to everything, it all comes down to sleep. Now Shawn Stevenson is a bestselling author and creator of the nutrition and fitness podcast, The Model Health Show. Amazing show, if you haven't listened to it yet. He's got a background in biology and kinesiology and he has over 11 years of working with clients as one of the top nutrition experts in the

• 2:40Lewis Howes?

  country. And on his podcast, The Model Health Show, he interviews world renowned experts on the topics of health, fitness, nutrition, personal development, and of course, sleep. And he breaks down dozens and dozens of research articles in almost every one of his episodes where he reveals the top science for the body nutrition and sleep. And in this interview, we talk about the different types of sleep that are out there and how they affect cognitive abilities and memory. So if you want to have a better memory, there's a different type of sleep that you need. Shawn's family culture and the importance of being playful, why playfulness actually allows you to sleep better, why Shawn's body deteriorated at 22 years old and how

• 3:24Lewis Howes?

  he turned his life around, how food is connected to sleep and the foods can aid in better quality sleep, which ones to eat before bed, which ones not to eat, biology versus willpower, and how to avoid setting yourself up for failure when you're trying to stay healthy. This is perfect for the start of the year, start of a decade. I'm telling you, you need to get great sleep in order to achieve great things in your life. If you want to have energy, clarity, focus, if you want to make sure you make better decisions, if you want to make sure you have better intuition, if you want to earn more, all these things come down to having the right sleep. So without further ado, let's dive into this episode with the one and only Shawn Stevenson.

• 4:15Lewis Howes?

  All right, welcome back to the School of Greenness Podcast. My man, Shawn Stevenson, in the house.

• 4:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Good to see you, man. Yeah, it's been a minute.

• 4:21Lewis Howes?

  We had you on, you were saying, four years ago. I thought it was two years.

• 4:24Shawn Stevenson?

  I know time has flown by.

• 4:25Lewis Howes?

  Time, man.

• 4:26Shawn Stevenson?

  It's crazy.

• 4:27Lewis Howes?

  Time. So for those that don't know, Shawn, you are the expert on sleep, and more than sleep now, but you're known for sleep. You've got a book about sleep. But you're just an amazing researcher on the body, and on human performance, and on nutrition, food, training, sleep, and you're doing more on the emotions and everything, on how we can perform better as human beings.

• 4:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Lewis Howes?

  Would I say that's about accurate?

• 4:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely, yeah, man.

• 4:56Lewis Howes?

  And you just moved to LA, so welcome.

• 4:58Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, you've been telling me for years, man, to come out here.

• 5:01Lewis Howes?

  We have some stuff in common. I lived in St. Louis for six years. You grew up there.

• 5:07Shawn Stevenson?

  Born and raised.

• 5:08Lewis Howes?

  Born and raised, man.

• 5:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, St. Louis.

• 5:09Lewis Howes?

  I still have 314. There you go.

• 5:11Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, me too.

• 5:14Lewis Howes?

  So I still have that. That's been like 20 years, having that cellphone number since 1999. And we're here, man. You've done some amazing things. You've got a book on Audible. It's one of the top books, Sleep Smarter on Audible, that helps so many people sleep better. And I thought it'd be perfect going into a new year and new decade to figure out, how can we sleep better? What are the main keys for sleeping better, moving forward? We talked about this four years ago. What's the same and what's updated on how we can sleep better?

• 5:45Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. You know, the thing for everybody to understand, I think it always starts with us asking the right question, you know? And a lot of us, sleep has become, it's just exploded. And I'm so grateful that I was there to kind of thrust this new movement in sleep wellness.

• 5:59Lewis Howes?

  I mean, now there's even so many apps that are, podcasts that are just storytelling to go to sleep.

• 6:05Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Lewis Howes?

  Calm has like this series, which is just Sleep Stories, I think it's called, to help people go to sleep. Because it's so hard for us.

• 6:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, and now we know, but...

• 6:15Lewis Howes?

  Why is it so hard to go to sleep?

• 6:17Shawn Stevenson?

  It's just the environment that we live in today. And it's looking again at the question, so what is sleep actually? We have to start there.

• 6:24Lewis Howes?

  What is it?

• 6:24Shawn Stevenson?

  So this is this thing we're chasing after, we're trying to get more of it, we know it's important. But sleep is really, first of all, it's very strange. You know, if you look at some of the characteristics from the outside, it's like you're unconscious. You know what I mean?

• 6:36Lewis Howes?

  You're there for hours.

• 6:37Shawn Stevenson?

  You're vulnerable, you're not really moving, your senses are dulled and gone down. You know, obviously your visual senses are reduced or just none unless you're weird and you have your eyes open. But you know, even your auditory, your sense of smell, your sense of touch, all those things reduce. And you're, but what's different from that and like a coma is that it's easily, you can come out of it if somebody nudges you enough or you know, you have something that goes on.

• 7:01Lewis Howes?

  It's a light coma.

• 7:02Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, it's like a little mini, mini hibernation, you're like a baby bear for a minute, you know? But what we see in the inside, and this is what's so cool now, is that we can track and we can study the brain and see what happens. We know you're sleeping based on changes that happen in your brainwaves. And so right now, we're in a kind of normal waking state of beta frequency in our brainwaves. Maybe a little gamma if we get to like, you know, Bruce Banner like amped up a little bit. But from our normal waking state of beta, we shift into alpha. It's just a slower pattern. And alpha is really aligned with what we would refer to as like getting in a flow state. Right? It's just a calm, relaxed state of presence. And we naturally transition into that state when we're getting close to sleep.

• 7:46Shawn Stevenson?

  This one, a lot of creativity can kind of manifest.

• 7:49Lewis Howes?

  So when we're getting ready for sleep, we get into alpha?

• 7:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 7:53Shawn Stevenson?

  This is why it's said it's very good to like, when you first wake up, because you go in reverse when you wake up. You know, to, you know, focus on your day, your goals for the day. Because, okay, so we move from beta to alpha and then we go to theta. And theta is a really strong transitionary state. In theta, you're in what it would be considered if we looked at it as compared to something like a hypnotic trance. All right? And

• 8:18Lewis Howes?

  Theta.

• 8:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Theta. And so this is

• 8:20Lewis Howes?

  That's when you're asleep.

• 8:22Shawn Stevenson?

  This is when you're not asleep. You're, this is a transitionary state, very close to sleep. And when you're in hypnotic trance, like we were just talking about Marissa Peer. I was just talking with her the other day. But we're kind of trying to manipulate that theta frequency to kind of get in there deeper in the brain. And to give a good analogy, like kids up until the age of about seven are spending a lot more time in theta. And so you're very impressionable, right? This is where, why kids like believe everything, you know?

• 8:47Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 8:48Shawn Stevenson?

  I'm not gonna throw out any names, you know, Santa Claus and anything like that. I'm not gonna say it's not real. But, you know, like, everything is just taken in very deeply, right? And this is where a lot of our programming that even lasts into our childhood takes place. Alright, so theta, you're very impressionable. And then from there, we transition into delta. And so this is when we know that we're in sleep. And then within our sleep, there are four primary stages. We have the big two that people know is non-REM sleep and REM sleep. Alright, so REM sleep, that's rapid eye movement sleep. This is when you're getting your dream on. And this is when

• 9:20Lewis Howes?

  So your eyes literally like

• 9:22Shawn Stevenson?

  Are, it is freaky, right? This is just a weird, weird thing, yeah. So it's rapid eye movement, your eyes are moving.

• 9:27Lewis Howes?

  And that's the best type of sleep?

• 9:29Shawn Stevenson?

  No.

• 9:29Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 9:30Shawn Stevenson?

  I'm not gonna say best, it's a part. You know, we need all of them, and this is the point we're gonna come to. And so, this is when a process, for example, during REM sleep is when you have something called memory consolidation. This is where things that you're learning even right now get converted into your short-term memory. Alright, so it gets filed away and becomes more of a permanent potential thing in your brain. You need sleep in order to remember stuff.

• 9:55Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 9:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And so there's a study recently, and what they did was, they had folks to do a memory test. And they had one set of the participants take the, the, the study, take the test in the morning. And then they had them to repeat the test at two-hour increments for 12 hours. And then they tracked their results. Then, they had another set of study participants, they had them take the test. And then they had them just, you know, kind of wait all day, get a good night's sleep, and then retest in the morning, without doing it over and over again. And they performed 20% better on the memory test. Only testing once, and then getting a good night's sleep and repeating. Alright, we tend to think that we need to keep hammering trials over and over again.

• 10:38Lewis Howes?

  We shouldn't do the overnight, stay up all night, testing and quizzing ourselves. We should be actually Practice for an hour, get a good night's sleep. And hopefully have better results.

• 10:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 10:50Lewis Howes?

  Pulling all-nighters.

• 10:51Shawn Stevenson?

  The thing is, you know, we've been in this situation where we're pulling all-nighter because we don't know anything.

• 10:56Lewis Howes?

  We don't know nothing. We gotta study the whole book.

• 10:59Shawn Stevenson?

  So yeah, man, but that's, that's non, that's REM sleep and then we have non-REM sleep. This is, it's considered more of the anabolic deep sleep. This is where a lot of the anabolic hormones like HGH gets secreted, right? And it's also known as the youth hormone. So kids have a lot of HGH. Up until around 18 to 20, we have a big, sharp decline in our HGH production.

• 11:21Lewis Howes?

  So how do we get more of that?

• 11:22Shawn Stevenson?

  Sleep. You produce the greatest amount of HGH because we secrete it during the day. All of our hormones are based on the time of day. And this is another really important point is that we're lined up with nature's clock, but we just don't realize it. Because humans have the unique ability, we can cut ourselves off from it. We could shut all the blinds and, you know, we could just create eternal daytime in this room if we wanted to. You know what I mean? But all of our hormones are getting released in a cyclical pattern. And human growth hormone, our greatest, greatest secretion or skeet of the HGH happens during sleep.

• 12:00Shawn Stevenson?

  And specifically during that first stage of sleep, when we go for the first time into deep delta, non-REM sleep.

• 12:08Lewis Howes?

  That's when we're producing HGH. We're creating more of it.

• 12:11Shawn Stevenson?

  The biggest secretion happens then. Yeah. And so if you're not getting optimal sleep, you're missing out on this powerful vital hormone. And whenever I would hear HGH, when I first started doing this research, getting close to a decade ago, I would think of Barry Bonds and like Jason Giambini.

• 12:26Lewis Howes?

  Wire, yeah, yeah.

• 12:27Shawn Stevenson?

  A-Rod, no disrespect, no disrespect, Marion Jones, but it's because of ESPN, just seeing the highlights in the news. But human growth hormone is something that we produce, you know, within our, within our own bodies. You know what I'm saying? So.

• 12:41Lewis Howes?

  How do we produce more of it? It's only through sleep?

• 12:44Shawn Stevenson?

  No, no, we could, with exercise, you know, especially like drivers of anabolic growth. So resistance training, but more so like power lifts. You can get a really good secretion.

• 12:57Lewis Howes?

  Power lifting will produce, help produce more HGH.

• 13:00Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And so the.

• 13:01Lewis Howes?

  What does HGH do for you when you have more of it?

• 13:03Shawn Stevenson?

  That's where I was gonna go to. So the benefit of HGH, it's not that, what we tend to think is that it makes you perform better. Specifically makes you bigger, right? That's what you think. If you see the transformation of somebody like Barry Bonds' body. It's not that it just makes you bigger and you can hit the baseball faster. They already have these skills. It's the recovery. It helps you recover a lot faster. My son, my eight-year-old son can get out and run, do sprints with us like crazy. Well, we're just demolished the next day. And he's totally fine. Doesn't feel a thing.

• 13:33Lewis Howes?

  He's just producing HGH without sleep.

• 13:35Shawn Stevenson?

  He's healing. You know, he's healing. So it helps with healing. It does help with protein synthesis and also retention of muscle mass. So this is huge. This is something we tend to lose as we get older is our muscle mass. And I think it's really important for us to understand when we're talking about body composition, weight loss, fat loss, all that stuff. Muscle is your body's fat burning machinery, really.

• 13:57Lewis Howes?

  You need to have more of it if you want to burn fat.

• 13:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. Because even as we're sitting, we're not training right now. But depending on the amount of muscle mass that we carry on our bodies has a huge impact on how many calories we're burning just sitting here. You know, our resting metabolic rate.

• 14:10Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 14:10Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, so HGH helps you to retain that muscle that you're out there working hard to build. You know, so those are just a few of the things.

• 14:17Lewis Howes?

  So what are the main lifts that you would say?

• 14:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Oh, man, I'll tell you straight up. Deadlift is like, it's money in the bank for producing HGH.

• 14:25Lewis Howes?

  You're talking like heavy, heavy? Or is this just like if you're doing it, it's 70, 80%?

• 14:30Shawn Stevenson?

  I mean, even 80%, 80% is pretty good, you know? But we're talking like getting up there close to your max.

• 14:35Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 14:36Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, yeah, absolutely. And that's for a lot of people, it's like that might be a little bit of fear comes up. Like, I don't want to lift that heavy. I'll tell you right now, for my, I've been in this field for almost 20 years. And what I've seen, people don't get hurt deadlifting. People getting hurt picking up a feather. You know, they're getting hurt picking up a pillow.

• 14:53Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 14:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Just because our bodies are so conditioned to, to sitting and not performing. And we're not doing the things that kids do that keep them healthy, right? One of those things is.

• 15:03Lewis Howes?

  Like jumping on a, jumping on the couch or just running around or just picking up stuff.

• 15:07Shawn Stevenson?

  When do we do that?

• 15:08Lewis Howes?

  We do it as a kid.

• 15:09Shawn Stevenson?

  And then something happens and we're just like, you know, our environment starts to say, stop playing.

• 15:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Stop playing so much. Especially from where I'm from, it's like leaving that something we say, you play too much.

• 15:19Lewis Howes?

  Wow, so true, man. You play too much.

• 15:22Shawn Stevenson?

  But it's so good for you.

• 15:23Lewis Howes?

  You should play a lot.

• 15:24Shawn Stevenson?

  You know what it does? And this is the thing, this is why, you know, both of us love sports.

• 15:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Shawn Stevenson?

  It's a dimension of that that's still socially acceptable, but we love it. You learn boundaries, you learn how to communicate in different ways besides just vocally. You learn how to move your body in space and like, things like proprioception. This is the awareness that your body, of your body in space. You improve your proprioception, your neuroception. All these different aspects of our bodies interacting with our environment and also our internal environment. And if we're not playing, we're missing out on this vital part of our development.

• 15:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Shawn Stevenson?

  You know?

• 15:59Lewis Howes?

  What are the best ways we can play, you think, as adults?

• 16:02Shawn Stevenson?

  Aw, man.

• 16:03Lewis Howes?

  Is it sports or is it just go out and throw a football or play frisbee or? What's, what are the activities you think are best?

• 16:10Shawn Stevenson?

  It's such a great question, man. You know, I've been, this is so funny. I've been thinking about this like the last two weeks. I have, so I, I didn't realize I was doing this because I have, my two sons live with me. I have three kids. My daughter's older than mine. It's two sons live with me. I have a nineteen year old son and an eight year old son that live in my house. And we just have a culture of like, we're dancing every day, you know, like, I don't know why, we just do it. Uh, we're playing every day. Just the other night, my sons, we had, you know, we sat down and ate dinner together. And then afterwards, they were fighting for like twenty minutes, but it was like, you know, they're play fighting.

• 16:43Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 16:43Shawn Stevenson?

  But, and there's with you being a parent, after a while, it's just like, would you shut up? You know, like, stop, you know, like, we start getting irritated. You play too much.

• 16:51Lewis Howes?

  You play too much.

• 16:52Shawn Stevenson?

  But then I catch myself like, they're just having a good time. They're learning how to have those boundaries, how to play with each other, how to move in space, how to grab somebody and not hurt them versus hurt them. You know what I mean? So, and they're playing, they're having a good time. And I'm, the thing is, I'm the one who usually initiates it. I just want to do it for a couple of minutes.

• 17:10Lewis Howes?

  Right, not for an hour.

• 17:11Shawn Stevenson?

  And then I'm just like, alright guys, chill. You know what I mean? And so, that's one of the things is if you have children. Play with your kids.

• 17:19Lewis Howes?

  Is that, what's that mean, play? Wrestle?

• 17:21Shawn Stevenson?

  One of the great exercises and what I used to do with my son, I mean, you know, we just moved out to LA, so I don't know the landscape as much, but I would take my son to the park and then I would just follow him and do whatever he does.

• 17:33Lewis Howes?

  Whatever he wants to do.

• 17:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 17:34Lewis Howes?

  Just run around.

• 17:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Going through the tunnels, climbing stuff. I follow you. He's the boss. You know, Simon says, you know what I mean?

• 17:42Lewis Howes?

  I like that.

• 17:42Shawn Stevenson?

  That's one thing.

• 17:43Lewis Howes?

  Okay. By the way, your wife has some like, some of the best home cooking I've ever had is with your wife. At your place. It's amazing. I can't remember what it was specifically, but it was some like casserole type thing.

• 17:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Oh, the casserole, yeah.

• 17:55Lewis Howes?

  So good, man.

• 17:56Shawn Stevenson?

  The buffalo casserole.

• 17:57Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man, it was amazing.

• 17:58Shawn Stevenson?

  And then she made cookies. And I know we were both like so dud and then she made cookies.

• 18:03Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 18:05Lewis Howes?

  Can always eat those cookies. That's my downfall, sugar.

• 18:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Lewis Howes?

  How bad is sugar for sleep?

• 18:10Shawn Stevenson?

  Hmm, that's such a great question, man.

• 18:12Lewis Howes?

  Because that's the only, I wouldn't say it's the only, but it's one of the negatives about me is that I eat too much sugar. And then I'll go off it for like sixty days, right? I'm like extreme.

• 18:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 18:23Lewis Howes?

  I'm all in on a bag of cookies. I can't just do one.

• 18:26Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Lewis Howes?

  Or I'll do nothing for a long time.

• 18:29Shawn Stevenson?

  But I think that deprivation can lead to the rebound behavior.

• 18:32Lewis Howes?

  Probably, because I'm just like, now I need it.

• 18:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, so here's the thing. So there was an incredible study that was done and there's, it's difficult to do human studies when it comes to addiction because of the implications, right? But there was a fantastic study done using rodents, using mice. And what they allowed the mice to do was have free access to either cocaine or sugar.

• 18:57Lewis Howes?

  And they picked sugar.

• 18:58Shawn Stevenson?

  Ninety-six percent of the time, the cocaine is not enough, right? They were so addicted to the sugar and they took-

• 19:06Lewis Howes?

  Sugar probably tastes better too, right?

• 19:07Shawn Stevenson?

  They took rats that were already even addicted to cocaine and they quickly progressed and shifted over to an addiction of sugar.

• 19:14Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 19:14Shawn Stevenson?

  It's that strong. And like we, humans, we're hardwired, if we're just looking at our biology, we're hardwired through evolution to crave and to enjoy sweet things. For our biology, it's an implication that there's a lot of dense carb, I mean, dense calories there. It's a dense calorie source.

• 19:30Lewis Howes?

  It's not a- Calorie rich, it's not like a healthy calories.

• 19:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, right, not necessarily, but even the sugar we'd be exposed to through our evolution would be something like the biggest gift we'd run into maybe was some honey, you know, but today we have everything 24/7, it's a whole, we're not, we're not wired up for this exposure, that's the.

• 19:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, honey was probably like a nice, it was probably so strong and then you just put a little bit on.

• 19:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Lewis Howes?

  To add, not like dump the whole thing in there, like a Winnie the Pooh or something. It's just like licking on the jar, because I can drink a whole jar of honey.

• 20:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Lewis Howes?

  If I wanted to, you know what I mean?

• 20:06Shawn Stevenson?

  I was so addicted to Honey Nut Cheerios, like that was my jam.

• 20:10Lewis Howes?

  Oh my god, those are so good.

• 20:10Shawn Stevenson?

  That Little B, man, it was like my bestie, man.

• 20:13Lewis Howes?

  Oh, those are so good.

• 20:14Shawn Stevenson?

  But even when I met my wife and I was like shifting, like I changed my health and I'd been working as a personal trainer for like a year and a half. But that was my thing, I was like eating organic whatever, but I had my Honey Nut Cheerios.

• 20:26Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 20:26Shawn Stevenson?

  It was my midnight snack, right? But here's the thing, this is.

• 20:29Lewis Howes?

  The milk tastes amazing.

• 20:30Shawn Stevenson?

  Afterwards, the milk.

• 20:31Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh, it's so good.

• 20:33Shawn Stevenson?

  Don't get me started, man.

• 20:34Lewis Howes?

  I haven't had cereal in a long time. That was one of the things that was the hardest for me to let go of, but that's something I eliminated this century from my diet. And I just replaced with cookies or something else.

• 20:45Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, man, it's crazy, dude, this, the, the culture again, that's the big thing, but just on that point of how does this affect our sleep? I think it's a really great question. And so, the first thing to understand is the impact that sugar has on various hormones. If we're thinking about, you know, cortisol for example, or, you know, stress response. And basically what happens is when, when we eat a high concentration of sugar, we get this hit and it feels good, you know, we like, we get like a serotonin hit, you know? And this is why some carbohydrates, like if we are select, selectively getting our carbohydrates, it can be a good thing.

• 21:25Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:25Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? But it's just when we go too far and we go, uh, we have a hypoglycemic response.

• 21:30Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? And so we get a blood sugar spike and then a blood sugar crash. And that for us, that's emergency to our biology, because when your blood sugar goes too low, you have reduced brain function. And your body, if we're talking about survival in the conditions that we evolved in, you're not sharp.

• 21:48Lewis Howes?

  You're tired.

• 21:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly, and you can be more of a victim, right? And so, or prey. And so what happens is, you get a response from your sympathetic nervous system and your cortisol levels, norbinofrin, you know, adrenaline, all those things start to spike to lift your blood sugar back up again.

• 22:05Lewis Howes?

  So you're not vulnerable.

• 22:06Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly, exactly. So that you're just sharp and ready and okay and prepared.

• 22:10Lewis Howes?

  So you're just, your body's just going up and down all day as opposed to a steady and maybe a spike when you eat a little bit and then steady and, right?

• 22:18Shawn Stevenson?

  But if we're talking close in proximity to sleep, that's gonna really mess your sleep up.

• 22:23Lewis Howes?

  So when, you know, there's all these different people that talk about intermittent fasting or when you should stop eating by. What does the research say about eating before sleep? Anything, whether it's healthy snack, dark chocolate, wine, I don't care what it is. Is there a time limit you should stop eating by before sleep? And is there certain foods you can eat before sleep that'll actually benefit or not?

• 22:50Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, this is a good question. I've been looking into this for quite some time now. So we, let's address both of these things. Let's address wine, let's address alcohol, and let's address food. All right, so when it, with alcohol, so what we do know is that alcohol does in fact help you to fall asleep faster. This is a fact across the board.

• 23:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it relaxes you.

• 23:10Shawn Stevenson?

  It's a sedative, you know? And that's all good. The issue, however, is that we experience something with alcohol in your system and how your body metabolizes alcohol. It's called a rim rebound effect, right? REM rebound effect. And so what happens is, we go into, when we, earlier we talked about those sleep stages. Basically, you're unconscious, but your sleep stages are fragmented and broken. And so, we'll go into a deep sleep.

• 23:40Lewis Howes?

  What's the main, what are the stages again of sleep?

• 23:43Shawn Stevenson?

  So we're transitioning as we go from

• 23:46Lewis Howes?

  You're awake?

• 23:46Shawn Stevenson?

  waking state to sleep, we go from beta, alpha, theta, delta. But within our sleep, we have these four stages. So we have non-REM sleep, REM sleep, and some transitionary stages.

• 23:56Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 23:57Shawn Stevenson?

  And so some of these stages, when we're actually asleep and unconscious, get broken. And so our REM sleep is suppressed, right? And remember, REM sleep is where a lot of memory processing takes place.

• 24:08Lewis Howes?

  So if you're drinking a lot at night, you'll have less memory. Is that what I'm hearing?

• 24:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Do you know anybody who was drunk before they went to sleep and not remember what happened?

• 24:19Lewis Howes?

  Lots of people.

• 24:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:21Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 24:22Shawn Stevenson?

  It's because of the sleep.

• 24:23Lewis Howes?

  So it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter that you got sleep. It's the quality of your sleep that matters.

• 24:28Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, yes, yeah. And you can literally forget what happened, you know, this whole

• 24:32Lewis Howes?

  So many people say that, I don't remember a thing.

• 24:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's because their REM sleep is damaged.

• 24:36Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 24:37Shawn Stevenson?

  But then there's a big rebound effect with the REM sleep towards the end of the sleep cycle. If we, if somebody is getting eight hours of sleep on alcohol.

• 24:44Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:45Shawn Stevenson?

  And so again, but this is not to say you can't drink. It's just, I would recommend give yourself a little bit of a curfew with alcohol of a couple of hours if you can. Like if you plan on getting to bed at midnight, you know, maybe just stop drinking around 10. Give your body, your body metabolizes alcohol relatively quickly for most folks. And you can accelerate and support the process by having some more water.

• 25:04Lewis Howes?

  Is there, is there a thing as having too much water before sleep?

• 25:08Shawn Stevenson?

  If peeing is a problem, you know, yeah, like so many, you know, people come into my clinic and they're just like, you know, I keep getting up in the middle of the night. They don't drink water all day, then they guzzle before they go to bed.

• 25:18Lewis Howes?

  Ah.

• 25:18Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, but there are, obviously there are some situations when folks have issues with, you know, their bladder and

• 25:23Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 25:24Shawn Stevenson?

  things like that, but for most folks.

• 25:25Lewis Howes?

  If you're drinking water before bed and you're waking up once, even once, messes up your sleep is what I'm hearing.

• 25:30Shawn Stevenson?

  I mean, it can, but I don't want to make a psychological big deal out of it because it's okay. There's even research now, and it's come out recently, just in the last couple of years about humans having Basically two phases of sleep. You know. It's okay to wake up for a moment and then go back. Yeah, so what would happen if we're talking, you know, a thousand years ago? Let's go back even further, ten thousand years ago. Yeah. When folks are, you know, you're living in tribes, you got a hut going, right? So you go to sleep, you know, but first of all, we would go to sleep earlier because when it gets dark. Yeah, seven o'clock at night. Safety, right? You're not out and about on the tundra, you know what I'm saying? Where the lion can see you, but you can't see it, right? You're a petat cave.

• 26:12Shawn Stevenson?

  This is, and even if you think about sleep, because again, like I've been just processing this stuff for the last few years. If it wasn't as valuable as it is, we would have evolved out of it a long time ago. Just if you think about how vulnerable you are, right? It's just so much magic happens when you're sleeping that we just can't get anywhere else. And so anyways, we would go to sleep when, when the sun goes down and wake up maybe. So just say somebody goes to sleep at nine o'clock. They sleep until maybe one, you get up, maybe have a little snacky, maybe have sex. Maybe, you know, if you got fire, maybe you write or read by fire. But today, phone, right? If we get up midnight snack, beaming light coming out of the refrigerator. Crazy, right? And, you know, and we're grabbing. What in the bathroom?

• 26:58Shawn Stevenson?

  You know what I mean? But then you go back to sleep and you'd have time to get another, you know, three, four hours of sleep in addition to that. So what I'm trying to say is it's not a problem that we wake up at night. And I've seen so many people get just very, just psychologically troubled. Messed up. You know, that I wake up at night, it's okay. It's okay, we have to relax into it and understand that, you know, things happen, our bodies, but for some folks, it is chronic, it's a chronic issue and they usually have to do what's, what's happening with their hormones. And if we did a hormone panel, we'd see that a lot of times we call them clinically tired and wired. Where even though they're physiologically tired, their body's wired at night. Cortisol is spiking way too early in the evening.

• 27:38Shawn Stevenson?

  Cause your cortisol is actually supposed to elevate first thing in the morning, like between, you know, like when the sun comes up. Yeah. That's how we are hardwired. Cortisol is not a bad thing. And I, that's another thing I want to make clear today. None of our hormones are bad, we wouldn't have them, you know, but it just gets all of the bad press now. But cortisol helps your thyroid to work. Right. Your thyroid is regulating your metabolism. You want to burn fat, you need cortisol, alright? It's not a bad guy, it's just if it's produced in the wrong times or the wrong amounts, it could be a little bit of a problem. Okay. You know, it's kind, I, I think of it like Hulk. You know, in the Avengers, you know, it's like, he's got a role, but you know, he might smash some stuff on accident. He's like giving too much responsibility.

• 28:21Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 28:22Shawn Stevenson?

  So, yeah, so if we're looking at alcohol, just to go back on that.

• 28:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, two hours before, don't be excessive with it. I'm assuming, right? Don't get drunk.

• 28:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, if you're getting, if you're getting drunk, you better believe like.

• 28:34Lewis Howes?

  You're screwed. Doesn't matter how much time you got, yeah.

• 28:36Shawn Stevenson?

  The hangover is a result of the sleep damage. That's really the big thing.

• 28:40Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 28:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Lewis Howes?

  So if you get a great sleep, you shouldn't have a hangover.

• 28:44Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 28:45Lewis Howes?

  But it's hard to have great sleep if you're drunk.

• 28:47Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, you could, I mean, forget about it. But also, and I know that a lot of people experience this, that you can handle it more when you're younger, right?

• 28:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, but it's still, you're not gonna remember things.

• 28:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, I'm not saying that, that part.

• 29:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Shawn Stevenson?

  And also, we're accelerating our aging when we do stuff like that. Sleep deprivation, I don't know if you talk with her, but I was talking with Alyssa Epple. And so her, her co-author of The Telomere Effect, they, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, she won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of telomerase. And so telomeres.

• 29:17Lewis Howes?

  You need them to be longer for you to have a longer life.

• 29:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Telomerase is an enzyme that can add length back on to your telomeres, essentially reversing the aging process. Essentially, it's very complicated, but just as essential. But what shortens your telomeres faster than anything, apparently, is sleep deprivation.

• 29:33Lewis Howes?

  So if you're pulling all-nighters, you're doing four hours of sleep only, and you think that's cool, it's not cool.

• 29:39Shawn Stevenson?

  It's not cool. You're, you're accelerating the time that you're going to kick on.

• 29:42Lewis Howes?

  You're gonna die quicker.

• 29:43Shawn Stevenson?

  Diabetes, heart disease. We used to see this stuff in folks who we describe as, quote, in the elderly population, arthritis, then it started to happen generations younger and younger and younger. Now we even have children who are getting adult onset diabetes. They had to change the name to a type 2 diabetes, right? Because it's no longer just adults getting it, right? And so just to make that clear, and I know this from experience because this happened to me. I had basically arthritis of the spine when I was 20, right? In track practice in St. Louis, I was doing a 200-meter time trial, and I broke my hip from running because my body, I was, I accelerated the aging process so much.

• 30:21Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 30:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Because of the way I was living my life.

• 30:23Lewis Howes?

  You weren't, you weren't sleeping well?

• 30:25Shawn Stevenson?

  Nothing was well, but a big part of me is, for me is like, what are you making your body out of? Which we know we'll get into and talk about another time, but you know, if you're not giving your body the raw materials to build your house, your physical house, it's just gonna do a patchwork job, you know?

• 30:40Lewis Howes?

  I don't remember you saying that. You broke your hip in practice.

• 30:42Shawn Stevenson?

  At track practice. No, no trauma, nobody hit me, 200 meter time trial, broke my hip.

• 30:48Lewis Howes?

  Man, Bo Jackson up in here.

• 30:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Dude, I ran a, I ran a four, five forty when I was 15.

• 30:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 30:53Shawn Stevenson?

  You know what I mean? Like, everything was looking great, but...

• 30:56Lewis Howes?

  What were you doing?

• 30:58Shawn Stevenson?

  Man, I was made out of like, true story, I was made out of probably like 5% Emo's Pizza.

• 31:03Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh, it's so good though. Clayton, Missouri, man, Emo's Pizza, it's so good.

• 31:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Like, I, I barely ate, I didn't eat a salad until I was in my twenties, like...

• 31:13Lewis Howes?

  I didn't eat salad until about five years ago, till my thirties, man.

• 31:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, but you were sneaking other stuff in, though.

• 31:18Lewis Howes?

  I was doing veggies, I was doing other stuff, but yeah, I didn't eat a salad because I was a picky, I'm still a picky SOB right now. But it's like every year I evolve more and more and I try new things, but I figured out a way to make a salad taste great. Cause I never liked the dressings, they always smelled bad for me. But Sweet Green, have you been to Sweet Green yet?

• 31:37Shawn Stevenson?

  I don't think so.

• 31:38Lewis Howes?

  Place is amazing. There's gotta be one by you, Sweet Green. It's kinda like, uh, just a build your own salad, so it's like I can throw some chicken in there or I can throw something else, but it's got a dressing, I found one dressing that I like. It's like this cashew, spicy cashew, and that made the difference for me. So I'm just like, fill up all the veggies in there and just a tiny bit of cashew dressing, it's like, I'm good. And I try to eat that almost every day.

• 32:02Shawn Stevenson?

  Ooh, so now we know your secret, man. So it's the cashew, spicy cashew dressing.

• 32:07Lewis Howes?

  Not too much, cause I don't wanna be drizzled with calories and all this stuff, but it's just a little bit, and...

• 32:12Shawn Stevenson?

  What's in the salad?

• 32:13Lewis Howes?

  So I put, uh, I put romaine and arugula and romaine or baby spinach, I mix up that three combination, usually just do two of them.

• 32:23Lewis Howes?

  Sometimes I do kale, but it's a little too hard for me now. So I do arugula and baby spinach usually and then romaine. And then I put carrots, onions, sometimes squash, cauliflower, broccoli. Uh, sometimes sweet potato based on what I'm doing. Then I'll put, yeah, then I'll put chicken and um, and a little bit of cashew sauce.

• 32:46Shawn Stevenson?

  Man, congratulations. You're adulting so hard right now, man.

• 32:50Lewis Howes?

  But it's like, those are the only ingredients that I'll put.

• 32:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, but listen to this, bro. You're, you're winning on a whole different level. So I just, and I've been talking about this a lot recently, but I've been studying the brain for a new project I've been doing. And a recent study, this was done at Chicago's Rush University. And they compiled all this data. They had thousands and thousands of study participants. And they found that test participants who were consuming two servings of green leafy vegetables a day had brains that were 11 years younger than the rest of the study participants who weren't getting that much in.

• 33:26Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:27Shawn Stevenson?

  Crazy, right?

• 33:28Lewis Howes?

  So leafy greens every day, two servings.

• 33:30Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And this, this was done on elderly folks. And so you can keep your brain 11 years younger by getting in two servings. Two servings a day.

• 33:38Lewis Howes?

  So let's get back to the um, what should we eat before sleep, if anything? And when should we finish eating before we go to sleep?

• 33:45Shawn Stevenson?

  Perfect, perfect.

• 33:46Lewis Howes?

  So we talked about alcohol.

• 33:47Shawn Stevenson?

  Yep, yep.

• 33:48Lewis Howes?

  Don't have too much, don't get drunk, but you can have some wine if you went to a couple hours before. Don't drink too much water because if you're gonna wake up all the time, that's not good either.

• 33:57Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:58Lewis Howes?

  So what about food?

• 34:00Shawn Stevenson?

  So with food, there's, there's contradicting information out there on this, you know? And so some of the best data shows that having a little bit of carbohydrates for your evening meal, for your dinner. So I'm not saying like eat a chock-a-daw and then go to bed. I'm saying like, you know, if you have dinner at seven, eight o'clock, having a little whack of carbohydrates, it helps to produce serotonin.

• 34:20Lewis Howes?

  What are the best carbohydrates? Like sweet potato?

• 34:22Shawn Stevenson?

  You just mentioned it, sweet potato. Uh, I mean, you know. Vegetables are carbohydrate dominant foods, but you know, some a little bit denser, you know, so we could say sweet potatoes, uh, there's quinoa, when we get into these things, everybody's different.

• 34:36Lewis Howes?

  It's different. You might be grain free, you might be there, yeah, yeah.

• 34:39Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, there's like saponins in, you know, the quinoa that might be trouble for some people.

• 34:43Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 34:44Shawn Stevenson?

  Could be white rice, brown rice, it could be, you know, a little pasta, you know, it depends on the person. There's different kinds of pasta now, you know what I'm saying? There's like.

• 34:52Lewis Howes?

  Cauliflower pasta.

• 34:53Shawn Stevenson?

  They make pasta out of everything.

• 34:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, zucchini pasta.

• 34:56Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, zucchini pasta, I think I saw like there's some coffee pasta, I don't know, man. I'm just kidding.

• 35:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:01Shawn Stevenson?

  That would be crazy though.

• 35:02Lewis Howes?

  Panan pasta, yeah. Okay, so you could have a little bit of carbohydrates for your meal.

• 35:07Shawn Stevenson?

  Fruit is another, obviously, carboid- uh, dominant category of foods.

• 35:12Lewis Howes?

  So what would that do for you?

• 35:14Shawn Stevenson?

  So this, this causes a boost in serotonin when we have a little bit of carbohydrates. And so I know the big, you know, there's a big keto movement, which again is a wonderful framework. I use all these different frameworks in my, in my nutrition practice as a consultant and as a nutritionist for, again, you know, almost 20 years now I've been in this field, but, um, and I would base it on what the person needed, right? And it's always dependent on you and where you are right now, which might change. And so when we're getting in the conversation about keto, you could even have a, a certain percentage of carbohydrates on a keto, you might even just reserve those for your evening meal.

• 35:47Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 35:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? And so beans could be another one, you know, depending on your digestion, how the beans are prepared. And so with that said, so serotonin, here's what's so cool about it. Serotonin is a precursor to making melatonin.

• 35:59Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 36:00Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? So your body produces this kind of glorified sleep hormone. But man, when we talked earlier about how our bodies line up with nature and how our body is secreting hormones on a pattern or cycles, melatonin is arguably the biggest controller of your body's metabolic or circadian rhythm, your circadian clock that's determining when you're producing all your hormones. Melatonin is not just about sleep, it's about regulating your whole body.

• 36:28Lewis Howes?

  That's why there's so many. Supplements coming out, melatonin supplements that are doing so well, right?

• 36:33Shawn Stevenson?

  But you gotta be careful. Like, that's straight up hormone therapy. You know what I mean? It's such a big regulator, controller. And, you know, just talking with the bosses in the space, you know, talking with Dr. Oz and Dr. Michael Bruce and all these guys and we're having these conversations. We've seen clearly that folks that get dependent taking too high of a dose or taking melatonin too frequently. And here's what we thought. It was just a hypothesis. We thought that like some other type of like taking exogenous testosterone, it might reduce your body's production. It doesn't reduce your body's production of melatonin, which we got, we gotta come back to where this is happening. But what it does is, is it depresses or shuts down your body's receptor sites for melatonin.

• 37:15Shawn Stevenson?

  So you still make it, but your cells, receptor sites can't engage and receive it and turn on the sleep-related processes and everything else. Problem, right? Okay, so it shuts down your body's ability to receive melatonin. And so, the great thing is that we do have access to these supplements, which is wonderful. I'm a big fan of using them in micro doses and/or even more so for me would be in spot cases, right? Just use them temporarily.

• 37:41Lewis Howes?

  Deficient of something, B12 or whatever, it's like take this for a few months until you feel like you're caught to speed.

• 37:47Shawn Stevenson?

  Our sleep is so important with so many things, and so if you just need to get on track. But we just don't want to create a dependency. I love it for travel. Like, if you're changing time zones, you want to get back on schedule. If you've had a couple rough nights of sleep, you know, maybe it's work or whatever. That's a great spot.

• 38:03Lewis Howes?

  Something, yeah, whatever.

• 38:04Shawn Stevenson?

  So, melatonin has its place, but just to go back to where this is produced and why even taking a supplement you still continue to produce is that. And this is crazy because in my conventional university class, I was taught that your pineal gland produces melatonin. That's it. We now know today that there's 400 times more melatonin in your gut, in your belly than in your brain. Alright, so this microbiome, all this science and all of this discussion happening now. It really is a final frontier when we're talking about health. It's the interface between the outside world and us. You know, it's like what we're taking and putting in our bodies. That's the most intimate experience in the world. And what's happening in your microbiome determine what becomes you.

• 38:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Shawn Stevenson?

  And what is waste, you know? So that's a whole other conversation. But I just want people to know that, that we have to take care of our gut health. And we'll come back, we'll talk about that another time.

• 38:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:57Shawn Stevenson?

  So melatonin is tied to all these things. But with serotonin, with getting that little hit of carbohydrates can be helpful for producing serotonin and melatonin in the evening. Now, there was a study that was conducted and they found that when folks who were overweight ate close to bedtime, they had a greater secretion of cortisol. All right, so upwards of like over 50% greater cortisol secretion. All of us, by the way, produce a little bit of cortisol when we eat a meal. Because it's a big, like, all hands on deck experience. Because again, you're taking stuff from the outside world and putting it in you. Your body got to make sure that you're safe.

• 39:37Lewis Howes?

  It's got to simulate it, it's got to, you know, check it all, make sure it doesn't throw it up, or yeah.

• 39:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Everything, like, it's so much that happens. But if you're, the folks who were overweight in the study, who consumed right before bed, had like over 50% higher secretion of cortisol. And the problem with that is that cortisol is kind of like the antithesis, or like, has an inverse relationship with melatonin. So if cortisol is high, melatonin gets...

• 40:01Lewis Howes?

  So you're not sleeping well if you're eating right before bed?

• 40:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. If you're overweight, obese, there's a higher propensity. And this is why there's some efficacy behind the statement of don't eat before bed. I don't like that statement as a blanket statement across the board. I don't. However, I do like to...

• 40:19Lewis Howes?

  The research, yeah.

• 40:20Shawn Stevenson?

  It's saying, you know, so just to be a little bit more mindful of that. But the problem is like, number one, if you want to have something, have something.

• 40:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 40:27Shawn Stevenson?

  That's, it's more stressful trying not to have a snack if you want a snack. But also, part of the reason we might want to have a snack, you know, at 12 o'clock at night is because we're up, you know, Netflix and chilling, you know what I mean?

• 40:38Lewis Howes?

  You should be asleep, buddy. Right? You should be asleep.

• 40:40Shawn Stevenson?

  So that's part of it, is just our practices and our culture around food and us not getting the nutrition we need. But it's just, it's our culture around food. And so it goes back to like, you need to be sleeping. A sleepy brain is a hungry brain.

• 40:54Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 40:54Shawn Stevenson?

  A sleepy brain is a hungry brain.

• 40:56Lewis Howes?

  So if you're tired, you're hungry?

• 40:58Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely, I call it tongue-ry.

• 41:01Lewis Howes?

  You got hangry and hungry.

• 41:03Shawn Stevenson?

  That just happened, yes.

• 41:05Lewis Howes?

  An angry brain is a hungry brain too, right?

• 41:07Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 41:08Lewis Howes?

  So why is that? Why is a sleepy brain hungry for food?

• 41:11Shawn Stevenson?

  Oh, man, this is so crazy. Listen to this. So there was a study that was conducted and it was crazy in what happens with the brain and your nutrition and glucose reaching the brain when you're sleepy. And so, across the board, even though we can use ketones for processes in the brain, we all know this, but there are certain parts of your brain that can only run on glucose. And so what the studies found, what the study found was that when folks were sleep deprived just one night, alright, so one night of total sleep deprivation was used in the study. So that's basically if we stayed up for 24 hours from now until the same time tomorrow. They found that there was a 14, I'm sorry, a 12% reduction in glucose reaching the brain. Alright, so this is literally, your brain is starting to starve.

• 41:54Shawn Stevenson?

  And what happens when that happens, when we go back to that evolutionary perspective, it's danger, right? All hands on deck, cortisol response, adrenaline response. It is a dangerous situation. And they found specifically 14% of that carbohydrate reduction or glucose reduction reaching your brain cells was from the prefrontal cortex. So that's the most human part of your brain responsible for executive function, social control, distinguishing between right and wrong. So your ability to even choose whether or not to eat a food is dramatically reduced because your brain is like starving. If you've ever had ice cream, if you've ever had cookies, if you've ever had a candy bar, your brain knows, hardwiring, I can get a dense source of glucose

• 42:38Shawn Stevenson?

  to shoot it back to my brain because I need it.

• 42:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Shawn Stevenson?

  And so that's when we get into a battle of our biology versus our willpower.

• 42:46Shawn Stevenson?

  Your willpower is gonna lose out eventually.

• 42:47Lewis Howes?

  That's true.

• 42:48Shawn Stevenson?

  You know? Even for the toughest among us, you know what I'm saying? So, but why stack conditions against yourself? And we do that when we're sleep deprived. And so, that's what I want people to know is that It's not, a lot of times, these things aren't necessarily your fault when you're trying to battle it out and not eat a food. It's because our brains are usually, a tired brain is a hungry brain.

• 43:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So what would you say is your, is the optimal evening routine or the one that you do?

• 43:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, that's a great question, man. Great question. It's evolved, you know what I mean? And that's what I want people to take away too, is that you can change. There's so much cool stuff that we can do today. You know, you got meditation, you got journaling, you got Tai Chi. You know what I'm saying? There's all this stuff you could do, playing board games. There's that cool, have you played the Heads Up?

• 43:34Lewis Howes?

  Oh yeah, it's great.

• 43:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? You know, so you've got all these cool things you could do to hang out with your friends, you know, spend some time with your significant other. How do we fit it all in? Well, you don't have to do everything, or you can do each thing in a microwave. But so for me, my current evening routine is, number one, just kind of the hallmark thing for me, is giving myself some tech-free time before I go to bed, before I lay my head down, at least 30 minutes.

• 44:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Shawn Stevenson?

  We all can do this. And Harvard researchers have confirmed, I talked about this, and I've pushed this into culture, like, the last five years hard. So if people have heard this, you know where it came from, all right? I've been really working to get this out here. And we've got them right here, man. We've got the new iPhone. It's got three cameras.

• 44:20Lewis Howes?

  Sick dude.

• 44:20Shawn Stevenson?

  It's fun to play with, right? But this, this device is the greatest deterrent for our sleep quality today.

• 44:27Lewis Howes?

  So bad.

• 44:28Shawn Stevenson?

  And so Harvard researchers confirmed that the light exposure, blue light specifically and white light, that kind of shoot out from our devices, that we can't really see if we're sitting here and there's this light around us, this ambient light. But if you're in a dark room and you see that phone,

• 44:43Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 44:43Shawn Stevenson?

  It's like emanating like this bluish alien light, right? And so what they found was that this light does in fact suppress your melatonin secretion and dramatically increases cortisol. And they got numbers on this. So what they found is that approximately every hour you're on your device at night, you suppress melatonin for 30 minutes.

• 45:04Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 45:05Shawn Stevenson?

  All right? Every hour you're on your device, you suppress melatonin for 30 minutes. So if you're on your device three hours, melatonin's suppressed for 90 minutes.

• 45:12Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 45:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? And so again, even though you might be unconscious and go to bed, and you're, you're not aware anymore, you're not going through your sleep cycles efficiently. So that's what it's really about is optimizing our sleep cycles.

• 45:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Shawn Stevenson?

  And we do that with the way we live our lives. And so just to go back on that point with me, just thirty minutes.

• 45:31Lewis Howes?

  At least no phone.

• 45:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, at least. Ideally, we want to see more like sixty minutes.

• 45:36Lewis Howes?

  Sixty, ninety.

• 45:37Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, I mean, then we're like, we get into that place of like, what do I do, though?

• 45:43Lewis Howes?

  You read a book, you hang out with your friends, you go to bed.

• 45:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Some people just aren't trying to hear that, man.

• 45:50Lewis Howes?

  So that's no phone and no TV?

• 45:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 45:53Lewis Howes?

  So no, you can't watch your show, your movie, you can't?

• 45:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Here's a, here's a, here's a couple of hacks. And a lot, I'm sure a lot of people know this. You got the blue light blocking glasses, you've got blue light blocking apps for your phone. Like, it's built into the iPhone now. You know, and folks who have Android, they have like a night shift, I'm sorry, what is it called? Twilight.

• 46:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Shawn Stevenson?

  Is another thing. I believe that's what it's called.

• 46:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so there's some things you can do.

• 46:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, so there's things that you can do to kind of reduce that experience. And for many folks, and I know myself included, I definitely do feel like, sometimes even it's a neuro, neuroassociation, just putting, putting the glasses on, excuse me, I would get sleepy. You know what I'm saying? Just by putting the glasses on. Yeah, chilling out.

• 46:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Or we can also, you know, dim the lights around us, maybe even change some bulbs, a couple of bulbs in your house. Candlelight, that's sexy, you know what I'm saying? So you just change, and we evolve with those kinds of lights in the evening. Those tones, right, these kind of warmer colors. And so that's what, that's what I do. I give myself a thirty minute curfew. I really love to just kind of take some time, hang out with my wife, we'll talk, you know, I'll do some reading. This is when I, you know, but we, again, like, God, it's a light dimmer.

• 47:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Shawn Stevenson?

  Lights a little bit dimmer. I'll do at least probably ten minutes of reading, twenty minutes sometimes. If we're not, you know, spending some time together, you know what I mean? So we have that. And then for me, I'd love if I get a chance to do a magnesium bath.

• 47:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 47:18Shawn Stevenson?

  In the evening. So this is, this is a big one, man. So magnesium has been found to be responsible for over six hundred and fifty biochemical processes in the body. Many of them related to relaxation and sleep. Alright, so magnesium is needed to like contraction and relaxation of your muscles, so the relaxation response of your muscles. Like if somebody's cramping, that kind of thing, magnesium helps a lot. Wow, okay. Right? So, but also it relaxes your nervous system. So you, it helps to shift over from your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system. Magnesium helps to shift you into the parasympathetic rest and digest part of your nervous system. Yeah. And so, people have been doing this for centuries, like Epsom salt baths has helped to improve sleep and uh, relax sore muscles, help you to heal faster, all that stuff.

• 48:04Shawn Stevenson?

  It has some credence. Now we got some like, supercharged magnesium salts and Really? So you do this almost every night? No, a couple of times a week, you know what I'm saying? But even once a week could be good. Yeah, what I have also, I have a topical magnesium spray. Wow. So I use that almost every night. So I'll just like massage, rub that in, and that's another thing that you could do too. Get a massage, alright, if you can. For sleep? From your significant other, or self massage, you know, there's even acupressure points, and I talk about this in Sleep Smarter, because I'm very analytical in how I think. I'm like, ah, you could like, touch a point and you know, but there is some evidence that this, you know, they did this in a clinic, I'm sorry, in a hospital. And so what they did was manipulate this acupressure point,

• 48:46Shawn Stevenson?

  and they saw higher levels of melatonin metabolites in their urine by manipulating this pressure point. So it's, it's doing something with melatonin. Right, right. But with massage, you produce endorphins, serotonin, right? So this all helps with that relaxation response. I don't know anybody that's ever gotten a massage and like, got numb, it's like, I'm so ready to fight now, you know what I mean? Right, right, you just wanna chill for another few hours, yeah. That's it, man. Okay. So, if I can, you know, my wife, like, I massage her feet, or if she wants to massage my feet, that's so great, man, by the way. Or I got like, a little tennis ball, and I'll just like, put that on the floor and rub that around on my feet, you know, the bottom of my feet. Uh, so there's another couple of things, and so some of these things are not as consistent.

• 49:30Shawn Stevenson?

  Consistent things for me is screen curfew, reading.

• 49:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Time with my wife and magnesium.

• 49:38Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 49:38Shawn Stevenson?

  Those are my things.

• 49:39Lewis Howes?

  And know your food at a certain time, probably, right?

• 49:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, I don't even think about it because I'm nourished and I don't have a hungry brain. So if I eat, you know, we finish eating at, you know, seven or eight, whatever it is, like, I feel good. Like, I don't need to jam any food before bed. Um, but the other thing I do as I'm walking into the bedroom is I turn the thermostat down.

• 49:58Lewis Howes?

  Make it cold.

• 49:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, and we've talked about this before. And so.

• 50:03Lewis Howes?

  Sixty-nine.

• 50:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Lewis Howes?

  That's what I keep it at, man, every night. So good.

• 50:07Shawn Stevenson?

  It is, you know, and this is goes back to that evolutionary process, evolutionary biology. We have a natural drop in our core body temperature at night, one to two degrees.

• 50:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Shawn Stevenson?

  And what the theory is, because again, like a lot of stuff, we don't know specifically why, but is that our body uses a lot of energy to try to keep us, keep our temperature up. So by bringing that down a little bit, more energy is being dispersed to do things like memory consolidation, like detoxification of your brain via the glymphatic system. Like, um, there's like a changing of the guard that happens in your gut microbiome. Like, all this energy is needed to bring you back better.

• 50:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? And so if your environment is too hot, no matter where you live on the planet, whether if it's like Chile or it's, um, you know, um, Antarctica.

• 50:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:55Shawn Stevenson?

  It gets, well, that might not be a good idea. But during the daytime and during the nighttime, the temperature is different. The temperature goes down a little bit at night, no matter where you are. And so if you artificially keep it high, your body's gonna kind of be trying to fight to bring itself down. So help it a little bit. Today, we do have access, a lot of us, to regulate our thermostat.

• 51:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 51:15Shawn Stevenson?

  At least, you know, like during this time of year here in L.A., like it can get down, you know, fifties and sixties. Like, you can just open a window.

• 51:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 51:21Shawn Stevenson?

  You know? And so, um, yeah, so that's what I do. I turn the thermostat down or turn the heat off if it's been on.

• 51:27Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 51:27Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. So that's your evening routine. What else do we need to know about sleep? Uh, you know, we've talked about sleep sanctuaries and making sure you have. The snake plants and all these other things. Do you still do the snake planting?

• 51:40Shawn Stevenson?

  I have not got, we just moved, so I haven't gotten my whole thing optimized. Except like, we got some blackout curtains, because you know when you came to my house, like, we were out in the woods.

• 51:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it was dark.

• 51:49Shawn Stevenson?

  It was dark, dark.

• 51:50Lewis Howes?

  You don't need blackout, you got, you got.

• 51:52Shawn Stevenson?

  It was, like, you know, maybe a little moonlight, but that's, our bodies, we evolved with that. You know, that's a natural spectrum of light, and the lux is so much less than what's beaming out of your telephone or the sun. But now, you know, kind of, you know, we're like in the neighborhood, so I got some blackout curtains again. But, something else that I would, I think people would be interested in, is still the buy-in, like, why does this matter? Why should I be looking at optimizing my sleep for 2020?

• 52:18Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 52:18Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, like, this is a new decade. This could be the best decade of your life.

• 52:22Lewis Howes?

  But it's also, with all these opportunities, and work harder mentality, and be more productive, you're gonna get less sleep, less quality sleep, if you have that mentality as well, right? If you're like, so many opportunities, it's a new decade, let's crush the decade. That type of thinking could make you hu- hurtful in sleep, right?

• 52:44Shawn Stevenson?

  When you said crush, I immediately thought of Gary Vee.

• 52:47Lewis Howes?

  Of course.

• 52:47Shawn Stevenson?

  And he's like the guy, everybody seems like, you know, he's, you know, he's out there just dominating. His thing now, that he's out talking about, he gets seven hours of sleep a night.

• 52:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Shawn Stevenson?

  I talked with him, maybe, four years ago, we were having dinner, and this is when, this is Beard Gary Vee. I don't know, he did this little moment of beard.

• 53:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 53:06Shawn Stevenson?

  And so, and I was just like, inquiring, like, hey man, so what's with their health practices? Like, you're trying to play the long game, you're talking about buying the Jets, how you gonna do that?

• 53:13Lewis Howes?

  If you're dead.

• 53:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Shawn Stevenson?

  D E A D, dead, dead, dead.

• 53:19Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 53:20Shawn Stevenson?

  So, what he was like, you know, he's hired a trainer to travel with him, because he like, he knows himself, to keep him accountable and that, and he gets his sleep, despite what people think, right? And so, just keep that in mind, the people that you're looking at, and the people that, even the ones that are saying, you know, sleep is for suckers, I promise they're sleeping. I promise.

• 53:37Lewis Howes?

  They gotta be.

• 53:38Shawn Stevenson?

  You can't operate, or, and also, they might not be sleeping enough, and they're not reaching their full potential. You know what I mean? So, be very careful about that, because what you wanna do, you don't wanna just execute. You wanna be the very best version of yourself to get up and execute. You can accomplish so much more when you feel well.

• 53:54Lewis Howes?

  I think I saw Steve Harvey talk about, he, he's mentioned something, he said, I think he said sleep.

• 54:02Lewis Howes?

  Sleep is for those who are broke or something like that.

• 54:05Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 54:05Lewis Howes?

  Did you see this?

• 54:06Shawn Stevenson?

  I know what you're talking about.

• 54:07Lewis Howes?

  I think he said something like that.

• 54:08Shawn Stevenson?

  I don't know if that was Steve. It might have been him. Yeah.

• 54:10Lewis Howes?

  He said this recently, or I saw a video came up about a month ago where he's like, sleep is for

• 54:15Shawn Stevenson?

  For broke people.

• 54:15Lewis Howes?

  For broke people or something like that where he's like, you gotta work harder.

• 54:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Lewis Howes?

  Than people, if you wanna make money, right? You gotta spend extra hours and things like that, but.

• 54:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. Again, like I know a lot of these people who have these messages. And even, you know, another really good friend of mine and yours too, Eric Thomas. Right? He's another person, you know, out there, but what he, and he shared this.

• 54:36Lewis Howes?

  He's like, I wake up at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m.

• 54:37Shawn Stevenson?

  But he goes to sleep early. Like, we've been, we've been hanging out for a long time.

• 54:41Lewis Howes?

  Sleep like 8 a.m. or something, right?

• 54:43Shawn Stevenson?

  He's knocked out, alright, but he's getting up and grinding, right? He's getting, when he's up, he's trouble. So his thing is, sleep, get enough sleep, but don't sleep in. Don't oversleep. Don't be lazy.

• 54:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Shawn Stevenson?

  That's the difference. It's not, don't sleep. That's killing yourself. And that's, you're not showing up as the best you, as we've kinda gone through today.

• 55:03Lewis Howes?

  Is there too much sleep?

• 55:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Absolutely, yeah. We can, and I know that many of us have experienced this where we, maybe we sleep longer than normal and we're tired. Like, we're super tired when we get up and like tired for a while. And a big part of that is just kind of even how we're interrupting our sleep cycles. But that's a, you know, really unique conversation.

• 55:21Lewis Howes?

  What is the optimal amount of hours for most people who live busy lives? Who are pushing the envelope on work, family, activities, they're doing a lot of things.

• 55:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 55:32Lewis Howes?

  They're trying to fill it all on their plate, you know, achieve their goals and do everything. What would be the optimal amount of hours of sleep for those types of people?

• 55:41Shawn Stevenson?

  I'll tell you right now that eight hours is, is not enough. For some people, alright, for some people. For some people, it's six. For some people, it's seven. For some people, it's nine. It depends, man. It's the answer that nobody wants to hear.

• 55:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 55:57Shawn Stevenson?

  Because, you know, these so-called experts are like giving people these cookie cutter answers, like, you need to get eight hours of sleep. I think that's wildly negligent to tell people that because you can become neurotic about something that you don't even really need. What it really boils down to, if you're getting eight hours of shitty sleep, for me, I liken sleep minutes to calories. Like today, most people are well aware that it's not just the quantity of calories, it's the quality of those calories.

• 56:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 56:26Shawn Stevenson?

  For same thing, it's the quality of those sleep minutes, not just the quantity, right? So you can get like. If you're looking at, um, what did I mention earlier? A Chocodal, right? Versus wild-caught salmon, or, you know, Louis's salad. Is there a name for this salad?

• 56:42Lewis Howes?

  I should call it the Great Salad or something. Cause it's a custom bowl.

• 56:49Lewis Howes?

  Greatness Bowl.

• 56:51Shawn Stevenson?

  The salad of greatness. So a Chocodal versus a salad of greatness, it's gonna have wildly different impact on what it does to your metabolism, right? And so the same thing with your sleep minutes. You can be getting like eight hours of Chocodal sleep because of your blue light exposure, because of you not tapping into thermal regulation, because you having issues with blood sugar regulation. And listen, goes on and on and on, some of the things we talked about. Or you can get an incredible optimized version of that sleep that only takes you six and a half hours, where you're going through your sleep cycles efficiently and you're waking up feeling like a beast, right? The answer is it depends. The quality of your sleep and who you are and what you're doing right now. Because there are times in your life when you know you've had to sleep more, right?

• 57:37Shawn Stevenson?

  If you're like, somebody's training for whatever, your body just needs a little bit more sleep. Maybe you're under a lot of stress, whatever the case might be. It's gonna change. And we have to honor our bodies. Obviously, I'm a big fan of routine, because your body's always looking for routine. But when you're up, life is dynamic, like things are gonna happen. And so I allow myself to change my sleep schedule a little bit. And I try to stay within a nice framework. But if something is going on, like, and I know that I'm stressed, like, man, you know, like, I really need to back off, I need to recover. I don't need to push it down more. And this also just comes with experience too.

• 58:10Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 58:11Shawn Stevenson?

  You know what I mean? So that I can wake up, recover, and get back on my grind. You know what I mean? And so, but just a little quick thing that I wanna share with people, that's like another big buy-in point, is that our sleep quality affects our appearance, right? Specifically, you know, our, everybody, nobody's waking up like, you know what? I just wanna be super ugly today. Like, it's ugly as possible, you know what I mean? I wanna scare children, you know what I mean? And there was this really cool study that was done recently. So this was just in 2017. And the Swedish researchers, and what they did was they had study participants take a picture after a full night of good sleep. And then they had them take a picture after sleep depriving them where they're getting about five hours, five to six hours of sleep for two days.

• 58:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Alright, so they sleep deprived them for two days, take their picture again. There's a mixture of pictures that these raiders, the people who are raiding all the people's beauty. And what they did was they looked at all the different pictures. And this is looking at what's happening in our brains, just again through evolutionary biology. When we see people, we get feedback.

• 59:18Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 59:18Shawn Stevenson?

  And what the scientists were wanting to do was to find out, does sleep deprivation cause a hesitance to want to be around somebody?

• 59:25Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 59:25Shawn Stevenson?

  Alright, and so what the raiders found was that when people were sleep deprived, they were deemed to be less attractive. They were deemed to be less healthy. And they also decided like, I would be less interested in socializing with this person. Okay? Just in two days of sleep deprivation. And another study by Swedish researchers found that just five days of sleep deprivation, you know, just getting less than six hours of sleep, led to forty-five percent increase in fine lines and wrinkles in the face. It aged you very quickly. But the good news is it reverses, not as quickly.

• 1:00:02Lewis Howes?

  It rebounds.

• 1:00:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:00:03Shawn Stevenson?

  It's called beauty sleep. Why don't we talk about this more?

• 1:00:07Lewis Howes?

  That's true.

• 1:00:07Shawn Stevenson?

  You know what I mean? It's called beauty sleep for a reason. There's real rejuvenative magic in this.

• 1:00:13Lewis Howes?

  In sleeping.

• 1:00:14Shawn Stevenson?

  You know what I mean? And so, looking at how we feel about other people and how we're showing up in the world, like your sleep has a big impact on that.

• 1:00:22Lewis Howes?

  And tell people about sleep debt. You mentioned this before. If you've gone twenty-five years of just horrible sleep, can you oversleep for twenty years?

• 1:00:33Shawn Stevenson?

  Twenty-five years, that's a long time.

• 1:00:35Lewis Howes?

  A few years, five years, ten years. You know, if you've been bad in your twenties and you've been partying late nights and you're a promoter and you get horrible sleep every night. Can you rebound and put more sleep in that bank debt and recover?

• 1:00:50Shawn Stevenson?

  And the way that we think about sleep debt, it doesn't work like that. The good news is, again, this kind of goes back to the conversation about telomeres. Once we change our habits and our practices, you can do things to start to reverse that aging process in some aspects, right? By lengthening those telomeres, by doing good things for your body, which includes getting more sleep. So you burning the candle at both ends, or burning the telomeres at both ends, you can reverse that process. That's the good news.

• 1:01:15Lewis Howes?

  That's good.

• 1:01:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, in the context of sleep debt, so if you're just sleep deprived for, you know, just say you're going like months at a time, getting, you know, four whatever hours. Your incidence of heart disease is skyrocketing, heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, all this stuff is going up. Chances are, you're not going to make it very far. Some people, even people listening, like, well, I'm fine. You gotta be careful about that. Now, that sleep debt is a lot to pay back. If it's like a day or two, maybe three, four days at the most, and you kind of catch up, you know, maybe on the weekend, that can be helpful. But it's still like, you're not getting back as much as you're taking out, if that makes sense.

• 1:01:55Shawn Stevenson?

  So the best strategy is to get high quality, the key word is high quality sleep more consistently. And then if something happens where it throws you off, like, you know, you go out, whatever, you know, like you got an event for a couple of days, all good. But guess what? You're going to probably be pretty destroyed and you're going to want to sleep more.

• 1:02:14Lewis Howes?

  Of course, yeah, of course.

• 1:02:16Shawn Stevenson?

  But if you're constantly dipping into that bank account, you can't readily pay it back as much as we think.

• 1:02:21Lewis Howes?

  Got it, man. Dude, this is awesome stuff. And you cover a lot of this in your podcast, your book. Where can we find your podcast and listen to that?

• 1:02:30Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, I mean, they're listening to this amazing podcast, I find my show. It's called The Model Health Show. And we've been, I think we started like maybe six, seven, eight months after you.

• 1:02:40Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:02:40Shawn Stevenson?

  And so we've got-

• 1:02:41Lewis Howes?

  I'm about to be seven years, end of January. So you're like-

• 1:02:44Shawn Stevenson?

  We're coming up in six years, yep, yep. And so what we do is we create masterclasses on specific subjects. So whether it's obviously sleep wellness or metabolism-

• 1:02:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Burning, natural treatments for, you know, things like depression and diabetes. And then I really strive to bring on the very best people in the world in their respective fields of health and wellness. And so we do masterclasses where it's solo episodes with me and we bring on the best people in the world.

• 1:03:08Lewis Howes?

  It's amazing, man.

• 1:03:09Shawn Stevenson?

  It's a really great time.

• 1:03:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's a great show. I love it.

• 1:03:11Shawn Stevenson?

  Thank you.

• 1:03:12Lewis Howes?

  It's really powerful because you can break down all the research that you're finding and you kind of share people with all the science and the proof of these things.

• 1:03:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Lewis Howes?

  Which I think is powerful. You're not just sharing ideas or thoughts, you're really digging in, so. And you've got some other projects that you're not talking about right now, but we'll have you come back on sometime and talk about those things. Talk about everything, man. So we'll have to, now that you're here in town, we'll have you come back on more. Let's share the three truths, because I don't know if people probably didn't hear you four years ago, all my new audience members, so. I don't even know if I asked you this last time.

• 1:03:42Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't think so.

• 1:03:43Lewis Howes?

  So imagine it's your last day on earth, many years from now, and you've created everything you want to create. You've done all the research, the books, the podcasts, whatever it is, you've done it all.

• 1:03:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Lewis Howes?

  But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work with you to the next world, heaven, wherever you go, right?

• 1:03:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Lewis Howes?

  But you get to leave behind a piece of paper and you can write down three things you know to be true about your whole life experience. Of all the lessons and truths that you know that you would want to share behind, what would you say are your three truths?

• 1:04:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Well, what's coming up for me, the first thing is that this might sound a little, love wins. That's what's coming up for me. Love wins. For me, over these years, man, I really believe that our relationships are the most impactful thing on our health, on our success in life, on our ability to, you know, problem solve and to just be happy. Our happiness quotient is our relationships. Sleep is amazing, but our relationships affect us. You know what I'm saying? So I think it's just a huge governing force and love wins, you know, and finding ways to not try to win, but to love more. So that would be one. I hope that makes sense.

• 1:04:54Lewis Howes?

  Love wins.

• 1:04:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Uh, number two would be, wow, this is tough, man, is self-care, you know?

• 1:05:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Make sure that you're taking care of yourself, that you can show up. As the best version of yourself for the people that need you. You know, there's a big culture today of, you know, pushing yourself to the limit, sacrificing this word sacrifice, sacrifice yourself so that you can do good for the people that you're trying to help, or you know, even do good for the world. But the word sacrifice is from a root, meaning to make sacred, right? And so if we're making sacred the craft of taking care of oneself so I can be the best version of myself, I don't really see it as a sacrifice. Like if I'm getting to bed early, if I'm skipping out on the party a little bit early, it's not a sacrifice, it's a sacred practice for me so that I can be the best me possible.

• 1:05:41Shawn Stevenson?

  So make sure that you're focusing on self-care as you move into the future. So that would be number two. And number three would be to laugh as much as possible and have fun, you know? Be with people who make you laugh, cultivate humor. I came from a place where there was a lot of, it was crazy, man. Like people from where I'm from, you can have post-traumatic stress syndrome, you don't even realize it, you know, the sirens, the gunshots, the violence. When you go outside, you don't know what's gonna happen, you know what I'm saying? It could be a nice day, everybody's out playing, shooting hoops on the crate, you know what I mean? Or, you know, it could be a drive-by, you know, and you got drug dealer right next door. And, you know, those are my idols, you know what I mean?

• 1:06:26Shawn Stevenson?

  And coming from that environment, and I think part of the reason that we made it out of those circumstances and did it somewhat gracefully is that we had laughter. You know, we still had laughter in our household, you know, even though like even, you know, my family members that weren't necessarily the best role models, we still had laughter, you know, and just being able to play, have fun. And so I think it's super important. And also just as we move into this next decade, you know, I think that laughter, humor, smiling, kindness, these are gonna be the things that really help to bring us together. We got enough stuff bringing us apart, you know, but if we stop taking ourselves so

• 1:07:10Shawn Stevenson?

  seriously and understand that we are just a cell in this incredible body that we call Earth. And our job is to be a light, you know, and to, we have the ability to light up any room we go into. And I've just literally yesterday ran an experiment. And you know, it's like the holiday season around this time. And I was just smiling at people, whether it's in the store, just people driving by in the parking lot. Boom, smiles, nine times out of 10, people will smile back.

• 1:07:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:07:40Shawn Stevenson?

  It's a responsive, reflexive thing. And we, and then they can carry that on to the next person.

• 1:07:45Lewis Howes?

  That's it, man. I love that. I love that. So instead of saying, you play too much, or don't play too much, say, you don't play enough, right?

• 1:07:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:54Lewis Howes?

  Keep playing.

• 1:07:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Keep playing.

• 1:07:55Lewis Howes?

  Why are you playing? Keep playing.

• 1:07:56Shawn Stevenson?

  Keep playing.

• 1:07:57Lewis Howes?

  I like that. Awesome, man. Well, I acknowledge you, brother. I appreciate your wisdom. I appreciate all the, the research that you, that you, you spend so much time on to give us clarity and peace of mind. Because these are scary topics and ideas that there's so much noise out there and we don't know what's true and what's not true. And we don't know what to do. There's usually too many options, too many things to try. So thank you for creating clarity, creating the research and the foundation for us to have routines and simplifying all this mess. So I acknowledge you, brother.

• 1:08:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Thank you, man. I receive that, man. Thank you.

• 1:08:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course. Okay, final question. What's your definition of greatness?

• 1:08:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Ah, my definition of greatness, coming from where I come from, and you know, I went to the other extreme. I just started to give myself my time, my energy to everybody else.

• 1:08:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Shawn Stevenson?

  And I kind of lost myself. And I was trying to find like enlightenment, you know, doing all this meditation. And I was brought this concept of non-attachment. And I believe that a lot of my suffering was a result of my attachment to, you know, my kids, my wife, and you know, my family members, all the people that I wanted to serve. And, and I get the concept because without as much attachment, you experience less suffering. I decided to consciously attach myself to my wife. It's not, it's not a ignorant love and attachment. It's a, it's a chosen decisive, intentional attachment. And so for me, greatness is loving somebody.

• 1:09:36Shawn Stevenson?

  More than anything else you can imagine. I love her so much. I would, of course, like many of us feel like, you know, we'll jump in front of a bus for somebody, but I more so than give my life for her, I want to live for her.

• 1:09:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:09:49Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, so that's how I feel. That's, that's what greatness is to me, you know, is um, being able to live fully and completely for somebody.

• 1:09:56Lewis Howes?

  Mmm. Shawn Stevenson. Thanks, brother. Beautiful, man. Appreciate it, man.

• 1:10:05Lewis Howes?

  I hope you enjoyed this episode with Shawn Stevenson. If you did, if this is your first time here, subscribe to the podcast over on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. We've got over 6,000 five-star reviews and we'd love to hear from you. So every comment, we'd love to see your comments and share them with our internal team and let other people know how much you enjoyed the School of Greatness podcast. If you've been around for almost seven years now, then make sure to subscribe if you haven't yet and leave us a review as well. We'd love to hear anyone's thoughts and ideas on this episode and on the show in general. And also share this with a friend. If you know someone who wants to feel better,

• 1:10:45Lewis Howes?

  be healthier, be fitter, lose weight, earn more money, have better relationships, have better sex, all that, then send them this link, lewishouse.com/896 to listen to this episode on the science of sleep for ultimate success with Shawn Stevenson. And share with your friends on social media. Tag me at Lewis Howes over on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all the places and tag Shawn Stevenson as well and let him know that you're listening to this or watching this on YouTube. Make sure to subscribe to all the different places we're at, YouTube, over a half a million subscribers over there. We've got some incredible content we post there. I'm on the TikToks now as well. So if you love TikTok, I'm at

• 1:11:26Lewis Howes?

  Lewis over there on TikTok. And we're just trying to build this thing into something that is a powerful machine of inspiration to bring hope, to bring clarity, to bring insights, resources to you, your friends, your family, and to the world. So please share this with your friends and let's continue to stay connected. This is gonna be a massive year 2020 and I'm super excited about.

• 1:11:51Lewis Howes?

  What we have coming up, the people we have coming on, the topics, what we're going to be diving into, all of it, this is going to be amazing. So I'm so grateful that you're here and I'm so glad that you enjoy the School of Greatness. Again, if this is your first time, welcome. We welcome you into the community. This is a incredible community where people from all over the world have a growth mindset. And you are part of this community now. So, welcome. And again, please leave us a review and subscribe over on Apple Podcast. Make sure to check out Shawn Stevenson, all that he's up to. Check out his book, it is amazing. I will have it all linked up on the show notes at lewishouse.com/896.

• 1:12:32Lewis Howes?

  And also, I want you to go to greatness.com. Check out greatness.com. We are launching something very soon over there. Go over there, opt in and be a part of the launch of something really exciting we have coming on over there at greatness.com. So check that out. And as the Buddha said, "To keep the body in good health is that duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep the mind strong and clear." Take care of yourself today, this week, this year, this decade. The body is all you have. You've got one body and it dictates a lot of your life. It dictates your mindset and everything else in your life. So take care of yourself. I love you. I hope you know that. And you know what time it is?

• 1:13:16Lewis Howes?

  It's time to go out there and do something great.