Why your sleep supplement stack can’t fix your bedtime.

If you’ve been chasing better sleep, fat loss, or muscle gain with “perfect” supplements and still feel stuck, this episode will explain why. I’m Angela Shurina, Certified Sleep Coach, and I’m breaking down the coaching framework I use to help clients stop majoring in minors and start getting real results from the essential efforts. We start with a simple story: a client sleeps poorly, takes all the supplements, and still wakes up tired. Then we zoom out to performance and body composition...

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Shurina, I'm your host, I'm your partner in personal and collective transformation, your master health, sleep, stress management, nutrition, body transformation, self-actualization coach, and just someone who is really passionate about, obsessed with human potential, doing our best and building a better tomorrow today. You know, at some point, I read this phrase, I think it was from a high-performance psychologist,

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  Michael Gervais, how if we want to make tomorrow a masterpiece, we gotta master today. There is no way around it, whatever it is you want to do, whatever it is you want to achieve, the work is always today, because what's going to be different about tomorrow? And tomorrow is not guaranteed.

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  So today, we are talking about baking, egg making, building muscles, sleeping well, fat loss, but most importantly, we are talking about this part of a coaching job, which is all about helping clients to prioritize what is required to bake a cake and what is icing on that cake. I want to share with you a short dialogue or something that a client shared with me in one of our recent sessions. He shared how he didn't sleep well, he's like, "Angela, I didn't sleep that well.

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  I went to bed later, couldn't fall asleep, and I took all the supplements, but I still didn't work quite well, and I woke up not feeling rested and fresh. And I also had a late night meal." And at that point, I'm like, supplements and a late night meal? No amount of supplement, guys, will fix, no sleep supplement stack will fix doing the things that set your biology up for failure. And now, back to baking and cake metaphor.

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  Have you ever, guys, and by the way, by the end of this podcast, you're gonna get very practical system for prioritizing your habits, your efforts in things like muscle building and fat loss, and yes, sleep. But before, let's talk about baking. Have you ever tried baking anything, like not just watched somebody doing it or thought about it, but actually tried baking? If you are an advanced and experienced baker, then think about the times when you tried to bake something for the first time.

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  But you know, forget about baking, some time ago, I got this fun and fancy vertical egg making machine. And somewhere in the instructions, it said, "Add a few drops of oil or spray oil into the machine, otherwise stuff will stick and it won't come out as it's supposed to come out up." I'm like, "I don't believe that, you know, the machine is probably smart enough without oil." I decided to save some calories and go oil-free, and you know what happened? I had to scoop my omelette out of the damn machine with a spoon to eat it.

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  That was quite a trick, the machine was not designing for spooning, for sure.

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  If you haven't tried baking anything, guys, you know, something that most people won't necessarily get right away. Every ingredient in the recipe has a job. Skip one, and the whole cake might just fall apart, just like my omelette didn't come out.

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  Decide to go egg-free for your cake, and don't act surprised when the cake won't mix or won't rise, no matter how well you mix everything else.

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  And no amount of skill or magic saves you if you forget to turn on the damn oven. There is no baking without heat, period. And, and, and, the temperature has to be just right, you know? A few degrees up, a few degrees down, and the whole process is gonna be messed up.

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  Most things we built in life work the same way. I wish I knew all the ingredients and all the ins and outs, but most of the things work in the same way, in a sense that we need to know the essential ingredients and the job each one does before we can prioritize substitute, cut, add, or do any sort of adjustment.

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  Let's talk about muscle building, right? For muscles to be built, the process need to include a few key ingredients, like major ones. Training, it has to be challenging, it has to challenge the muscle you have so it adapts and grows to the challenge. Like, if you don't use it, you lose it, the body is very good at prioritizing without you thinking about that. You need to train with challenging weight, you need to feed that muscle, and not just protein, you also need sufficient calories, without sufficient calories, your body can't build things up. You also need certain vitamins and minerals to run the process of muscle synthesis properly.

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  A lot of people, I work with quite a few people in the beginning of my career in Southeast Asia, and a lot of them wouldn't get the idea that the amount of rice they eat won't correct zinc deficiency, which most of them had in their diet due to their cultural eating patterns, and a lot of rice that can interfere with zinc absorption, right? So those things, they really do matter. And then sleeping is when the whole process of building stuff up happens, and it's super hard to build, almost close to impossible, if one of those ingredients is not optimized, or at least not present to some sufficient amount.

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  Train hard, but skip the calories additional needed to build stuff up, skip the protein or not enough, or micronutrients like zinc, and your muscle synthesis won't happen, no muscle. Get your nutrition perfect, but skip the challenging weight training, again, no muscle development, nada, nada. Doesn't work. And sleep, that's when the actual building happens, so if you will not sleep properly every single night, especially after your weight training, then forget about that muscle gain, right?

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  So this has to come together in order for muscle building to work, and have come together quite consistently. Or consider fat loss, no matter what kind of magical drug comes out, or carbs, no carbs, some again, magical diet, or removing certain ingredients or adding certain ingredients, none of that will work, and also supplements, etc. If you don't create internally the state of calorie deficit, when the body needs to use your fat as a fuel for its activity, like no matter what you do, calorie deficit has to be present.

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  We did not learn yet how to bend laws of physics, so the body does not work in this energy, according to energy equation, energy in, energy out, to fuel its function, and then change body composition as a response to what's happening with your calorie equation. And sleep, it's also quite a complex biological process that has its own non-negotiables, just like any cake. Digestion need to shut down, body temperature needs to drop, it needs to be dark and quiet, stress needs to settle so the brain can finally unwind, caffeine, alcohol out.

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  Eating works against almost every one of those, that late night meal broke almost every single process. Digestion needs your core temperature to rise, the opposite of sleep.

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  Digestion needs your nervous system to be more active, also the opposite of sleep. Your blood sugar swings need to stabilize with food, it's up and down journey, depending on the quality of your meal might be more or less, that's why it is not recommended to eat processed sugars and lots of processed foods in general for your dinner, because it causes your blood sugar to fluctuate a lot more. Sleep is complicated, but this part isn't, eating late is not good for it. In fact, it breaks, it works against most of the processes that your body needs to perform in order for your body to sleep. And no supplement stack on top of that, gonna fix it.

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  Just like the best icing, the most perfect icing, won't fix a cake that didn't rise, like it doesn't matter.

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  This is most of my work as a coach, helping people see which habits move the outcome thereafter forward, whether that's better sleep, sharper creative output, fat loss, or muscle gain, and which ones are just noise, like that, you know, icing on cake that didn't rise.

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  My job is to help people to tell your cake ingredients from your icing.

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  Again, same principle with fat loss, same principle with muscle building, same principle with figuring out your direction in life, same principle with your productivity, your creative output. No matter how much drug you take, if you don't set up that schedule, consistent schedule to do your writing, there is no creativity coming out of you consistently, I promise you.

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  Supplements can help, guys, but they are there to supplement, right, the word versus do the main job. Somebody smart called those pills supplements, so people don't confuse. If your timing, your eating, your caffeine and alcohol, your environment, your stress are all over the place, that supplements that isn't making your sleep any much better.

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  So, the main question of today, guys, what's that health outcome you are working on right now? And are you working on the ingredients that bake the cake or just icing a cake that you never baked, right? Are you doing the hard job of icing the cake that you never baked? Because that is quite frustrating experience. You work so hard on that icing, but the cake is not there. So you end up with all this beautiful icing with no cake to ice it on top.

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  And again, back to sleep and eating. Eating is a fundamental process to your survival. The body will prioritize eating and metabolizing nutrients needed for your survival over your sleep. And sleep or and eating is an active up activity, whereas sleep is down regulation and rest, you know, even though it says rest and digest, in order for digestion to properly happen, you've got to rest, but not sleep. Maybe that's why people confuse it, I'm not sure.

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  But when you eat a meal, that fuel needs to go into activity, not into sleep. And more important than that, your body needs to be internally active, raise your temperature, activate your nervous system, your blood sugar is going to start to fluctuate, all of these processes and probably a lot more processes, the opposite of what needs to happen in sleep. And that is why you won't be able to sleep all that well with a lot of food in your stomach. And again, supplement is that icing, but the cake has to be there first. And the cake is

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  good sleep routine, not drinking caffeine and alcohol, not eating late, creating environment that supports sleep, right, darkness and quiet and your stress levels, your nervous system, you're going to feel safe and calm. Because sleep is quite a vulnerable state. And if your nervous system in the state of fight or flight and stress, you won't be able to sleep. Because your body, your brain feel like they might need you awake to deal with whatever is, you know, happening in your environment that keeping you stressed. So that's why also you can't sleep when you're stressed. Because as far as your brain concerned, you need to deal

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  with the reality, not sleep, which might be dangerous for your life. So, sleep and baking. In any process, whatever goal you're trying to work on, like right now, I'm trying to figure out the essential ingredients in my business. And I know that until I figure those out, no amount of fancy content or copyrighting will fix the, for example, one of the essential ingredients is lead generation or being in front of the right people consistently. No amount of again, of smart copy or some automation will fix the fact that it's not there and it's

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  not figured out that. And the same with sleep and the same as weight training, the same with fat loss, your productivity, creative output, there are ingredients that are, that bake the cake, and then there is icing. And so it is very important to first figure out the main cake ingredients and do them consistently. And I think if you have time for it, do it. If not, your cake will be just as delicious. Hope this podcast episode was useful, guys. Don't forget that there is individual session with me, you can book in the show notes. It's going to save you so much time and energy knowing all these details. At least you're going to know what to work on and what you can skip, substitute, improve, change, cut, right? So

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  this session is designed for that. And to help you for the next two weeks after the session, included in the price, implement all this advice by building system and habits that make the execution automatic. So the link to that one-on-one session with me to help you with sleep, stress management, nutrition, fat loss, muscle building, health, creativity, productivity, cognitive performance, figuring out your why, values, and next step in your life. And how to become the most awesome human being you can possibly be. So the link to that session is in the show notes. And also don't forget to share a review, especially if you

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  are on Apple, seems to do much better, Spotify, put us, give us five stars, leave a comment. And so we together can help more people. All of that, a couple of links in the show notes, check them out. And don't forget to share this podcast episode. Like with one person who's struggling to do the thing, make them realize they got to figure out the ingredient for the cake. Because before they work on icing, otherwise, there's going to be a lot of time wasted, energy wasted, probably money wasted, and just a whole bunch of frustration. So thank you, guys, for tuning in. I thank you for listening. Check out the show notes, re-listen to this podcast episode, figure out the base ingredients for baking the cake,

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  not the icing. And till next time, keep growing.